Atmospheric News
AMS Past President and Fellow James Mahoney to Retire
Dr. James R. Mahoney, AMS Past President and Fellow and assistant secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and deputy NOAA administrator, plans to retire when a successor is confirmed..
In a letter to President Bush, Mahoney outlined his plan to retire from both his position at NOAA and his special assignment as director of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program once a replacement has been selected and confirmed. Mahoney and his family decided he should retire from full-time employment because of his health. He plans to remain in place long enough to continue implementation of ongoing interagency climate science programs and NOAA initiatives, as well as to transition his oversight of these to his replacement.
As deputy NOAA administrator, Mahoney helps oversee the day-to-day functions of NOAA, as well as laying out its strategic and operational future. The agency manages an annual budget of $4 billion. He is managing the development of a comprehensive research program realignment aimed at better integrating observations and research across all of NOAA. He is also the Executive Sponsor of the NOAA Science Advisory Board.
As director of the U.S. Climate Chance Science Program, he manages the $2 billion annual budget U.S. government organization that coordinates and integrates scientific research on changes in climate and related systems. CCSP involves 13 federal scientific agencies and integrates the planning and budgeting their climate and global change activities. CCSP was formed by the Bush Administration to accelerate research to improve understanding of global climate change, and incorporates the congressionally mandated U.S. Global Change Research Program.
Mahoney is a fellow and former president of the American Meteorological Society. He has served on several committees of the National Academy of Sciences and, in 1999, completed a term as co-chairman of the Academy’s Board on Atmospheric Science and Climate. He was sworn in to his current position on April 2, 2002, after confirmation by the United States Senate.
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NOAA Projects 18-21 Tropical Storms This Season
With eight tropical storms, two of which became hurricanes, forming by August 2, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration increased the number of storms in its 2005 hurricane season outlook. NOAA said it expects 11 to 14 more tropical storms to form by the November 30 end of the season, with seven to nine becoming hurricanes, including three to five major hurricanes. In total, this season is likely to yield 18 to 21 tropical storms, with nine to 11 becoming hurricanes, including five to seven major hurricanes.
The predicted high levels of activity during the remainder of the season are consistent with NOAA’s pre-season outlook issued last spring, and are comparable to those seen during August to October of the very active 2003 and 2004 seasons.
An average Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 through November 30, produces 10 named storms in which six become hurricanes, including two major hurricanes with winds of at least 111 mph. The most active hurricane season was in 1933 with 21 storms, followed by 1995 with 19 storms. The most hurricanes in a season was 12 in 1969, and the highest number of major hurricanes was eight in 1950.
or more see www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2005/s2484.htm
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NCAR Radar Probes Hurricane Rainbands
Starting August 15, researchers from several universities and government agencies began one of the largest hurricane research projects ever undertaken. Its goal is to better understand dramatic, rapid changes in tropical storm intensity that have baffled forecasters for years.
The team includes scientists from the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, the University of Washington, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the U.S. Navy.
The project, called the Hurricane Rainband and Intensity Change Experiment (RAINEX), will study how the outer rainbands and inner eye of a hurricane interact to influence the storm's intensity. RAINEX will investigate other interactions between a hurricane's rainbands and its eyewall. Although researchers have studied the eye and outer rainbands of hurricanes extensively, few if any experiments have ever examined these two components together and how their interaction might affect a storm's strength. The outer bands of a hurricane often have strong winds and lots of rain, and that can actually affect the overall intensity of a hurricane.
The RAINEX team will study this interaction using data recorded during hurricane research flights. Beginning August 15 and running through the remainder of this year's Atlantic hurricane season, two NOAA P-3 aircraft and a U.S. Navy P-3 will fly simultaneously into hurricanes well before the storms threaten landfall. Flying in the hurricane's outer bands and punching into the eyewall on most flights, the aircraft will use sophisticated Doppler radar and GPS dropsondes to record wind speed and direction, temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, and other critical data.
Researchers at the University of Washington and NCAR will provide expertise in airborne Doppler radar analysis, while researchers at Rosenstiel School will construct a state-of-the-art hurricane model using the data collected during the research flights.
Once the data are collected, the researchers will assimilate them into hurricane models to gain a better sense of whether a storm's circulation speeds up or slows down as rainbands wrap around the hurricane. The researchers will share this information with hurricane operational centers and national environmental prediction centers around the world.
For more see http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2005/rainex.shtml
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July Averaged Hot, Wet
An extended heat wave in July pushed the nation's average temperature higher than normal, while global temperatures were second-highest on record for the month, according to scientists at the NOAA National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.
NOAA scientists report that the average temperature for the contiguous United States for July (based on preliminary data) was 1.5 degrees F (0.8 degrees C) above the mean for 1895-2004. This was the twelfth warmest July on record, with widespread heat across the nation, including much above average temperatures throughout the Southwest and West. Nine states had much above normal temperature for July, with an additional 33 states above average. Only six states in the contiguous U.S. were near average and no state was cooler than average for July. Nevada had its second warmest July on record.
Most of the warmth occurred during an extended heat wave (July 11- 27), when mean temperatures in parts of the West exceeded 5-10 degrees F above average. More than 200 cities broke daily high temperature records, with Denver, Colo., having its second warmest July since 1872 and equaling the all-time highest daily temperature record of 105 degrees F, set in 1878.
Las Vegas tied its all-time record daily maximum temperature of 117 degrees F, and had five consecutive days with temperatures exceeding 115 degrees F. In the last few days of July, the warmth crept eastward and was briefly replaced by cooler temperatures in the northern Plains setting new daily low temperature records in some locations. Temperatures across Alaska were above average, with a statewide temperature of 2.0 degrees F (1.1 degrees C) above the 1971-2000 mean, ranking 4th warmest since 1918.
Precipitation was near average for the nation overall, with unusually dry conditions across the Rockies, High Plains and the mid-to-upper Mississippi Valley. This contrasted with above average wetness in the Southeast, in large part related to land-falling tropical storm activity. Georgia and Alabama both had their fifth wettest July on record, while Colorado and New Mexico were third and fourth driest, respectively. Salt Lake City, Utah, had only one percent of its average July rainfall, while Great Falls, Mont., recorded only 7 percent of its normal July precipitation.
At the end of July, moderate-to-extreme drought (as defined by a widely-used measure of drought—the Palmer Drought Index) affected 17 percent of the West ( Rockies westward), an increase of 6 percent from June 2005. The heat wave, combined with drier-than-average conditions in the Midwest, also took a toll on the corn crop, with drought declarations in both Wisconsin and Illinois. The dry weather in the West triggered wildfires, burning acres well above the 10-year average as of the end of July. A wet fall and winter resulted in extensive undergrowth, providing abundant fuel for the summer fires.
There were five named tropical storms in July 2005: Cindy, Dennis, Emily, Franklin and Gert. Both Dennis and Emily became hurricanes, with approximately 32 deaths blamed on Dennis as it moved through the Caribbean region. Cindy and Dennis made landfall in the U.S., Cindy as a tropical storm around Grand Isle, Louisiana, and Dennis as a major Category 3 hurricane around Navarre Beach, Florida. Cindy's major impact was rainand flooding across the southeastern states, while Dennis produced a large storm surge and rain-related flooding across the Southeast.
The average global temperature anomaly for combined land and ocean surfaces for July (based on preliminary data) was 1.1 degrees F (0.6 degrees C) above the 1880-2004 long-term mean. This was the second warmest July since 1880 (the beginning of reliable instrumental records). The warmest July was in 1998 with an anomaly of 1.2 degrees F (0.7 degrees C) above the mean. There were warmer than average conditions in Scandinavia, much of Asia, North Africa and the western U.S., while below-average temperatures occurred in northern Canada and northern Alaska. Ocean temperatures were also second highest on record.
For complete details see http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2005/jul/jul05.html
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Collaboration Melds Disparate Weather, Climate Models l
A multiagency collaborative of researchers has announced the first successful melding of computer models from several different organizations into four new simulations of Earth's physical system.
NCAR is part of the community effort creating the simulations, which are field trials of the Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF), a national-scale collaboration building a standard software platform that allows different weather, climate, and data-assimilation components to operate together on parallel supercomputers.
In addition to NCAR, the ESMF partners on the field tests are Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), operated by the Department of Energy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Goddard Space Flight Center), NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, (GFDL), NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Prediction, ,and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
The framework increases cross-disciplinary communication, making it possible for scientists and software developers, weather forecasters and climate modelers to share software more easily, port codes to a variety of computing platforms, and reuse common code in a variety of applications.
ESMF software is component-based, meaning that it allows researchers to easily assemble complex models by representing the models as collections of smaller components that are coupled together. Researchers using ESMF have a standard way to add new capabilities and swap in different options, making it much simpler for them to exchange codes with other groups and institutions, and facilitating the free flow of ideas.
Details on the four simulations, or interoperability experiments, are described online at http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2005/esmf.html
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