WEEKLY WEATHER & CLIMATE NEWS

WEEKLY WEATHER AND CLIMATE NEWS

29 July-2 August 2013

Items of Interest:

A hot July 1852 in New York made for an interesting news article -- An article published over this past weekend in "The New York Times" describes and analyzes a colorful article under the headline "The Streets in Midsummer" that appeared in the 27 July 1852 issue of its predecessor, "The New-York Daily Times." The article appearing 162 years ago chronicled the effect that temperatures approaching 90 degrees (Fahrenheit) had upon the residents of New York City. The current article leads one to reflect on how the media have described weather extremes that have affected life in our nation's history even back in the 19th century. [New York Times] (Special thanks to Dr. Kelly Redmond, regional climatologist for the Western Regional Climate Center, for forwarding this link. EJH)
High-quality maps of August temperature and precipitation normals across US available -- The PRISM Climate Group at Oregon State University has prepared high-resolution maps depicting the normal maximum temperature, minimum temperature and precipitation totals for May across the 48 coterminous United States for the current 1981-2010 climate normals interval. These maps, with a 800-meter resolution, were produced using the PRISM (Parameter-elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model) climate mapping system.
August weather calendar for a city near you -- The Midwestern Regional Climate Center maintains an interactive website that permits the public to produce a ready to print weather calendar for any given month of the year, such as April, at any of approximately 270 weather stations around the nation. (These stations are NOAA's ThreadEx stations.) The entries for each day of the month includes: Normal maximum temperature, normal minimum temperature, normal daily heating and cooling degree days, normal daily precipitation, record maximum temperature, record minimum temperature, and record daily precipitation; the current normals for 1981-2010.
New version of NOAA's "Climate Data Online" released -- NOAA's National Climatic Data Center recently released a newly designed version of its "Climate Data Online (CDO)," an web-based interface that allows the public to access new climate data sets in addition to traditional data sets. All the datasets can be accessed through the CDO interactive mapping tool. In addition, archived Doppler radar data products can be accessed. [NOAA National Climatic Data Center News]
Very distant views of Earth -- One week ago NASA released to images taken of Earth by two NASA spacecraft that from nearly opposite ends of our solar system. One of the images was obtained from the Cassini spacecraft as it passed near Saturn, or at a distance of approximately 1.45 billion kilometers (898 million miles) from Earth. The other image was made by the MESSENGER spacecraft that is in orbit around Mercury and is approximately 98 million kilometers (61 million miles) from Earth. Because of the distances between the spacecraft and Earth, these images show our planet as only points of light that is reflected from the Sun. [NASA Earth Observatory]

Weather and Climate News items:

Eye on the tropics --- Two tropical cyclones were detected across the tropical waters of the North Atlantic and the eastern North Pacific basin during the last week:
In North Atlantic Basin, the fourth named tropical cyclone of the 2013 Atlantic hurricane season quickly formed from a tropical depression that was located approximately 300 miles to the west-southwest of the Cape Verde Islands. This tropical cyclone that was named Tropical Storm Dorian traveling rapidly to the west-northwest across the tropical North Atlantic during the later part of the week. However, during the early evening hours of last Saturday, Tropical Storm Dorian weakened and degenerated into a tropical wave approximately 550 miles to the east of the northern Leeward Islands. As of Sunday, remnants of former Tropical Storm Dorian were located to the north of the Leeward Islands as a weak trough of low pressure that forecasters gave a medium chance for becoming an organized tropical cyclone north of Puerto Rico. For additional information on Tropical Storm Dorian including satellite images, consult the NASA Hurricane Page.
In eastern North Pacific basin, a tropical depression formed during the second half of last week over the eastern sections of the basin approximately 950 miles to the west-southwest of the southern tip of Mexico's Baja California Peninsula and quickly intensified into Tropical Storm Flossie. This tropical storm, the sixth named tropical cyclone in that basin, traveled to the west and west-northwest during the late week. On Saturday, Tropical Storm Flossie crossed the 140-degree West meridian of longitude, which made this system the first named tropical cyclone in the Central North Pacific Basin. Forecasts made early Sunday indicate that Tropical Storm Flossie could reach Hawaii's Big Island on Monday, accompanied by locally heavy rain, 45 to 55-mph winds and 15 to 20-foot seas that could produce high surf. The NASA Hurricane Page has satellite images and additional information on Tropical Storm Flossie.
Tropical Weather Outlook extended to five days -- NOAA's National Hurricane Center (NHC) recently announced that the time period covered by its Tropical Weather Outlook would be extended from 48 hours to five days, effective at the start of August. NHC will begin including information about a system's potential for development using probabilistic forecasts during the following five-day period as a text product. A corresponding five-day genesis potential graphic is planned to become operational by this fall. [NOAA National Hurricane Center News]
Special "CATS eye" on International Space Station looks at aerosols -- A special instrument called a CATS-eye has been attached to the International Space Station in order to track airborne particles in the Earth's atmosphere and to serve as an early version of an instrument for a future satellite that will be launched in 2021. CATs, which stands for the Cloud-Aerosol Transport System, that is on the space station contains a lidar (light detection and ranging) or laser unit that fires directly into the atmosphere to detect the aerosols. [NASA Global Climate Change]
A giant particle accelerator discovered in the heart of the Van Allen radiation belts -- Scientists from NASA and the Los Alamos National Laboratory studying data collected from NASA's twin Van Allen Probes of the Earth's radiation belts have discovered the source of the super-energetic charges particles in these belts as having been accelerated locally within the belts. These particles reach speeds that are nearly 99 percent of the speed of light. [NASA Goddard Space Flight Center]
Changes in New Orleans area levee systems are proposed -- A team of researchers from the University of Notre Dame have conducted a study of the levee systems designed to protect the New Orleans (LA) metropolitan area from the high water accompanying tropical cyclones that approach the area. The researchers propose that the lowering of a 55-mile long stretch of man-made levees along the Lower Mississippi River system in Plaquemines Parish and its ultimate return to its natural state would allow storm surge associated with storm systems to partially pass across the Mississippi River, thereby helping decrease the storm surge upriver toward New Orleans. [University of Notre Dame News]
Pacific equatorial cold water region studied -- Scientists at Oregon State University have obtained six years of observations on ocean water mixing from small instruments deployed on NOAA deep-sea equatorial moorings that permitted them to explain the existence of a large cold water region in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. They suspect that more mixing could be related to development of La Niña events, while less mixing would be associated with El Niño events. [Oregon State University News]
Decoding the long-term climate fluctuations in the Atlantic Ocean -- A team of German and Russian scientists has been investigating the role of heat exchange between atmosphere and ocean in an attempt to explain the long-term climate variability in the Atlantic Ocean. They analyzed meteorological observations and sea surface temperatures across the basin that extend over the last 130 years, finding the ocean significantly affects long term climate fluctuations, while the atmosphere is mainly responsible for the shorter-term, year-to-year changes. Their research could aid in the predictability of long-term climate fluctuations. [GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel]
Satellites used to measure plant health focus on the cellular level -- NASA scientists have been using data collected by Earth-observing satellites that detect the fluorescence emanating from plants to assess the plant's health. The fluorescence is light invisible to the human eye that has been emitted by plants during photosynthesis. The fluorescence data collected by the Global Ozone Monitoring Instrument 2 (GOME-2) instrument on the European Metop-A meteorological satellite are converted into global maps of plant health at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. [NASA Global Climate Change]
Reconstruction of temperature changes over the last two millennia made on the continental scale -- An international team of 78 researchers including those from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center recently published their reconstruction of the surface air temperature variations on all the continents beginning 2000 years ago. They produced standardized 30-year mean temperatures averaged across all seven continental-scale regions extending back over the last 2000 years that show some distinct periods in the temperature record that included the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, but with little globally uniform patterns. [NOAA National Climatic Data Center News] The results of this research were published as a paper entitled "Continental-Scale Temperature Variability during the Last Two Millennia." At the end of June 2013, this paper ranked number one in online attention in Nature Geoscience. [NOAA National Climatic Data Center News]
Rapid acceleration of Greenland inland ice moves "like butter" -- Researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder and their colleagues created ice-sheet-wide velocity maps for Greenland using a NASA program called Making Earth System Data Records for Use in Research Environments. From these velocity maps, the researchers saw an increased in the flow of the inland segment of the Sermeq Avannarleq Glacier in interior Greenland, with flow rates 150 percent faster than a decade earlier. They claim that surface meltwater draining through cracks in an ice sheet can warm the sheet from the inside, softening the ice and letting it flow faster, like a warm stick of butter. [NASA Earth Observatory]
Warming climate may cut snow water storage of a Oregon watershed in half -- Scientists at the Oregon State University foresee a decrease in the amount of water stored in peak snowpack in the McKenzie River watershed of the Oregon Cascade Range by approximately 56 percent based upon a projected 3.6 Fahrenheit degree temperature increase. The dramatic reduction in snow water storage in the maritime snowpacks of western Oregon would be due to the change from snow to rain in the relatively low mountainous regions associated with only a modest temperature increase. The reduction in snow water storage would have major impactions on ecosystems and human activity across the region. [Oregon State University News]
Rising air temperatures cause tropical ecosystems to boost carbon dioxide levels -- Scientists at NASA's Ames Research Center and their colleagues from other research centers around the world have found tropical ecosystems capable of generating significantly higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide than non-tropical ecosystems. They discovered that a temperature increase of one Celsius degree in tropical surface air temperatures lead to an average annual growth rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide equivalent to one-third of the annual global emissions from combustion of fossil fuels and deforestation combined. The team used a state-of-the-art, high-performance computing and data access facility called NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) at Ames to investigate the mechanisms underlying the relationship between carbon dioxide levels and increased temperatures. Apparently, carbon uptake in tropical ecosystems is reduced at higher temperatures. [NASA Global Climate Change]
An All-Hazards Monitor-- This Web portal provides the user information from NOAA on current environmental events that may pose as hazards such as tropical weather, fire weather, marine weather, severe weather, drought and floods. [NOAAWatch]
Earthweek -- Diary of the Planet [earthweek.com] Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader.

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