WEEKLY WEATHER & CLIMATE NEWS

WEEKLY WEATHER AND CLIMATE NEWS

16-20 November 2009

Eye on the tropics -- During the last week several tropical cyclones (low pressure systems that form over tropical or subtropical oceans) developed and traveled across tropical waters of the major ocean basins:
- In the North Atlantic basin, Hurricane Ida traveled northward across the Gulf of Mexico early last week, having reached category-2 status (on the Saffir-Simpson Scale) after passing through the Yucatan Channel. The hurricane weakened to a tropical storm before making landfall along the Alabama Gulf Coast early Tuesday. However, remnants of this former tropical storm became an extratropical storm that traveled eastward and was absorbed by another midlatitude-low pressure center over the western North Atlantic off the Carolina coast. A more vigorous nor'easter type storm formed and affected the Middle Atlantic coast from late last week through the weekend. For additional information on former Hurricane Ida and the more recently developed nor'easter along with satellite images , consult the NASA Hurricane Page.
- No organized tropical cyclones formed in the eastern North Pacific or central North Pacific basins last week.
- In the North Indian Ocean basin, a tropical cyclone identified as Tropical Storm Phyan formed over the waters of the Arabian Sea early last week. Moving to the north-northeast, this storm made landfall along the western coast of India north of Mumbai by midweek. See additional information and satellite imagery associated with Tropical Storm Phyan on the NASA Hurricane Page.
- In the South Indian Ocean basin, Tropical Cyclone Anja formed over the weekend and intensified rapidly to a category 2 cyclone on the Saffir-Simpson Scale as it traveled to the southwest.
Winter Awareness -- Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Ohio and Tennessee will observe Winter Awareness Week during the upcoming week (16-20 November). In addition, Kansas and Missouri will observe Winter Awareness Day on Wednesday, 18 November.
Becoming AWARE --November is also Tornado Awareness Month in Mississippi, since November is the second highest month for tornadoes in the Magnolia State.
Celebrate GIS Day -- This coming Tuesday, 18 November 2009, has been declared GIS Day, an event designed to create geographic awareness around the world using geographic information systems (GIS). This event, with the theme "Discovering the World through GIS", is principally sponsored by the National Geographic Society, the Association of American Geographers, University Consortium for Geographic Information Science, the United States Geological Survey, The Library of Congress, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, and ESRI. [GIS Day]
Real-time hurricane alley movies are available -- The GOES (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite) Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has developed real-time HDTV movies of the Atlantic and eastern Pacific "hurricane alleys" along the East and West coasts that provide the public with a new hurricane visualization tool. [NASA GSFC]
High temperature records are outpacing low temperature records across the US -- Researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, NOAA, The Weather Channel and Climate Central have found that during the last decade the number of daily high temperature records that were set across the coterminous United States were approximately twice the number of low temperature records for that same time span. The frequency of record highs appeared to be at a higher frequency across the Western States and the East. The researchers also compared the numbers during this current decade with those of previous decades since 1950. [UCAR/NCAR]
October drought report -- The National Climate Data Center has posted its October 2009 drought report online. Using the Palmer Drought Severity Index, approximately nine percent of the coterminous United States experienced severe to extreme drought conditions at the end of October, while 33 percent of the area had severely to extremely wet conditions.
El Niño event strengthens -- Sea-level height data collected over the last two weeks by NASA's Topography Mission/Jason-2 oceanography satellite indicate large-scale weakening of the trade winds across the central and western equatorial Pacific during October, suggesting that the current El Niño event continues to strengthen. This El Niño event could provide relief to the Western States where drought conditions prevailed for much of this past year. [NASA JPL] See also NASA JPL Photojournal.
Watching a meteor shower -- A member of the Meteoroid Environment Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center predicts that except for areas experiencing overcast night time skies, viewing conditions should be ideal for viewing this year's Leonid meteor showers that should peak on Tuesday, 17 November. A new moon should provide for relatively dark skies. Between 20 to 30 meteors per hour were expected across the Americas, while Asia could experience between 200 to 300 meteors per hour. The Leonid meteor showers, which appear to emanate from the constellation Leo, occur in November as Earth passes through the debris trail from Comet Tempel-Tuttle. [NASA MSFC] [Science@NASA]
China's heavy snowfall seen from space -- Images obtained late last week from the MODIS instrument on NASA's Terra satellite shows the snow cover across northern China from the heaviest snowfall in decades. [NASA Earth Observatory]
Sediment trails seen in offshore Gulf of Mexico waters -- An image obtained early last week from the MODIS sensor on NASA’s Aqua satellite shows interesting patterns of sediment-laden waters of the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast. The sediments that became suspended in the shallow waters of the northwestern Gulf may have been due in part to the waves associated with the landfalling Tropical Storm Ida along the Alabama Gulf Coast, as well as to river runoff coming from above-average October rainfall totals across the Gulf Coast States. [NASA Earth Observatory]
Review of October weather and climate across the US -- Preliminary October 2009 monthly temperature and precipitation data from across the nation have led scientists at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center to report that this past month was the third coolest and the wettest October since 1895, when comprehensive national climate records began. Nearly all states, with the exception of the Southeastern States, had statewide temperatures that were below or much below 20th century averages. Oklahoma had the lowest statewide October temperature in 115 years of record. Only Florida had a statewide October temperature that was much above average. Forty of the 48 coterminous states recorded above to much above average statewide precipitation totals during October 2009, with Iowa, Arkansas and Louisiana experiencing their wettest October on record. Arizona, Utah and Florida were the only states that experienced below average statewide October precipitation. [NOAA News]
Another "smart buoy" is deployed -- NOAA recently deployed the seventh in a series of "smart buoys" at the mouth of Severn River near Annapolis, MD in Chesapeake Bay. This buoy is a part of the Chesapeake Bay Interpretive Buoy System that will monitor weather and oceanographic conditions along with water quality in the nation's largest estuary and provide real-time environmental data to the public and scientists. [NOAA News]
Monitoring water vapor with lidar -- Researchers with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have been conducting the MOHAVE (Measurements of Humidity in the Atmosphere and Validation Experiments) 2009 campaign at the Laboratory's Table Mountain Facility using lidar to obtain high-precision measurements of water vapor in the upper troposphere. [NASA JPL]
Controversy arises on carbon cycle -- A researcher at the United Kingdom's University of Bristol claims that recently obtained data would indicate that the balance between the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide and the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed in the terrestrial and oceanic ecosystems appears to have remained relatively constant since 1850, despite a significant increase in the annual emissions of carbon dioxide during the last 150 years. He suggests that the oceans and the terrestrial ecosystems would have a much greater capacity to sequester carbon dioxide than previously thought. [University of Bristol]
Studying glacial flow in a lab -- A geoscientist at Iowa State University has developed a large machine called a "glacier sliding simulator" that can be used to study how glaciers slide on their beds. This device should help researchers determine how glaciers would react to climate change. [Iowa State News Service]
Using improved climate forecasts to help ease drought effects -- Researchers at North Carolina State University, Columbia University, Brazil's Federal University of Fortaleza and Australia's University of New South Wales have developed a new water management tool that would use the newer improved climate forecasts to determine rainfall and streamflow patterns months in advance, thereby permitting water managers to have sufficient lead time to plan for potential droughts or intervals of excess rainfall. [North Carolina State Newsroom]
Determining the amount of ocean water -- Geoscientists from Germany's University of Bonn, the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences and the Alfred-Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Science have determined the change in water mass in the world's oceans. These researchers used satellite data collected by NASA's GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) mission. Their calculations should help improve climate models. [EurekAlert!]
Melting of Greenland ice cap accelerates -- Using satellite observations and a regional atmospheric model, a researcher from the United Kingdom's University of Bristol and colleagues have found that the Greenland ice sheet is loosing mass at an accelerating rate. [EurekAlert!]
Lightning detector could help track Sun's rotation rate -- Geophysicists at Israel's Tel Aviv University have discovered that a 27-day cyclic variation in lightning strike data collected by Very Low Frequency wire antennas in their lightning detection station in the Negev Desert appears to be associated with a single rotation of the Sun. This discovery may help monitor the influence that solar rotation and activity could affect weather and climate on Earth. [American Friends of Tel Aviv University]
Efforts at reducing greenhouse gases may not slow climate change -- Claiming that approximately half of the increased temperatures across the US since 1950 could be attributed to land use changes, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology advises policymakers around the world to address the influence of global deforestation and urbanization upon climate change, in addition to the often-discussed influence by greenhouse gas emissions. [Georgia Tech]
Ancient soils suggest Congo Basin was treeless in Late Jurassic -- Paleontologists at Southern Methodist University claim that geochemical analysis of ancient soils obtained from Central Africa's tropical Congo Basin indicates that this basin, which currently contains a massive tropical rainforest, appears to have been arid with little seasonal rainfall during the late Jurassic Period (between 150 million to 200 million years), a time when the basin was a part of the Gondwana continent. [EurekAlert!]
Satellite aerosol data aid climate studies -- European scientists have been using global aerosol data collected since 1995 from instruments onboard the European Space Agency's ERS-2, Envisat and the Meteosat Second Generation satellites to study the role that aerosols play upon the global climate. [ESA]
Retreat of Antarctic glaciers could aid in sequestering carbon dioxide -- Scientists from British Antarctic Survey recently claimed that the melting and retreat of the Antarctic glaciers have permitted more photosynthesis to occur in the waters around Antarctica, which they claim could serve as a new natural "sink" for carbon dioxide, removing an estimated 3.5 million metric tons of carbon from the ocean and atmosphere annually. [EurekAlert!]
Caves yield information on impact of climate change on California droughts -- Researchers at the University of California Davis who analyzed stalagmites obtained from a cave in the central Sierra Nevada Mountains have determined that California endured centuries-long droughts during the past 20,000 years at times that coincided with the thawing of the Arctic ice caps. [UC Davis News] [KGO-TV ABC-Channel 7] (Editor's Note Special thanks go to Jim Blink, a long time member of the AMS Education Project, for this news item. EJH)
An earlier start to life on Earth suggested -- Scientists from Texas A&M, Yale and Stanford Universities who examined 3.4-billion year old rocks from South Africa suggest that the Earth's climate may have been much cooler than previously thought early in the planet's history, meaning that conditions conducive for development of life could have also started earlier. [EurekAlert!]
Fossil plants link Patagonia to New Guinea during a warm Eocene -- Researchers from Penn State University and colleagues from the US and Argentina have found fossil plants that lived during the Eocene epoch (between 52 and 47 million years ago), which suggest that South America's Patagonia, a currently cold and dry steppe climate, had a warm and lush climate during the Eocene. Furthermore, these plants would link Patagonia to New Guinea during that warm interval. [EurekAlert!]
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]
Global and US Hazards/Climate Extremes -- A review and analysis of the global impacts of various weather-related events, including drought, floods and storms during the current month. [NCDC]
Earthweek -- Diary of the Planet [earthweek.com] Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader.

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