WEEKLY CLIMATE NEWS

DataStreme ECS WEEK ELEVEN: 16-20 November 2009

ITEMS OF INTEREST

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]
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]
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]
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]

CURRENT CLIMATE STATUS

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]
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.

CURRENT CLIMATE MONITORING

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.
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]
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!]
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]
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]
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!]
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]

CLIMATE FORCING

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]
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]

CLIMATE IMPACTS ON THE BIOSPHERE

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!]

CLIMATE MODELING EFFORTS

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]

CLIMATE FORECASTS

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]

PALEOCLIMATE RECONSTRUCTION

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)
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!]
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!]
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!]

CLIMATE AND SOCIETY

Monitoring the "plastic vortex" -- Researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography traveled approximately 1000 miles out over the eastern North Pacific last August to the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" as part of SEAPLEX (Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition) to investigate a convergence zone of plastic and other marine debris that has accumulated in the North Pacific Ocean Gyre. [Scripps Institution of Oceanography]
In a related item, a woman in Marin County north of San Francisco has been using the plastic found washed up on her county's beaches from the Pacific gyre to make jewelry. [KGO-TV ABC Channel 7] (Editor's Note Special thanks go to Freida Blink, a long time member of the AMS Education Project, for this news item. EJH)
Website for human dimensions of climate change -- An interagency effort within the US federal government that included NOAA, the Bureau of Land Management and the US Forest Service, has resulted in a website called HD.gov (for HumanDimensions.gov) that provides users, such as natural resource managers, with information on the human dimensions on a variety of topics of interest such as climate change. [HD.gov]
Earthweek -- Diary of the Planet [earthweek.com] Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Concept of the Week: Evolution of Climate Models

Climate scientists have been building increasingly sophisticated, mathematical climate models to serve two main purposes: test the sensitivity of the climate to altered conditions and simulate climate over time, either back into the past or forward into the future. The simplest, early type of climate model (zero dimensional) was the "energy balance model", which provides an average planetary temperature from incoming and outgoing radiation. A one-dimensional energy balance model determines the surface temperature from the energy balance at individual latitude belts.

More complex models involve the physical equations of motion (gas laws, thermodynamics and radiation interactions) subject to climate forcings, the boundary conditions of solar radiation, surface properties and atmospheric composition. As computers improved, models have included a three-dimensional oceanic circulation ("atmosphere-ocean coupling"), then interactions between the atmosphere, cryosphere and geosphere, with climate feedback mechanisms involving the exchanges of heat and water. Finally, models have been able to incorporate the improved knowledge of the biogeochemical processes. Climate models calculate variables such as temperature at individual points within the three-dimensional grid of cells across the Earth's surface and vertically through the atmosphere, ocean, ice and land. A tradeoff exists between the number of grid points (the spatial resolution) and the number of numerical computations. Time and space accuracy costs increased computational time and expense.

The development of numerical weather prediction models during the 1960s and 1970s spurred the development of General Circulation Models (GCMs) for climate. One of the early atmospheric GCMs was developed at Princeton University's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL). By the 1990s, comprehensive climate models were being perfected with three-dimensional oceanic circulation. Ultimately, the term GCM could be used to refer to a Global Climate Model that represents the major climate system components (atmosphere, ocean, land surface and polar ice) and their interactions. The Community Climate Model at the National Center for Atmospheric Research is one of the most comprehensive climate model currently available. This model has been used to determine the future temperature response for several scenarios concerning the release of greenhouse gases through the 21st century as proposed by the IPCC reports.

Concept of the Week: Questions

(Place your responses on the Chapter Progress Response Form provided in the Study Guide.)

General circulation models are generally [(less), (more)] sophisticated than energy balance models.
Increasing the spatial resolution of a global climate model causes the computational time to [(increase),(decrease),(remain the same)].

Historical Events:

16 November 1958...More than six inches (6.4 inches) of snow fell at Tucson, AZ, one of the biggest ever for that location. (David Ludlum) (The Weather Channel)
16 November 1959...The most severe November cold wave in U.S. history was in progress. A weather observing station located 14 miles northeast of Lincoln, MT reported a reading of 53 degrees below zero, which established an all-time record low temperature for the nation for the month of November. Their high that day was one degree above zero. (David Ludlum) (The Weather Channel)
17 November 1953...The temperature at Minneapolis, MN reached 71 degrees, their warmest reading of record for so late in the autumn. (The Weather Channel)
18 November 1955...An early season cold snap finally came to an end. Helena, MT experienced 138 consecutive hours of subzero temperatures, including a reading of 29 below zero, which surpassed by seven degrees their previous record for the month of November. Missoula, MT broke their November record by 12 degrees with a reading of 23 below zero, and Salt Lake City, UT smashed their previous November record of zero degrees with a reading of 14 degrees below zero. Heavy snow in the Great Basin closed Donner Pass, CA and total crop damage from the cold wave amounted to eleven million dollars. (David Ludlum)
19 November 1957...Nineteen inches of snow covered the ground at Cresco, IA, a record November snow depth for the state. (The Weather Channel)
19 November 1996...A 24-hour maximum precipitation record for the state of Oregon was established when 11.65 in. of rain fell at Port Orford. (NCDC)
20 November 1914...The high temperature of 28 degrees at Atlanta, GA was their earliest daily high below the freezing mark. (The Weather Channel)
20 November 1979...A blizzard struck Cheyenne, WY producing a record 19.8 inches of snow in 24 hours, and a record total of 25.6 inches in forty hours. Strong winds created huge drifts stopping all transportation. (19^th-21^st) (The Weather Channel)

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