WEEKLY CLIMATE NEWS

Thanksgiving Week: 23-27 November 2009

This is Thanksgiving Break for the Fall 2009 offering of the DataStreme Earth Climate Systems course. This Weekly Climate News contains new information items and historical data, but the Concept of the Week is repeated from Week 11.

Have a happy and safe Thanksgiving Week from the AMS DS ECS Central Staff and Ed Hopkins!

ITEMS OF INTEREST

Satellite images provide a new world map for all -- NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey have recently released a new collection of images covering the entire land surface of the Earth with a resolution of approximately 30 meters collected from NASA’s Landsat satellites between 2004–2007. This collection is available free of charge to anyone in any country. [NASA Earth Observatory] [USGS Newsroom]
Announcing a NASA Hurricane Twitter site Officials at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center recently announced that a companion "Twitter" page to the NASA Hurricane Page has become available. NASA Hurricane Page

CURRENT CLIMATE STATUS

State and city weather extremes for October 2009 -- The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) has posted a listing of some of the notable extremes in temperature, precipitation and other weather elements across the nation for the recently completed month of October in "Selected U.S. City and State Extremes for October 2009". Note that this site may be updated during the following several weeks as more data are received and analyzed.
A global review of October 2009 temperatures -- Preliminary analysis of worldwide combined ocean and land temperatures by scientists at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center indicates that the recently completed month of October 2009 had the sixth highest global October surface temperature since a sufficiently dense and reliable network began in 1880. They also found that the globally averaged land surface temperature for October 2009 was the sixth highest on record for October, while that month's global ocean surface temperature was the fifth highest. [NOAA News]

CURRENT CLIMATE MONITORING

A large "ozone hole" remains over Antarctica -- Researchers with the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory and their colleagues have found that this austral spring's thinning of the stratospheric ozone layer over Antarctica, often dubbed the "ozone hole," reached its annual peak circumference in late September 2009, with a size that ranked it tenth largest since satellite surveillance began in 1979. [NOAA News]
Expanded ocean climatology database released -- NOAA’s National Oceanographic Data Center recently released World Ocean Database 2009, the largest and most comprehensive collection of scientific data about the global oceans, including records of ocean temperature and salinity profiles that may extend back through the entire 19th century. This database represents one part of the climate services provided by NOAA and is part of the Integrated Ocean Observing System and the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). [NOAA News]
Mapping global carbon dioxide transport from space -- An image obtained from data collected by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder instrument (AIRS) on NASA's Aqua satellite during July 2009 shows the large-scale patterns of atmospheric carbon dioxide being transported by the planetary atmospheric circulation regime. [NASA]
New European environmental satellite passes early tests -- Engineers with the European Space Agency recently reported that the MIRAS (Microwave Imaging Radiometer using Aperture Synthesis) instrument onboard the recently launched SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) satellite has been successfully activated and tested. This instrument is designed map soil moisture and ocean salinity, as part of effort designed to understand the role that these variables play in regulating the planetary hydrologic cycle. [ESA]
New high-technology used to measure snow and soil moisture -- Researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder, the National Center for Atmospheric Research and NOAA have discovered a "multipath" signals method that uses the interference patterns created by the reflection of traditional GPS satellite signals off the ground to measure snow depth along with soil and vegetation moisture. They expect that this technique will benefit meteorologists, water resource managers, climate modelers and farmers. [University of Colorado News]
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

A warmer and windier Lake Superior detected -- A research team from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Minnesota-Duluth reports that higher surface water temperatures and less winter ice on North America's Lake Superior during the last several decades has also resulted in stronger winds across the world's largest freshwater lake, which can also affect lake currents, biological cycles and pollution. [University of Wisconsin-Madison News]
Research challenges identified for understanding landscape changes -- In a report prepared by the National Research Council, ten academicians from around the nation identified nine research challenges and four research initiatives that would be used in the study of how the landscapes of Earth change. [EurekAlert!]
Ore deposits may be linked to ancient atmosphere -- Researchers from Carnegie Institution and colleagues claim that large quantities of the Earth's mineral wealth, such as nickel, appear to have been deposited several billion years ago by geochemical processes that may have involved constituents in the ancient oxygen-poor planetary atmosphere much different from present. [EurekAlert!]

PALEOCLIMATE RECONSTRUCTION

Demise of large North American animals during late Pleistocene led to landscape change -- Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Wyoming and Fordham University have shown that as some of North America's large herbivores, such as mastodons and mammoths, disappeared following the retreat of the large Pleistocene glaciers during the Wisconsin Age approximately 15,000 years ago, the landscape began to change. [University of Wisconsin-Madison News]
Open oceans had higher extinction rates during mass extinctions -- Paleontologists at the Universities of Cincinnati and Chicago report that during the five major world-wide mass extinctions that appear to have occurred in Earth history, those species in the open-ocean experienced extinction rates that were greater than experienced by their counterparts in the shallow epicontinental seas or on land. [University of Cincinnati News]

CLIMATE AND SOCIETY

Rwandan lake could experience a volatile explosion -- A group of scientists from the US and Africa are concerned that carbon dioxide and methane gas could accumulate at the bottom of Lake Kivu, a freshwater lake system bordering Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, resulting in an explosion that could be disastrous for the two million people that live close to the lake. [Rochester Institute of Technology News]
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.

This Concept of the Week is repeated from Week 11.

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 models 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:

23 November 1909...Rattlesnake Creek was deluged with 7.17 inches of rain in 24 hours to establish a record for the state of Idaho. (The Weather Channel)
23 November 1943...Northern New Hampshire was in the grips of a record snowstorm that left a total of 55 inches at Berlin, 56 inches at Randolph and many other locations over 40 inches. The 56-inch total at Randolph in Coos County established a 24-hour snowfall record for the state. In Maine, Middle Dam received a record 35 inches of snow in 24 hours. (David Ludlum)
23 November 1974...Bismarck, ND was in the middle of a 5-day snowstorm during which 28.3 inches fell, the greatest on record. (Intellicast)
23 November 1983...A 24-hour snowfall record for Duluth, MN was broken with 16.9 inches. 19.7 inches fell during the entire storm, also a record.
23 November 1991...La Crosse, WI set a new record for 24-hour snowfall with 13 inches. This storm brought the monthly total to 28.2 inches, also a record. (Intellicast)
24 November 1950...The temperature at Chicago, IL dipped to 2 degrees below zero to equal their record for the month established on the 29^th in 1872. On the first of the month that year, Chicago established a record high for November with a reading of 81 degrees. (The Weather Channel)
26 November 1896...Snow and high winds hit the Northern Plains and the Upper Mississippi Valley, with a Thanksgiving Day blizzard across North Dakota. The storm was followed by a severe cold wave in the Upper Midwest. The temperature at Pokegama Dam plunged to 45 degrees below zero, which remains the lowest recorded November temperature in Minnesota. (David Ludlum)
29 November 1975...Red River was buried under 34 inches of snow in 24 hours, establishing a record for the state of New Mexico. (The Weather Channel)
29 November 1985...The temperature at Bismarck, ND plunged to 30 degrees below zero to establish their record low for the month of November. The high that day was 4 degrees below zero. (The Weather Channel)
29 November 1989...Sault Ste Marie, MI finished the month of November with a record 46.8 inches of snow. (The National Weather Summary) (Storm Data)

Return to DataStreme Earth Climate Systems website