DataStreme ECS WEEK TEN: 12-16 April 2010

ITEMS OF INTEREST

• Prepare for National Lab Day -- The Digital Learning Network at NASA Langley Research Center is hosting a series of live webcasts during April aimed at encouraging K-12 teachers to promote hands-on science education in their classrooms. This series of webcasts are in preparation for National Lab Day scheduled for Wednesday, 12 May 2010. [NASA Langley]
• New geosynchronous weather satellite makes its first image of Earth --
Officials with NOAA and NASA recently released the first full-disk visible image of Earth made by sensors onboard NOAA's GOES-15 (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite) launched one-month earlier. [NOAA News] [NASA GOES-P Mission]
• Effects of spring runoff into the Adriatic seen from space --
An image obtained last week from the MODIS sensor on NASA's Aqua satellite shows the color contrast due to sediments from runoff from spring rainshowers and melting snow in Italy's Apennine Mountains spreading out across the Adriatic Sea. [NASA Earth Observatory]
• Development of long-term global instrumental climate records --
Learn about the various globally averaged instrumental temperature records that scientists with the National Climatic Data Center along with their colleagues at NASA and in the United Kingdom have produced in this week's Supplemental Information…In Greater Depth.

CURRENT CLIMATE STATUS

• National weather and climate reviewed for March 2010 -- Scientists at the NOAA National Climatic Data Center recently reported that their analysis of preliminary data indicates March 2010 across the United States was warmer and drier than normal. The monthly temperature averaged across the coterminous US for March 2009 was nearly two Fahrenheit degrees above the long-term average extending back to 1895 when comprehensive climate records became available nationwide. States across the Northeast, the upper Midwest and the northern Rockies had much above average temperatures, while many of the southern tier of states experienced much below average temperatures. Precipitation across the coterminous US was nearly one quarter of an inch below the long-term average, with scattered areas of the Midwest, the Mid-South and northern Rockies experienced much drier than average. Sections of the Northeast and the southern Rockies were wetter than average in March. The Canadian Ice Service reported that ice coverage across the Great Lakes in mid-March was the smallest since records began in 1973. [NOAA News]
• Southeast Asia and southwestern China suffer from drought conditions --
An extended regional drought that developed across Southeast Asia and southwestern China has caused low river levels and water shortages across the region, especially along the Mekong River watershed in China, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. [CNN]
• Tracking March airborne dust --
An image generated from data collected by the MODIS sensor on NASA's Terra satellite shows the atmospheric dust loading in the atmosphere around the world during the month March 2010 expressed in terms of the dimensionless aerosol optical thickness. [NASA Earth Observatory]

CURRENT CLIMATE MONITORING

• European "ice satellite" successfully launched -- Officials with the European Space Agency announced last week that its CryoSat-2 satellite, a polar orbiting satellite dedicated to monitoring the Earth's ice, successfully reached orbit last Thursday after being launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. [ESA]
• Estimates of emissions from Icelandic volcano made from space --
A research team from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Goddard Space Flight Center have been using data collected from sensors onboard NASA's Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite and a ground based network to make near real-time estimates of the heat and volume of lava escaping from Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano, which erupted last month for the first time in 120 years. [NASA JPL]
• First science flight completed by NASA's Global Hawk --
During the last week, NASA's Global Hawk, a 44-foot remotely controlled aircraft capable of flying for 30 hours at altitudes to 65,000 feet, successfully completed its first scientific flight over the Pacific Ocean from California's Mojave Desert north to Alaska's Kodiak Island. For additional flights will be made this month as part of the Global Hawk Pacific mission that designed to sample the chemical composition of the troposphere and stratosphere, as well as to make "ground truth" observations for instruments onboard NASA’s Aura satellite. [NASA JPL]
• Keeping track of Antarctic ice from space --
Satellite images of ice shelves and glacial ice on the Antarctic Peninsula were recently released:
• A series of three images obtained from the MODIS instruments on NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites from March 2002 to late February 2005 shows the Larsen B Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula that collapsed and shattered in 2002, with fragments that lingered until 2005. [NASA Earth Observatory]
• Two images made in April 2002 and February 2003 from sensors on NASA’s Landsat 7 satellite show the retreat of the Crane Glacier on the Antarctic Peninsula at and after the collapse of Larsen B Ice Shelf. [NASA Earth Observatory]
• Water temperatures seen to rise in US streams and rivers --
Researchers from the University of Maryland and their colleagues have found that annual mean water temperatures from 20 major streams and rivers across the United States have been increasing by as much as 0.14 Fahrenheit degree per year, with some of the largest rates of warming occurring in urban areas. [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

• Studying ancient seafloor "supervolcanoes" -- In fall 2009, an international team of scientists participating in Integrated Ocean Drilling Program's Expedition 324 have been exploring the origin of the 145 million-year-old Shatsky Rise volcanic mountain chain on the ocean floor more than 900 miles east of Japan. The supervolcanoes in this submarine mountain chain approximately two miles below the sea surface spewed large amounts of gases and particles into the atmosphere, as well as re-paving the ocean floor and changing the oceanic circulation. [Texas A&M University]
• Decline in Eastern US forests resumes --
Researchers from the US Geological Survey who have been part of the Survey's Land Cover Trends project report that during the last three decades, the forest cover across the eastern United States has resumed its decline, following an increase in forest cover for much of the 20th century. These researchers are concerned that the forest cover loss, which could be attributed to timber production, mountaintop removal for mining and urban expansion, would have important implications for future carbon sequestration and biodiversity. [EurekAlert!]

CLIMATE IMPACTS ON THE BIOSPHERE

• Migratory birds adversely affected by extreme weather and climate -- Researchers from NASA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service, the University of Maryland-College Park and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found that migratory bird species suffer population losses from destruction of critical habitat along their migratory flight paths due to severe weather events such as tropical cyclones (hurricanes) and changes in climate, including extended drought conditions. [NASA Earth Science News Team]
  A map generated from data obtained from NASA's Landsat 5 satellite shows the path of Hurricane Hugo through South Carolina in 1989 that damaged the forest habitat for some of the migratory bird populations. [NASA Earth Observatory]
• Desert plants also feel effects of global warming --
Ecologists with the University of Arizona have noted that desert winters across the Southwest have becoming warmer and drier over the last several decades as changes in large scale climate have delayed onset of winter precipitation, resulting in delays in the emergence of winter annual plants in the Sonoran Desert. These changes in the local climate have also affected the types of desert annuals. [LiveScience]
• Pollen from pine carried great distances by the wind --
A forest biologist from the Forest History Society and the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, NC has found that pollen from the loblolly pine, a commonly planted tree in the Southeastern States, can germinate after being blown offshore from mainland forests by winds and then drifting for long distances to the barrier islands of North Carolina's Outer Banks. Her research indicates that some tree species could survive changes in climate as the pollen could be carried for long distances and remain viable. [EurekAlert!]

CLIMATE FORECASTS

• Hurricane forecast update -- Last week, the hurricane forecast team from Colorado State University headed by Phil Klotzbach released its April update of their forecast of the 2010 North Atlantic hurricane season that officially begins on 1 June 2010. Because of record warm waters in the equatorial Atlantic and the weakening of the current El Niño event, the team foresees a more active seasonal than average. In this update, the forecasters call for 15 named tropical cyclones (hurricanes and tropical storms), with eight potentially becoming hurricanes. As many as four could become severe, reaching category 3 or higher on the Saffir-Simpson Scale. They also anticipate a higher than average probability of a major Atlantic hurricane making landfall somewhere along the coast of the coterminous US. [USA Today] [The Tropical Meteorology Project]

PALEOCLIMATE RECONSTRUCTION

• Familiar pattern discovered in long-term climate record -- A geologist at the University of California-Santa Barbara who analyzed ocean cores from 57 sites around the world has concluded that the climate record for the last 1.2 million years that she extracted has a pattern that connects with the rhythmic changes in the Earth's orbital cycle involving changes in orbital eccentricity, axial tilt and precession of the equinoxes. [EurekAlert!]

CLIMATE AND SOCIETY

• Another Dust Bowl raises concerns on the Plains -- Farmers and ranchers on the Plains, along with climate scientists from the Oklahoma Climate Service and the US Department of Interior are concerned that the lack of rain, plus above average temperatures across the Plains could bring about another Dust Bowl that could result in social upheaval paralleling the infamous Dust Bowl era of the 1930s that decimated much of the region. [USA Today]
• Understanding changes in Arctic weather and climate involves combination of science and Inuit traditional knowledge --
Research scientists with the University of Colorado at Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) have been using the traditional weather forecasting skills based upon generations of environmental knowledge passed down by the Inuit forecasters along with modern scientific observations and computer models to improve the understanding of climate change in the Canadian Arctic. [CIRES]
• More reliable wind power grid proposed --
Researchers from the University of Delaware and Stony Brook University have proposed a wind power grid that would use the power output from a series of five-megawatt wind turbines to be built offshore of the US East Coast. This grid would provide more consistent electricity production from a string of wind generators strategically located over the western North Atlantic where winds are more persistent and would provide more reliable wind power. [EurekAlert!]
• High ozone levels found in lower atmosphere over southwestern Iberian Peninsula --
Researchers at Spain's National Institute of Aerospace Technology and the University of Huelva have found that their measurements of surface ozone levels at four measuring stations the Huelva Province of southwestern Spain during a six-year span has shown the spring and summer ozone levels to exceed the threshold levels established by European Directive regulations. [EurekAlert!]
• 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]

COMPARATIVE PLANETOLOGY

• Earthweek -- Diary of the Planet [earthweek.com] Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Concept of the Week: Developing a Quality Long-term Instrumental Climate Record

Systematic temperature and precipitation observations have been made at various locations across the nation for nearly two centuries. While only a handful of stations were available in the early 19th century, weather and climate observations currently are made from several hundred automatic weather sites operated by the National Weather Service and the Federal Aviation Administration as well as approximately 8000 stations in the Cooperative Observers Network administered by the National Weather Service. The weather data from these networks are also used to quantitatively assess changes of climate during the instrumental period of the past as well into the future. However, a variety of factors can affect the homogeneity of the record. For example, the locations of many of the stations have moved, from original downtown building roofs to current locations at airports. And the physical surroundings of the stations have changed, many becoming more urbanized.

In the late 1980s, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in conjunction with the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory created the United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) of 1218 stations across the 48 coterminous states having long-term records of both daily temperature and precipitation. This network was designed to provide an essential baseline data set for monitoring the nation's climate commencing in the late 19th century. These stations were created from a subset of the Cooperative Observers Network, chosen based upon long-term data quality that included length of record, percent of missing data, spatial distribution and number of station changes. Many of the selected USHCN stations were rural in an attempt to reduce the influence of urbanization. Using statistical analyses, data for these stations have been adjusted to account for movement of stations, or when a different thermometer type was installed. An urban warming correction was applied based upon population of the surrounding area.

More recently, NOAA began the US Climate Reference Network (USCRN), a project designed to collect and analyze climate data of the highest possible quality for the next 50 to 100 years. Each USCRN station would have electronic sensors that would make routine measurements of air temperature, precipitation, IR ground surface temperature, solar radiation and wind speed with a frequency of every five minutes and transmit these data to both NCDC and to National Weather Service offices via orbiting satellites on nearly a real-time basis. In addition to these measurements, additional sensors could be added to the USCRN stations that would measure soil temperature and soil moisture. Conscientious and detailed site selection was made for all stations so that they would not only be spatially representative, but that they would be in locations where the surrounding physical conditions would have a high likelihood of remaining the same over the next 50 to 100 years. Many of the sites were placed on federal or state owned lands, helping minimize the contamination of the climate record by urbanization or other changes in local ground cover.

These long-term, comparative, spatially representative values are vital to detect and verify the subtle changes in climatic conditions before they become overwhelmingly obvious.

Concept of the Week: Questions

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

1. The majority of United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) stations were in [(rural), (urban)] settings.
2. The instruments in the US Climate Reference Network (USCRN) sample the atmosphere as frequently as [(5 minutes),(1 day),(1 month)].

Historical Events:

• 12 April 1815...Massive eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia blew 400 cubic kilometers (100 cubic miles) of ash skyward. Eruption disrupted the global weather for several years, particularly noteworthy: the cold summer of 1816 in North America and Europe. (The Weather Doctor)
• 12 April 1934...Winds atop Mount Washington, NH (elevation 6288 feet) averaged a world record 186 mph for five minutes, with a peak gust from the southeast of 231 mph, which is the highest wind speed ever clocked in the world. (David Ludlum)
• 12 April 1985...Key West, FL set a new record for April rainfall in a 24-hour period as 6.06 inches of rain were recorded, eclipsing the previous record of 6.04 inches which fell on 29 April 1941. In addition, the heavy rainfall shattered the old record for this date set back in 1931 when 1.49 inches of rain fell. (Intellicast)
• 12 April 1996...Duluth, MN recorded 1.7 inches of snow on this day to raise its seasonal snowfall total to 132.8 inches -- its snowiest winter on record. The old record was 131.6 inches set back in 1949-50. (Intellicast)
• 13 April 1955...The town of Axis, AL was deluged with 20.33 inches of rain in 24 hours establishing a state record. (The Weather Channel)
• 13 April 1985...The high temperature of 86 degrees for this date at Medford, OR was the highest ever so early in the spring season. (Intellicast)
• 14 April 1933...The state intensity record for snowfall for New Hampshire was set at Franklin Lake as 35 inches fell in 24 hours. (Intellicast)
• 14 April 1986...The world's heaviest hailstone, weighing 2.25 pounds, fell in the Gopalganj District of Bangladesh. This hailstone could have reached speeds in excess of 90 mph. (Accord's Weather Guide Calendar) (Wikipedia)
• 15 April 1921...Two-mile high Silver Lake (elevation 10,220 ft) in Boulder County, Colorado received 76 in. of snow in 24 hrs, the heaviest 24-hr total of record for North America. The storm left a total of 87 in. in twenty-seven and a half hours. (David Ludlum)
• 15 April 1927...New Orleans, LA was drenched with 14.01 inches of rain, which established a 24-hour rainfall record for the state. This record was eclipsed in August 1962, when 22.00 inches fell in a 24-hour span. (The Weather Channel)
• 16 April 1975...A single storm brought 119 inches of snow to Crater Lake, OR, establishing a state record. (Intellicast)
• 16 April 2007…An intense nor'easter raging along the New England Coast caused the barometric pressure reading at Albany, NY to fall to 28.84 inches of mercury (976.68 mb), the lowest barometric pressure reading ever recorded in April in the Empire State's capital city. (The Weather Doctor)
• 17 April 1948…A ten-minute deluge dumped 34 mm (1.34 inches) of rain on Tauranga, the wettest 10 minutes ever recorded on New Zealand. (The Weather Doctor)
• 17 April 1997...The Red River of the North crested at Fargo, ND, with a record crest of 39.6 ft, which is 22.6 ft above flood stage. This record flood, produced by several major winter storms, heavy spring rain, rapid snow melt, and ice jams, was responsible for at least 11 deaths (7 in North Dakota and 4 in Minnesota) and tremendous property damage along with large scale evacuations of residents from the Grand Forks metropolitan area. Dikes along the river gave way. Overall damage and cleanup costs have been estimated to range from $1 to $2 billion in Grand Forks, where a portion of the downtown burned as firefighters had a difficult time reaching the buildings due to the flood. [NCDC]
  Editor's Note: "History repeats!" During the second week of April 2001, the Red River at Grand Forks reached a river stage of 45 ft, or approximately 17 ft above flood stage and about 7 ft below the top of the levee. In 1997 this gauge measured a record 54.35 ft. EJH
• 18 April 2004...A record 182 consecutive days of no measurable precipitation began in San Diego, CA on this date, which ended on 17 October 2004 with 0.09 inches of rain. This new record broke the 181-day record set the previous year. Interestingly, the rain that followed the more recent dry spell resulted in October 2004 becoming San Diego's wettest month on record (4.98 inches). (Accord Weather Guide Calendar)

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Prepared by Edward J. Hopkins, Ph.D., email hopkins@meteor.wisc.edu
© Copyright, 2010, The American Meteorological Society.