WEEK THREE: 13-17 February 2017

Report from the Field:

• A very happy Dr. Steve LaDochy, a DataStreme LIT Leader and meteorology professor from Cal State University, Los Angeles, reported on the abundant rainfall across southern California that has alleviated the extreme to exceptional drought conditions that have plagued the region for the last five years. He gleefully reported that all his fruit trees are alive again in his backyard, although the lemons and oranges were still on the small, understandable as they have been starved of rain over this five-year span. Steve noted that Los Angeles has received its normal annual rainfall already, with almost 200% of normal rain for early February. Furthermore, the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the source for most of Southern California's water supply, have the most snow ever! Previous highest recorded snows were in the El Niño year of 1982-83.

ITEMS OF INTEREST

• Worldwide GLOBE at Night 2017 Campaign commences -- The second in a series of GLOBE at Night citizen-science campaigns for 2017 will commence this Saturday (18 February) and continue through Monday, 27 February. GLOBE at Night is a worldwide, hands-on science and education program designed to encourage citizen-scientists worldwide to record the brightness of their night sky by matching the appearance of a constellation (Orion in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres) with the seven magnitude/star charts of progressively fainter stars. Activity guides are also available. The GLOBE at night program is intended to raise public awareness of the impact of light pollution. The next series in the 2017 campaign is scheduled for 20-29 March 2017. [GLOBE at Night]
• Participate in Field Photo Weekends --  The public is invited to join thousands of other citizen scientists from across the nation in the Field Photo Weekend during the upcoming President's Day Weekend (18, 19, 20 February 2017) by taking six digital photographs at a place that you choose and submit these photos via a smartphone app or on-line with your computer. These photos, to be taken in the four cardinal directions (North, East, South and West), upward and downward, will be placed in the Geo-Referenced Field Photo Library, which is a community- and citizen- science data portal for people to share, visualize and archive geo-referenced photos from the fields in the world. By taking photos this weekend along with three other Field Photo Weekends later this year (Memorial Day, 4th of July and Labor Day weekends), one can begin to visualize seasonal changes in the local landscape. View the short (4-minute) animation describing the weekend. [Earth Observation and Modeling Facility University of Oklahoma] 
• Stewardship projects brought to classrooms by NOAA Climate Stewards-- The NOAA Climate Stewards Education Project (CSEP) was developed several years ago to build a climate-literate public actively engaged in climate stewardship by having formal and informal educators working with elementary through university age students with sustained professional development, collaborative tools and support. Over 1000 educators have participated in an online community that connects them through webinars with experts, regional workshops, and educational resources. [NOAA News]
• Monitoring degree-day units -- If you would like to monitor how this winter is affecting the amount of energy that you need for heating your home, please read this week's Supplemental Information...In Greater Depth. You will see how heating degree-day units are computed, as well as the corresponding cooling-degree day units. This supplemental also provides links to tabulations of the cumulative heating and cooling degree-day units that are available on a monthly basis for selected cities across the country.

CURRENT CLIMATE STATUS

• Western drought lingers despite recent heavy precipitation -- Deke Arndt, Chief of the Climate Monitoring Branch at NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), has written a Beyond the Data blog cautioning about the recent demise of the "exceptional drought" classification from across the nation. Paraphrasing the late baseball sage Yogi Berra, Deke used the title "Western drought: It ain't over 'til...well, it ain't over" to focus on the complexity of the classification of drought and its implications to many segments of society, which makes the declaration of the end of the current drought especially across California seemingly unadvisable. He explains is reasoning in five "sidebars," along with several graphs and animated maps showing the progression of the recent drought conditions. [NOAA Climate.gov News]

CURRENT CLIMATE MONITORING

• Monitoring Antarctica's changing Larsen Ice Shelf from space -- A mosaic of four natural-color satellite images centered on the northern part of Antarctica's Larsen Ice Shelf was made from data collected by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) onboard Landsat 8 in early January 2016. The Larsen Ice Self, situated along the northeastern coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, has undergone dramatic change as the region has experienced rapid warming over the last century. This mosaic shows the remnants of two large sections of the fractured ice shelf that have been identified as Larsen A and B. Several smaller embayments to the north that are covered by a much thinner layer of sea ice are also apparent on this mosaic. [NASA Earth Observatory]
• Preparing for "science in the shadow" during this summer's total solar eclipse -- NASA is funding eleven scientific studies that will collect data in the two to three minutes of shadow cast by the Moon during this upcoming total solar eclipse on 21 August 2017 as the path of the shadow's center travels from the Oregon coast across the northern Rockies and the central Plains to the Midwest and then to the Southeast before exiting off the South Carolina coast. The NASA-funded studies will involve several scientific disciplines and involve a variety of instrument platforms, such as satellites and ground-based observations, that will focus on certain aspects of the Sun and the Earth during the eclipse. This summer's total solar eclipse will be the first that will be witnessed by people in the 48 contiguous United States in nearly 40 years. [NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Feature] (Editor's note: NASA has posted a webpage that focuses on this total solar eclipse, with an assortment of suggested educational activities and an eclipse party suggestions. EJH)

CLIMATE FORCING

• Explanations made as to why ocean has absorbed more carbon over past decade -- A geographer from the University of California Santa Barbara and colleagues report that the increase in the absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans during the past decade was due to a slowing of the ocean's overturning circulation. A weaker overturning would bring less carbon-rich deep waters to the surface, limiting the amount of carbon dioxide that escapes from the deep ocean. They based their findings upon analysis of oceanographic temperature, salinity, carbon-14 data collected from more than 30 years of observations. The researchers also noted that this recent increase followed a decrease in carbon dioxide uptake during the 1990, which they also attributed to changes in oceanic circulation. While the current increased uptake of carbon dioxide would reduce the amount of this greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, which should slow the rate of global temperature increase, the increase in dissolved carbon dioxide should result in increased ocean acidification, which disintegrates the calcium carbonate shells of some marine organisms. [University of California Santa Barbara News]

CLIMATE FORECASTS

• Updated El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Diagnostic Discussion & last La Niña advisory outlook are released -- Late last week forecasters at NOAA's Climate Prediction Center (CPC) and the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) released their monthly El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Diagnostic Discussion in which they posted their last La Niña advisory for the foreseeable future. They based their decision to issue a final La Niña advisory as La Niña conditions were no longer present at the start of February, resulting in the return of an ENSO-neutral situation with neither El Niño nor La Niña conditions. During the first week of February 2017, beginning in February and continuing through the remainder of the first half of 2017. Sea surface temperatures (SST) that were slightly (0.3 Celsius degrees) below average across the central equatorial Pacific Ocean, but above average (1.5 Celsius degrees) above average in the eastern equatorial Pacific. In addition to the pattern of sea surface temperature anomalies, the atmosphere patterns were also consistent with ENSO-neutral conditions in terms of the location of atmospheric convection and the low-level winds. The forecasters foresee a continuation of ENSO-neutral conditions through at least the end of meteorological spring 2017 in the Northern Hemisphere (March through May). [NOAA Climate Prediction Center]
  A blog was written by a scientist from NOAA's Climate Prediction Center describing the departure of La Niña conditions by early February. November. Attention was also paid to the water temperatures in the equatorial Pacific to some depth below the surface where the SST anomalies are typically obtained to ascertain the existence of El Niño, La Niña or ENSO-neutral conditions. [NOAA Climate.gov News]
  (Editor's note: Documentation is provided on the maps page of the Climate.gov website of how the SST anomalies are determined for the ENSO monitoring region across the equatorial Pacific Ocean basin and used to determine if El Niño or La Niña conditions are occurring. EJH)
  

PALEOCLIMATE RECONSTRUCTION

• Sea-level change in Southeast Asia 6000 years ago may have implications for current coastal dwellers -- A team of ocean scientists and statisticians from the US, Singapore, Indonesia and the Netherlands recently reported on the nearly two-foot changes in sea level in East and Southeast Asia that occurred approximately 6000 years ago, pointing to these fluctuations were without assistance from climate change influenced by humans. The researchers based their conclusions from their reconstruction of changes in sea level from analysis of samples obtained from coral micro atolls located near the Indonesian island of Belitung, which is between Sumatra and Borneo. They noted that the recurrence of such a change could be catastrophic since 100 million people currently live within three feet of sea level across East and Southeast Asia. [Rutgers University News]

CLIMATE AND THE BIOSPHERE

• Thinning Arctic sea ice stimulates springtime ocean plant growth -- A contractor with NOAA Research and Climate Program Office wrote a feature for ClimateWatch Magazine describing how the net productivity of the Arctic Ocean basin has increased over the last 13 years. This increase has been especially noticeable in spring because the Arctic sea ice is thinner and younger than in the earlier years, allowing for more photosynthesis. She provides a map of total chlorophyll concentration across the Arctic Ocean in spring 2016 using data collected by sensors on NASA satellites and a graph showing the changes in the net primary productivity in the Barents Sea from 2003 through 2016. [NOAA Climate.gov News]

CLIMATE AND SOCIETY

• New alliance creates initiative to cut losses from extreme weather events -- A new public-private partnership is being created that intends on helping reduce societal harm from extreme environmental events such as tornadoes, hurricanes, thunderstorms, and droughts. The Alliance for Integrative Approaches to Extreme Environmental Events recently announced its intention to serve as an organizing framework to bring together experts from different disciplines, including meteorologists and social and behavioral scientists, to better understand, predict, and respond to severe weather events. [EOS Earth & Space Science News]
• Recent news on wind power:
  • The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) recently announced in its blog that wind power generated by the United States wind conversion systems has reached an historic milestone as it has surged into first place as the nation's largest renewable resource, surpassing the power obtained from the nation's hydroelectric power plants. In addition, wind energy is now the nation's fourth-largest source of electric capacity. [Into the Wind – the AWEA Blog]
  • Although wind power capacity increased in the United States, China widened its wind power lead over the US, as nearly three times more wind power was produced by the Chinese than by the Americans. [Bloomberg News]
• Earthweek -- Diary of the Planet [earthweek.com]

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), now the National Centers for Environmental Information, 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:

• 13 February 1784...Ice floes blocked the Mississippi River at New Orleans, then passed into the Gulf of Mexico. The only other time this occurred was during the "Great Arctic Outbreak" of 1899. (David Ludlum)
• 13 February 1899...This day was the coldest morning of record along the Gulf Coast. The mercury dipped to 2 degrees below zero at Tallahassee, the lowest reading of record for the state of Florida. The record low temperature for the state of Louisiana was set at Minden, when the thermometer fell to 16 degrees below zero. A trace of snow fell at Fort Myers, FL. This was the farthest south snow has ever been observed in the U.S. until 1977 when snow fell in Miami. The lowest temperature ever recorded at Dayton, OH occurred when it dropped to 28 degrees below zero. (David Ludlum) (Intellicast)
• 13 February 1905...Morning lows of 29 degrees below zero at Pond, AR, 40 degrees below at Lebanon, KS, and 40 below at Warsaw, MO established all-time records for those three states. (The Weather Channel)
• 13 February 2006...Central Park in New York City recorded its all-time heaviest snowstorm with 27 inches. Blizzard conditions struck New England as well, with 30 inches at Fairfield, CT and 18 inches at Boston. (National Weather Service file)
  
• 15 February 1936...The temperature at Parshall, ND plunged to 60 degrees below zero to establish a state record low temperature. On the 6^th of July that same year, the temperature at Steele, ND hit 121 degrees, also a state record high temperature. (David Ludlum)
• 16 February 1903...The temperature at Pokegama Dam, MN plunged to 59 degrees below zero to establish a state record. (David Ludlum) This record has since been broken with a 60 degree below reading in 1996. (NCDC)
• 16 February 1929...Britain's greatest snowfall of 70.9 inches fell in just 15 hours at Dartmoor, Great Britain. (The Weather Doctor)
• 16 February 1943...Record cold prevailed in the northeastern U.S. The morning low of 32 degrees below zero at Falls Village, CT established a state record, yet the afternoon high that day was 20 degrees above zero. In January 1961, this Connecticut record low was tied. (David Ludlum) (The Weather Channel)
• 16 February 1966...Heavy rain fell in Whenuapai, New Zealand, with 4.2 inches of rain falling in one hour, a new record for that time period in New Zealand. (The Weather Doctor)
• 16 February 1989...A surge of arctic air produced all-time record high barometric pressure readings of 31.08 inches at Duluth, MN, 30.97 inches at Chicago, IL and 30.94 inches at South Bend, IN. Readings of 31.00 inches at Milwaukee, WI and 30.98 inches at Rockford, IL tied their all-time records. (The National Weather Summary)
• 16 February 1996...A coastal storm produced heavy snow along the East Coast to push seasonal snowfall totals to new records at several locations. The following cities set new all-time seasonal snowfall records: Lynchburg, VA (8.1 inches new, 51.3 inches seasonal total); Washington/Dulles, VA (7.5, 53.4) ; Washington/National, DC (6.8, 40.8); Baltimore, MD (9.8, 54.9); Philadelphia, PA (7.5, 55.9); Hartford/Bradley, CT (10.3, 90.2) and Providence, RI (7.0, 78.0). (Intellicast)
• 17 February 1748...The temperature at Charleston, SC fell to 10 degrees, the lowest temperature ever recorded in the Colonial South. (The Weather Doctor)
• 17 February 1926...A deadly avalanche, Utah's worst, demolished 14 miner's cottages and a three-story boarding house in Binham Canyon. Thirty-six are killed and 13 injured. (The Weather Doctor)
• 17 February 1936...The temperature at McIntosh, SD plunged to 58 degrees below zero to establish a state record low temperature. (David Ludlum)
• 17 February 1974...Lakelse Lake, British Columbia received 46.5 inches of snow over 24 hours, Canada's greatest 24-hour snowfall on record that stood for nearly one quarter of a century until 57 inches fell in 24 hours at Tahtsa Lake, British Columbia on 11 February 1999. (The Weather Doctor)
• 17-18 February 2003...The President's Day snowstorm set a new Boston, MA record for the greatest snowstorm total snowfall: a total of 27.5 inches. (The Weather Doctor)
• 18 February 1899...While much of the central and eastern U.S. was recovering from the most severe cold wave of modern history, the temperature at San Francisco, CA soared to 80 degrees to establish a record for month of February. (David Ludlum)
• 18 February 1959...Some of the higher elevations of California were in the midst of a five-day storm that produced 189 inches of snow, a single storm record for North America. (13^th-19^th) (David Ludlum)
• 18 February 1966...The temperature at Winnipeg, Manitoba dropped to 49 degrees below zero, the city's lowest recorded temperature. (The Weather Doctor)
• 18 February 1979...The record low temperature for the state of New York was set at Old Forge when the temperature plummeted to 52 degrees below zero. (Intellicast)
• 18 February 1996...Cuba's coldest morning on record occurred when the temperature at Bainoa, Cuba dropped to 33 degrees. (The Weather Doctor)
• 19 February 1998...The temperature at Mardie, Western Australia reached 122.9 degrees, the second highest temperature ever recorded in Australia. (The Weather Doctor)
• 20 February 1974...The mean wind speed at Bonilla Island, British Columbia was 89 mph, the highest sustained speed on record in British Columbia. (The Weather Doctor)
• 20 February 1995...The temperature at the Civic Center in Los Angeles, California soared to 95 degrees. This is highest temperature ever recorded at the location during the month of February. (National Weather Service files)
  

Return to RealTime Climate Portal

Prepared by Edward J. Hopkins, Ph.D., email hopkins@aos.wisc.edu
© Copyright, 2017, The American Meteorological Society.