7-11 June 2010

DataStreme Earth Climate Systems will return for Fall 2010 with new Investigations files starting during Preview Week, Monday, 30 August 2010. All the current online website products will continue to be available throughout the summer break period.

• Early Sunrise -- Within the next week, many locations in the continental United States will experienced the date of earliest sunrise. While the longest daylight at each locale in the Northern Hemisphere will occur in over two weeks on the summer solstice (early Monday morning, 21 June 2010), the precise time of earliest local sunrise occurs before this date because the apparent sun now "leads" the clock time. This time discrepancy, which now amounts to approximately 2 minutes, occurs because of a combination of factors that result from the earth moving more slowly in its elliptical orbit because the earth presently is near its farthest point from the sun (aphelion on Tuesday morning, 6 July 2010) and the effect of the tilt of the earth's spin axis (near the summer solstice). For reference, the latest sunsets of the year will occur later in June as the apparent sun slows and by the first week of July "lags" clock time by about 4 minutes.
• World Environment Day -- Last Saturday, 5 June 2010, was declared World Environment Day by the United Nations in an effort to stimulate worldwide awareness of the environment and to enhance political attention and action. This observance was established initially by the UN General Assembly in June 1972 to mark the opening of the UN's Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment. Various activities were planned. This year's theme for World Environment Day is "Many Species. One Planet. One Future." [World Environment Day]
• World Ocean Day to be celebrated -- World Ocean Day or a "Celebration of the Sea" will be celebrated Tuesday, 8 June 2010 in an effort to increase public awareness and to foster public involvement in the management of the ocean and its resources. Although this date was created at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, it had not been officially recognized by the United Nations until 2009. This year's theme is "Our oceans: opportunities and challenges" and focuses on the great diversity of life in the oceans and how the citizens of the world can help in its conservation. A partial listing is provided for events across the US and other nations that will celebrate World Ocean Day. [The Ocean Project]
• "Break the Grip of the Rip®" -- NOAA, the United States Lifesaving Association and the National Park Service have designated this upcoming week of 6-12 June 2010 as national Rip Current Awareness Week. Using the theme, Break the Grip of the Rip®, efforts are meant to heighten public awareness of rip currents at surf beaches that claim the lives of as many as 100 people in the United States annually. [NOAA News] [NWS Rip Current Safety]
• Space weather forum to be held -- The National Space Weather Program Council in conjunction with NOAA's Office of the Federal Coordinator for Meteorological Services and Supporting Research (OFCM) will sponsor Space Weather Enterprise Forum 2010 on 8 June at the National Press Club in Washington DC. This forum, which has a theme Building an Informed and Resilient Society-the Decade Ahead, designed so the space weather community can share information and ideas among policymakers, senior government leaders, researchers, service provider agencies, private sector service providers, space weather information users, media, and legislators. [The National Space Weather Program]
• Summer of Innovation program to be kicked off -- This coming Thursday 10 June, NASA will kick off its Summer of Innovation initiative in an effort to engage middle-school students and teachers in stimulating math- and science-based education programs. While the program will officially launched at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA with approximately 250 invited students and teachers from southern California, thousands more will be able to participate on a live NASA Television program. [NASA JPL]
• Movie made of 2009 hurricane season -- The Laboratory for Atmospheres at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center created and placed on the NASA Hurricane Page a six-minute video of the 2009 Atlantic hurricane season from a sequence of satellite images obtained from the fleet of NASA and NOAA satellites. [NASA GSFC/NOAA]
• Smoke from Canadian wildfires reaches New England -- Images obtained at the start of last week from the MODIS sensor on NASA's Aqua satellite shows the smoke plume spreading southeastward across New England and the western North Atlantic Ocean from several large wildfires that were burning in the forests of Quebec to the north of the St. Lawrence River Valley. [NASA Earth Observatory]

• Monitoring sea surface temperatures over hurricane breeding areas -- An image of the sea surface temperatures of the tropical North Atlantic and the tropical eastern North Pacific made from data collected by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E) onboard NASA's Aqua satellite shows waters that were sufficiently warm to promote hurricane formation, especially from the west coast of Africa to Central America, the region where Atlantic hurricanes typically develop. [NASA Earth Observatory]

• Seasonal shift in track of African dust may have started over the Atlantic --A mosaic of images obtained early last week from the MODIS sensor on NASA's Terra satellite shows a plume of dust from Africa's Sahara Desert crossing the Atlantic to the northeast coast of South America before curving to the northwest over the eastern Caribbean. The seasonal shift in the path of the dust plume toward the Caribbean and ultimately to the Southeastern US may have begun. [NASA Earth Observatory]
• 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]

• Monitoring solar output from a satellite perspective -- A review article has been prepared that describes NASA's efforts at monitoring the solar irradiance or the amount of solar radiation reaching the top of the Earth's atmosphere by radiometers placed on several orbiting NASA and NOAA satellites since 1978. The cyclic variations in solar irradiance associated with solar activity and its influence on climate are also discussed. [NASA Earth Science News Team]
• Baltic Sea is more salty due to warmer climate -- Based upon their analysis of 500 years of climatic data, researchers from Sweden's University of Gothenburg claim that the warming climate appears to be responsible for reduced river runoff into the Baltic Sea, thereby increasing the salinity in this brackish sea. However, these researchers suggest that major regional differences may occur. [EurekAlert!]
• A month-long air sampling campaign starts -- As part of an Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility study project coordinated by the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, more than 60 scientists from 12 research institutions have commenced a nearly month-long field campaign called the "Carbonaceous Aerosols and Radiative Effects Study (CARES)" in California's Central Valley designed to study how tiny aerosols affect the climate. [Pacific Northwest National Laboratory News]
• New agricultural carbon accounting tool developed -- A research team from the US Energy Department's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the University of Tennessee, the US Department of Agriculture and Kansas State University has developed a new carbon accounting tool that uses NASA satellite data and high-resolution Department of Agriculture inventory data sets along with computational resources to monitor agricultural-based carbon emissions nationwide. The information obtained with this tool can be used for the reporting of emissions required under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. [Oak Ridge National Laboratory]
• Monitoring carbon dioxide underground storage -- A technology developed at the US Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory called Electric Resistance Tomography (ERT) has been used to track the carbon dioxide pumped into deep underground formations, such as oil fields, for storage. [Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory News]
• Mountains moved by flow in Earth's mantle -- Scientists at the University of Southern California and Italy's University of Rome theorize that small-scale convection in the Earth's mantle can help shape "mobile belts" containing crustal fragments floating between continental plates, which would result in upward motion of the semi-liquid mantle and the development of mountains and volcanoes. [EurekAlert!]

• NASA's Climate Simulation Center debuts -- Last week, officials with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center unveiled the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS), an organization at NASA Goddard designed to create data sets, numeric models and visualizations designed to simulate the Earth's climate, including short-term climate predictions (seasons to years) to climate change projections (decades to centuries). While this center will support scientists from NASA and other organizations, one of the features is the NCCS Data Exploration Theater, which can display a global simulation with a 3.5-km resolution on a 17- by 5-foot multi-screen visualization wall. [NASA GSFC]
• Forecasts indicate oil could reach the nation's Atlantic coast later this summer -- Researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and their colleagues at other research institutions developed a set of animations showing the trajectory of the oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon BP disaster using various model simulations extending out 130 days based on the Parallel Ocean Program, which is the ocean component of the Community Climate System Model. One of the animations showed the massive oil spill in the Gulf being carried by near surface currents through the Florida Strait and northward along the Atlantic Coast of the US by the Gulf Stream 130 days into the future. [UCAR/NCAR]

• Another forecast model predicts an active North Atlantic hurricane season -- Early last week, scientists at Florida State University's Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies announced that they were calling for an active 2010 North Atlantic hurricane season with 17 named tropical cyclones (tropical storms and hurricanes), including 10 hurricanes based upon the guidance supplied by their unique numerical forecast model. Their forecast compares with the long-term average of 11 named tropical cyclones and six hurricanes, as well as being consistent with the potentially active season foreseen by NOAA scientists and the hurricane forecasters at Colorado State University. [Florida State University News]

• Using tree rings to date historic property in Southeast -- Researchers from the University of Florida and University of Tennessee recently applied dendrochronology techniques to verify the age of a late 18th-century building in St. Augustine, FL for historians working to renovate one of the city's oldest historic properties. The researchers relied put a large master chronology database collected from pine stumps in south central Georgia. This dating technique using tree rings has been used more extensively in the West but less often in the Southeast, were a humid climate tends to cause wood to decay more rapidly. [University of Florida News]
• Sediment cores indicate arctic ice at historically low point -- Researchers from Ohio State University and colleagues at other research institutions in the US, Canada, Denmark and the United Kingdom have determined from the sediment cores retrieved from the Arctic Ocean floor that the current Arctic ice cover is the smallest in several millennium. [Ohio State University News]
• Using marine fossils to study land and sea level changes in Florida -- A geologist at the University of Florida claims that marine fossils found in the north-south running ridges that help form the Florida Peninsula together with the results from his computer model would indicate that rises in land level had been greater than changes in sea level in the past. He calculates that Florida's land surface is rising at an annual rate of one-twentieth of a millimeter, much less than the estimated annual sea level rise of approximately 3 millimeters. [University of Florida News]
• Ancient aquifer provides water for oasis near Death Valley -- Geological researchers at Brigham Young University have determined that the water gushing at 10,000 gallons per minute onto the desert floor at Ash Meadows, an oasis near Nevada's Death Valley, is flowing from an aquifer after beginning a journey that started approximately 15,000 years ago under what is now the Nevada Test Site. [Brigham Young University News]
• Thick haze may have provided UV screen for early Earth -- Using the haze layer that shrouds Saturn's moon Titan as an analogue, researchers at the University of Colorado-Boulder suggest that atmospheric haze consisting of hydrocarbon aerosols from methane and nitrogen chemical byproducts created by photochemical reactions may surrounded planet Earth approximately three billion years ago and could have been sufficiently thick to have protected the planet's primordial life from damaging ultraviolet radiation from the sun. This protective haze layer during the Archean period would have preceded the ozone layer that currently protects life on Earth. [University of Colorado-Boulder News Center]

• UN's emission reduction program is challenged by Amazon fires -- In research conducted at the United Kingdom's University of Exeter, satellite and ground-based data indicates deforestation and increasing fire occurrence rates in the Amazon have canceled a portion of the carbon savings to be achieved by the United Nation's REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) policy. [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]
• Earthweek -- Diary of the Planet [earthweek.com] Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader.

• 7 June 1972...Richmond, VA experienced its worst flood of record as rains from Hurricane Agnes pushed the water level at the city locks to a height of 36.5 feet, easily topping the previous record of thirty feet set in 1771. (The Weather Channel)
• 9 June 1966...Hurricane Alma made landfall over the eastern Florida Panhandle -- the earliest land falling hurricane on the U.S. mainland on record. (Intellicast)
• 9 June 1988...The temperature at Del Rio, TX soared to an all-time record high of 112 degrees. (The National Weather Summary) (Storm Data)
• 9 June 1990...San Diego, CA set a new record rainfall amount on this date, as 0.38 inches of rain fell breaking the old record of 0.13 inches established in 1892. Moisture from the remains of Hurricane Boris was responsible for this rare rain event. (Intellicast)
• 10 June 1995...The temperature at Yakutat, AK soared to 87 degrees for its highest temperature on record. (Intellicast)
• 11 June 1877...The temperature at Los Angeles, CA reached 112 degrees during a heat wave. It would have been the all-time record for Los Angeles but official records did not begin until twenty days later. Over a century later, Los Angeles would again reach this temperature on 26 June 1990. (The Weather Channel) (The Weather Doctor)
• 11 June 1972...Heavy showers brought 1.64 inches of rain to Phoenix, AZ, a record for the month of June. (The Weather Channel)
• 12 June 1991...The largest volcanic eruption of the 20th Century began as Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines injected 15 to 30 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. Global dust cloud cooled the planet, reversing for a time the global warming trend, as 1992 was globally one of the coolest since the 1970s. On the same day that Mt Pinatubo awakens from its 635-year slumber, Typhoon Yunya crossed Luzon province. Mudslides and flooding caused many deaths and added with impacts of Pinatubo leaving more than a million homeless. (The Weather Doctor)
• 13 June 1907...The temperature at Tamarack, CA dipped to 2 degrees above zero, the lowest reading of record for June for the U.S. The high that day was 30 degrees. Tamarack received 42 inches of snow between the 10^th and the 13^th. On the 13^th the snow depth was 130 inches. (The Weather Channel)
• 13 June 1977...Masirah, Oman received 16.95 inches of rain this day, a national record. (The Weather Doctor)

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