WEEKLY CLIMATE NEWS

16-20 August 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.

ITEMS OF INTEREST

Media day announced for NASA's hurricane research flights -- NASA officials recently announced that they will host the media on Tuesday 31 August 2010 in Fort Lauderdale, FL and Houston, TX to provide a look at the agency's Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes (GRIP) mission, a six-week campaign starting this week that will study the development and intensification of Gulf of Mexico hurricanes. [NASA Headquarters]

Buoys launched to measure air-sea interactions in typhoons off Taiwan --An international team of scientists from the University of Miami, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the United Kingdom's University of Leeds and Environment Canada recently deployed two instrumented buoys in the waters of the western North Pacific near Taiwan. These tandem buoys will collect atmospheric and oceanic data that should permit them to better understand the air-sea interactions during typhoons. [Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science News Releases]

CURRENT CLIMATE STATUS

Monitoring the movement of a large ice island -- Approximately two weeks ago, an approximately hundred-square mile "ice island", estimated to be four times the size of Manhattan Island, calved from northern Greenland's Petermann Glacier. Several images of the large ice island were obtained over a nine-day span in late July and early August from the MODIS sensor on NASA's Terra satellite that show the calving process. [NASA Earth Observatory]
A more recent image of the ice island or iceberg was obtained near the end of last week from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) sensor on NASA's Terra satellite.[NASA JPL]

Review of the weather and climate of July 2010 --Scientists with the NOAA National Climatic Data Center recently released their preliminary monthly climate statistics for July 2010:

For the 48 coterminous United States, the July 2010 average temperature was approximately 1.3 Fahrenheit degrees above the 20th century average July temperature, or equivalently, this past July was the 17th warmest since a sufficiently dense and reliable national climate network was developed in 1895. The states along the Eastern Seaboard, extending from Maine to Florida, had statewide temperatures that were well above average, with Rhode Island and Delaware experiencing their highest statewide July temperatures in the 116-year record. Most of the states in the Mississippi Valley and across the Great Lakes had above average temperatures, as did the Southwestern states. Montana, Idaho and Texas had below average July statewide temperatures. The nationwide precipitation was 0.48 inches above the 20th century average. Many of the states across the Plains and into the Great Lakes had above to much above average statewide precipitation for July, while many Southeastern and Middle Atlantic states had below to much below average precipitation. The West Coast states and northern sections of the Intermountain West were also dry. [NOAA News]
For the globe, the combined global land and ocean surface temperature for July 2010 was the second highest reading for the period of record that extends back to 1880 when a sufficiently dense worldwide climate network was developed. The global average land surface temperature for July 2010 was the highest on record, while the global ocean surface temperature for July was the fifth highest. For the first seven months of 2010, the January-July combined global land and ocean surface temperature was the highest on record, as was the global average land surface temperature. The global ocean surface temperature for January through July was the second highest.
The scientists indicated that sea surface temperatures continued to drop across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, suggesting that La Niña conditions had developed during July 2010.
The areal extent of the Arctic sea ice in July was the second smallest since satellite records began in 1979, while the Antarctic sea ice for the month was above average. [NOAA News]

Monitoring the Indian monsoon and flooding -- The summer southwest monsoon season, with frequent rainfall, continues across southern and eastern Asia along with surrounding waters of the Indian and western Pacific Oceans.

An image obtained from data collected by sensors on NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite shows the departures of the daily rain rates from long-term average values for the first nine days of August 2010 over the region affected by the summertime Indian monsoon circulation regime. Areas of Pakistan, India, China and Indonesia reported positive precipitation anomalies, which correspond to the above average rainfall that contributed to widespread deadly flooding and mudslides in many of these areas. [NASA Earth Observatory]
Images obtained from the MODIS instrument on NASA's Terra satellite in mid July and mid August shows the extent of the deadly flooding in the Indus Valley that has occurred in Pakistan due to heavy rain associated with the summer monsoon circulation regime. [NASA Earth Observatory]
Landslides caused by torrential rains in northwestern China were responsible for at least 24 fatalities and over two dozen missing persons by late last week. [USA Today]

Russian heat wave and fires continue --

Russian heat wave is tracked from space -- An image generated from data collected by the MODIS sensor on NASA's Terra satellite displays the land surface temperature anomalies across the Russian Federation during the third and fourth weeks of July 2010. The anomalies, which represent the departure of the observed surface temperatures from the corresponding 2000-2008 averages, show that western Russia and eastern Siberia were experiencing much above average surface temperatures, associated in part with the extended drought across many of these regions. Lower than average surface temperatures were detected over northern Asiatic Russia. [NASA Earth Observatory]

Monitoring the Russian wildfires -- An image obtained from data collected by the Measurements of Pollution in the Troposphere (MOPITT) sensor on NASA’s Terra satellite shows relatively high levels of atmospheric carbon monoxide over western Russia during the first week of August, caused by the numerous wildfires that had developed across the region following a hot and dry early summer. The carbon monoxide levels were especially high around Moscow, the national capital. The MOPITT sensor measures the vertical distribution of atmospheric carbon monoxide in the low to mid troposphere, or at altitudes ranging from two to eight kilometers. [NASA Earth Observatory]
The carbon monoxide pollution from the Russian wildfires was also tracked by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument onboard NASA's Aqua spacecraft, as indicated by two images made on 21 July and 1 August 2010. The AIRS instrument senses the atmospheric carbon monoxide at an altitude of approximately 5.5 km (18,000 ft). [NASA JPL]
Videos depict global extent of fire-generated pollution -- As part of the "Eyes on the Earth 3-D" feature on NASA's global climate change page, two videos have been produced that show the air pollution that has spread around the globe during the last month from recent large wildfires across Russia, Siberia and western Canada. These videos are based on data obtained from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite, which samples carbon monoxide concentrations at an altitude of approximately 5.5 km (18,000 ft). One of the videos is centered over Moscow, Russia and shows the effect of the Russian wildfires from mid July through mid August. The second movie, which covers the same time interval, is centered over the North Pole and provides an indication of the long-range transport of the carbon monoxide pollutants. [NASA]
Rain fell around Moscow near the end of last week and helped cause the temperature in the capital city to fall. While the rain provided some relief to both the heat and the smog from the wildfires, some of the wildfires continued to burn.[USA Today]

CURRENT CLIMATE MONITORING

Phoenix heat waves studied from space -- Researchers at Researchers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Arizona State University and the University of California at Riverside have been using data collected by satellites to study the relationships between temperature variations and socioeconomic variables across Arizona's Phoenix metropolitan area during heat waves. These researchers have found that the urban poor appear the most vulnerable to extremely hot conditions, where few amenities are found, while residents with higher incomes appear to fare better because of neighborhoods that have more vegetation that mitigates some of the heat stress. [NASA]

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 the role of clouds in Earth's climate -- Professor Graeme Stephens of Colorado State University and a principal investigator of NASA's CloudSat mission is featured in an interesting article that provides a new perspective on the role that clouds have in maintaining a habitable climate on planet Earth. With the assistance provided by several researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a comparison is made between clouds and climate on Earth with those on Mars, Venus and Titan, the largest of Saturn's moons. [NASA JPL]

Oscillating cloud patterns are found -- Using satellite imagery along with computer models, a team of scientists from NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, Israel's Weizmann Institute, the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and China's Peking University has found that cloud elements in certain large-scale cloud patterns appear to organize and communicate with other neighboring cloud elements to form a oscillating pattern with regular periodic rainfall events. They likened the oscillation of the cloud activity to the chirping of crickets or the flashing of fireflies on a summer night. The researchers claim that their findings show that particulate matter plays an important role in the structure of clouds and could have implications for future climate change research.[NOAA News]

Changes in Sun's "conveyor belt" may have been linked with extended solar minimum -- Solar scientists at High Altitude Observatory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of California, Los Angeles report that the unusually long period of a relatively quiet Sun at the end of the solar cycle in 2008 may have been associated by a stretching of the Sun's "conveyor belt." This belt is a plasma current that circulated along the solar surface between the Sun's equator and its polar regions, with a return magnetic flux flow. [UCAR/NCAR]

PALEOCLIMATE RECONSTRUCTION

Secrets of El Niño events could disappear with Indonesian ice field -- Glaciologists and technicians from Ohio State University, the University of Louisville and the Institute of Geography in the Russian Academy of Sciences have drilled through an ice cap on a 16,000-foot mountain range in Indonesia and obtained ice cores that they hope would contain a tropical climate record from which a long-term record of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon can be deciphered. The researchers warn that the ice field could disappear in the next few years due to global-scale changes in climate. [Ohio State University Research]

Chinchilla pellets help reconstruct past rainfall levels -- Scientists at the Universidad Catolica de Chile and the Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity in Santiago have been measuring the size of chinchilla feces found in old preserved middens to reconstruct the rainfall in Chile's Atacama Desert and surrounding areas over the last 14,000 years. Arguably one of the world's driest climates, the Atacama Desert does receive some rain in association with El Nino events. [Discovery News]

Earth's climate belts during ancient times are reconstructed -- A team of geologists from the United Kingdom's University of Leicester and France's University of Lille 1 have used chitinozoans, microfossils of marine zooplankton to reconstruct the Earth's climate belts during the late Ordovician Period (between 460 and 445 million years ago). The researchers found that the general global distribution of these belts were similar to those found today, even though the levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide just before the late Ordovician glaciation had been thought to have been over twenty times higher than at present. [EurekAlert!]

Massive shift in supercontinent's position could have occurred in Cambrian times -- Analysis of the paleomagnetic record obtained from a basin in central Australia by Yale University geologists indicates that southern Gondwana, a part of the Pangaea supercontinent shifted a large distance relative to the South Pole during the Cambrian, approximately 525 million years ago. This shift, which may have been the result of plate tectonics or "true polar wander", occurred at the time of the "Cambrian explosion" when many of the major groups of complex animals appeared. The large-scale landmass movements could have affected environmental factors such as climate, carbon concentrations and ocean levels. [Yale University News]

CLIMATE IMPACTS ON THE BIOSPHERE

Asian rice production slowed by rising temperatures -- An international team of researchers that included those at the University of California, San Diego have found that increasing temperatures, especially the nighttime minimum temperatures, over the last 25 years have resulted in reductions in the yield growth rate in several Asian rice-growing regions that range from 10 to 20 percent. They warn that this reduction in the Asian rice yield due to changes in climate could affect food security and poverty in many areas of Asia. [LabSpaces]

A link between our nation's freshwater and climate -- A review article relates how the diverse collection of freshwater aquatic systems across the nation is affected by trends in global climate. In addition to the climate affecting the biological composition of the aquatic ecosystems, the effects upon the nation's water quality and supply are also considered. [Earthgauge]

CLIMATE AND SOCIETY

Rationing may be needed as Lake Mead level reaches a 54-year low -- The persistent drought, together with increased demands for water, has caused the lake level of Lake Mead, located on the Colorado River behind the Hoover Dam, to drop the a 54-year low. If the lake level continues to drop at the current rate through the end of the year, the level would be within nine feet of the level that would trigger water restrictions involving the reduction of water delivers to agricultural interests in Nevada and Arizona. Additional restrictions could follow. [The Arizona Republic]

Creating a charcoal-like substance to offset carbon emissions and global warming-- Researchers at the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and colleagues at other research institutions claim that the production of "biochar", a charcoal-like substance derived from organic materials, could offset 1.8 billion metric tons of carbon emissions annually, which would represent as much as 12 percent of the world’s human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. This substance, generated by a slow pyrolysis process, can be used to create power through the production of bio-based fuels and improve food production by increasing soil fertility. [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]

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]

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

Historical Events:

16 August 1909...A dry spell began in San Bernardino County of southern California that lasted until the 6th of May in 1912, a stretch of 994 days! Another dry spell, lasting 767 days, then began in October of 1912. (The Weather Channel)
17 August 1885...Amos, CA hit 130 degrees to set the unofficial August U.S. high temperature record. (Intellicast)
18 August 1924...A record August rainfall for the United Kingdom occurred when 9.4 inches deluged Cannington (Somerset) England. (The Weather Doctor)
18 August 1927...Pressure in unnamed tropical storm fell to 887 millibars (26.18 inches of mercury) over the Pacific Ocean east of Luzon in the Philippines, one of the lowest surface measurements on record. (The Weather Doctor)
18-19 August 1935...The temperature soared to record high levels in each of the Maritime Provinces, with a 98 degree reading at Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, 101 degrees in Collegeville, Nova Scotia and 103 degrees in Rexton, New Brunswick. (The Weather Doctor)
18 August 1936...Iowa had its hottest ever August day with the average high temperature for 113 stations being 106.5 degrees Fahrenheit. (Intellicast)
18-19 August 2007...A cooperative observer near Hokah in southeastern Minnesota recorded 15.10 inches of rain, establishing a new 24-hour maximum precipitation record for the Gopher State. (NCDC)
19 August 1939...Tuckerton, NJ received 14.81 inches of rain, which established a 24-hour maximum precipitation record for the Garden State. (NCDC)
19 August 1955...Rains from tropical Storm Diane fell on ground saturated from Tropical Storm Connie a week before. Westfield, MA recorded 18.15 inches in 24 hours, to set a statewide record for the Bay State, while the 24-hour precipitation record for the Nutmeg State was set at Burlington, CT with 12.77 inches. Extreme flooding occurred in all of New England. (Intellicast)
19 August 1960...The heaviest recorded 24-hour precipitation accumulation to date for the Arctic drenched Mould Bay, Northwest Territories with 1.88 inches of rain. (The Weather Doctor)
19 August 1969..."Never say die" Camille let loose a cloudburst in Virginia resulting in flash floods and landslides that killed 151 persons and cause 140 million dollars damage. Massies Hill in Nelson County, Virginia received an estimated 27 inches of rain in 24 hours. This amount is an unofficial record for the state, while the official 24-hour maximum precipitation record is 14.28 inches at Williamsburg on 16 September 1999. (David Ludlum) (NCDC)
19 August 1986...The temperature at San Antonio, TX soared to an all-time record high of 108 degrees. (Sandra and TI Richard Sanders 1987)
21 August 1983...The temperature at Fayetteville, NC soared to 110 degrees to establish a state high temperature record. (The Weather Channel)
21 August 1992...The earliest recorded snowfall in Edmonton, Alberta since record keeping began in 1884. (The Weather Doctor)
21 August 2007...Hail with diameters of up to 5.25 inches fell in southeastern South Dakota, resulting in considerable damage to roofs of buildings. The largest hailstone had a circumference of 18.00 inches and weighed 1.0 pound, which represents the largest documented hailstone in South Dakota since records began in 1950. (NCDC)
22 August 1816...The growing season for corn was cut short as damaging frosts were reported from North Carolina to interior New England in the "Year-without-a-Summer". (David Ludlum)
22 August 1976...The temperature soared to record high for Newfoundland: with a 98.1-degree reading at Botwood. (The Weather Doctor)

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