Thanksgiving Week: 22-26 November 2010

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

ITEMS OF INTEREST

• A Long Polar Night -- After being above the horizon for only 66 minutes last Thursday (18 November 2010), the sun set at 1:45 PM Alaska Standard Time at Barrow, the northernmost city in Alaska. This sunset was for the last time this year as the next time the sun will rise above the local horizon in Barrow will be at 1:05 PM AST on 23 January 2011. While the sun will be below the horizon for the next 66 days, residents of this city will have roughly three hours of some diffuse sunlight each day that is equivalent to civil twilight, provided the cloud cover is not too thick. To check the sunrise and sunset times of Barrow or any location in the United States go to the US Naval Observatory's on-line, interactive service for the entire year.
• "Earth As Art" --
In conjunction with Geography Awareness Week, the US Geological Survey released the latest set of Landsat satellite images in the third of its award winning series of USGS and NASA images entitled "Earth As Art 3." This series shows a wide variety of features on the Earth from the perspective of an orbiting satellite. [USGS Newsroom]

CURRENT CLIMATE STATUS

• October drought report -- The National Climate Data Center has posted its October 2010 drought report online. Using the Palmer Drought Severity Index, approximately five percent of the coterminous United States experienced severe to extreme drought conditions at the end of October, while 16 percent of the area had severely to extremely wet conditions.
• A global review of October 2010 temperatures --
Preliminary analysis of worldwide combined ocean and land surface temperatures by scientists at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center indicates that the recently completed month of October 2010 ranked as the eighth warmest 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 2010 was the sixth highest on record for October, while that month's global ocean surface temperature was the tenth highest. Furthermore, the scientists reported that the combined land and ocean surface temperatures averaged over the first ten months of 2010 has tied 1998 for the highest January through October average in 131 years of record. The January-October 2010 global average land surface temperature was the second highest behind 2007, while the corresponding global ocean surface temperature ranked second highest behind 1998. La Nina represented a significant factor in the global ocean temperatures. The average Arctic sea ice extent for October 2010 was the third lowest October sea ice extent since satellite surveillance began in 1979. [NOAA News]

CURRENT CLIMATE MONITORING

• Troposphere is warming -- Scientists from NOAA, the NOAA-funded Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites (CICS), the United Kingdom Met Office, and United Kingdom's University of Reading, recently conducted a review of the history of understanding temperature changes and their causes in the scientific literature over the last four decades. These researchers found that the troposphere, or the lowest six miles of the atmosphere, has been warming and this warming has been generally consistent with both theoretical expectations and with climate models. [NOAA 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

• Deep sea lava bakes sediments and releases greenhouse gases -- Researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have discovered that hot lava emanating from deep sea volcanoes along ocean ridges are baking ocean sediments, which releases greenhouse gases. This discovery is contrary to some earlier thoughts that this process represented a carbon sink rather than a carbon source. [Discovery News]
• Newly discovered drumlin field helps in glaciation studies --
Researchers from Sweden's University of Gothenburg have found that landforms containing accumulations of glacial debris or till known as drumlins usually thought to have been created during the ice advance during the last Ice Age also can be produced by modern glaciers, such as those found in Iceland. [EurekAlert!]

CLIMATE AND THE BIOSPHERE

• Earlier flowering linked to changing climate -- A biologist at the University of Cincinnati who has studied the flowering cycle of plants native to southwestern Ohio reports that many of these plants have been flowering significantly earlier. He attributes this earlier flowering in part to the increases in global temperature during the last several decades. [University of Cincinnati News]
• Tundra fires increase with rises in Arctic temperatures --
Using data collected from sediment cores, along with recent fire and climate data, researchers from the University of Illinois and the University of Idaho have determined that fires in the tundra across the Arctic basin have increased in recent decades as air temperatures across this basin have increased. [University of Illinois News Bureau]

CLIMATE FORECASTS

• Three-month seasonal weather outlook released -- Late last week, forecasters at NOAA's Climate Prediction Center (CPC) released an update their Winter Outlook for meteorological winter (the three months of December 2010 through February 2011) across the nation. They feel that the winter weather will be influenced by stronger La Niña conditions, an anomalous atmospheric and oceanic circulation regime that tends to favor lower than average sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific. In terms of their temperature outlook, the forecasters foresee a better than equal chance for above average winter temperatures across the southern and central sections of the nation, primarily from the western Gulf of Mexico and the Rio Grande Valley northward across the Plains to Kansas. On the other hand, the northern Plains and sections of the upper Mississippi Valley, along with southwestern California, would have a good chance of experiencing below average temperatures. Their precipitation outlook calls for better than even chances that the Pacific Northwest the northern Rockies and the adjacent northern Plains, along with sections of the Midwest, extending from the lower Ohio Valley to the eastern Great Lakes, should have better than equal chances of above average winter precipitation. However, the southern tier of states, from southern California eastward to the Middle Atlantic coast would experience dry conditions, especially across sections of southern Georgia and northern Florida. A summary of the prognostic discussion of the outlook for non-technical users is available from CPC.
  At the same time, CPC also released its US Seasonal Drought Outlook that will run through February 2011. This outlook indicates improvement in the drought conditions across the Midwest, including the Ohio and mid-Mississippi Valleys, and scattered sections of the central Rockies and the southern Cascades. Some marginal improvement was anticipated across scattered areas across the Appalachians, the lower Mississippi Valley and the Great Basin. Drought conditions were anticipated to persist or develop across the Southeast, the Gulf Coast, Texas and the Southwest.

CLIMATE AND SOCIETY

• Two cities using satellite data to plan for future climate change -- City officials in Seattle, WA and New York City, NY, two metropolitan areas with dissimilar in cultural and geographic attributes, are employing data collected by NASA satellites to plan for future climate change. One of the projects designed to help cities plan for future climate change has involved use of measurements of sea-level change made by the NASA's Ocean Surface Topography Mission. [NASA Global Climate Change]
• 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

• Venus Climate Orbiter science team chosen -- NASA recently announced a list of US scientists that it chose as part of its Venus Climate Orbiter Participating Scientist Program designed collaborate with scientists with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency in conducting research using the recently launched Venus Climate Orbiter, or "Akatsuki" mission. This mission was launched last May and is scheduled to arrive at Venus within two and one half weeks. The Orbiter is to map the Venusian atmospheric circulation, along with the evolution and vertical structure of the planet's thick clouds. [NASA JPL]
• Earthweek --
Diary of the Planet [earthweek.com] Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader.

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.)

1. General circulation models are generally [(less), (more)] sophisticated than energy balance models.
2. 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)

Return to DataStreme Earth Climate Systems website

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