DataStreme ECS WEEK TEN: 2-6 April 2012

ITEMS OF INTEREST

• Masters climatology -- The 2012 Masters Golf Tournament, one of professional golf's four major championships, will begin this coming Thursday (5 April) at the Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, GA. The Southeast Regional Climate Center has produced a Masters Climatology for 1934-2011 that includes the daily maximum and minimum temperatures and the 24-hour precipitation totals for each day of the four-day event in early April, extending over the last 77 years.
• NASA's Hurricane Twitter is highly popular -- During the month of March 2012, NASA's Hurricane Twitter social media page surpassed 200,000 subscribers, a mark that few other NASA Twitter accounts have reached. This page posts daily updates on current tropical cyclones including images and videos. [NASA Hurricane/Tropical Cyclones Mission]
• Scientist examines how debris influences glaciers -- Dr. Kimberly Casey, a glaciologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, was recently interviewed about her fieldwork on remote glaciers in the Himalayas and the European Alps in which she studied the effects of dust and debris on the glaciers upon which the particles collect and accumulate. She also used data from the ASTER sensor on NASA's Terra satellite to map particulate types on glaciers. [NASA GSFC]
• Successful launches of sounding rockets light the Middle Atlantic Coast -- Early last Tuesday (27 March) NASA launched five suborbital sounding rockets in rapid succession from its Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia as part of the Anomalous Transport Rocket Experiment (ATREX) designed to measure the 200 to 300 mph winds found at altitudes between 60 to 65 miles above the Earth's surface. These rockets released a chemical tracer that created milky white clouds used to track the wind speeds and direction out over the western Atlantic Ocean. The launches and clouds were reportedly seen from Wilmington, NC north to Buffalo, NY and westward to Charlestown, WV. [NASA GSFC]
• 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

• Review of global weather and climate for February 2012 and boreal winter -- Using preliminary data collected from the global network of surface weather stations, scientists at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center have determined that the combined global land and ocean surface temperature for February 2012 ranked the 22nd highest for any February since global climate records began in 1880. They also noted that the combined land-ocean temperature for the three months of December 2011, January and February 2012 was also the 17th highest for this three-month Northern Hemisphere winter-Southern Hemisphere summer season. Furthermore, the average global ocean surface temperature for February was the twelfth highest on record and for the three-month season was the 15th highest. The global land surface temperature for February 2012 was 37th highest, while that of the December 2011-February 2012 was the 20th highest. The results indicate that the continuing La Niña event remained a factor. The areal coverage of Arctic sea ice during February 2012 was the fifth smallest February extent since satellite surveillance began in 1979, while the sea ice around Antarctica was the fifth largest. While the snow cover across the Northern Hemisphere for the three-month winter season was the 14th largest for the record that started in the late 1960s, the winter snow cover over North America was the fourth smallest. [NOAA/NCDC State of the Climate]

• Global surface ocean currents and temperature patterns in motion -- A high-resolution visualization was produced using NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory computational model that shows surface ocean currents with corresponding sea surface temperature data. This computational model called "Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean, Phase II" (ECCO2) attempts to model ocean eddies that can affect the transport of heat and carbon in the world oceans. [NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio]
• Surface salinity differences found between Atlantic and Pacific Oceans off North America -- An image shows surface salinity (salt concentration) over the western North Atlantic and the eastern North Pacific Oceans surrounding North America generated from a global ocean model run by the NOAA Environmental Modeling Center. The image shows that the western North Atlantic is saltier than the eastern North Pacific, with the salinity differences attributed to differences in the freshwater input and the evaporation from the ocean basins. [NOAA Environmental Visualization Lab]
• Evidence of thawing permafrost seen from space -- More than 60 scientists meeting at a workshop recently held at Germany's Alfred Wegener Institute showed that high resolution data collected from sensors onboard satellites such as the European Space Agency's Envisat show changes in the land surface characteristics including surface temperature, land cover and snow parameters, soil moisture and terrain. These changes provide evidence of thawing permafrost across the polar latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere. Thawing of the permafrost releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere across the Arctic, helping accelerate the effects of large-scale climate change. [ESA]
• West Antarctic ice shelves are tearing apart -- Glaciologists from the University of Texas report that their analysis of nearly 40 years of satellite imagery indicates the ice shelves floating on the waters of the eastern Amundsen Sea Embayment are becoming more fractured and less able to hold the grounded ice in West Antarctica. They also note that the changes have been rapid during the last decade. [University of Texas]
• 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

• Oceans could have hidden carbon dioxide during last Ice Age -- Using newly developed isotope measurement techniques on ice core samples, scientists from Switzerland's University of Bern, France's University of Grenoble and Germany's Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research have found that processes within the ocean have been responsible for sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the deep ocean during cold ice age periods over the last 800,000 years, including the last Ice Age at times around 20,000 years ago. Only at the end of the Ice Age, oceanic circulation transported the stored carbon dioxide to the surface where it was emitted into the atmosphere. [Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research]

CLIMATE IMPACTS ON THE BIOSPHERE

• Current year's global vegetation compared with last year -- Images showing the differences in the global vegetation from one week ago and the corresponding date in March 2011 were produced satellite generated data. The differences are described by a normalized vegetation difference index, a measure of global greenness, generated from data collected by the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) onboard NOAA's polar orbiting satellites. Sections of the Northeastern States, the Canadian Prairie Provinces appear to be greener this year because of early spring blooms, while drought across the Southeastern States have resulted in "browner" conditions across this region as compared with last year. [NOAA Environmental Visualization Lab]
• Switch discovered that accelerates flowering time for plants -- Researchers at the United Kingdom's John Innes Centre on the Norwich Research Park have found that a plant control gene (PIF4) binds a special molecule (Florigen) at higher temperatures in spring that can trigger early flowering in many plants. [John Innes Centre]
• Diverse ecosystems threatened by extreme weather -- Using mathematical simulations, researchers at Sweden's Linköping University report that species extinction in bio-diverse ecosystems including coral reefs and tropical rainforests would increase because of more extreme weather events such as hurricanes, droughts and excessive rainfall caused by increased global temperatures. [Linköping University]
• Heat stress may help coral reefs survive changing climate -- An international team of scientists who recently conducted a study on the equatorial Pacific island nation of Kiribati conclude that coral that have survived heat stress in the past appear to be more likely to survive future warm events associated with changing climate. [University of British Columbia]
• Coral reef declines in Caribbean predate warming oceans -- A research team from Scripps Institution of Oceanography and other institutions using a novel excavation technique to reconstruction a timeline in the coral reefs in along the Caribbean side of the Panama Isthmus claims that land clearing and overfishing have caused damage to these reefs, predating the damage caused by warmer waters associated with anthropogenically forced changes in climate. [EurekAlert!]

PALEOCLIMATE RECONSTRUCTION

• Fossil raindrop impressions indicate warm early atmosphere -- Researchers at the University of Washington have used evidence obtained from fossilized impressions of raindrops made on sediments from approximately 2.7 billion years ago to deduce that the atmospheric pressure at that time and infer that greenhouse gases were sufficiently abundant to maintain air temperatures that would permit liquid drops to fall as rain. The researchers used the sizes of the raindrop impressions to ascertain raindrop velocity, atmospheric pressure and composition. [University of Washington]

CLIMATE AND SOCIETY

• International report on managing extreme events risks released -- Last week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its 594-page report entitled "Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX)." This report, prepared by an interdisciplinary team of 220 authors form 62 countries, states that evidence suggests that changing climate have led to changes in weather and climate extremes such record high temperatures, heat waves, heavy precipitation during the last 50 years and that these climate extremes could, in combination with social vulnerabilities, lead to create climate-related disasters. Appropriate policies aimed to avoid, anticipate and respond to these disasters could reduce the impact of these events. [IPCC Press Release] Note: A 20-page summary for policy makers is a available.
• 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.

Reports from the Field -- Robert Volpe, a teacher at Virginia Beach City Public Schools, reported on the early spring in southeastern Virginia. He noted that Box Turtles came out of hibernation in mid March and he wondered if they would grow larger with a longer summer. The flowering cherry trees and the willow oaks finished blooming this past Sunday, but his Forsythias appear to be blooming closer to schedule, but possibly because they are shaded by taller trees. Red Bud and oaks have completed their pollination. He also noted that because of the early bloom of many different plants nearly simultaneously, hay fever may be a major problem.
Bill Huskin, a DataStreme Climate Studies LIT Member from Doylestown, PA, reported that the temperature in southeastern Pennsylvania fell to 27 degrees last Tuesday, which likely caused damage to his peach trees that had bloomed early due to the unseasonably warm weather of the previous two weeks. He claims that temperatures below 28 degrees would cause damage to his fruit trees. The exact damage will take several more weeks to assess.

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:

• 2 April 1970...The last snowstorm of the 1969-70 winter season came to an end at Chicago, IL as 10 .7 inches of snow fell -- a final contribution to the season's amount of 77 inches, which set a new all-time snow season record for the city. (Intellicast)
• 2 April 1975...A severe storm over the northeastern US began on this day and blasted the area for the next 3 days. Wind gusts reached 87 mph at West Harpswell, ME and Boston, MA recorded its lowest April pressure on record (28.68 inches). Tides along the coast ran 2 to 4 feet above normal and anywhere from 1 to 4 feet of snow fell from western New York to northern Maine with the higher elevations receiving the most. (Intellicast)
• 3 April 1955...Record snow fell across north-central Wyoming and south-central Montana as Sheridan WY established a 24-hour snowfall record with 26.7 inches. (The Weather Doctor)
• 3 April 1996...Marquette, MI recorded 12.6 inches of snow on this day to raise its seasonal snowfall to 250.8 inches -- the city's snowiest winter ever. The old record was 243.8 inches set back in 1981-82. The snowfall for the month now stood at 43.4 inches -- the snowiest April on record for the city as well. (Intellicast)
• 4 April 1933...Pigeon River Bridge, MN reported 28 inches of snow, which established the state 24-hour snowfall record. (4th-5th) (The Weather Channel)
• 4 April 1955...A severe 3-day spring snowstorm ended over north central Wyoming and south central Montana. Sheridan, WY had near blizzard conditions for 43 hours and recorded 22.7 inches of snow in 24 hours on the 3^rd to set a new 24-hour snowfall record. Billings, MT had a storm total of 42.3 inches, a new single storm snowfall record. (Intellicast)
• 4 April 1973...Sandia Crest, NM reported a snow depth of 95 inches, a record for the state of New Mexico. (The Weather Channel)
• 5 April 1926...A reported 0.65 inches of rain fell in one minute at Opid's Camp, CA (Intellicast)
• 5 April 1945 ...The temperature at Eagles Nest, NM plunged to 36 degrees below zero to establish an April record for the continental United States. (Sandra and TI Richard Sanders - 1987)
• 5 April 1989...Unseasonably hot weather prevailed in the southwestern U.S. Afternoon highs of 100 degrees at Santa Maria, CA and 105 degrees in Downtown Los Angeles established records for the month of April. (The National Weather Summary)
• 6 April 1886...Detroit, MI recorded its biggest snowfall in 24 hours when 25.4 inches fell. (Intellicast)
• 6 April 1989...Unseasonably hot weather prevailed in California. Afternoon highs of 91 degrees in Downtown San Francisco, 93 degrees at San Jose, 98 degrees at San Diego, 103 degrees at Santa Maria, 104 degrees at Riverside, and 106 degrees in Downtown Los Angeles established records for the month of April. (The National Weather Summary)
• 6 April 1990...The last measurable snowfall of the 1989-90 season occurred at Valdez, AK. This brought the season snowfall to a whopping 560.2 inches, breaking the old record of 517 inches set back in the 1928-29 season. (Intellicast)
• 8-10 April 1958...A global 48-hour precipitation record was established at Aurere, La Reunion Island, when 97.1 in. of rain from a tropical cyclone fell on the Indian Ocean island. (The Weather Doctor)
• 8 April 1989...Two dozen cities in the southwestern U.S. reported new record high temperatures for the date. Phoenix, AZ equaled their record for April of 104 degrees established just the previous day. (The National Weather Summary)

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Prepared by Edward J. Hopkins, Ph.D., email hopkins@meteor.wisc.edu
© Copyright, 2012, The American Meteorological Society.