WEEKLY CLIMATE NEWS

WEEKLY CLIMATE NEWS

DataStreme ECS WEEK ELEVEN: 9-13 April 2012

ITEMS OF INTEREST

Development of climatographies -- Learn about the various globally averaged instrumental temperature records that scientists with the National Climatic Data Center have produced in this week's Supplemental Information...In Greater Depth.

CURRENT CLIMATE STATUS

Several US cities reap savings from less snow -- The relatively warm winter and the below average snowfall across many areas across the Midwest and the Northeast has allowed at least five large cities to realize substantial savings this year because of fewer times that snow removal and ice control were needed in the 2011-12 snow season. [USA Today]

CURRENT CLIMATE MONITORING

Increases in Southern Hemisphere nitrous oxide over last 65 years monitored -- Scientists from Australia, the US and Korea have constructed a 65-year record of atmospheric nitrous oxide (N₂O) concentrations in the Southern Hemisphere drawn from atmospheric sampling at the Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station, Tasmania, and from air extracted from the Antarctic ice sheet. This record shows that N₂O, a long-lived greenhouse gas and a major ozone-depleting chemical, has increased and through the isotopic analysis, this increase appears to be largely from agricultural sources. [Explore CSIRO]
Rapid Antarctic ice shelf disintegration seen from space -- A sequence of images obtained from the Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) onboard the European Space Agency's Envisat satellite over a ten-year span documents the rapid disintegration and retreat of the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica. The breakup and shrinkage of the Antarctic ice shelf has been attributed to increased global temperatures associated with climate change. [ESA 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

Rising carbon dioxide levels linked to temperature increases ending last Ice Age -- Scientists from Oregon State University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the National Center for Atmospheric Research and France's CNRS-Universite Aix-Marseille claim that they have established a clear cause-and-effect relationship between increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and the globally-averaged temperature changes during the end of the last Ice Age. [Oregon State University]
Industrial air pollution and volcanic activity linked to Atlantic Ocean temperature changes -- Researchers with the United Kingdom's Met Office claim that they have clearly linked the "dirty pollution" associated with aerosols generated by industry along with volcanic eruptions to the observed temperature variations in the Atlantic Ocean known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) during the 20th century. These researchers used a Met Office climate model to simulate physical processes to reproduce the temperature variations. They warn that human activity can drive large-scale regional climate changes. [UK Met Office]
Warming climate does not always translate to streamflow changes -- Scientists at Oregon State University who analyzed 35 headwater basins in the United States and Canada over a 20-to 60-year span found that the impact of higher air temperatures on streamflow rates was less than expected in many locations, which would suggest that some ecosystems may be resilient to certain aspects of changing climate. [Oregon State University]
Studies focus on a past major global warming event -- Scientists have been studying the origins of the onset of a major increase in global temperature during the Cenozoic Era approximately 55 million years ago that had been identified as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). Scientists from the University of New Hampshire and the Utrecht University in the Netherlands have found that this major "hyperthermal" was followed a series of hyperthermals that occurred more than 50 million years ago. During all these hyperthermal events, carbon was released into the atmosphere. [University of New Hampshire Media Relations]

University of Massachusetts-Amherst

CLIMATE IMPACTS ON THE BIOSPHERE

Predicting which plants can survive drought and climate change -- In research conducted by life scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, progress appears to have been leading to predicting of which plant species and worldwide vegetation types could survive drought and therefore escape extinction caused by climate change. [UCLA Newsroom]

CLIMATE FORECASTS

Hurricane season forecast -- Last week, the hurricane forecast team from Colorado State University headed by Phil Klotzbach released its April forecast of the 2012 North Atlantic hurricane season that officially begins on 1 June 2012. The team foresees a less active hurricane season than average due in part to to an anomalous cooling of the surface waters in the equatorial Atlantic during the last several months. Additionally, they are anticipating a good chance that El Niño conditions could develop by late fall or early fall replacing the dwindling La Niña event. In this April forecast, the forecasters call for 10 named tropical cyclones (hurricanes and tropical storms), with four potentially becoming hurricanes. As many as two hurricanes could become severe, reaching category 3 or higher on the Saffir-Simpson Scale. They also anticipate a below average probability of a major Atlantic hurricane making landfall somewhere along the coast of the coterminous US. [USA Today] [The Tropical Meteorology Project]

PALEOCLIMATE RECONSTRUCTION

Ice sheet collapse and sea-level rise near end of last Ice Age investigated -- Using data collected from coral samples obtained during the Tahiti Sea-Level Expedition 310 of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, a team of international scientists have shown that the occurrence of a dramatic sea-level rise approximately 14,600 years ago during the "Bølling warming" at the onset of the last deglaciation corresponds to a rapid collapse of massive ice sheets. This global sea level rise identified as Melt-Water Pulse 1A (MWP-1A) was approximately 14 meters. [International Ocean Discovery Program]
Slow subsidence of Earth's crust found beneath the Mississippi Delta -- Geologists from Tulane University who compared detailed sea-level reconstructions from several areas in coastal Louisiana including the Mississippi Delta and the New Orleans metropolitan area have found the Earth's crust has been sinking during the last 7000 years at a much slower rate than previously assumed. However, they warn that the sea-level rise along the Gulf Coast could occur at a rate approximately five times greater than during pre-industrial times. [NSF News]

CLIMATE AND SOCIETY

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.

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.)

General circulation models are generally [(less), (more)] sophisticated than energy balance models.
Increasing the spatial resolution of a global climate model causes the computational time to [(increase),(decrease),(remain the same)].

Historical Events:

9 April 1983...Hottest day in Malaysian historical record, as the temperature reached at Chuping, Malaysia reached 101 degrees, a record that was tied nine days later. (The Weather Doctor)
9 April 2000...A record April snowfall of 14.6 in. shut down Montreal, Quebec. Snow removal contracts had ended on 1 April. (The Weather Doctor)
9 April 1995...Glasgow, MT recorded 12.2 inches of snow in 24 hours, its greatest 24-hour snowfall on record. (Intellicast)
10 April 1985...A late season cold snap in the east set record low April temperatures in the following cities: Asheville, NC, 23 degrees; Beckley, WV, 11 degrees; Elkins, WV, 3 degrees. April record lows were tied in Raleigh-Durham, NC (23 degrees) and Roanoke, VA (20 degrees). (Intellicast)
10 April 1996...A wind gust of 253 mph was measured when the eyewall of Tropical Cyclone Olivia passed over Australia's Barrow Island. This gust became the highest surface wind speed record, replacing the 231-mph wind gust measured at New Hampshire's Mount Washington Observatory on 12 April 1934. (Accord Weather Guide Calendar)
12 April 1815...Massive eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia blew 400 cubic kilometers (100 cubic miles) of ash skyward. Eruption disrupted the global weather for several years, particularly noteworthy: the cold summer of 1816 in North America and Europe. (The Weather Doctor)
12 April 1934...Winds atop Mount Washington, NH (elevation 6288 feet) averaged a world record 186 mph for five minutes, with a peak gust from the southeast of 231 mph, which is the highest wind speed ever clocked in the world. (David Ludlum) On 10 April 1996, a wind gust of 253 mph was measured when the eyewall of Tropical Cyclone Olivia passed over Australia's Barrow Island and is now considered to be the highest surface wind speed record. (Accord Weather Guide Calendar)
12 April 1985...Key West, FL set a new record for April rainfall in a 24-hour period as 6.06 inches of rain were recorded, eclipsing the previous record of 6.04 inches which fell on 29 April 1941. In addition, the heavy rainfall shattered the old record for this date set back in 1931 when 1.49 inches of rain fell. (Intellicast)
12 April 1996...Duluth, MN recorded 1.7 inches of snow on this day to raise its seasonal snowfall total to 132.8 inches -- its snowiest winter on record. The old record was 131.6 inches set back in 1949-50. (Intellicast)
13 April 1955...The town of Axis, AL was deluged with 20.33 inches of rain in 24 hours establishing a state record. (The Weather Channel)
13 April 1985...The high temperature of 86 degrees for this date at Medford, OR was the highest ever so early in the spring season. (Intellicast)
14 April 1933...The state intensity record for snowfall for New Hampshire was set at Franklin Lake as 35 inches fell in 24 hours. (Intellicast)
14 April 1986...The world's heaviest hailstone, weighing 2.25 pounds, fell in the Gopalganj District of Bangladesh. This hailstone could have reached speeds in excess of 90 mph. (Accord's Weather Guide Calendar) (Wikipedia)
15 April 1921...Two-mile high Silver Lake (elevation 10,220 ft) in Boulder County, Colorado received 75.8 in. of snow in 24 hrs, the heaviest 24-hr total of record for North America. The storm left a total of 87 in. in twenty-seven and a half hours. (David Ludlum)
15 April 1927...New Orleans, LA was drenched with 14.01 inches of rain, which established a 24-hour rainfall record for the state. This record was eclipsed in August 1962, when 22.00 inches fell in a 24-hour span. (The Weather Channel)

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