WEEKLY CLIMATE NEWS

30 April -4 May 2012

DataStreme Earth Climate Systems will return for Fall 2012 with new Investigations files starting during Preview Week, Monday, 27 August 2012. All the current online website products will continue to be available throughout the summer break period.

ITEMS OF INTEREST

"Be Air Aware" -- National Weather Service and the US Environmental Protection Agency have announced that this upcoming week (30 April-4 May 2012) is Air Quality Awareness Week and they are urging Americans to "Be Air Aware." [NOAA Air Quality] Individual states and localities will have specific Air Quality Awareness Week activities.
Kentucky Derby climatology -- With the 138th running of the Kentucky Derby set for next Saturday (5 May 2012), the National Weather Service's Louisville (KY) Forecast Office has posted a climatology for Derby Day, including the historical weather extremes. [Louisville NWSFO]
Spring comes to interior Alaska -- The ice on the Tanana River at Nenana officially went out last Monday evening (23 April 2012 at 7:39 PM, Alaska Standard Time). The median date for ice-breakup is 5 May. [Nenana Ice Classic] The jackpot for the famous 96th annual Nenana Ice Classic was a record $350,000.00, with an undisclosed number of winners. [Fairbanks Daily News-Miner] NOTE: A graph of the date of ice-out for each year since the Classic was started in 1917 has been plotted by this editor. EJH
Between equinox and solstice -- Next Tuesday (1 May 2012) will be May Day, which had its origins as a great Celtic festival Beltane. This date is close to the traditional "cross quarter" day, roughly halfway between the vernal equinox (20 March 2012) and the summer solstice (20 June 2012). (Note that Saturday 5 May 2012 is closer to the halfway point between the equinox and solstice. EJH)
Public comments invited for new National Weather Service webpage -- NOAA's National Weather Service is currently seeking public comments on the design and contents of its newly designed web site. Anyone may provide comments for the next three weeks using the "preview" web site at http://preview.weather.gov/.
May is National Wetlands Month -- The US Environmental Protection Agency, along with other federal agencies and environmental groups, has designated May as American Wetlands Month in an effort to increase public awareness of the importance of protecting and preserving the nation's wetlands. This year's observance is the 22nd annual National Wetlands Month. [EPA-Wetlands]
"Walking the dog" video used to visualize trend and variation in long-term temperatures -- Dr. James Brey, Director of the American Meteorological Society's Education Program forwarded the following:
"An effective way to explain the relationships between shorter term temperature averages, which to go up and down, with global temperatures which are trending upward is with this little video. The dog walking in this little video wanders around, up and down in the frame but always trends in the direction of his owner moving to the upper right. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0vj-0imOLw&feature=player_embedded#!.
Richard Alley, at the Tri-Agency PI meeting last week had another illustration which showed the fallacy of the 'out of context' claim by climate change deniers that global temperatures are actually falling. He picked about a half dozen dates from the record and related them to events in his own life. 'When I started kindergarten the temperature was falling.' (A short segment of a temperature graph, with the temperature decreasing was placed on a large graph with an x-y axis showing time and temp.) When I was 10 years old, I lived in such and such city and the temperature was falling. (A short segment of a temperature graph, with the temperature decreasing was placed a little higher on large graph.) "When I was 15 and won a science fair competition, the temperature was falling." (A short segment of a temperature graph, with the temperature decreasing was placed a little higher on large graph.). We'll you get the picture. By the time he had earned tenure and become a best selling author the line segments were high on the graph but all were falling. Filling in the gaps showed times of rise, of course, and the overall trend was a dramatic increase in temperature with an unmistakable upward trend."
Determining the size of the "fireball" over the Sierras -- Experts from NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and from the Meteoroid Environments Office at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center estimate that the ball of bright light that traversed the skies of central and northern California one week ago Sunday morning may have been a space rock that was the size of a minivan and had the weight of approximately 154,300 pounds as it passed through the Earth's atmosphere. This meteor disintegrated and released energy that was equivalent to a 5-kiloton explosion. [NASA JPL]

CURRENT CLIMATE MONITORING

Research aircraft joins Operation IceBridge campaign --The NASA Langley Research Center's newly acquired HU-25C research airplane has recently joined the agency's P-3B aircraft in Greenland to help collect environmental data and survey the planet's polar ice as part of NASA's 2012 Operation IceBridge campaign. This year's campaign is part of a multi-year mission to study the rapidly changing features of the ice sheets, ice shelves and sea ice in the Arctic and in Antarctica. A scanning laser altimeter called LVIS (Land, Vegetation, and Ice Sensor) has been mounted on the HU-25C aircraft to collect data on Arctic surface topography. [NASA Langley Research Center]
Determining the amount of precipitation in the southern Appalachians --A team of scientists working for NASA's Precipitation Measurement Missions (PMM) are attempting to determine how much precipitation falls on the southern Appalachians from both ground-based measurements and from satellite sensors such as those on NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM). A large fraction of the total annual precipitation across this region in considered as drizzle or light rain. [NASA GSFC]
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

Most of Antarctic ice loss due to warm ocean currents -- Using data collected by the sensors onboard NASA's Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) along with various numerical models, an international team of scientists have determined that warm ocean currents attacking the underside of ice shelves are the dominant cause of recent ice loss from Antarctica. [NASA]
One week's monitoring of the plume from Mexican volcano --Researchers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center have assembled a week-long animation of visible and infrared images obtained from NOAA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, GOES-13, showing the plume of volcanic ash and condensate obtained from the plume emanating out of Mexico's recent Popocatepetl Volcano. [NASA GSFC]
Climate change over eastern United States delayed by a "warming hole" -- Climate scientists at Harvard University and their colleagues from several other research institutions discovered that particulate pollution from the 1930s through 1990 created a cold patch across the eastern United States that they called a "warming hole," which temporally obscured the effects of global warming that have been occurring elsewhere. This cold pool occurred prior the reduction of particulates following the implementation of the Clean Air Act. [Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences]

CLIMATE AND THE BIOSPHERE

Some tree species may grow better in urban heat islands -- A tree physiologist from Columbia University and colleagues from the US, New Zealand and Israel have found that several tree species appear to grow better in the urban heat islands within urban areas than they do in nearby cooler suburban and rural areas. The researchers believe that the higher city temperatures stimulate more robust growth in some of these tree species. [Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory]

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.

Historical Events:

30 April 1888...World's deadliest hailstorm occurred at Moradabad, India as enormous hailstones killed 230 persons and many livestock. An additional 16 people died in another town. (The Weather Doctor)
30 April 1991...Memphis, TN set a new monthly rainfall record for April with 17.13 inches of rain. The old record was 13.90 inches set back in 1877. (Intellicast)
30 April 1994...The rain finally stopped on the Kaneohe Ranch on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, ending a streak of 247 consecutive days of rain that began 27 August 1993. (The Weather Doctor)
1 May 1854...After 66 hours of steady rain, the Connecticut River reached a level of nearly twenty-nine feet (28 feet 10.5 inches) at Hartford, CT (the highest level of record until that time). The record height was reached in the midst of a great New England flood that followed sixty-six hours of steady rain. (David Ludlum) (Intellicast)
1 May 1935...Snow, ice and sleet brought winter back to parts of southeast Minnesota. Minneapolis received three inches of snow to tie their May record that was established in 1892. (1^st-2^nd) (The Weather Channel)
1 May 1954...The temperature at Polebridge, MT dipped to 5 degrees below zero to establish a state record for the month of May. (The Weather Channel)
2 May 1899...A storm buried Havre, MT under 24.8 inches of snow, an all-time record for that location. The water equivalent of 2.48 inches was a record 24-hour total for the month of May. (The Weather Channel)
6 May 1933...Charleston, SC was deluged with 10.57 inches of rain, an all-time 24-hour record for that location. (The Weather Channel)
6 May 1978...A record late season snowstorm struck Colorado. Denver checked in with 14 inches for its greatest May snowstorm on record. (Intellicast)

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