DataStreme ECS WEEK TEN: 7-11 November 2011

• "Falling back" this past weekend -- Early this past Sunday morning most of the nation will revert back to Standard time after nearly 8 months of observing Daylight Saving Time. Since Arizona, Hawaii and Puerto Rico do not observe Daylight Saving Time, no time change will be needed in those parts of the country. The U.S. Congress has mandated time changes. Following the old adage of "spring ahead, fall behind", you will need to turn your clocks back by one hour to conform with the local time observance. Note: A recent Energy Policy Act has extended Daylight Saving Time, with the start on the second Sunday in March (13 March 2011) and the end on the first Sunday in November (6 November 2011). Next spring, Daylight Saving Time will start on Sunday morning, 11 March 2011.
  A change from Daylight Saving to Standard Time does not deduct an extra hour of daylight from the day nor does it affect weather and climate patterns. The daily climate data collected at those automatic weather stations operated by the National Weather Service and the Federal Aviation Administration, together with all the cooperative weather observing stations around the nation are always made according to local standard time.
• Free admission into the National Parks -- This coming weekend, Friday, 11 November 2011 through Sunday 13 November 2011, has been designated by the National Park Service as fee-free days in honor of Veterans Day. This fee waiver will cover entrance and commercial tour fees in many of the national parks and monuments administered by the Park Service. [National Park Service Fee Free Days]

• Carbon dioxide emissions rate accelerated during last year -- The US Department of Energy recently calculated that the global output of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere jumped by six percent between 2009 and 2010, the biggest amount on record. The researchers indicate that this record increase indicates that the levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts four years ago and shows how feeble the world's efforts are at slowing man-made global warming. [USA Today]
• Contaminants in the environment seen by multi-color sensors -- A "hyperspectral" (HSR) camera, or a light sensor with the ability to detect more than 1000 colors from reflected sunlight, has been developed at Israel's Tel Aviv University. These small and easy to use sensors can be used by researchers to monitor harbors, urban areas, forests and agricultural lands to "diagnose" contaminants and other environmental hazards in real time. [American Friends of Tel Aviv University]
• 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]

• Quiet Sun comes alive with massive solar flares -- Solar scientists at NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center report that solar activity has increased has increased after an unusually quiet period and that a solar flare last week occurred in a region of the Sun that is the most active since 2005, with dozens of sunspots. [USA Today]
• More frequent stalled winter weather patterns with a warmer North Atlantic -- Scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center report that atmospheric weather patterns known as "blocking events" resulting in slow-moving winter weather systems and more frequent massive snowfalls appear to be more frequent during decades when the waters of the North Atlantic Ocean are warmer than usual. The researchers also feel that these stalled patterns can also trigger changes in the ocean circulation. [NASA Goddard Space Flight Center]
• Air pollution and Arabian Sea cyclone intensity link detected -- Researchers from the University of Virginia, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, the NOAA Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies and South Korea's Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology have found that air pollution appears to be making cyclones over the Arabian Sea more intense. Increased concentrations of atmospheric aerosols appear to diminish the amount of sunlight reaching the surface of India, which would weaken the regional wind patterns, creating a more favorable environment for the development of stronger Arabian Sea cyclones due to less vertical wind shear (change in wind speed and/or direction over altitude). [NSF News]

• Climate change affecting responses in tree species across the nation's forests -- Scientists at Oregon State University and the University of British Columbia report that various tree species in western forests are undergoing a huge "migration" because of increased temperatures associated with changing climate, insect attack, diseases and wildfires. Some established species such as the lodgepole pine would decline or disappear. [Oregon State University]
  In a similar study conducted by scientists at Duke University and the US Forest Service, more than one half of the tree species across the Eastern forests in 31 states do not appear to be adapting to changes in climate as quickly or as consistently as previously predicted. The geographic ranges of these tree species appear to be contracting. [Duke University]
• Air pollution fertilizes tropical forests -- Scientists with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama have found that air pollution from human activity has disrupted the nitrogen cycle in tropical forests in Panama and Thailand. [EurekAlert!]
• Rates of fauna and flora escape from climate change similar on both land and sea -- In research conducted at the University of California at Santa Barbara, rates at which land-based animal and plant populations would move in response to changes in climate appear to be similar to corresponding populations in the oceans. [NSF News]
• Changing climate leads to bigger birds in central California -- Scientists at San Francisco State University have found that birds are growing in wingspan length and in mass in central California during the last 40 years. These researchers claim that their research indicates these trends are due to climate change, which appears to run counter to a well-known ecological rule that would have smaller bird size with increasing temperatures. [San Francisco State University News]

• Changes foreseen in California’s Bay-Delta due to climate changes -- A team of USGS scientists and their academic colleagues have produced an assessment of how California's interconnected San Francisco Bay and Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (the Bay-Delta system) would change by 2009 in response to several climate scenarios ranging from slow to rapid warming trends. The results of their investigations indicate that this area will experience shifts in its biological communities, rising sea level and modified water supplies of the remainder of the 21st century due to the impacts of global climate change. [USGS Newsroom]

• Evidence of Roman-Period megadrought found -- Dendrochronologists at the University of Arizona's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research have found a previously unknown multi-decade drought period within the second century A.D. across the southern San Juan Mountains of south-central Colorado based upon their analysis of tree ring cores collected across the region. The region serves as a primary drainage site for the Rio Grande and the San Juan rivers, with the later being a tributary for the Colorado River. [University of Arizona News]
• Human and climate causes of the extinctions of large Ice-Age mammals revealed -- An international and interdisciplinary researchers including those from Penn State University and Denmark's University of Copenhagen report that both climate change and humans were responsible for the extinction or near extinction of large Ice-Age era mammal populations including woolly rhinoceros, woolly mammoth, wild horse, reindeer, bison, and musk ox within the last 10,000 years. [Penn State University Science] [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]

• Water for life found below Martian surface -- Researchers from Brown University and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory report that their analysis of mineral-mapping data for more than 350 sites on the surface of Mars collected by European and NASA orbiters suggests that the longest lasting water sources necessary for life would have formed below the Red Planet's surface. Apparently, the types of clay minerals detected could support sufficient amounts of water for millions of years. [NASA JPL]
• Earthweek -- Diary of the Planet [earthweek.com] Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader.

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)].

• 7 November 1986...Temperatures reached a daily record 86 degrees at New Orleans, LA, equaling the highest ever for November. (Storm Data) (Intellicast)
• 8 November 1914...On this date the longest "official" rain-free time span on record for the U.S. of 767 days ended in Bagdad, CA. Some meteorologists question the accuracy of this record kept by railroad employees at that time. (Accord Weather Guide Calendar)
• 8 November 1966...The temperature in downtown San Francisco reached a November record of 86 degrees. (The Weather Channel)
• 8 November 1991...The first week of November ended in Iowa with the average temperature for the state of 18.3 degrees, a full 24.7 degrees below normal. Easily this was the coldest first week of November ever. (Intellicast)
• 8 November 1999...The temperature reached 89 degrees at Kennebec, South Dakota, breaking the all time record for the warmest November maximum temperature ever recorded in the state. (The Weather Doctor)
• 9 November 1913...The "Freshwater Fury", a rapidly deepening cyclone, caused unpredicted gales on the Great Lakes. Cleveland, OH reported 17.4 inches of snow in 24 hours, and a total of 22.2 inches, both all-time records for that location. During the storm, winds at Cleveland averaged 50 mph, with gusts to 79 mph. (David Ludlum) (The Weather Channel)
• 12 November 1911...The central U.S. experienced perhaps its most dramatic cold wave of record. During the early morning, temperatures across the Central Plains ranged from 68 degrees at Kansas City to 4 degrees above zero at North Platte, NE. In Kansas City, the temperature warmed to a record 76 degrees by late morning before the arctic front moved in from the northwest. Skies became overcast, winds shifted to the northwest, and the mercury began to plummet. By early afternoon, it was cold enough to snow, and by midnight the temperature had dipped to a record cold reading of 11 degrees above zero. Oklahoma City also established a record high of 83 degrees and record low of 17 degrees by midnight that same day (11/11/11), followed by 14 degrees, another record low, by the next morning. In southeastern Kansas, the temperature at Independence plunged from 83 degrees to 33 degrees in just one hour. (David Ludlum) (The Weather Channel) (The Kansas City Weather Almanac) (Intellicast)
• 12 November 1906...The mercury soared to 106 degrees at Craftonville, CA, a November record for the U.S. (The Weather Channel)
• 12 November 1959...Between noon on the 11th and noon on the 12th, a winter storm buried Helena, MT under 21.5 inches of snow, which surpassed their previous 24 hour record by seven inches. (The Weather Channel)
• 12 November 1980...A fringe rain band from Hurricane Jeannie in the Gulf of Mexico let loose a deluge of 23.38 inches of rain in 24 hours at Key West, FL, an all-time 24 hour record. (Intellicast)
• 12 November 1987...Heavy snow spread across much of New England. The seven inch total at the Logan Airport in Boston was their highest of record for so early in the season, and the 9.7 inch total at Providence, RI was a record for November. (Storm Data) (The National Weather Summary)
• 13 November 1933...The first dust storm of the Great Dust Bowl era of the 1930s occurred. The dust storm, which had spread from Montana to the Ohio Valley the day before, prevailed from Georgia to Maine resulting in a black rain over New York and a brown snow in Vermont. Parts of South Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa reported zero visibility on the 12^th. On the 13^th, dust reduced the visibility to half a mile in Tennessee. (David Ludlum) (The Weather Channel)

Return to DataStreme Earth Climate Systems website

Prepared by Edward J. Hopkins, Ph.D., email hopkins@meteor.wisc.edu
© Copyright, 2011, The American Meteorological Society.