DataStreme ECS WEEK ELEVEN: 14-18 November 2011

• Celebrate Geography Awareness Week -- This upcoming week (13-19 November 2011) has been identified as Geography Awareness Week. National Geography Awareness Week, launched by presidential proclamation in 1987, is designed to draw attention to geo-literacy and "the importance of geographic understanding in ensuring our nation's economic competitiveness, national security, environmental sustainability, and the livability of our communities in the 21st century." This year's Geography Awareness Week theme, "Geography: The Adventure in Your Community" promotes the idea that the geographic perspective is an important way to understand every community--no matter what size, or how long or briefly one has been a part of it.
• Watching a meteor shower -- This year's Leonid meteor showers should peak during the late night hours of this coming Thursday night and Friday morning (17-18 November). Approximately 15 meteors per hour were expected. The Leonid meteor showers, which appear to emanate from the constellation Leo, occur in November as Earth passes through the debris trail from Comet Tempel-Tuttle. Unfortunately the viewing conditions will not be the ideal, as a waning gibbous (half-full) moon will be near the shower's radiant, or originating point after local midnight. [Astronomy]
• "Killer solar flares" should not be a problem next year -- Solar physicists with NASA and NOAA claim that although the current solar cycle should peek before early 2014, Earth residents should not be concerned about the possibility of a giant "killer solar flare" that could hurl enough energy to destroy Earth in 2012, as some have feared. However, they do caution that coronal mass ejections, or bursts of electromagnetic energy and particles emitted by a more active Sun, could alter or interfere with satellite communications, GPS operations and power grids on the Earth's surface. [NASA GSFC]
• Weather research partnership renewed with University of Oklahoma -- NOAA recently announced that the agency has selected the University of Oklahoma to continue a weather research partnership through the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies (CIMMS) for at least five and up to 10 years. CIMMS, which is located in the National Weather Center Building on the University of Oklahoma Research campus in Norman, focuses on weather radar research, improving severe storms forecasts and improving the understanding of extreme weather and short-term regional climate. [NOAA News]
• Accessing the national climatographies -- NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) has produced numerous climatographies that are quantitative descriptions of climate that include tables and charts portraying the characteristic values of selected climatic elements at a station or over an area. Some of these climatographies provide a variety of daily, monthly and annual normal climate data for agricultural, transportation and other interests. This week's Supplemental Information…In Greater Depth provides the links to selected climatographies from NCDC.

• Review of October weather and climate across the US -- Preliminary data for October 2011 from across the nation have led scientists at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center to report that the nationwide average temperature for this past month was approximately 0.9 Fahrenheit degrees above the 20th century (1901-2000) long term average. The northern Plains and upper Midwest had temperatures that were much above this long-term average. Other Plains States, the northern Rockies, the Southwest and the Northeast also reported above average temperatures. On the other hand, the Southeast had below to much below average October temperatures. Preliminary precipitation records for October 2011 indicate that the month was slightly drier than the 20th century average, with the monthly average precipitation for the 48 coterminous states being approximately 0.07 inches below average. Although several of the Rocky Mountain States and most of the Northeastern States had much above average precipitation, numerous states in the Mississippi Valley recorded below to much below average statewide precipitation totals during October 2010. [NOAA News]

• First measurements obtained from nation's newest environmental satellite -- Last week scientists from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center released the first images obtained from the Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS) onboard the agency's newest Earth-observing satellite National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project (NPP). One of the first images of the Earth's atmospheric water vapor included Tropical Storm Sean over the waters of the North Atlantic Ocean. The NPP is designed to serve as a bridge between NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) of satellites and the next-generation Joint Polar Satellite System, a NOAA program that will also collect weather and climate data. [NASA GSFC]
• NOAA's Annual Greenhouse Gas Index continues to climb -- Scientists at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory recently reported that the NOAA Annual Greenhouse Gas Index (AGGI), based on measurements of the concentrations of various greenhouse gases from the agency's global air sampling network, has increased in 2010. The AGGI determines the direct climate influence of many long-lived greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide that are added to the atmosphere by human activity, as a percentage of the base or "index" year of 1990. [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]

• Long-term carbon storage in Ganges Basin may foretell higher global temperatures -- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientists have found that carbon has been stored in the soils and sediments of South Asia's Ganges-Brahmaputra Basin for the last 500 to 17,000 years. These researchers warn that increases in global temperatures could destabilize this pool of carbon in the basin, as well as in similar places elsewhere around the global, which would potentially increase the rate of carbon dioxide release into the atmosphere. [Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution]

• Methane release may have cause major climate change 56-million-years ago --Researchers at Rice University and Oregon State University believe that massive amounts of carbon were released from methane hydrate deposits in the ocean floor approximately 56 million years ago to cause a major change in the global climate now identified as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). The methane released apparently was converted to atmospheric carbon dioxide, which resulted in an increase of global temperature by as much as 6 Celsius degrees. [Rice University]
• Millennium-long record links precipitation variability in Northeast and Southwest -- Researchers at the University of Rhode Island have reconstructed a 1000-year long precipitation record for the Northeast from data collected in a New York State lakebed and a Rhode Island estuary that reveals a link in the variability in this Northeastern precipitation record with a similar record from the Southwest. The researchers claim that the similarities in the records from opposite sides of the country can be correlated with a large-scale weather pattern that circulates from the North Pacific Ocean across North America. Their results also validate climate models that predict an increasing number of extreme weather events. [EurekAlert!]

• Warmer climate causes faster growing trees bordering the tundra -- Scientists from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Woods Hole Research Center and the Swiss Federal Research Institute report that evergreen trees growing in northern Alaska along the tundra appear to be growing faster than they had a century ago. [Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory]

• Health costs of climate change-related disasters in US are quantified -- Researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health have determined that health costs exceeding $14 billion dollars have been accrued and nearly 1700 deaths caused by the impacts of six events in the United States during the last decade that have been attributed to climate change. These events included the Florida hurricanes in 2004, the 2009 North Dakota floods, California heat wave in 2006 and wild fires in 2003, nationwide ozone air pollution from 2000-02, and West Nile virus outbreaks in Louisiana in 2002. Hospitalizations and emergency room visits were also considered. [Columbia University Mailman School of Health]
• Wind forecasts save power company millions of dollars -- A highly detailed wind energy forecasting system developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) appears to be saving Xcel Energy, an electric power utility company in the Midwest and the Plains States, several millions of dollars. These savings to ratepayers have been accrued through improved estimates of the amount of wind power farms. [UCAR/NCAR News]
• 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]

• Scientists collect data from close encounter with an asteroid -- Instruments onboard NASA's Swift satellite collected data from the asteroid 2005 YU55 that passed within 860,00 miles of Earth early last Wednesday, 9 November 2011. Ultraviolet data collected should aid in understanding the asteroid's surface composition. [NASA GSFC]
• 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)].

• 16 November 1958...More than six inches (6.4 inches) of snow fell at Tucson, AZ, one of the biggest ever for that location. (David Ludlum) (The Weather Channel)
• 16 November 1959...The most severe November cold wave in U.S. history was in progress. A weather observing station located 14 miles northeast of Lincoln, MT reported a reading of 53 degrees below zero, which established an all-time record low temperature for the nation for the month of November. Their high that day was one degree above zero. (David Ludlum) (The Weather Channel)
• 17 November 1953...The temperature at Minneapolis, MN reached 71 degrees, their warmest reading of record for so late in the autumn. (The Weather Channel)
• 18 November 1955...An early season cold snap finally came to an end. Helena, MT experienced 138 consecutive hours of subzero temperatures, including a reading of 29 below zero, which surpassed by seven degrees their previous record for the month of November. Missoula, MT broke their November record by 12 degrees with a reading of 23 below zero, and Salt Lake City, UT smashed their previous November record of zero degrees with a reading of 14 degrees below zero. Heavy snow in the Great Basin closed Donner Pass, CA and total crop damage from the cold wave amounted to eleven million dollars. (David Ludlum)
• 19 November 1957...Nineteen inches of snow covered the ground at Cresco, IA, a record November snow depth for the state. (The Weather Channel)
• 19 November 1996...A 24-hour maximum precipitation record for the state of Oregon was established when 11.65 in. of rain fell at Port Orford. (NCDC)
• 19 November 2009...Adelaide, Australia reported a temperature reading of 109 degrees, which set an all-time record high for the month of November, Elliston had a 111-degree reading, which was its all-time record for any day. The month of November 2009 was the warmest November on record for Australia. (Accord Weather Guide Calendar)
• 20 November 1914...The high temperature of 28 degrees at Atlanta, GA was their earliest daily high below the freezing mark. (The Weather Channel)
• 20 November 1979...A blizzard struck Cheyenne, WY producing a record 19.8 inches of snow in 24 hours, and a record total of 25.6 inches in forty hours. Strong winds created huge drifts stopping all transportation. (19^th-21^st) (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.