5-9 December 2011

DataStreme Earth's Climate Systems will return for Spring 2012 with new Investigations files starting during Preview Week, Monday, 16 January 2012. All the current online website products, including updated issues of Weekly Climate News, will continue to be available throughout the winter break period.

• It's Sure Dark! -- Have you noticed that the sun is setting early these days? During the first ten days of December, many locations throughout the country will experience their earliest sunset times of the year. The exact day for the earliest sunset depends upon the latitude, so you may want to check the date in your locale from the sunrise tables appearing in an on-line, interactive service available for the entire year at most cities in the United States. The reason for the earliest sunsets occurring in early December rather than on the winter solstice (during the early hours of Thursday, 22 December 2011) is that the sun is not as precise a timekeeper as our watches. Because of a combination of factors involved with Earth's elliptical orbit about the sun and the tilt of Earth's spin axis with respect to the plane of the ecliptic, the sun appears to "run fast" by as much as 15 minutes as compared with clock time in November. However, with the approach of the winter solstice and perihelion (the smallest earth-sun distance during the early evening of 4 January 2012), the apparent sun slows during December and finally lags the clock by 12 minutes in February. Consequently, a noticeable and welcome trend toward later sunsets can be detected by the end of December, especially by those residents in the northern part of the country. However, the latest sunrises occur at most locales in early January, meaning that early risers will continue seeing dark and dreary mornings for another month.
• Congress kills creation of a National Climate Service -- The US Congress recently voted to bar NOAA from launching a National Climate Service that would serve as a "one-stop shop" for climate information. [Washington Post]
• Tracking an iceberg from space -- Natural color visible images recently generated from data obtained from the MODIS sensor onboard NASA's Terra satellite show how two icebergs have split from the remnants of the large iceberg B-15A that had fractured off Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf in March 2000. [NASA Earth Observatory]

• Annual Arctic Report Card released -- Last week, NOAA's Climate Program Office released its 2011 annual update of the "Arctic Report Card," a report of the state of the air, ocean and ice in the Arctic basin prepared by an international team of 121 scientists from 14 countries, including those from NOAA. These experts have found that air and water temperatures in this region continued to increase in 2011, with decreases in Arctic snow cover and a thinning of Arctic sea ice, together with the second lowest areal coverage in summer sea ice. They also noted that the Arctic basin is entering a new environmental state, as the ocean stability and chemistry has changed along with a change in the region's terrestrial and marine life. Arctic tundra vegetation continues to expand. [NOAA News]
• Review of Atlantic hurricane season -- With the end of the official 2011 hurricane seasons in the North Atlantic and eastern North Pacific basins last week, NOAA forecasters assessed the season and the forecasts that they had made earlier. They noted that the 2011 Atlantic season was active and that the 19 named tropical cyclones and seven hurricanes, including three major hurricanes, matched their earlier predictions. [Note: A short-lived, unnamed tropical storm that formed in early September between Bermuda and Nova Scotia was recently added to the list.] The 19 named tropical cyclones represent the third highest total (tied with 1887, 1995, and 2010) over the last 161 years. While only one hurricane (Irene) hit the United States, NOAA officials feel that it helped break "hurricane amnesia" that appeared to develop by the public especially in the Northeast because of the length of time since the last-falling hurricane. [NOAA News] The NOAA Environmental Visualization Laboratory released a 4.5 minute animation of imagery collected by the NOAA GOES-13 satellite through the entire 2011 hurricane season (1 June-30 November). [NOAA Environmental Visualization Laboratory]
  Hurricane experts, Professor William Gray and Philip Klotzbach from Colorado State University in Fort Collins, also issued a report (in pdf format) in which they summarized the 2011 Atlantic tropical cyclone activity and assessed their seasonal and two-week forecasts. They noted that while tropical cyclone activity was above average, many of these tropical cyclones were relatively weak, with only a slightly above average number of intense hurricanes. They admitted that the activity level was below their earlier predictions.

• Texas drought apparent on groundwater maps generated by satellites--Recent maps depicting the nation's groundwater as ascertained from data collected by NASA's GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) mission satellites show the exceeding low levels of groundwater storage across Texas, the result of a long-standing severe to exceptional drought. The data used to create the maps comes from instruments on the paired orbiting satellites detecting small changes in the Earth's gravity field caused primarily by the redistribution of water on and beneath the land surface. [NASA's Earth Science News Team]
• Satellite confirms sharp decline in pollution from nation's power plants -- A team of scientists from Environment Canada and the US Environmental Protection Agency have used the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA's Aura satellite to confirm that major reductions have occurred in the levels of a sulfur dioxide, an air pollutant generated by coal power plants in the eastern United States, since 2005. [NASA GSFC]
• Monitoring wave-like oscillations in electromagnetic field strength in ionosphere -- Using data collected by NASA Goddard's Vector Electric Field Instrument onboard the US Air Force's Communications/Navigation Outage Forecast System satellite, scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center have discovered electromagnetic waves emanating from the tops of thunderstorms combine and propagate upward into the Earth's ionosphere (at altitudes of approximately 60 miles) in what are called "Schumann resonance." The scientists believe that monitoring this resonance can be used not only help in determining the types of atoms and molecules in the upper atmosphere, but also determine the Earth's electric environment and even help in analyzing weather patterns. [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]

• Planetary respiration rate is checked -- Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography who have been monitoring isotopic ratios of oxygen contained in carbon dioxide for more than 30 years claim that recent work on global photosynthesis rates indicates plants may be assimilating approximately 40 percent more atmospheric carbon dioxide than previously thought. [Scripps Institution of Oceanography]
• Upward trend in pollution linked to stronger Arabian Sea tropical cyclones -- In research conducted by scientists from the University of Virginia, NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and South Korea's Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, pollution from human activity that has spread across the Indian Ocean like a "brown cloud" appears to been responsible for stronger tropical cyclones in the Arabian Sea. The scientists based their conclusions on both observations and models to demonstrate the relationship between decreasing wind shear and the growth of the brown cloud, along with the increase in the number of highly intense storms with winds over 120 mph in the last several decades. [NOAA News]
• Drop in carbon dioxide levels could have led to Antarctic ice sheet -- Scientists at Purdue and Yale Universities studying molecules from ancient algae retrieved from deep-sea cores report that decreases in atmospheric carbon dioxide by as much as 40 percent approximately 34 million years ago appear to have been the driving force leading to planetary cooling at the end of the Eocene epoch and the formation of the mile-thick Antarctic ice sheet. The researchers claim that the "tipping point" in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels for cooling that initiates ice sheet formation is approximately 600 parts per million, or approximately one and a half times current levels. [Purdue University]

• Canadian national winter outlook issued -- Forecasters with Environment Canada issued their outlooks for temperature and precipitation across Canada for meteorological winter, the three months of December 2011 through February 2012. The temperature outlook indicates that many areas of Canada, including the Prairie Provinces, most of the Yukon, Northwest and Nunavut would experience below normal (1981-2010) temperatures, while southeastern Canada, stretching from southeastern Ontario eastward to the Maritime Provinces would have above normal temperatures. Areas from Lake Superior to Hudson Bay and eastward would generally have close to normal winter temperatures.
  The Canadian precipitation outlook for Winter 2011-12 indicates that British Columbia and the Maritime Provinces would have below normal winter precipitation, while the Yukon and the Northwest Territories plus sections of Ontario and Quebec stretching northward from the eastern Great Lakes to Hudson Bay would have above normal precipitation.
  [Note for comparisons and continuity with the three-month seasonal outlooks of temperature and precipitation generated for the continental United States and Alaska by NOAA's Climate Prediction Center, one would need to use Environment Canada's probabilistic forecasts for temperature and precipitation.]
• Abrupt permafrost thaw would increase threat to climate -- A survey of 41 international scientists conducted by researchers at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks and the University of Florida indicate that thawing of the arctic permafrost due to increased temperatures across the Arctic basin would release carbon compounds such as methane into the atmosphere and have a greater effect on additional warming than carbon dioxide. The researchers estimate that the amount of carbon released by 2100 could be as much as five times larger than reported by recent modeling studies. [Institute of Arctic Biology]

• Mathematical modeling used for predicting health of populations exposed to climate change -- Scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles and their colleagues have developed a comprehensive mathematical model called an integral projection model that is designed to track the health of populations exposed to climate change and ultimately help improve the predictions for species facing these environmental changes. [UCLA Newsroom]

• Humans and climate contributed to extinction of large Ice-Age mammals -- An international team of scientists report that based upon their analysis of genetic, archeological and climatic data, they conclude that changes in climate and humans both were responsible for extinction of woolly rhinoceros, woolly mammoth, wild horse, reindeer, bison, and musk ox. These large Ice-Age mammals flourished about 2 million to 12,000 years ago that included numerous cold glacial periods interrupted by many warm interglacial periods. [Penn State University]

• Early rise of atmospheric oxygen was complicated -- An international team of researchers who investigated rock cores from the Fennoscandia Arctic Russia - Drilling Early Earth Project (FAR DEEP project), which includes a record from the Proterozoic Eon (2,500 million to 542 million years ago), report that the increase in free oxygen in the atmosphere probably occurred in a long interrupted series of increases and decreases. This discovery reveals a more complex nature to the "Great Oxidation Event" that had been previously thought to have contained a large increase in oxygen during a single event. [Penn State University]
• Thoughts about the Earth's magnetic pole reversals -- An article from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center highlights current scientific understanding of the occurrence of the long-term periodic reversal in the Earth's magnetic poles once every 200,000 to 300,000 years during the last 20 million years. The timing of these reversals in the polarity of the Earth's magnetic field have been documented from deep-sea sediment cores especially along the Mid-Atlantic Rift. A discussion of the implications of these reversals upon life on Earth is also made. [NASA GSFC]

• 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.

• 5 December 1941...The temperature at Enosburg Falls soared to 72 degrees to establish a state record for Vermont for the month of December. (The Weather Channel)
• 6 December 1950...Duluth, MN had their greatest 24-hour snowfall when 25.4 inches fell. (Intellicast)
• 8 December 1938...The temperature at La Mesa, CA soared to 108 degrees to set a U.S. record for the month of December. Los Angeles reached 91 degrees, the only time a 90 degrees reading was reached in December in that city's history. (The Weather Channel) (Intellicast)
• 10 December 1919...A 28-inch snowfall for 24 hours at Bend, OR set a new 24-hour snowfall record for the state. (Intellicast)
• 10 December 1946...The temperature at New York City soared to 70 degrees, the highest ever for a December day. (David Ludlum) (Intellicast)
• 10 December 1949...The barometric pressure at Las Vegas, NV reached a record low reading of 29.17 inches (987.8 millibars). (The Weather Channel)
• 10 December 1995...Intense lake effect snow squalls buried Buffalo, NY under 37.9 inches in 24 hours, the city's greatest 24-hour snowfall and biggest snowstorm ever. Watertown, NY recorded 39 inches in just 12 hours and had 4 inches of snow an hour each hour for six consecutive hours. (Intellicast)
• 11 December 1932...Very cold weather prevailed along the West Coast. San Francisco received 0.8 inch of snow, and at the airport the temperature dipped to 20 degrees. At Sacramento, CA, the mercury dipped to 17 degrees to establish an all-time record low for that location. Morning lows were below freezing from the 9^th to the 15^th at Sacramento, and the high on the 11^th was just 34 degrees. The cold wave dealt severe damage to truck crops and orange groves in the Sacramento Valley. (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.