WEEKLY CLIMATE NEWS

DataStreme ECS WEEK FIVE: 28 September-2 October 2015

ITEMS OF INTEREST

September is National Preparedness Month -- The month of September has been declared National Preparedness Month (NPM), which is aims to educate and empower Americans to prepare for and respond to all types of emergencies, including natural disasters. NPM is sponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), which has provided a toolkit of marketing materials to help promote the month, is the lead on this campaign that was originally launched in 2004. The theme for 2015 NPM is "Don't Wait. Communicate. Make Your Emergency Plan Today." During Week 5 (27-30 September), the weekly hazard-focused theme is to lead up to National PrepareAthon! Day on 30 September 2015. [FEMA's Ready.gov] NOAA's National Weather Service is working with FEMA to communicate the importance of emergency preparedness as a key component of its Weather-Ready Nation campaign. [NOAA Weather Ready Nation]
End of the growing season -- If you live in the northern portion of the country, the growing season may have already ended as cold air masses have moved southeastward from Canada. Check the interactive maps produced by the Midwestern Regional Climate Center's Vegetation Program that show the first occurrence of 28-degree and 32-degree Fahrenheit temperature readings of this fall across the 48 coterminous United States. (Use the "Current Season Freezes" in the "Shaded Maps Menu" on left to select the desired map.) Comparison can be made with the maps showing the median dates of occurrence of the first 32-degree (or 28-degree) Fahrenheit temperatures (in the appropriate "Climatologies" sections) across the lower 48 states. (The median date means that half of the occurrences of a 32-degree reading over the 30-year normal occur prior to this date, while the other half occur after this date.) Following first frost, some delightful days should occur during October and early November in what is often called "Indian Summer."
Start of a new water year -- On Thursday, 1 October 2015, the new water year of 2016 will begin. As defined by the US Geological Survey and used by hydrologists in reports dealing with surface water supply, the "water year" is defined as the 12 months commencing on 1 October of any given year and ends on 30 September of the following year. The water year is designated by the calendar year in which it ends, such that the 2016 water year runs through 30 September 2016.
High-quality maps of October temperature and precipitation normals across US available -- The PRISM Climate Group at Oregon State University's website has prepared high-resolution maps depicting the normal maximum, minimum and precipitation totals for October across the 48 coterminous United States for the current 1981-2010 climate normals interval. These maps, with a 800-meter resolution, were produced using the PRISM (Parameter-elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model) climate mapping system.
October weather calendar for a city near you -- The Midwestern Regional Climate Center maintains an interactive website that permits the public to produce a ready to print weather calendar for any given month of the year, such as October, at any of approximately 270 weather stations around the nation. (These stations are NOAA's ThreadEx stations.) The entries for each day of the month includes: Normal maximum temperature, normal minimum temperature, normal daily heating and cooling degree days, normal daily precipitation, record maximum temperature, record minimum temperature, and record daily precipitation; the current normals for 1981-2010.
Monitoring the drought -- During this past summer, western sections of the nation continued to experience major drought. See how the drought is monitored and assessed by reading this week's Supplemental Information…In Greater Depth.

CURRENT CLIMATE STATUS

Updates made to number of acres burned across nation in August -- NOAA scientists have recently corrected the number of acres that have burned across the nation during the month of August 2015 to 2.4 million acres, which represents the third-largest August burned area on the record begun in 2000. Many of the significant wildfires during the month occurred across Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. [NOAA Climate.gov News]
Current Sierra Nevada snowpack appears to be smallest in 500 years -- Scientists from the University of Arizona, the University of Arkansas, and the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information's Paleoclimatology Program recently reported that based upon their analysis of tree-ring records dating back to 1500 this year's record low snowpack across California Sierra Nevada Mountain range appears to be unprecedented, occurring once in approximately 500 years and once every 1000 years at elevations below 7000 feet. These exceptionally low snowpack levels pose significant challenges to California, which depends upon the snowpack for approximately 30 percent of its water supply. [NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information News]
Late winter snowpack on Andes seen from space -- A natural color image generated by data obtained from the MODIS sensor onboard NASA's Aqua satellite earlier in September shows the snow cover along the higher terrain of South America's Andes Mountain range in Chile and Argentina as austral winter drew to a close. Although a large winter storm dumped nearly ten feet of snow along the mountains to the northeast of Chile's capital city of Santiago, the 2015 winter season had small snowfall accumulations. [NASA Earth Observatory]

CLIMATE MONITORING

Parallel science campaigns to be flown over both polar regions -- NASA is conducting overlapping science campaigns called Operation IceBridge in both Antarctica and the Arctic that are designed as part of its airborne survey of changes in Earth's polar ice. Beginning in 2009, IceBridge has studied Antarctic ice conditions in September through November, but this year a new field campaign has been added to collect measurements of sea and land ice in the Arctic to provide insight into the impact of the summer melt season. [NASA Goddard Space Flight Center]
Airborne measurements of air quality made from California wildfires --Beginning in late August, a team of scientists from NASA's Ames Research Center have been using an Alpha Jet to collect environmental data from smoke plumes emanating from recent wild fires in California's southern Sierra Nevada Mountains. The jet aircraft collected ozone and greenhouse gas samples from the wildfire smoke as part of the Alpha Jet Atmospheric eXperiment (AJAX) project in order to determine their effects upon air quality. [NASA Ames Research Center]

CLIMATE AND THE BIOSPHERE

Satellites assist bird migration in California -- Through the efforts of the BirdReturns program, 7000 acres of new, temporary wetland habitat will be available in California for birds migrating to the south from the Arctic this fall. The BirdReturns program represents an effort by citizen science and conservation efforts designed to create "pop-up habitats" for some of the millions of shorebirds that migrate each year along the "Pacific Flyway" from summer breeding grounds in Alaska and Canada to winter habitats in California, Mexico and Central and South America. This effort has been aided by images obtained from NASA's Landsat satellites that help identify rice fields that can be flooded for several weeks to make the wetlands. [NASA Earth Observatory]
Oceanic phytoplankton seen to be declining in Northern Hemisphere -- Scientists from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and the Universities Space Research Association have found that declines in certain types of microscopic phytoplankton algae such as diatoms have shown significant declines since the late 1990s. Significant losses were found in the North Pacific, North Indian and Equatorial Indian oceans. These long-term declines were found from the results of a model run using NASA satellite data and indicate changing ocean conditions, due to natural variation or changing climate. [NASA Goddard Space Flight Center]
Humpback whales unexpectedly seen in the Pacific Northwest's Columbia River -- Humpback whales have been seen recently in the lower Columbia River to as far upstream as Astoria, OR. According to a NOAA Fisheries biologist, as many as several dozen whales were in search of food and the this summer's reduced river flow along with above average warm ocean waters in the eastern North Pacific have caused their food supply in fish to move farther upstream. [KGW.com News]

CLIMATE MODELLING EFFORTS

New forests cannot sequester as much carbon as predicted -- Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the United Kingdom's University of Bristol claim that most carbon emissions models appear to overestimate the capacity of regrowing forests to sequester atmospheric carbon. They indicate that despite a projected abundance of atmospheric carbon dioxide that would fuel photosynthesis, nitrogen is limited, which would limit forest growth. The scientists modeled future land cover and land use changes and other factors. [University of Illinois News Bureau]
Model used to estimate Antarctic ice sheet melting -- Researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and colleagues in Germany have developed the "Parallel Ice Sheet Model" run on the University of Alaska's high performance computers that simulates the movement and melting of ice in the Antarctic ice sheet. The researchers report that human emissions could raise the global temperature by 20 Fahrenheit degrees, sufficient to melt the ice sheet and rending an ice-free Earth. [University of Alaska Fairbanks News]

CLIMATE FORCING

More smoke can lead to less rain in some locales -- Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and colleagues have found that the smoke from fires set by humans in the savannas and forests across western Africa appear to have been reducing the rainfall during the region's dry season. The researchers have used data obtained from sensors on NASA's Aqua, Terra and TRMM (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission) satellites, along with ground-based weather observations and output information from an atmospheric model. Reductions in cloud cover and rainfall were seen, suggesting that dark soot aerosols absorb incoming sunlight, warming the atmosphere that suppresses convective activity needed to develop cumulus clouds. [NASA Earth Observatory]
Doubling of frequency in future extreme Pacific sea-level events anticipated -- Recent analysis of tide-gauge data and simulations using computer modeling experiments have led scientists at the University of Hawaii and Manoa and Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) to warn that more frequent extreme interannual swings in the levels of the Pacific Ocean. They claim that in addition to the gradual sea level rise stemming from warming oceans and melting ice caps, enhanced El Niño and La Niña events in the future could result in more extreme sea level occurrences could occur, especially in the tropical southwestern Pacific. These extreme sea level events could impact vulnerable coastal communities. [University of Hawaii News]
In another study, a team of scientists from the US Geological Survey (USGS) and several academic research institutions in Australia project that an upsurge of severe El Niño and La Niña events will cause an increase in storm events leading to extreme coastal flooding and erosion in populated regions across the Pacific Ocean. [USGS Newsroom]

PALEOCLIMATE RECONSTRUCTION

Pollen record indicates mega-droughts in California in the past -- Paleoscientists from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have analyzed pollen levels in a sediment core drilled from the bottom of Lake Elsinore on the eastern flank of southern California's Santa Ana Mountains. They found that this high-resolution pollen record indicates a series of mega-droughts that gripped the region between approximately 27,500 and 25,500 years ago. These changes may have been fueled by warm ocean conditions that are similar to those currently seen offshore of southern California. [Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory News]

CLIMATE AND SOCIETY

Fire-scarred California towns seen from space -- Natural and false-color images obtained from data collected by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) onboard NASA's Landsat 8 satellite early last week show the newly burned areas in northern California. Several wildfires included the Valley Fire, one of California's most damaging fires, burning thousands of acres of forests along with as many as 1910 structures around Middletown, CA and causing the loss of seven lives. [NASA Earth Observatory]
Earthweek -- Diary of the Planet [earthweek.com]

Concept of the Week: Keeping your cool!

In order to survive, humans need to maintain a nearly constant internal core temperature that is within several degrees of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Your internal temperature depends upon an energy balance involving the gain and loss of energy from radiation (incoming solar versus incoming and outgoing infrared radiation), sensible heat transfer (conduction and convection), latent heat of evaporation (respiration and perspiration) and the body's metabolic rate. This heat transfer depends upon the differences between skin temperature and the ambient air temperature of the surroundings. In addition, wind and atmospheric humidity can affect the rate of sensible and latent heat transfer. Problems arise when either too much or too little heat flows to or from the body, yielding hypothermia and hyperthermia (heat stress) conditions, respectively.

When the air temperature increases, heat flow from the body is often reduced. Heat flow can be increased to maintain stable temperatures involuntarily by thermoregulatory processes such as increased perspiration (sweating) and dilation of the blood vessels. Humans can also act to prevent hyperthermia by selecting lightweight and light colored clothes, as well as seeking of shade and well ventilated locations. Unfortunately, high atmospheric humidity that often accompanies high summer temperatures also reduces body heat loss since evaporative cooling by perspiration is suppressed. During the summer, the National Weather Service alerts the public of potentially dangerous combinations of high air temperature and atmospheric humidity levels by calculating the Heat Index.

Statistics kept by the National Weather Service reveals that heat (along with high humidity) is responsible for the greatest number of weather-related deaths across the nation during the 10-year period (2001-2010), with 115 fatalities occurring per year. By comparison, 116 fatalities per annum are caused by tropical cyclones (hurricanes and tropical storms), 56 deaths per year are associated from tornadoes and 25 deaths annually caused by the cold (low temperatures). (Note: The large number of fatalities associated with the hurricanes of 2005, which totaled 1016 deaths in the US due primarily to Hurricane Katrina, has inflated the annual averages associated with tropical cyclones.) Furthermore, concern has been raised that during this century, more frequent and more severe heat waves due to global climate change could become more common, leading to a greater risk of hyperthermia and, ultimately, to higher morbidity rates.

Concept of the Week: Questions

(Each week you will be asked to respond to two questions relating to that week's Concept of the Week topic. Place your responses on the Chapter Progress Response Form provided in the Study Guide.)

The heat index is a function of air temperature and [(atmospheric humidity),(wind speed),(sunshine levels)].
The annual number of fatalities across the nation in the last ten years due to heat stress is approximately [(15),(60),(120)].

Historical Events:

28 September 1893...Albuquerque, NM was soaked with 2.25 inches of rain, enough to establish a 24-hour record for that city. (The Weather Channel)
28 September 1986...Torrential rains and floods were responsible for South Africa's worst natural disaster in Natal. As much as 35 in. of rain fell between the 25^th and 29^th to the northeast of Empangen, resulting in 317 deaths and 163 people missing. Topsoil from some farms was completely washed away leaving only bedrock. (Accord Weather Calendar)
30 September 1992...Fairbanks, AK averaged a frigid 31.7 degrees for the month, 13.2 degrees below normal and a record. Beginning on the 9^th, a record low was set for every day of the month. The temperature plunged to 3 degrees on the 30^th, the lowest ever for September. Snowfall for the month totaled 24.4 inches, more than three times the previous record. The snows never melted. Plant foliage still green, was frozen into place and week long power outages occurred as whole trees bent over onto power lines in the heavy wet snow. (Intellicast)
1 October 2006...Wichita, KS recorded its hottest October day ever on the 1st with a 97-degree high temperature. (The Weather Doctor)
2 October 1858...The only tropical cyclone known to produce hurricane-force (estimated) winds on the California coast hit near San Diego, CA. Damage to property is considerable. (The Weather Doctor)
2 October 1980...The temperature at Blue Canyon, CA soared to 88 degrees, an October record for that location. (The Weather Channel)
3 October 1912...The longest dry spell of record in the U.S. commenced as Bagdad, CA went 767 days without rain, ending on 9 November 1914. (David Ludlum)
4 October 1969...Denver, CO received 9.6 inches of snow. October of that year proved to be the coldest and snowiest of record for Denver, with a total snowfall for the month of 31.2 inches. (Weather Channel)
4-7 October 1972...Remnants of Hurricane Joanne brought heavy rain and flooding to much of Arizona. It was the first documented tropical storm to reach the state with its cyclonic circulation intact. Severe flooding occurred in the Clifton, Duncan and Safford areas. (The Weather Doctor)
4 October 1976...The mean wind speed reached 88.5 mph at Melfort, Saskatchewan, the province's highest ever sustained wind. (The Weather Doctor)
4 October 1987...A rapidly deepening coastal storm dumped record snows across eastern New York State and western New England. Grafton, NY was buried under 22 inches of snow, North Springfield, VT had 21 inches and Pownal, VT recorded 18 inches. Most of the snow occurred at higher elevations but even Albany, NY received 6 inches, their earliest measurable snow in 117 years of records. Damage to trees was extensive as many trees were still in full leaf. (The National Weather Summary) (Storm Data) (The Weather Channel) (Intellicast)
In California, high temperatures of 100 degrees at San Francisco, and 108 degrees at Los Angeles and Santa Maria, were October records. San Luis Obispo was the hot spot in the nation with an afternoon high of 111 degrees. (The National Weather Summary).
4 October 1998...As many as 27 tornadoes touched down across Oklahoma, establishing the national record for tornadoes in any state on a single October day. (The Weather Doctor)
4 October 2005...The Minneapolis-St. Paul (MN) International Airport received 4.61 inches, breaking the local daily rainfall record for October. North of the Twin Cities, weather spotters reported nine inches of rain in the town of Spencer Brook. (The Weather Doctor) 5 October 1917...The temperature at Sentinel, AZ soared to 116 degrees to establish an October record for the nation. (The Weather Channel)

Return to DataStreme ECS RealTime Climate Portal