WEEKLY CLIMATE NEWS

WEEKLY CLIMATE NEWS

WEEK THREE: 8-12 February 2016

ITEMS OF INTEREST

Worldwide GLOBE at Night 2016 Campaign continues -- The second in a series of GLOBE at Night citizen-science campaigns for 2016 will continue through Wednesday 10 February. GLOBE at Night is a worldwide, hands-on science and education program designed to encourage citizen-scientists worldwide to record the brightness of their night sky by matching the appearance of a constellation (Orion in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres) with the seven magnitude/star charts of progressively fainter stars. Activity guides are also available. The GLOBE at night program is intended to raise public awareness of the impact of light pollution. The next series in the 2016 campaign is scheduled for 1-10 March 2016. [GLOBE at Night]
Mardi Gras climatology -- Since Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the 40-day Lenten season observed by Christians, will begin on Wednesday (10 February), this Tuesday is a day of celebration in many locations that is variously called Mardi Gras (French for Fat Tuesday) or Shrove Tuesday. One of the more famous Mardi Gras celebrations occurs each year in New Orleans, LA. The National Weather Service Forecast Office at New Orleans/Baton Rouge has a 2016 Mardi Gras Climatology that provides the normal temperatures and precipitation along with extremes for New Orleans during the Mardi Gras week prior to Ash Wednesday. Some additional statistics are provided.
Monitoring degree-day units -- If you would like to monitor how this winter is affecting the amount of energy that you need for heating your home, please read this week's Supplemental Information...In Greater Depth. You will see how heating degree-day units are computed, as well as the corresponding cooling-degree day units. This supplemental also provides links to tabulations of the cumulative heating and cooling degree-day units that are available on a monthly basis for selected cities across the country.

CURRENT CLIMATE STATUS

Rains make return to California during January -- During the second half of January 2016, a series of storms traveling across the North Pacific Ocean brought much needed precipitation to California in the form of mountain snow and heavy rain along the coast and at low elevations. Although most of the precipitation fell across northern California, some rain was brought into southern California, which has been anxiously awaiting some frequent moisture-laden storms typically associated with winters with an ongoing El Niño event. Some slight reduction in the exceptional drought conditions have been found across the Golden State with this winter's storms. [NOAA Climate.gov News]

CURRENT CLIMATE MONITORING

New El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) webpage is unveiled -- Last week NOAA announced that a new El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) webpage had been launched at https://www.climate.gov/enso that will permit the public to obtain information on El Niño and La Niña events in one place. The latest updates and forecasts of these anomalous atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns will be available, along with information on the impacts of these events on the US and the globe. [NOAA Climate.gov News]
Update on "commissioning phase" of Jason-3 -- Following the launch of the Jason-3 spacecraft onboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on 17 January 2016, scientists from NOAA and the French government space agency CNES (Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales) will be conducting a series of calibration and validation tests on all the systems and equipment onboard this spacecraft for the next six months before the official transition of satellite operations by CNES to NOAA. Once operational, Jason-3 will collect data that will be used to detect changes in global sea level, maintaining the 20-year legacy of the earlier Topex/Poseidon, and Jason satellites. [NOAA NESDIS News Archive]
Examining historic snow data records can be challenging -- Deke Arndt, Chief of the Climate Monitoring Branch at NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (or NCEI, which was formerly the National Climatic Data Center), recently wrote a delightful and thoughtful blog on the challenges involved with attempting to assess the historical snowfall records that are archived at NCEI. [NOAA News] (Editor's note: Working in the Wisconsin State Climatology Office, this editor empathizes with Deke as to the challenges of the snowfall data, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. EJH)

CLIMATE FORCING

Clouds serve to play a large role in melting of Greenland Ice Sheet -- An atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues from Belgium have found that clouds are playing a larger role in the rapid melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet than previously thought and this melting may be responsible for nearly one-third of the global sea-level rise. Their study, which included cloud observations over Greenland from NASA's CloudSat and CALIPSO satellites, indicates that clouds are causing the temperature of the Greenland Ice Sheet to rise by 2 to 3 degrees compared to cloudless skies and accounting for as much as 30 percent of the ice sheet melt. [University of Wisconsin-Madison News]

CLIMATE FORECASTS

Drier conditions could become the new norm across the Southwest -- Researchers at the National Centers for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) recently reported that the large scale weather patterns that typically bring precipitation-producing water vapor to the Southwestern United States appear to becoming less frequent, which could result in the region sliding into the drier climate state that has been predicted by global forecast models. The researchers based their conclusions upon their identification of approximately a dozen weather patterns across the contiguous United States from analysis of 35 years of weather data. Low pressure systems over the eastern North Pacific offshore of the Washington coast that typically produce precipitation across the Southwest now are being replaced by high pressure, leading to drier conditions. Concern is being voiced that with increased population in the Southwest, any prolonged drought could have profound adverse effects upon the region. [NCAR/UCAR AtmosNews]
Global temperature forecast made for next five years -- The United Kingdom's Met Office (formerly the Meteorological Office) recently issued its 5-year global temperature forecast running from 2016 through 2020. Based on their model projections, the forecasters foresee a continuation in the upward trend in global temperatures, which would likely surpass those recorded during the warmest year of 2015. However, they note that areas of the North Atlantic Ocean and portions of the Southern Ocean may continue showing a cooling signature. [UK Met Office News]

CLIMATE AND THE BIOSPHERE

Warming ocean could cause major changes for Northeast fisheries -- NOAA marine scientists and their colleagues from other research agencies recently released the "Northeast Climate Vulnerability Assessment," the first multi-species assessment in a forthcoming series in the in the NOAA Fisheries Climate Science Strategy designed to determine how vulnerable the nation's marine fish and invertebrate species are to climate change. This recent assessment involved an evaluation of 82 marine species in the Northeast region of the US, which were either listed or under consideration for listing on the federal Endangered Species Act. All species, which included commercial and recreational fish species, were categorized according to their vulnerability to climate change. [NOAA Fisheries Northeast Fisheries Science Center News]
Acoustic transmitters used to track endangered salmon in drought-stricken California -- Researchers with NOAA Fisheries and the California Department of Water Resources have surgically implanted tiny acoustic transmitters into the bellies of salmon smolts before release into California's Sacramento River in order to track these fish out to the ocean. The goal is to see how the endangered Chinook salmon would survive the long-term drought that has been plaguing California over the last several years. [NOAA Fisheries Feature Stories]

CLIMATE AND SOCIETY

Selecting suitable offshore wind energy sites -- An underwater survey is being conducted by a team of scientists off the North Carolina coast to determine the best places to establish future wind energy sites. This wind energy biological survey project involves a partnership between include NOAA's National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the University of North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences, and Geodynamics Group LLC. [NOAA National Ocean Service News]
Earthweek -- Diary of the Planet [earthweek.com]

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), now the National Centers for Environmental Information, 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.)

The majority of United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) stations were in [(rural), (urban)] settings.
The instruments in the US Climate Reference Network (USCRN) sample the atmosphere as frequently as [(5 minutes),(1 day),(1 month)].

Historical Events:

8 February 1933...The record low temperature for the state of Texas was set at Seminole when the mercury dropped to 23 degrees below zero. (Intellicast)
8 February 1936...The temperature at Denver, CO plunged to its all-time record low temperature of 30 degrees below zero. (David Ludlum) (The Weather Channel)
9 February 1899...Norway House, Manitoba reported a temperature of 63 degrees below zero to set the province's record for lowest temperature. (The Weather Doctor)
9 February 1933...The temperature at Moran, WY, located next to Teton National Park, plunged to 63 degrees below zero to establish a state record. The temperature at the Riverside Ranger Station in Montana near West Yellowstone, MT dipped to 66 below zero to establish a record for the state, and a record for the nation, which stood until 1954. (David Ludlum)
9 February 1934...The mercury dipped to 51 degrees below zero at Vanderbilt to establish a record for the state of Michigan. The temperature at Stillwater Reservoir plunged to 52 degrees below zero to establish a record for the state of New York; this record was subsequently tied in February 1979. (David Ludlum) (NCDC)
10 February 1899...The record low temperature for the state of Ohio was set at Milligan when the mercury dipped to 39 degrees below zero. The record low temperature for Virginia was also set at Monterey with 29 degrees below zero; this record has been broken in January 1985. (Intellicast) (Sandra and TI Richard Sanders - 1987)
10 February 1933...The temperature at Seneca, OR fell to 54 degrees below zero, tying Oregon's statewide low temperature record set the previous day at Ukiah. (NCDC)
10 February 2011...The Oklahoma Mesonet weather station at Nowata recorded a temperature of 31 degrees below zero, which is the lowest reading in the Sooner State, breaking the previous statewide record low of 27 degrees below zero set at several stations in earlier years. By midafternoon, the temperature at Nowata increased by 53 Fahrenheit degrees to 22 degrees above zero. (Accord Weather Guide Calendar) (NCDC)
11 February 1895...Braemar (Grampian), Scotland reported a temperature of 17 degrees below zero, the lowest temperature ever measured in the United Kingdom. (The Weather Doctor)
11 February 1899...Perhaps the greatest of all arctic outbreaks commenced on this date. The record low temperature for Washington, DC was set when the temperature fell to 15 degrees below zero. (David Ludlum) (Intellicast)
11 February 1935...Temperature of 11 degrees below zero at Ifrane, Morocco was the lowest temperature ever in Africa. Ifrane is a ski resort town at an elevation of about 5400 feet in the Atlas Mountains. (The Weather Doctor)
11 February 1970...Mount Washington, NH, the highest point in New England, recorded 10.38 inches during a 24-hour span (10^th-11^th) to set a statewide 24 hour maximum precipitation record. (NCDC)
11 February 1999...Tahtsa Lake, located in the Whitesail Range of the Coast Mountains of British Columbia reported 57 inches of snow, which set a new 24-hour snowfall record for Canada, eclipsing the old record of 46.5 inches of snow that fell at Lakelse, BC on 17 January 1974. This former record replaced a 44.0 inch summertime snowfall on 29 June 1963 at Livingston Ranger Station, AB. (Accord's Weather Guide Calendar) (The Weather Doctor)
12 February 1899...Texas and the eastern Great Plains experienced their coldest morning of modern record. The temperature at Camp Clarke, NE plunged to 47 degrees below zero to establish a record for the Cornhusker State; this record has been tied in December 1989. (David Ludlum)
13 February 1784...Ice floes blocked the Mississippi River at New Orleans, then passed into the Gulf of Mexico. The only other time this occurred was during the "Great Arctic Outbreak" of 1899. (David Ludlum)
13 February 1899...It was the coldest morning of record along the Gulf Coast. The mercury dipped to 2 degrees below zero at Tallahassee, the lowest reading of record for the state of Florida. The record low temperature for the state of Louisiana was set at Minden, when the thermometer fell to 16 degrees below zero. A trace of snow fell at Fort Myers, FL. This was the farthest south snow has ever been observed in the U.S. until 1977 when snow fell in Miami. The lowest temperature ever recorded at Dayton, OH occurred when it dropped to 28 degrees below zero. (David Ludlum) (Intellicast)
13 February 1905...Morning lows of 29 degrees below zero at Pond, AR, 40 degrees below at Lebanon, KS, and 40 below at Warsaw, MO established all-time records for those three states. (The Weather Channel)

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