WEEKLY CLIMATE NEWS

4-8 May 2009

DataStreme Earth Climate Systems will return for Fall 2009 with new Investigations files starting during Preview Week, Monday, 31 August 2009. All the current online website products will continue to be available throughout the summer break period.

CURRENT CLIMATE MONITORING

Spring comes to interior Alaska -- The ice on the Tanana River at Nenana officially went out last Friday night (1 May 2009 at 8:41 PM, Alaska Standard Time). The jackpot for the famous 93rd annual Nenana Ice Classic was $283,723.00. The median date for ice-breakup is 5 May. [Nenana Ice Classic] As of Sunday, Ice Classic officials were determining the winner of the prize. The winner(s) will be announced at the start of this week. [Fairbanks Daily News-Miner]
New airborne radars to help monitor climate change in Arctic -- Last Friday, scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Dryden Flight Research Center departed on a two-month field test of radar units over Greenland and Iceland in a modified NASA Gulfstream III aircraft. This aircraft is equipped with a pair of new airborne radar units (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar and the Glacier and Land Ice Surface Topography Interferometer) that ultimately will be placed on satellites to monitor climate change associated with changes in the arctic glacial ice cover. [NASA JPL]
Tracking climate change by monitoring sea salt by satellites -- A new satellite mission called Aquarius is planned for launch in May 2010 that is designed to track sea salinity from space. Researchers hope that this mission will permit them to monitor a changes in climate associated with changes in global temperature and in the hydrological cycle, including droughts and floods [NASA JPL]
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]

CLIMATE FORCING

Sunspots return -- A pair of images made last week by instruments on NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft shows sunspots and ultraviolet light emitted by the Sun after an unusually quiet several months at the beginning of the new solar cycle. [NASA Earth Observatory]

CLIMATE AND THE BIOSPHERE

Forest fire smoke contains potentially harmful chemicals -- Scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have found that smoke from forest fires contain alkaloids, or common plant toxins, which can be potentially harmful to both human health and to ecosystems. [Pacific Northwest National Laboratory]
Determining amount of carbon dioxide emission from fires -- Researchers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and colleagues have used carbon monoxide data collected from the Measurements of Pollution in the Troposphere instrument on NASA's Terra satellite to determine that the amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere by fires across the major islands of Oceania has doubled between 2000 and 2006. They are also attempting to determine how climate affects and influences the growth of wildfire, as well as its intensity. [NASA Earth Science News Team]
Unique biota in Russian lake threatened by climate change --A team of US and Russian scientists report at changes in Siberia's Lake Baikal, such as the duration of ice cover, due to changes in climate have also adversely affected the biota of the lake. [EurekAlert!]
Chemical that contaminates seafood increases in ocean -- Scientists with the US Geological Survey have found that increased emissions of mercury attributed to human activity especially in Asia has entered the North Pacific Ocean from the atmosphere as methylmercury and contaminated tuna and other types of seafood. According to current projections of mercury emissions, a 50 percent increase in the mercury levels in the Pacific could occur by 2050. [US Department of Interior]

PALEOCLIMATE RECONSTRUCTION

Northern and Southern Hemisphere glaciers were not in synch -- Researchers from the United States, New Zealand, Norway and Switzerland have found that New Zealand's mountain glaciers appeared to have shown more rapid changes in size during the last 7000 years than their counterparts in the Northern Hemisphere, thereby putting the New Zealand glaciers out of phase with those in the Swiss Alps and elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere. [EurekAlert!]

CLIMATE AND SOCIETY

Grading national air quality --The American Lung Association recently released its Annual State of the Air report that grades the national air quality for hundreds of cities and counties across the United States, based upon ozone, annual particle pollution and 24-hour particulate pollution. This report notes that 60 percent of American citizens live in communities where air pollution often reaches unhealthy levels. [Science Daily] Editor's note: The full report, along with the specifics for individual states and specific counties are available at http://www.stateoftheair.org/ . EJH
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.

Historical Events:

6 May 1933...Charleston, SC was deluged with 10.57 inches of rain, an all-time 24-hour record for that location. (The Weather Channel)
6 May 1978...A record late season snowstorm struck Colorado. Denver checked in with 14 inches for its greatest May snowstorm on record. (Intellicast)
7 May 1964...The temperature at White Mountain 2, located in California, dipped to 15 degrees below zero to set a record for May for the continental U.S. (The Weather Channel)
10 May 1910...A meteorograph ascent of an instrumented Weather Bureau kite to 23,835 feet from Mount Weather, VA set the altitude record for the site. The ascent, which had a kite with instruments to measure atmospheric conditions aloft, used 10 kites in tandem and 8.5 miles of kite wire. (Accord's Weather Guide Calendar)
10 May 1966...Morning lows of 21 degrees at Bloomington-Normal and Aurora established an Illinois state record for the month of May. Snow flurries were reported at Kansas City, MO and Chicago, IL (The Weather Channel) (Intellicast)
10–11 May 1986….Bangkok, Thailand received 15.79 inches of rain in 24-hours, which was a national record. (The Weather Doctor)

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