WEEKLY CLIMATE NEWS

11-15 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.

ITEMS OF INTEREST --

Hurricane season begins in the eastern North Pacific -- The 2009 hurricane season in the eastern North Pacific Ocean basin begins on Friday, 15 May 2009. The hurricane season in the North Atlantic basin, including the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico will begin in two weeks on 1 June. The official hurricane seasons in both basins end on 30 November 2009. NOAA has declared the week of 24-30 May 2009 to be Hurricane Awareness Week across the nation.
Notable satellite images from last week -- Images from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) onboard NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites provide a detailed view of weather-related events. The following notable satellite images show some of these events during last week:
- The smoke plume produced by the Jesuita Fire that threatened numerous residents in the mountainous region surrounding Santa Barbara, CA last Friday. The wildfire was fanned by strong and persistent sundowner winds from the north. [NASA Earth Observatory]
- Dust plumes being carried across Syria and Iraq early last week. [NASA Earth Observatory]

CURRENT CLIMATE MONITORING

Review of nation's weather and climate in April 2009 -- Scientists at the National Climatic Data Center have determined from preliminary temperature data from across the coterminous United States that the recently concluded month of April 2009 was slightly cooler than the 20th century nationwide average for the month. While many states had temperatures that were near the long-term average, states in the Pacific Northwest, the northern and central Plains and the Southeast reported April temperatures that were below normal. Only the Northeast, stretching from the Middle Atlantic northward to the eastern Great Lakes and New England had above average temperatures. The statewide temperature for New Hampshire was the eighth highest since reliable national climate records began in 1895.
The month was slightly wetter than average on a national scale, with many states across the Southeast and the nation's midsection experiencing above to much above average April precipitation. Georgia reported their fifth wettest April since 1895, while Kansas and Michigan had their ninth wettest April and Illinois its tenth wettest. States that had below average April precipitation totals included California, Oregon, Minnesota, Mississippi, New York, Vermont and North Carolina. [NOAA News]
Boreal winter temperature anomalies mapped from space --A map generated from data collected by the MODIS sensor on NASA's Aqua satellite between December 2008 and February 2009 shows the surface temperatures of the continents displayed as temperature anomalies for the three months that correspond to meteorological winter season in the Northern Hemisphere. [NASA Earth Observatory]
Indian Ocean buoy network to improve monsoon predictions -- An array of moored buoys, called the "Research Moored Array for African-Asian-Australian Monsoon Analysis and Prediction", has been deployed across the Indian Ocean that will collect meteorological and oceanographic data to help scientists predict the dramatic variations between seasonal monsoon rains and droughts across south Asia, equatorial Africa and Australia. [NOAA News]
Contractor selected to build next generation weather satellites -- NOAA and NASA officials recently announced that they have selected Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co. to build two satellites for the GOES-R series, which represents NOAA's next generation of geosynchronous (or geostationary) satellites that would be launched beginning in 2015. These satellites will have a lightning activity detection system for over land and oceans and will be able to provide improved observations of sea surface temperatures. [NOAA News]
Arctic Ice Mission is underway -- NASA scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Dryden Flight Research Center arrived in Greenland early last week on NASA's Gulfstream G-III research aircraft to begin a calibration test of a radar unit designed to survey Arctic sea ice and glaciers on Greenland and Iceland. [NASA Dryden]
Monitoring changes in Antarctic ice sheet using new technology -- Scientists working with the British Antarctic Survey have been employing a variety of new tools such as satellite images, ice-penetrating radar and sonar to monitor the movement of ice from the interior of Antarctica toward the coast, as well the extent of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. One of the goals of their research is to correctly estimate the contribution of ice melt to changes in global sea level. [EurekAlert!]
Satellite sensor helps study ionosphere and geomagnetic storms -- NASA researchers at the Langley Research Center are using the multi-channel infrared radiometer onboard the Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry (SABER) satellite to measure the properties of the E-region of the Earth's ionosphere and to determine the effects that geomagnetic storms would have on this layer. [NASA Earth Science News Team]
An interesting perspective of Earth -- An image of the eastern Pacific Ocean and western coastal sections of the North and South American continents was made from NASA’s Mercury MESSENGER spacecraft when it made a flyby of planet Earth in August 2005 before it will enter the orbit of Mercury in March 2011. [NASA Earth Observatory]
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

Long-term carbon cycles in ocean could be driven by variations in a global monsoon -- A scientist at Shanghai's Tongji University claims that the oceanic carbon reservoir appears to have undergone periodic variations with a 400,000-year periodicity, corresponding to the variations in the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit. He believes that these oceanic carbon cycles as indicated by carbon isotope compositions of calcite test of foraminifera are associated with a global scale "monsoon." [EurekAlert!]
Alaska volcano remains restless -- An image obtained last week from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) on NASA's Terra satellite shows a plume of volcanic ash and steam emanating from Alaska's Mount Redoubt volcano that is located approximately 100 miles southwest of Anchorage. The Alaska Volcano Observatory, which has been monitoring Redoubt's seismic activity, has declared the activity at a Code Orange level. [NASA Earth Observatory]
Three dimensional view of wildfire plume is provided -- Researchers from NASA Langley's Science Directorate have produced vertical profile images of the plumes of smoke emanating from last month's wildfire near Myrtle Beach, SC obtained from a High Spectral Resolution Laser mounted on a King Air B200 aircraft. These data are to be used to help improve models of fire emissions developed by the US Environmental Protection Agency. [NASA Earth Science News Team]
Upcoming solar storms should be mild -- An international panel of experts led by NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center predicts that solar storms affecting the Earth during the Solar Cycle 24 spanning the next several years should be relatively mild and could be some of the weakest in more than 80 years. However, the experts caution that the planet is vulnerable to a severe solar storm. [NOAA News]
Experiment shows that atmospheric carbon does not reach deep ocean -- Oceanographers with the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who collected particulate carbon data from the deep-diving Carbon Explorer floats in the Southern Ocean following the Southern Ocean Iron Experiment (SOFeX), an iron-fertilization experiment, indicate that much of the carbon from plankton blooms never reaches the deep oceans. Their discovery runs counter to those efforts proposed to sequester large amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide by fertilizing plankton with iron in those iron-poor regions of the world's oceans in an attempt to reduce increases in global temperature. [Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory]

CLIMATE AND THE BIOSPHERE

North Atlantic shrimp populations responding to climate changes -- Researchers from NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center, Canada's Bedford Institute of Oceanography, the United Kingdom, Iceland, Denmark and Norway have determined that the size of the North Atlantic shrimp populations depends upon timing of the ocean water temperature and that the size of the shrimp catch could serve as an indicator of changes in climate. These researchers based their study on the timing of the annual shrimp hatch between 1998 and 2007 across the North Atlantic Ocean, basing their analysis on satellite images that reveal the timing of spring phytoplankton blooms based on ocean color. [Northeast Fisheries Science Center]

PALEOCLIMATE RECONSTRUCTION

Increased free oxygen could have caused Earth's earliest ice age -- Scientists from the University of Maryland and their colleagues from Germany, South Africa, Canada and the United States report that they have uncovered geological evidence that increases in the level of atmospheric oxygen approximately 2.4 billion years ago during what is generally known as the "Great Oxygenation Event" appear to have coincided with the first widespread ice age on the planet, as the rise in oxygen reduced the atmospheric greenhouse gases. [University of Maryland]
Dinosaurs may not have been wiped out by a meteorite -- A research team from Princeton University, Switzerland's University of Lausanne and Spain's CES Fundación San Valero claims that it has collected biotic evidence from several sites in the United States, Mexico and India indicating volcanoes were responsible for the demise of dinosaurs approximately 65 million years ago, thereby refuting the popular theory that an asteroid or meteorite strike had been the culprit. The geoscientists also believe that a massive tsunami did not necessarily occur, as would be suggested by an asteroid impact. [Princeton University]
Comets may have provided key ingredients for early life -- Research conducted at Israel's Tel Aviv University suggests that comets colliding planet Earth approximately four billion years ago with may have provided some of the organic materials necessary for the emergence of life on the newly formed planet. [American Friends of Tel Aviv University]

CLIMATE AND SOCIETY

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:

11 May 1966...The 1.6 inch-snow at Chicago, IL was their latest measurable snow of record. Previously the record was 3.7 inches on the 1^stand 2^nd of May set in 1940. (The Weather Channel)
11 May 2003…A total of 4.63 inches of rain fell at Nashville, TN, breaking the previous 24-hour record for the month. (The Weather Doctor)
12 May 1916...Plumb Point, Jamaica reported 17.80 inches of rain in 15 minutes, which set a world record. (The Weather Doctor)
13 May 1930...A man was killed when caught in an open field during a hailstorm 36 miles northwest of Lubbock, TX. This event was the first, and perhaps the only, authentic death by hail in U.S. weather records. (David Ludlum)
13 May 1992...Record late season snow ended over the Tanana Valley and Yukon Uplands in Alaska. This storm set two records at Fairbanks. The 9.4 inches of snow from the storm was by far the greatest May snow on record, shattering the previous record of 4.5 inches set on 13 May 1964. The total water content of the melted snow and rain was also a new one-day record for May (0.78 Inches). Snowfall in excess of two feet occurred at elevations above 2000 feet. (Intellicast)
14 May 1834...The greatest snowstorm ever to occur in May hit the Northern Atlantic coastal states. The hills around Newbury, VT were covered with up to 24 inches of snow and the higher elevations around Haverhill, NH received up to three feet. (Intellicast)
14 May 1896...The mercury plunged to 10 degrees below zero at Climax, CO, the lowest reading of record for the U.S. during the month of May. (David Ludlum) This record has since been broken in May 1964 by a reading of 15 degrees below zero at White Mountain in California. (NCDC)
14 May 2001…A storm stalled south of Nova Scotia drenching Halifax with 3.89 inches of rain, the greatest daily May rainfall since records began in 1871. (The Weather Doctor)
15 May 1968…Only tornado of record to have ever touched down in Alaska was spotted near Anchorage. (The Weather Doctor)
16 May 1917...Marquette, MI had its latest opening of navigation on Lake Superior in history. (Intellicast)
16 May 1924...The temperature at Blitzen, OR soared to 108 degrees to set a state record for the month of May. The record was later tied at Pelton Dam on the 31 May 1986. (The Weather Channel)
17 May 1997...Two inches of snow fell at Herman, MI, marking the last measurable snow for the 1996-1997 snow season. The 384.0 inches for this just concluded snow season broke a state snowfall record that was set the previous 1995-1996 season of 347.0 inches. The average snowfall at Herman is 239.7 inches. (Accord's Weather Guide Calendar)
17 May 1979...A reading of 12 degrees at Mauna Kea Observatory (elevation 13,770 feet) established an all-time record low temperature for the state of Hawaii. (The Weather Channel)

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