WEEKLY CLIMATE NEWS

1-5 June 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 --

Start of the summer season -- Meteorological summer (June, July and August) commences on Monday 1 June 2009.
Atlantic Hurricane Season begins -- The official 2009 hurricane season for the North Atlantic Basin will begin on Monday, 1 June. The National Hurricane Center maintains a hurricane preparedness website that provides information and educational material for the various hurricane hazards including storm surge, high winds, tornadoes and flooding. (A Spanish version of this website is also available.) In the Eastern North Pacific basin, the hurricane season began on 15 May. The season will run until 30 November in both basins.
World Hydrography Day celebrated -- The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) will celebrate the fourth annual World Hydrography Day on Thursday 5 June 2009. The theme for this year's celebration is Hydrography-Protecting the Marine Environment. [IHO] [Note: This link is to a pdf file that requires Adobe Acrobat Reader - see below.]
World Environment Day -- This Friday, 5 June 2009, has been declared World Environment Day by the United Nations in an effort to stimulate worldwide awareness of the environment and to enhance political attention and action. This observance was established initially by the UN General Assembly in 1972 to mark the opening of the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment Various activities are being planned. [World Environment Day]
Early Sunrise -- Within the next week, many locations in the continental United States will experienced the date of earliest sunrise. While the longest daylight at each locale in the Northern Hemisphere will occur in over two weeks on the summer solstice (late Saturday night, 20 June 2009), the precise time of earliest local sunrise occurs before this date because the apparent sun now "leads" the clock time. This time discrepancy, which now amounts to approximately 2 minutes, occurs because of a combination of factors that result from the earth moving more slowly in its elliptical orbit because the earth presently is near its farthest point from the sun (aphelion on Friday evening, 3 July 2009) and the effect of the tilt of the earth's spin axis (near the summer solstice). For reference, the latest sunsets of the year will occur later in June as the apparent sun slows and by the first week of July "lags" clock time by about 4 minutes.

CURRENT CLIMATE MONITORING

Monitoring this past season's sea ice around Antarctica -- Satellite-derived images show the maximum and minimum sea ice extent around Antarctica from last September and February, respectively. These images were made from the Special Sensor Microwave/Imagers flown on a series of Defense Meteorological Satellite Program missions and the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for the Earth Observing System (AMSR-E) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. [NASA Earth Observatory]
New cooperative institute for climate and satellite established -- Announcement has been made of the establishment of the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites at College Park, MD and Asheville, NC where scientists and researchers from NOAA, the University of Maryland, North Carolina State University and ten other research institutions will collaborate on projects that use satellite observations to detect, monitor and forecast climate change along with the impact of climate change on the environment. [NOAA News]
Smog from Hawaiian volcano seen from space -- A photograph taken by a crewmember on the recent Space Shuttle Atlantis mission shows the volcanic smog, locally called VOG, that was emanating from the Kilauea Volcano on Hawaii's Big Island. [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

Seasonal variation occurs in the heights of large ocean waves -- An engineer with the Spanish University of Cantabria has applied a statistical model to assess how the height of ocean waves around the Iberian Peninsula varies over time, in particular, the seasonal variation in extremely high waves, due in part to seasonal variations in migratory storm systems that affect the region. This work could help in the design and construction of coastal infrastructure and offshore oil platforms. [EurekAlert!]
Studying the impact of space storms on Earth -- Researchers from the University of Alberta have been using data from NASA's THEMIS (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions During Substorms) mission to use magnetic tremors to determine where the greatest impact will occur as solar storms reach the Earth's upper atmosphere and produce a geomagnetic substorm in the atmosphere. [NASA GSFC]
Searching for alien oceans on distant planets -- Scientists from several universities and NASA are participating in a project called the Deep Impact/EPOXI mission in which they are attempting to develop a method for determining if some distant planet outside of our solar system would have an ocean with liquid water that would be capable of supporting life. In an early experiment, planet Earth appeared as a "pale blue dot." [NASA JPL]

CLIMATE AND THE BIOSPHERE

Big, old trees in Yosemite are disappearing -- Forest ecologists from the University of Washington and the Yosemite Field Station of the US Geological Survey have found that the density of large diameter old trees within California's famed Yosemite National Park has fallen by nearly one-quarter during a span of approximately 60 years of the mid and late 20th century. These researchers suspect that higher temperatures across the West during this time could be to blame. [BBC News]
Satellites show ozone damage to important crops -- A research scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center has used data obtained from NASA satellites to determine how increases in low-atmospheric ozone levels have resulted in increased damage to soybeans, a cash crop across several states in the Upper Midwest. He estimated the damage to the soybean crop across the nation at more than $2 billion across the nation as a result of increased summer temperatures and levels of anthropogenically generated emissions from fossil fuel combustion. [NASA Earth Science News Team]
Fluorescence helps map global ocean plant health -- Marine biologists from Oregon State University have used data collected by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite to determine the amount of fluorescent red light emitted by ocean phytoplankton and then to estimate the health and productivity of global ocean plants. [NASA Earth Science News Team]
Predicting the effects of climate change on sheep population -- An international team of researchers from the US, Germany and Mexico have been attempting to develop a set of mathematical models that will be able to predict the effect of climate change on the population of bighorn sheep that have been introduced to an island in the Gulf of California off the coast of Mexico. [EurekAlert!]

CLIMATE FORECASTS

National summer outlook is released -- Forecasters at NOAA's Climate Prediction Center have recently released their outlook of weather and climate conditions for the upcoming three months that are considered meteorological summer. They anticipated that much of the nation, especially across the Southwest, the Intermountain West and the Eastern Seaboard would experience a better than even chance of having above average summer temperatures, while the northern Plains had a better than even chance of below average temperatures. Elsewhere, equal chances of above and below average temperatures were expected. The precipitation outlook for the summer indicates that the interior Northwest could have an above average chance of below average summer precipitation, while the Four Corners area of the Southwest and the Florida Peninsula were thought to have a better than average chance of above average rainfall. These outlooks were based upon what the forecasters considered as "ENSO-neutral" conditions continuing through the rest of this year, with neither a warm phase El Niño event nor a cool phase La Niña event foreseen. [USA Today]
Improvements made in modeling Earth's ocean climate -- Researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a new computer gridding technique that projects the faces of a cube onto the surface of a sphere, which permits more uniform coverage in polar regions during computing simulations of ocean circulation and climate run on the NASA Advanced Supercomputers (NAS) facilities at Ames Research Center. [NASA JPL News]

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:

1 June 1907, Sarmiento, Argentina reported a temperature of 29 degrees below zero, the lowest temperature ever recorded in South America. (The Weather Doctor)
1 June 1941...Burlington, KS received 12.59 inches of rain, which set a 24-hour precipitation record for the Jayhawk State. (NCDC)
1-17 June 2001...The deadliest and costliest tropical storm in US history, Tropical Storm Allison, wandered westward across the tropical Atlantic and crossed over into the Pacific before reversing and moving back into the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. On 1 June the tropical wave, which eventually evolved into TS Allison, moved into the Gulf of Tehuantepec on the Pacific coast of Mexico after moving westward across the tropical Atlantic and the Caribbean from the west coast of Africa on 21 May. On the 2^nd, a cyclonic (counterclockwise) circulation developed to the south-southeast of Salma Cruz, Mexico, but the low-level circulation became ill-defined as the system moved inland on the 3^rd over southeastern Mexico and western Guatemala. This system intensified again and eventually moved northward to the Texas Gulf Coast and then eastward to the Atlantic before turning into an extratropical storm in mid-June. (Accord's Weather Guide Calendar)
1 June 2005…The UV (ultraviolet) Index in Toronto, Ontario reached 11 or Extreme on the 5-category UV scale, marking the first time the new extreme category has ever been attained in Canada. (The Weather Doctor)
2 June 1917...The temperature at Tribune, KS dipped to 30 degrees to establish a state record for the month of June. (The Weather Channel)
3 June 1905...Seattle, WA received its heaviest ever 24-hour June rainstorm with 1.42 inches falling. (Intellicast)
4-5 June 1908...Helena, MT was deluged with 3.67 inches of rain to establish their all-time 24-hour rainfall record. (The Weather Channel)
5 June 1993...A strong, late season spring storm moved into California. The 0.76 inches of rain at Los Angeles set a new daily rainfall record for June. Lake Gregory was deluged with 3.24 inches of rain in 24 hours and a foot of snow fell at the Mammoth Mountain ski area. (Intellicast)
6-10 June 1816...The temperature reached 92 degrees at Salem, MA during an early heat wave, but then plunged 49 degrees in 24 hours to commence the famous "year without a summer". Late season snow fell across New England and eastern Canada. The editor of the Bangor (ME) Register observed that individual snowflakes that fell on Bangor during the afternoon of the 6^th covered areas up to two inches in diameter. Snow fell near Quebec City, Quebec over a 5-day period accumulating to 12 inches with "drifts reaching the axel trees of carriages" during this infamous Year Without a Summer. The Montreal Gazette reported that this "Extraordinary Season" gave snow squalls to the city on the 6^th and 8^th. On the 7^th, a famous June snow fell in the northeastern U.S. Danville, VT reported drifts of snow and sleet twenty inches deep. The Highlands were white all day, and snow flurries were observed as far south as Boston MA. Waltham, MA reported a low temperature of 33 degrees and New Haven, CT had a low of 35 degrees (David Ludlum) (Intellicast) (The Weather Doctor) (Accord's Weather Guide Calendar)
6 June 1894...One of the greatest floods in U.S. history occurred as the Williamette River overflowed to inundate half of the business district of Portland, OR. (David Ludlum)
7 June 1972...Richmond, VA experienced its worst flood of record as rains from Hurricane Agnes pushed the water level at the city locks to a height of 36.5 feet, easily topping the previous record of thirty feet set in 1771. (The Weather Channel)

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