9-13 May 2011

DataStreme Earth Climate Systems will return for Fall 2011 with new Investigations files starting during Preview Week, Monday, 29 August 2011. All the current online website products will continue to be available throughout the summer break period.

• Spring comes to interior Alaska -- The ice on the Tanana River at Nenana officially went out last Wednesday afternoon (4 May 2011 at 4:24 PM, Alaska Standard Time). The median date for ice-breakup is 5 May. [Nenana Ice Classic] The jackpot for the famous 95th annual Nenana Ice Classic was $338,062.00, with 22 winners. [Fairbanks Daily News-Miner] NOTE: A graph of the date of ice-out for each year since the Classic was started in 1917 has been plotted by this editor. EJH
• Land of the Midnight Sun -- After spending 28 minutes below the horizon, the sun will rise at Barrow, AK early Wednesday morning (2:37 AM AKDT on 11 May 2011) and remain above the local horizon for the next 12 weeks, before going below the horizon for nearly 50 minutes on 2 August 2011 (at 2:10 AM AKDT).
• Hurricane season begins in the eastern North Pacific -- The 2011 hurricane season in the eastern North Pacific Ocean basin begins on Sunday, 15 May 2011. 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 2011. NOAA has declared the week of 22-28 May 2011 to be Hurricane Awareness Week across the nation.
• Former astronaut appointed to major post in NOAA -- Kathryn D. Sullivan, PhD, the first American woman to walk in space, recently was confirmed by the US Senate to become Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Environmental Observation and Prediction in NOAA. [NOAA News]

• Floods remain a problem in Midwest -- Comparison of the images obtained from the MODIS sensor on NASA's Aqua satellite in late April and at the start of last week shows the extent of some of the flooding that occurred across sections of Kentucky, Illinois and Indiana due to the torrential rains that hit the region on the first weekend of May. [NASA Earth Observatory]
  Recent estimates made by the US Geological Survey indicate that some rivers in middle Tennessee crested at record high levels, exceeding previous record levels in some cases by nearly 14 feet. [USGS Newsroom]

• Monitoring this past season's Arctic sea ice -- Two images made from microwave data collected by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program and by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E) on NASA’s Aqua satellite show the range in the areal extent of the sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean. One of the images was made last September at the minimum ice extent, while the other image was from March 2011 near the maximum extent of sea ice. Displays of the extent of median sea ice extent for September and March over the 1979-2000 interval were also included. [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 change effects in the Arctic are more extensive than previously thought -- Researchers from Sweden's Lund University and colleagues warn that the effects of increased temperatures associated with climate change in the Arctic basin are taking place at a faster pace than expected. Some of the effects include reduced snow cover, shorter winter seasons and thawing tundra. [Lund University]

• North American farmers may be dodging global temperature increases -- Researchers at Stanford University claim that farmers across the US, Canada and northern Mexico have been lucky to this point in escaping the negative impacts of increasing global temperature. However, many other agricultural producing countries have found reduced corn and wheat yields with increased air temperatures. [Stanford University]

• Long-term history of El Niño/La Niña events deciphered from tree rings -- Scientists from the University of Hawaii's International Pacific Research Center and their colleagues from the US, Japan, China have reconstructed a l100-year history of El Niño and La Niña events in the eastern half of the tropical Pacific, based upon annual tree-ring records obtained from North America. This reconstruction from trees in the Southwestern United States compared favorably with instrumental records of sea-surface temperatures and isotopic analysis of corals in the Pacific. The history shows that the El Niño activity has been highly variable, varying on time scales from decades to centuries. [University of Hawaii]
• A cool, dry earth helped succulent plants expand -- Biologists from Brown University, the University of Zurich and Oberlin College have determined that as the Earth cooled and became more arid between 10 and 5 million years ago, the number of succulent plants, such as cacti, and tropical grasses expanded across the planetary landscape. This time during the late Miocene may have also coincided with lower atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. [Brown University]
• Improved plumbing in plant leaves helped first rainforests to develop -- A team of scientists from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and other organizations have discovered that when water was made more available to plant leaves through increasingly sophisticated plumbing systems within the plant nearly 40 million years ago, the plants were able to fix more carbon and grow larger. [Smithsonian Tropical Research Institution]

• Report on glacial melt threat to made to the Pope -- A report commissioned by the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences was to be presented to Pope Benedict XVI, in which a panel leading climate and glacier scientists called attention to the threat of glacial melt, citing a moral imperative for society to address climate change. This report was entitled "Fate of Mountain Glaciers in the Anthropocene". [Scripps Institution of Oceanography]
• Increased fatalities could occur with more heat waves -- Using three different temperature projections through the end of the 21st century, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and colleagues at other research institutions have determined that between 166 and 2217 additional deaths per year could occur in Chicago between 2081 and 2100 because of more extreme heat waves. [Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health]
• A warmer world should not harm nation's wind energy production -- Atmospheric scientists at Indiana University Bloomington claim that their analysis of the output from several regional climate models involving wind patterns across the coterminous United States during the next 50 years indicates that projected increases in global temperature should not significantly affect the nation's production of wind energy. [Indiana University]
• 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.

• 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)
• 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)

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Prepared by Edward J. Hopkins, Ph.D., email hopkins@meteor.wisc.edu
© Copyright, 2011, The American Meteorological Society.