WEEKLY CLIMATE NEWS

DataStreme ECS WEEK 9: 2-6 November 2015

ITEMS OF INTEREST

Time change does not affect climate records -- Daylight Saving Time ended this past Sunday morning across essentially the entire nation -- the exceptions include Arizona, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and about 18 counties in Indiana. These changes have been mandated by the U.S. Congress in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which extended Daylight Saving Time across the nation, with the start on the second Sunday in March (8 March 2015) and the end on the first Sunday in November (1 November 2015). Most of Canada also observes changes to Daylight Saving Time at the same time [National Research Council Canada]. In other words, following the old adage of "spring ahead, fall behind", you will need to turn your clocks ahead by one hour to conform with the local time observance. Next spring, Daylight Saving Time will start on Sunday morning, 13 March 2016..
What does this time change mean to you (other than earlier sunsets)? Contrary to a popular belief that has surfaced at times, the change from Standard to Daylight Saving Time does not add an extra hour of daylight to the day nor does it affect climate record keeping. The daily high and low temperatures, along with the 24-hour precipitation taken by essentially all stations across the nation are based upon local Standard time, not Daylight time. Therefore, the daily entries in the Preliminary Local Climate Data (CF6) for any of the more than 200 cities around the nation will remain on Standard time throughout the year. The daily climate data collected at those automatic weather stations operated by the National Weather Service and the Federal Aviation Administration, together with all the cooperative weather observing stations around the nation are always made according to local standard time. NOTE: You may check the correct current official time at http://www.time.gov/.
High-quality maps of November temperature and precipitation normals across US available -- The PRISM Climate Group at Oregon State University's website has prepared high-resolution maps depicting the normal maximum, minimum and precipitation totals for November and other months across the 48 coterminous United States for the current 1981-2010 climate normals interval. These maps, with a 800-meter resolution, were produced using the PRISM (Parameter-elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model) climate mapping system.
November weather calendar for a city near you -- The Midwestern Regional Climate Center maintains an interactive website that permits the public to produce a ready to print weather calendar for any given month of the year, such as November, at any of approximately 270 weather stations around the nation. (These stations are NOAA's ThreadEx stations.) The entries for each day of the month includes: Normal maximum temperature, normal minimum temperature, normal daily heating and cooling degree days, normal daily precipitation, record maximum temperature, record minimum temperature, and record daily precipitation; the current normals for 1981-2010.
Visualization of median dates for first measurable snow across nation is posted -- Deke Arndt, a climatologist with NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (formerly National Climatic Data Center), recently posted a national map that is a plot of the median dates of the first measurable snowfall (defined as an accumulation of at least 0.1 inches of snow in 24 hours) over the current 1981-2010 climatological normals interval. Deke discusses the geographic variability of these median dates of first measurable snowfall across the country along with how these occurrences have varied since 1950 due to changes in climate. [NOAA Climate.gov News Features]
Reconstructing past climates -- Scientists from many disciplines have developed a variety of methods that use proxy indicators such as tree rings, ice cores and ocean cores to reconstruct past climates, some extending back thousands of years. For more details on paleoclimatology, or the study of past climates, and available data sets, please read this week's Supplemental Information...In Greater Depth.

CURRENT CLIMATE STATUS

Satellite images show arrival of autumn across the Midwest -- A comparison of the true color images made of the Midwest in late August and in mid October from data collected by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument onboard the NOAA-NASA Suomi NPP satellite shows seasonal changes in the region's land cover. The August image showed green colors from the lush agricultural and forested areas across the region, while the October image revealed a bronze hue due in part to the barren landscape following the fall harvest and in part from the fall coloration from the deciduous vegetation. [NOAA National Environmental Visualization Laboratory]
Video of meltwater cutting through the Greenland Ice Sheet -- A video shows the large river of meltwater cutting a canyon through the Greenland Ice Sheet. This video was taken recently by a team of scientists measuring the melting of the ice this past summer. Watch the video and then scroll down to article. [New York Times] [Note: Special thanks are extended to Dr. Ira Geer, Director Emeritus of the AMS Education Program, for forwarding this link. EJH]
Slowing of the melt of the southern Greenland Ice Sheet is seen -- A glaciologist from Scotland's University of Edinburgh and his colleagues have found from that the melt rate of sections of the Greenland Ice Sheet has been decreasing in recent years. They base their findings on analysis of images generated from data collected by instruments onboard NASA's Landsat 5, 7, and 8 satellites over the last 30 years, comparing the rates observed between 2007 and 2014 with those during the reference period of 1985 through 1994. Although increases of global temperatures have created positive feedback loops that resulted in accelerated losses of those sections of the Greenland Ice Sheet reaching the sea, negative feedback loops appear to be slowing the melt rate for those sections of the Ice Sheet ending on land. [ NASA Earth Observatory]
Antarctic Ice Sheet found to be gaining more mass than is lost -- In a new study, researchers from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center claim that the Antarctic Ice Sheet has been accumulating more snow and ice overall than is being lost during the last several decades. They base their findings upon the rates of mass changes derived from radar altimeters on two European Space Agency European Remote Sensing (ERS) satellites between 1992 and 2001, and by the laser altimeter on NASA's Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) from 2003 to 2008. The entire Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice per year from 1992 to 2001, slowing to a net gain of 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008. However, some areas of the Antarctic continent, such as the Antarctic Peninsula, have been increased their mass loss. [NASA Goddard Space Flight Center]

CURRENT CLIMATE MONITORING

This season's Antarctic "ozone hole" found to be larger and delayed this year -- Researchers with NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center report that their analysis of ozonesonde and satellite data shows the Antarctic "ozone hole," or the region of low ozone concentrations in the stratosphere that forms in austral spring over Antarctica, was larger and formed later than in recent years. As of early October 2015, the ozone hole had reached a size of 10.9 million square miles, which is larger than the area of the North America continent, and represents the fourth largest size in the 1991-2014 interval. The hole also lasted through mid-October, roughly two weeks later than usual. [NOAA Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research News]
Data collected from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument on the NASA/NOAA Suomi NPP satellite indicated that the hole had reached its largest single-day area for the year on 2 October 2015. [NASA Earth Observatory]
The Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 mission starts a second year of observations -- This past September marked the first anniversary of the start of routine science operations involving NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) mission, a spacecraft that provides an experimental carbon-dioxide measurement mission designed to provide the international science community with an unprecedented detailed view of the global carbon cycle. Launched in July 2014, the primary mission of OCO-2 over the next two years is to track the large-scale movement of carbon between several planetary carbon reservoirs including the atmosphere, the biosphere (plants and animals), the soil and the ocean, from season to season and from year to year. At this time scientists have been detecting seasonal and spatial variations in the fluxes of carbon between reservoirs. [NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory News]
Evaluation of drought in southeast Brazil made from satellite-derived gravity data -- A hydrologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center analyzed the amount of water stored in aquifers and rivers across Brazil between 2002 and 2015 from gravity data collected from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites. He estimated that southeastern Brazil, which is in its worst drought in more than three decades, has lost approximately 15 trillion gallons of water per year on average between 2012 and 2015. [NASA Goddard Space Flight Center]
Operational responsibility changes hands for nation's space weather satellite -- During the last week, NOAA officially took command of the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite from NASA, the agency that had launched this spacecraft in February 2015 and had activated it. DSCOVR is the nation's first operational satellite in deep space that was placed in an orbit approximately one million miles from Earth (near the L1 Lagrange point) so as to monitor solar magnetic storms and collect solar wind data for NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center. [NOAA NESDIS News Archives]

CLIMATE FORECASTS

Canadian national seasonal outlook issued -- Forecasters with Environment Canada issued their outlooks for temperature and precipitation across Canada for November 2015 through January 2016, which represents the last month of meteorological autumn and the first two months of meteorological winter. The temperature outlook indicates that most of Canada should experience above normal (1981-2010) temperatures for these three months. Only few scattered areas across northern and northeastern Canada could expect near to below normal temperatures.
The Canadian precipitation outlook for late autumn 2015 and the start of the 2015-16 winter season indicates a few scattered areas across southern Saskatchewan and Ontario and over northeastern Canada could experience below average precipitation. On the other hand, large sections of northwestern Canada extending from the Yukon Territory into the Canadian Archipelago, the region in central Canada around Hudson Bay and the section of Quebec in the St. Lawrence River Valley should experience above average precipitation for the upcoming three months. Elsewhere, near average precipitation should be expected.
[Note for comparisons and continuity with the three-month seasonal outlooks of temperature and precipitation generated for the continental United States and Alaska by NOAA's Climate Prediction Center, one would need to use Environment Canada's probabilistic forecasts for temperature and precipitation.]

CLIMATE FORCING

Carbon dioxide is seen to form quickly as ancient permafrost thaws -- Researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey and their colleagues from the University of Colorado Boulder and Florida State University have made measurements as to how rapidly the dissolved organic carbon material from ancient (about 35,000 years old) "yedoma" soils decomposes upon permafrost soil thaw and how much carbon dioxide is produced at a newly excavated tunnel near Fairbanks, AK. Yedoma is a distinct type of permafrost soil found across Alaska and Siberia that had been deposited as wind-blown silts in the late Pleistocene age before freezing. [USGS Newsroom]

CLIMATE AND THE BIOSPHERE

Marine food web disrupted by the current El Niño event -- A comparison of images generated from data collected by the MODIS sensors onboard NASA's Aqua satellite in October 2014 with those from this past month show differences in the sea surface chlorophyll in the Pacific Ocean between these two years, the result of the development of a strong El Niño event in recent months. Trade winds have been weakening across the eastern tropical Pacific, which has resulted in the disruption of the normal oceanic circulation pattern with the warm pool of water over the western Pacific propagating eastward and a weakening of the upwelling along the western coast of South America. Subtle changes in the spatial distribution of chlorophyll can be detected. [NASA Earth Observatory]
Devastating effects from Dust Bowl in the 1930s persisted for decades -- A team of researchers from nine major academic institutions across the nation that was led by a distinguished professor at the University of Tennessee's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering has made a study that focused upon modeling the carbon budgets in agricultural areas across the country. One of the major results of this study showed that soil quality continued to decline until the 1980s following the Dust Bowl era of the 1930's, which counters the commonly held idea that the negative effects from this era had ended in the 1940s with new farming techniques. The current study indicates that even today, soil quality has not returned to the level in the mid-1930s immediately preceding the Dust Bowl. [Tennessee Today -- University of Tennessee News]

CLIMATE AND SOCIETY

Earthweek -- Diary of the Planet [earthweek.com]

Concept of the Week: Extending the Historical North American Drought Record

Through history, drought has been a major concern for many people as the lack of adequate water can adversely affect agriculture, and in the extreme case, the availability of potable (drinkable) water. The Case in Point for Chapter 9 describes the migration of ancient peoples across the semiarid Southwest due to what may have been major drought conditions. During the last century, the "Dust Bowl" era drought in the 1930s created many problems in this country. The effects of this seven-year long drought were made worse by poor agricultural techniques and land management. The effect of the drought on the nation was also exacerbated by the coincident Great Depression. Drought remains a problem today across Texas and the West Coast as we can see from inspection of the current weekly US National Drought Monitor produced by the National Drought Mitigation Center.

How do the current drought events compare with earlier droughts? A time series of computed Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) values began in 1895 when a sufficiently dense climate network was established. During the 20th century, several episodes of drought have had a major national impact. The exceptional drought that developed in the early 1930s extended across much of the nation resulting in the "Dust Bowl" era. The PDSI time series shows that the 1930s drought was the worst in the last century, with nearly 80 percent of the nation experiencing moderate to extreme drought in 1934. During the 1950s, the southern Plains and the Southwest also experienced a major drought, when 50 to 60 percent of the nation was under drought conditions.

What about farther back in history? Sophisticated tree-ring analysis techniques allow researchers to extend the drought record across a large section of North America farther into the past. In 1998, Edward R. Cook at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory along with colleagues at Arizona and Arkansas reconstructed past drought conditions across the nation based upon annual tree-ring data obtained from a network of 388 climatically sensitive tree-ring sites. From these data, time series of annual summertime (June-August) PDSI values were determined back to 1700 at 155 grid points across the nation. These gridded tree-ring chronologies were calibrated with PDSI chronologies generated by instrumental records at selected Historical Climate Network stations commencing in the late 19th century. The researchers found that the 1930s drought was the most severe drought to hit the nation since 1700.

By 2004, the series was expanded to 835 tree-ring sites, primarily across the West, where exactly dated annual tree-ring chronologies were obtained. The new grid covered most of North America with a latitude-longitude spacing of 2.5 degrees. In addition to the 286 grid point PDSI time series, annual contour maps of PDSI were constructed that span much of the continent. This work permitted extension of the spatial and temporal coverage of the drought reconstruction not only into Canada and Mexico, but back 2000 years. From this more recent data set they produced an online "North American Drought Atlas." They found several "megadroughts" in North America were even more severe than the 1930s drought. In addition to being more severe, some droughts extended over several decades, considerably longer than those of the 20th century. One such megadrought was in the 16th century, an event that along with another megadrought into the early 17th century has been implicated by some researchers in the hardships encountered by British settlers in the Virginia area, such as the disappearance of the Roanoke Colony.

Concept of the Week: Questions

(Place your responses on the Chapter Progress Response Form provided in the Study Guide.)

The 1930's Dust Bowl era drought [(does), (does not)] appear to be the most intense across the nation of any in the last two thousand years.
The "North American Drought Atlas" is based on 835 sites where trees in climatically sensitive areas produce [(monthly),(annual),(biennial)] growth rings.

Historical Events:

2 November 1946...A heavy wet snow began to cover the Southern Rockies. Up to three feet of snow blanketed the mountains of New Mexico, and a three-day snowstorm began at Denver, CO. By the time it ended, this storm had dropped 31 inches, making it the second greatest snowfall ever in city history and causing roofs to collapse. (David Ludlum)
2 November 1961...The temperature at Atlanta, GA reached 84 degrees to establish a record for November. (The Weather Channel)
2 November 1966...A storm brought 18 inches of snow to Celia, KY in 24 hours. It tied the state 24-hour snowfall record first established at Bowling Green. (The Weather Channel)
2 November 1988...A very intense low pressure system brought heavy rain, snow, and high winds, to parts of the northeastern U.S. Portland, ME established a record for November with 4.52 inches of rain in 24 hours, and winds along the coast of Maine gusted to 74 mph at Southwest Harbor. (The National Weather Summary) (Storm Data)
3 November 1890...The temperature at Los Angeles, CA reached 96 degrees, a November record for 76 years. (David Ludlum)
3 November 1927...The "Great Vermont Flood" began as a two-day rain of up to 9 inches put rivers in western New England over their banks. Somerset, VT was deluged with 8.77 inches of rain to establish a 24-hour record for the state. (3^rd-4^th) (The Weather Channel) (Intellicast)
3 November 1989...Cold weather prevailed in the central U.S. The low of 7 above zero at Marquette, MI was their lowest reading of record for so early in the season. (The National Weather Summary)
4 November 1983...The temperature at Billings, MT soared to 77 degrees, a new record for the data and month. (Intellicast)
4-5 November 1966...The River Arno surged above flood stage and caused irreparable damage to much of the architectural and art treasure of Florence, Italy. Millions of historical library volumes were either damaged or destroyed. More than 15,000 vehicles were also destroyed. Roughly two-thirds of Florence was flooded, 113 people died and 30,000 were made homeless by the flooding on both the Arno and Po rivers. (Accord Weather Calendar) (Wikipedia)
5 November 1977...A slow moving storm produced five to nine inch rains across northern Georgia causing the Toccoa Dam to burst. As the earthen dam collapsed, the waters rushed through the Toccoa Falls Bible College killing three persons in the dorms. Thirty-eight persons perished at a trailer park along the stream. Eighteen bridges were washed out in Madison County. (David Ludlum)
5 November 1987...Heavy rains in California's Death Valley National Park washed out many park roads. As much as 1.20 in. of rain fell at Scotty's Castle, compared with the annual rainfall average of 2.28 in. Up to 8000 people attending a recreational encampment were stranded. (Accord Weather Calendar)
5 November 1991...Elkins, WV dropped to 8 degrees, the coldest so early in the season. Pittsburgh, PA dropped to 11 degrees also the coldest so early. Jackson, KY fell to 17 degrees, a daily record. (Intellicast)
6 November 1988...A powerful low-pressure system over the Great Lakes Region continued to produce snow across parts of the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes Region. Snowfall totals along the shore of Lake Superior reached 24 inches, with three feet of snow reported in the Porcupine Mountain area of Upper Michigan. Marquette, MI established a November record with 17.3 inches of snow in 24 hours. (The National Weather Summary) (Storm Data)
6 November 1989...Unseasonably warm weather prevailed in the south central and southeastern U.S. The high temperature of 89 degrees at the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport in Texas equaled their record for November. (Storm Data) (The National Weather Summary)
6 November 1994...Downtown San Francisco, CA was drenched with 6.19 inches of rain in 24 hours to set an all-time record for the city.
7 November 1986...Temperatures reached a daily record 86 degrees at New Orleans, LA, equaling the highest ever for November. (Storm Data) (Intellicast)
8 November 1914...On this date the longest "official" rain-free time span on record for the U.S. of 767 days ended in Bagdad, CA. Some meteorologists question the accuracy of this record kept by railroad employees at that time. (Accord Weather Guide Calendar)
8 November 1966...The temperature in downtown San Francisco reached a November record of 86 degrees. (The Weather Channel)
8 November 1991...The first week of November ended in Iowa with the average temperature for the state of 18.3 degrees, a full 24.7 degrees below normal. Easily this was the coldest first week of November ever. (Intellicast)
8 November 1999...The temperature reached 89 degrees at Kennebec, South Dakota, breaking the all time record for the warmest November maximum temperature ever recorded in the state. (The Weather Doctor)
9 November 1913...The "Freshwater Fury", a rapidly deepening cyclone, caused unpredicted gales on the Great Lakes. Cleveland, OH reported 17.4 inches of snow in 24 hours, and a total of 22.2 inches, both all-time records for that location. During the storm, winds at Cleveland averaged 50 mph, with gusts to 79 mph. (David Ludlum) (The Weather Channel)

Return to DataStreme ECS RealTime Climate Portal