WEEKLY WEATHER & CLIMATE NEWS

WEEKLY WEATHER AND CLIMATE NEWS

27 June- 1 July 2016

Items of Interest:

Worldwide GLOBE at Night 2016 Campaign resumes -- The seventh in a series of GLOBE at Night citizen-science campaigns for 2016 will commence on Monday (27 June) and continue through 6 July. GLOBE at Night is a worldwide, hands-on science and education program designed to encourage citizen-scientists worldwide to record the brightness of their night sky by matching the appearance of a constellation (Hercules in the Northern Hemisphere and Scropius in the Southern Hemisphere) with the seven magnitude/star charts of progressively fainter stars. Activity guides are also available. The GLOBE at night program is intended to raise public awareness of the impact of light pollution. The next series in the 2016 campaign is scheduled for 28 July-6 August 2016. [GLOBE at Night]
Change in seasons -- The beginning of July marks the beginning of the new heating season. Traditionally, meteorologists and climatologists define the heating season to run from 1 July to 30 June of the following year. Heating degree day units are accumulated commencing on 1 July. Likewise, the snow season runs from 1 July through 30 June. Seasonal snowfall totals for next season will be summed from Monday.
The half-way point -- Midpoint of calendar year 2016 will occur at midnight local standard time on Saturday, 2 July 2016.
check -- Start of India's summer monsoon season monitored from space -- An animation of images obtained from NASA's Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) core satellite shows the total rainfall accumulated across India and adjacent sections of Pakistan and Bangladesh during the first eight days of June 2015. The animation, which was produced by NASA's Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM (IMERG), shows the onset of India's southwest monsoon season that features a broad southwesterly wind flow and rainfall across South Asia. According to some reports, the monsoon rainfall started on 5 June, slightly later than normal. [NASA Goddard Space Flight Center]
High-quality maps of July 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 July 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.
July 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 July, 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.
Weather in Philadelphia for the 4th of July 1776--This Saturday is the 4th of July or Independence Day. Sean Potter, a consulting meteorologist who has an interest in history, wrote an article four years ago that describes the weather observations made during July 1776 in Philadelphia by Thomas Jefferson who wrote the Declaration of Independence. [Weatherwise Magazine]
"Warmest day of the year" approaches -- NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (formerly National Climatic Data Center) has created a "Warmest Day of the Year" map for the contiguous United States based upon the highest daily maximum temperatures of the year as calculated from the 1981-2010 climate normals. Additional maps are available for Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. Many places across the nation will experience their highest daily temperatures within the next two to three weeks. However, some locations in Arizona and New Mexico affected by the Southwest Monsoon reach their maximum temperatures during the last two weeks of June. On the other hand, coastal locations along the Pacific Ocean and in Hawaii would have the highest temperatures in September because of the thermal lag due to proximity of the ocean. [NOAA National Climatic Data Center News] Note: For comparison, a corresponding national map is available that shows the "Coldest Day of the Year" based upon the occurrence of the lowest daily minimum temperatures over the 1981-2010 climatological normals interval. [NOAA Climate.gov News]

Weather and Climate News items:

Eye on the tropics --- During the last week, tropical cyclone activity was limited to the North Atlantic basin, which includes the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. As the week started, a tropical depression formed late Sunday afternoon over the waters of the southwestern Gulf of Mexico almost 200 miles to the east-southeast of Tuxpan, Mexico. By early Monday morning, this tropical depression had intensified into Tropical Storm Danielle, the fourth named tropical cyclone of 2016 in the Atlantic basin, as it moved generally west toward the Mexican coast. Spreading locally heavy rain across east central Mexico, Danielle made landfall early Monday evening as a weak tropical storm. The NASA Hurricane Page has satellite images and additional information on Tropical Storm Danielle.
Track historical hurricanes using a map viewer -- An interactive website is available to emergency managers and the public that permits tracking the development and movement of more than 6000 tropical cyclones, including hurricanes, extending back to 1851 in the Atlantic basin using a Geographic Information System (GIS) map viewer. [NOAA Climate.gov Maps] or [NOAA National Ocean Service]
Mid-June heat wave scorches the American Southwest -- During the second and third weeks of June 2016, an atmospheric circulation regime became established over a large section of the North American continent that resulted in many locations in the Southwestern US reporting record or near-record high temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Some locations not only set high temperature records for the June, but reached readings that rank within the top five all-time for their respective locations. Consequently, June 2016 is expected to rank historically very high if not record-setting with respect to temperature at many of these locations. With some locations in Arizona reaching above 110 degrees between 18-22 June, conditions became life-threatening, as evident by the deaths of four hikers in Arizona due to the heat. [NOAA Climate.gov News]
Unusual weather pattern responsible for recent floods in western Europe described -- A somewhat unusual weather event that became stationary over Europe was responsible for the record rainfall across sections of France and Germany beginning in late May and continuing into June. This event is called a "cut-off" low pressure system in which the column of cold air extending upward through the troposphere became detached from the typical west to east flow of the atmosphere, which resulted in a stalled low pressure area accompanied by a persistent pattern of clouds and rain across a wide area of Europe. Some scientists are linking these unusual weather patterns that brought persistent heavy rains to climate change signals. [NOAA Climate.gov News]
Demise of the recent El Niño event is chronicled -- An ENSO blog was written by a NOAA Climate Prediction Center (CPC) researcher describes the life cycle the 2015-16 El Niño event, detailing its recent demise, which the writer called the "discharging" period as warm surface waters in the equatorial waters of the Pacific travel poleward. A block diagram showing the waters of the Pacific in three-dimensions is animated to demonstrate the cooling of the subsurface ocean and then the near surface waters over a several month span as the El Niño event ends. [NOAA Climate.gov News]
Satellite measures methane leaks from California storage facility -- Data collected by the Hyperion spectrometer on NASA's Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite were used to measure the quantity of methane gas that was leaking from a large underground storage facility in California on three separate orbital overpasses last winter. These findings were confirmed by NASA's Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) that was flown on a NASA ER-2 aircraft. [NASA Earth Observatory]
NOAA's first space weather satellite cleared to go operational -- After months of tests involving instrument validation, NOAA's Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) will become operational on 27 July, making it NOAA's first space weather satellite in its role of monitoring potentially damaging space weather storms approaching Earth. DSCOVR, which was launched in February 2015, will replace NASA's aging research satellite, the Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE). DSCOVR is in an orbit one million miles from Earth, positioned at the first Sun-Earth Lagrange point (L1) where the gravitational influence of the Sun and the Earth are in equilibrium. Sensors onboard DSCOVR include the Faraday Cup plasma sensor, which measures the speed, density and temperature of the solar wind, and a magnetometer, which measures the strength and direction of the solar wind magnetic field. Together, the instruments will provide forecasters at NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) necessary information to issue geomagnetic storm warnings. [NOAA News]
Improvements being made to estimating Earth's planetary energy budget -- A team of researchers with NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, the University of Hawaii's Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research and NASA's Langley Research Center have found that a strong agreement in between two independent measurement schemes of the Earth's energy imbalance made by the Argo Profiling Floats and the CERES (Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System) satellite. The former method is an in-situ measurement of the near-surface ocean heating rates and the latter technique involves monitoring of the "top of the atmosphere" annual energy flux. The Earth's annual energy imbalance, which amounts to approximately 0.7 Watts per square meter, is a consequence of planet Earth gaining energy due to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases and to the large thermal inertia of the oceans. [NOAA Climate Office News]
Two strategies could be used to limit number of heat-related deaths due to climate change -- Health care researchers at Columbia University examined the anticipated change in the frequency of heat waves in the New Your City metropolitan area by the year 2080 due to projected global climate change and found that as many as 3331 people could die annually from exposure to heat during the summer months in New York City. The researchers based their projections upon a new model that accounts for variability in future population size, greenhouse gas trajectories, and the extent to which residents adapt to heat through interventions such as the use of air conditioning and public cooling centers. Furthermore, the scientists found two potential ways for limiting the number of heat-related deaths, which would involve cutting fossil fuel emissions and improving adaptation efforts, including efforts to reduce the urban heat-island effect. [Mailman School of Public Health Columbia University News]
An All-Hazards Monitor -- This Web portal provides the user information from NOAA's National Weather Service, FAA and FEMA on current environmental events that may pose as hazards such as tropical weather, fire weather, marine weather, severe weather, drought and floods. [NOAA/NWS Daily Briefing]
Earthweek -- Diary of the Planet [earthweek.com]

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