WEEKLY WEATHER & CLIMATE NEWS

WEEKLY WEATHER AND CLIMATE NEWS

29 December 2014 - 2 January 2015

Items of Interest:

It's Sure Dark in the morning! -- Have you noticed that if you are an early riser, that mornings remain dark and somewhat dreary although local sunsets are becoming noticeably later during the last week? During the last week of December and the first week of January, many locations throughout the country will experience their latest sunrise times of the year, even though the winter solstice occurred more than one week ago on Sunday, 21 December 2014. The exact day for the latest sunrise depends upon the latitude, so you may want to check the date in your locale from the sunrise tables appearing in an on-line, interactive service available for the entire year at most cities in the United States. The reason for the late sunrise now rather than on the winter solstice is because the sun is not as precise a timekeeper as our watches. Because of a combination of factors involved with Earth's elliptical orbit about the sun and the tilt of Earth's spin axis with respect to the plane of the ecliptic, the sun appeared to "run fast" by as much as 15 minutes as compared with clock time in November. In early December, most locations experienced their earliest sunsets. However, with the approach of the winter solstice and perihelion (the smallest earth-sun distance during the early morning of 4 January 2015), the apparent sun slows during December and finally lags the clock by 12 minutes in February. Consequently, a noticeable and welcome trend toward later sunsets can be detected by the end of December, especially by those residents in the northern part of the country. However, the latest sunrises occur at most locales in early January, meaning a continuation of the dark and dreary mornings for another week or two.
No "leap second" will lengthen 2014 -- The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) has determined that no "leap second" would be inserted to lengthen the calendar year of 2014. Since 1972, "leap seconds" have been inserted on the last day of December 15 times, with the most recent occurrence on 31 December 2008 when the service's atomic clocks were stopped for one second just before midnight (2359Z, or 6:59 PM EST, 5:59 PM CST, etc) to readjust the time scale based on the atomic clock to the time scale based upon the rotation of the Earth with respect to the sun. At the time, tidal friction and other natural phenomena had slowed the Earth's rotation rate by approximately two milliseconds per day. In addition, a "leap second" has been inserted ten times at the end of June, with the most recent one added on 30 June 2012. [US Naval Observatory]
Climatology of Southeast NCAA bowl games updated -- The Southeast Regional Climate Center has provided a listing of the weather history for twelve NCAA college bowl games that are to be played within the next two weeks across the Southeastern States. This climatology includes the warmest, coldest, wettest and snowiest days in the particular bowl's history.
High-quality maps of January 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 January 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.
January 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 January, 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.
In Close --

Weather and Climate News Items:

Eye on the tropics --- Tropical cyclone activity across the global ocean basins was relatively sparse during the last week. In the Southern Indian Ocean basin, Tropical Storm Kate developed near Australia's Cocos Keeling Islands Traveling to the southwest, Kate intensified to a category 3 cyclone on the Saffir Simpson Scale by the start of this past weekend as maximum sustained surface winds reached at least 120 mph. By the end of the weekend, Cyclone Kate had weakened and could become a tropical storm by early this week as it would continue to travel toward the southwest. The NASA Hurricane Page has additional information and satellite images on Cyclone Kate.
In the western North Pacific basin, Tropical Depression 23-W formed on Sunday (local time) over the waters of the Philippine Sea approximately 650 miles to the southeast of Manila in the Philippines. This tropical depression was traveling westward and could strengthen to become a tropical storm before making landfall along the northern coast of Mindanao by early Monday.
Sun's portrait in X-Rays -- A team of scientists recently produced a high-resolution image of the Sun from data collected by NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), an Earth-orbiting telescope that focuses upon high-energy X-rays from various sources in the Universe. This image shows X-rays streaming from the Sun's corona or its outer atmosphere. [NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory News]
Two new apps promote weather and environmental satellite "crowd sourcing" -- Two free mobile application programs or apps were developed by NOAA's academic partner, the Space Science and Engineering Center (SSEC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, that provide mobile phone users the ability to see and capture satellite data. One of these apps, the "SatCam" app, which is for iOS devices, allows mobile users the capability of capturing observations of sky and ground conditions at the same time that an Earth observing satellite is overhead. The other apps is the "WxSat" (short for Weather Satellite) app, which is for iOS and android devices, displays and animates full-resolution, real-time weather satellite data. WxSat leverages the SSEC Data Center holdings to provide global coverage for visible, infrared, and water vapor channels. These two apps would be useful for "crowdsourcing" in that the citizen scientists with mobile devices would be able to help provide SSEC scientists and their colleagues with information that could be used to check the quality of the cloud products created from satellite data. [NASA Goddard Space Flight Center]
Review of Canada's top ten weather stories in 2014 -- During the last week, meteorologists with Environment Canada released a list of what they considered the top ten weather events across Canada during this calendar year of 2014. The top story was the long cold 2013-14 winter across Canada. Additional stories focused upon the flooding in the eastern provinces, wildfires across western and northern sections of their nation and the summer that was hot along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, but cool in the populated areas of Ontario and Quebec. [Environment Canada]
Updated quarterly regional climate impacts and outlooks released -- During the last week NOAA and its partners released a set of regional quarterly climate impact and outlook reports for seven regions across the United States. These reports include descriptions of major climate events that occurred during the previous three months (September-November 2014) along with climate outlooks for the first quarter of 2015. [NOAA NCDC News]
Looking under the ice at the South Pole -- Scientists have created an image showing a vertical cross section of the Antarctic ice sheet in the vicinity of the South Pole in order to show the structure of this ice sheet. This image, which was based upon data collected by downward-pointing radar on aircraft, extends from the surface of the ice cap to a depth of approximately 3 kilometers and stretches several hundred kilometers on each side of the South Pole. The radar images obtained from the airborne campaign have been used to help in the selection of a drilling site near the South Pole where an ice core of approximately 1500-meter length is to be extracted that ultimately should provide a detailed history of the climate of Antarctica over approximately the last 40,000 years. [NASA Earth Observatory]
Funding to be awarded for climate change studies -- The US Secretary of the Interior, Sally Jewell, recently announced that her department's regional Climate Science Centers and the US Geological Survey (USGS) National Climate Change and Wildlife Science Center are awarding nearly $6 million to universities and other partners for 50 new research projects to better prepare communities for impacts of climate change. This research funding is part of the President's Climate Action Plan. [US Department of Interior Press release]
Active and ancient organic chemistry found on Mars -- NASA s scientists and their colleagues who have been analyzing a rock-powder sample collected by the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) laboratory onboard NASA's Mars Curiosity rover reported an order of magnitude increase in the organic chemical compound methane (CH₄). This discovery represents the first definitive detection of Martian organic chemicals in material on the surface of Mars. [NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory News] A discussion was also made of how the Curiosity instrument made the first detection of organic matter on the Martian surface. [NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory 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] Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader.

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