February 2017
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By the time you read this on Monday morning, the Oroville Dam in California, holding back the second biggest reservoir in the state, may have been washed out. As of Sunday night, there are flash flood warnings due to an imminent collapse of the auxiliary spillway for low-lying areas downstream of the dam. While the…
Posted in: Climate and Ag in the news -
NOAA has a great discussion of a frigid outbreak of cold air that occurred in 1899, culminating in bitterly cold conditions on February 10. Here is how their discussion starts: “Over 115 years ago, a cold wave that would become known as the “Great Arctic Outbreak” took the United States by storm. People across the…
Posted in: History -
Climatologists know that the most likely place to first see the impacts of a warmer world is in the Arctic, where feedbacks due to snow and sea ice and their effect on the albedo make climate very sensitive to small temperature variations. Albedo is the reflectivity of the earth’s surface, and snow and ice are…
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This Day in History posted a story this week on an article published in the Sacramento Bee back on February 11, 1921, describing a terrible tornado which hit the Gardner Settlement near Toomsboro, east of Macon, Georgia on February 10. The tornado track was described as five miles long and half a mile wide and…
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On the EarthSky blog today the authors posted a short video of a spacecraft destroying a sundog. You’ve probably seen sundogs or parhelia before–they are optical phenenoma caused by sunlight refracting through ice crystals which show up as spots of light to the left or right of the sun, usually near sunrise or sunset.…
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The latest QPF shows that the next week should be below average in precipitation across most of the area, with most areas receiving less than half an inch. Most of what rain does fall is likely to be on Tuesday and Wednesday. The week after that looks a little more likely for some rain, although…
Posted in: Climate outlooks -
The latest WunderBlog post updates us on the status of Arctic sea ice. The bad news is that it is at a new record low for this time of year, even though it’s winter in the Arctic now. Temperatures there this winter have been incredibly warm, which has helped lead to the low ice coverage. (See…