Pam Knox

  • New drought study from North Carolina

    The State Climate Office of North Carolina released an article today describing some summer student research on drought indices they have undertaken.  You can read the article at https://climate.ncsu.edu/climateblog?id=150&h=5666e5c1. The researcher looked at two different datasets of temperature and created a new drought index to compare to the standard Palmer Drought Severity Index to see how…

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  • In conjunction with the NOAA climate report released today, NOAA has provided a report on nuisance flooding at coastal stations along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts based on their coastal data sets.  Nuisance flooding is minor coastal flooding driven by higher than normal tides coupled with unusually storm weather, not major flooding from storm surges.…

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  • NOAA released their latest climate summary for the US today.  It shows that the West continued its string of above-normal temperatures and dry conditions, although a few areas did receive above-normal rainfall.  The central US was cooler than average in August with some areas of very wet conditions in the northern Plains and dry conditions…

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  • How does your air compare?

    Occasionally I’ve been asked where the cleanest air in the US is located.  This is especially important for those who have health issues related to breathing, such as COPD, allergies, or cystic fibrosis.  It can be hard to find this information since monitoring is usually done by individual state agencies who don’t all use the…

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  • The 7-day rainfall we’ve seen in the Southeast shows that it was feast or famine for many areas.  The map below details the percent of normal each area received based on radar estimates.  It shows that southeast Georgia received the heaviest rain from the remains of Erika, with some areas receiving more than 500 percent…

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  • Today marks the 115th anniversary of the Galveston hurricane that is estimated to have killed over 10,000 people when the city of Galveston TX was hit by a storm surge of over 15 feet.  This story was memorialized in the fantastic book, “Isaac’s Storm”.  If you have never read it and you like to read…

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  • Trying to grow rice in Wisconsin

    As I was driving home from the airport today, I heard this interesting story about attempts to grow rice in Wisconsin on National Public Radio.  You can listen to the story here. A Marquette University professor is trying to grow rice in the climate of Wisconsin to see if he can get it to produce…

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