Pam Knox

  • Cliff Mass of the University of Washington posted a long article on his blog this week describing the atmospheric and oceanic conditions which have led to the unusual conditions for the past two years.  While his blog is focused on the Pacific Northwest, much of his analysis also applies to the Southeast, with the caveat…

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  • Spring outlooks from EDEN and ProFarmer

    EDENotes, the blog of the Extension Disaster Education Network, posted their spring outlook this week at https://blogs.extension.org/edenotes/2015/03/25/weather-wednesday-spring-outlook/.   As I noted earlier, the forecast calls for an increased chance of above normal precipitation in April through June in the Southeast. ProFarmer also published an article describing the expansion of drought in the Northern and Central Great…

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  • The State Climate office of North Carolina has released their latest blog posting this week on last winter’s conditions in NC.  In the blog posting they also provide an analysis of how the forecasts from folklore and from their own analysis panned out.  They close with an update on El Nino and its likely impacts…

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  • Update on cold weekend conditions

    Earlier this week I noted that we were in for some cold weather and possible frost this coming weekend.  I wanted to give you an update on the general situation, although you will want to get detailed forecasts from the National Weather Service or another source as the cold weather moves in. The cold front…

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  • The National Weather Service has a new experimental product available which provides 6-day forecasts of evapotranspiration in a zoomable map format.  A weekly total is also available.  You can access this product at https://preview.weather.gov/graphical/.  You can find the FRET daily values by looking under Agriculture at the bottom of the product pull-down menu on the top…

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  • The Climate.gov web site has a good introductory section on climate data.  You can find the primer at https://www.climate.gov/maps-data/primer/climate-data-primer.  It includes information on how climate is measured, how the data are processed and quality controlled, how past climates are interpreted and how future climate is predicted, and where to get climate data.  I also have a…

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  • El Ninos don’t all look the same

    The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory released a short article this week describing research to be published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.  In the article it discusses the variability in temperature distributions in different El Nino episodes.  Some episodes feature strong temperature anomalies, while others are weaker.  Some favor the strongest warming near…

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