Climate science
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Many of you know that one factor that may have affected the recent presidential election is the number of fake news stories that were sent out via social media like Facebook. This week has been an example of a related issue, fake weather news. My Facebook feed has been buzzing the last few days about…
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A good science lesson from recently retired Milwaukee meteorologist Vince Condella (a friend of mine from grad school): It’s that time of year again, one of the great paradoxes of nature. On Wednesday, January 4, at 7:18 a.m. Arizona time, 8:18 a.m. in Wisconsin, the Earth reaches Perihelion, its closest approach to the Sun during the…
Posted in: Climate science -
This week NOAA released their latest report, the fifth edition of Explaining Extreme Events from a Climate Perspective, which presents 25 peer-reviewed research papers that examine episodes of extreme weather of 2015 over five continents and two oceans. It features the research of 116 scientists from 18 countries analyzing both historical observations and changing trends…
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The latest ENSO blog post from NOAA’s Climate.gov provides an excellent discussion of how La Niña causes shifts in temperature and precipitation across the Southeast and other regions of the US and other countries. It describes the shifts in the jet stream associated with the pool of colder-than-normal ocean temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean…
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How do you know if a state has set a new record for temperature, precipitation or snowfall? It’s not an easy process! You have to look at the historical data, assess its accuracy, determine what other events compare to it, and decide if the potential new record meets all the qualifications needed to represent an…
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There has been quite a bit of kerfluffle in the news lately about climate scientists rushing to archive climate data and worries that research on climate science will be significantly cut back once President Trump takes office. Cliff Mass of the University of Washington has a thoughtful and detailed discussion of why it is important…
Posted in: Climate science -
While many younger folks are thinking about the North Pole this week in a non-scientific way, Dr. Marshall Shepherd of UGA takes an analytical approach to the topic, discussing why the North Pole is cold in his latest Forbes blog post here. The article also looks at differences between the North and South Pole and…