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…

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  • 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…

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  • If you get questions about how we know that the earth is warming but the people who ask don’t want to hear about computer models or climate data, you might be interested in this recent blog post from Skeptoid.  The audio track and transcript explain the basic physics behind the calculations of temperature on a planet…

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  • This week NASA announced that it has produced a new visualization of how carbon dioxide moves around the globe.  It shows how CO2 moves around the earth and between the northern and southern hemispheres.  You can really see the difference in the two hemispheres in terms of land area and plant life.  You can read…

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