Climate science
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The Cloud Appreciation Society’s monthly cloud picture for November showed a mysterious ring in the cloud layer over Warwickshire, England. Where did it come from? You can read the detective story at EarthSky at https://earthsky.org/earth/mystery-cloud-appreciation-society-pretor-pinney-nov-2016. The Cloud Appreciation Society is a great place to look at other pictures of clouds too. You can visit them at https://www.cloudappreciationsociety.org.
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In place of Black Friday I am offering a White Friday instead. Here is a fantastic picture of a rare fogbow from Scotland which is making the rounds of my Facebook feed today. You can read about what makes a fogbow or white rainbow at Yahoo here. If that’s not enough of the white stuff,…
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Wildfires are still raging across the Southeast. You can see a recent satellite picture at EarthSky at https://earthsky.org/earth/southeastern-us-wildfires-tennessee-northcarolina-southcarolina-georgia-nov2016. Some areas are so smoke-filled and potentially hazardous that people have been evacuated, for example in Rabun County GA according to WGAU here and the Atlanta Journal Constitution here. Eos.org reported this week on some research being done on…
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Deke Arndt’s latest post in NOAA’s “Beyond the Data” blog has a great description of the Southeast drought that we are experiencing this year. It does an excellent job of describing how the drought developed and discusses how drought monitoring is done when dryness occurs at different time scales. You can read it here.
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I read a story this morning in Growing Georgia reminding producers that the deadline for purchasing crop insurance for fruit is coming on November 20. I thought I would take a minute to discuss what the current weak La Niña means for spring frost. In general, neither El Niño nor La Niña are particularly indicative…
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Weather Underground had some interesting pictures of clouds in upstate New York that looked a bit like jellyfish. While we don’t have any clouds in the sky outside my office today (remember that a drought is too many days of nice weather in a row), I have seen similar clouds in the past and someday…
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Is the sun causing the warming we have seen in recent decades? This is a comment I occasionally get from people who are not paying careful attention to how climate works. While solar radiation can affect climate on a variety of time scales (ice ages from distance-related orbital changes in our trip around the sun,…