Climate science
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Since 2014, when this blog started, I’ve run a couple of articles about when the average date of the coldest day of the year is for everywhere in the United States. Here is an update that now includes an interactive map to show you when you can expect the coldest day of the year to…
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Anyone who follows how variations in climate and how they affect the weather we observe in any year know that El Nino and La Nina, collectively known as ENSO or El Nino Southern Oscillation, is one of the biggest drivers of yearly climate in the Southeast. For the past three years we have had La…
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Climate models are very complex, and one part of the models that is especially difficult to get correct is how the models handle clouds. Clouds tend to be smaller than the grid size of the models and reach to different wavelengths of light in different ways. High clouds during the day can cool things off…
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The 5th National Climate Assessment was released on Tuesday morning, the culmination of almost five years of work since the 4th Assessment was released in 2018. This assessment, written by several hundred scientists and reviewed several times by numerous government, public, and private groups as well as interested citizens, contains the latest scientific knowledge of…
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If you follow national climate news, you have probably seen a lot of splashy information on the 5th National Climate Assessment, which was released Tuesday morning to a lot of acclaim and a huge roll-out of information about the changing climate in the United States. I was one of the authors of the Southeast chapter,…
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There are many sayings in folklore about how to predict the upcoming winter based on phenological observations of persimmon seeds, the coats of animals, and when birds fly south. Observations of woolly bear caterpillars and their comparative amounts of brown and black stripes is one that I get asked about from time to time. Here…
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If you watch the weather forecasts carefully, either for regular weather or for tropical storms, you probably already know that meteorologists use multiple models to help make their predictions of what the weather is likely to be and how storm systems will move across an area. Forbes has a great description of why forecasters use…