Climate science
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Water vapor and carbon dioxide are both contributors to greenhouse warming on the Earth. I’ve gotten questions from time to time about their relative importance to greenhouse warming. Dr. Marshall Shepherd of UGA provides a good discussion of the topic in a recent Forbes.com blog post here.
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Earthzine published an interesting article earlier this month about the decrease in wind speeds that have occurred in recent years compared to the longer-term average. You can read it at https://earthzine.org/2016/06/10/a-new-kind-of-drought-u-s-record-low-windiness-in-2015/. This is important because of our increasing use of wind power to provide electricity, since lower wind speeds are less efficient for power production and…
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The summer solstice arrives on Monday at 6:34 EDT. You can read about what it is on the WunderBlog at https://www.wunderground.com/news/summer-solstice-first-day-summer-20140619#prclt-JnRYWA1s. You might also be interested to read about the difference in the length of day from north to south at EarthSky here. Happy astronomical summer!
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Dr. Marshall Shepherd of UGA published a new column in Forbes.com this week about mammatus clouds, the beautiful and sometimes scary clouds that form on the undersides of severe thunderstorms (and occasionally in other places as well). You can read his blog post here. The Cloud Appreciation Society also has some great pictures of mammatus…
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While it seems to be pretty intuitive that parking in the shade helps keep your car cool, there has been surprisingly little data collected to show how much cooler it is. The State Climatologist of Arizona, Nancy Selover, has contributed to a recent article describing their work to measure car temperatures in sun and shade…
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Deke Arndt writes more details about the relationship between spring rain and summer temperature in the latest Beyond the Data from NOAA. It turns out that spring rain affects daytime high temperatures much more than nighttime low temperatures due to the effects of solar radiation during the day on wet soil which is not seen…
Posted in: Climate science -
In a warmer climate with a longer growing season, climatologists have generally considered that the longer frost-free season will lead to an increase in insect pests that affect both crops and livestock. I was interested to see an article posted today in Phys.org describing the impacts that a warming climate may have on insect pests,…