Climate science
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“With huge plumes of particles rising into the atmosphere from deserts and farmland, the question is whether they raise temperatures or lower them.” This quote is from a new BBC article on studying the impacts of dust on local and global climate. We’ve all seen pictures of huge dust storms, both in the “Dust Bowl”…
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Sometime later this week NOAA should publish the statistics on fall climate for the US. The maps below show the temperature and precipitation departures for the Southeast from the High Plains Regional Climate Center. While temperatures were a bit above normal almost everywhere in the Southeast, the real story is the very wet conditions across…
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This is the International Year of Soils. A number of stories have been written about the importance of healthy soils in stabilizing climate and improving yields of crops. University of Tennessee at Knoxville scientists recently released a study showing that the soil in the region encompassing the Dust Bowl in the 1930’s is still degraded,…
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Now that we are getting into the colder months, you can expect to see more atmospheric optical effects related to ice crystals high up in the sky, although it’s so cold up there that some of them can occur any time of year. One of the most common and spectacular of these is the halo,…
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Steve Hilberg has an interesting post on the CoCoRaHS blog this week about the history of how clouds acquired their names (like cirrus, cumulus, etc.) and the man that classified them. You can read it here. If you like pictures of clouds, you can find many at the Cloud Appreciation Society website, https://cloudappreciationsociety.org/.
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With our rain chances on the rise for the next few days, you might have heard your local forecaster talk about the probability of precipitation or PoP. But what does a 40% chance of rain really mean? It turns out that not even meteorologists agree on a definition. Check out Dr. Marshall Shepherd’s blog from…
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In the latest blog entry from NOAA’s Beyond the Data, Deke Arndt discusses the interesting fact that cold “things” such as observations like morning minimum temperatures, Arctic climate conditions, and winters have steeper trends towards warm conditions than warmer locations or seasons. To find out why, you can read his post at https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/beyond-data/climate-change-rule-thumb-cold-things-warming-faster-warm-things.