Climate science
-
With all the rain we’ve had this week, the smell of rain has been on my mind. EarthSky had a blog entry on petrichor, the official term for the smell of rain (here). I was surprised to learn that the word was created by the Australian National Science agency, CSIRO, based on Latin roots. I…
-
The rainy conditions we’ve been having this week can be attributed in part to the El Nino which is currently underway in the Eastern Pacific Ocean and is expected to continue for the next few months. You might be wondering what other agricultural impacts are likely in an El Nino year. The folks at AgroClimate.org…
-
The rain in the Southeast this week has cut down the amount of pollen in the air by quite a bit this week. Trees are leafing out, which means that the pollen-bearing flowers are dropping off. But there are plenty of other sources of pollen still to come. You can see a list of common…
-
One of the consequences of the continuing drought in California has been the unprecedented string of extremely high temperatures that have occurred in the last few years. Normally a portion of the sun’s energy that hits the earth goes to evaporating water from the surface, either from soils or water bodies or indirectly through evapotranspiration…
-
The Pacific Decadal oscillation, or PDO, is a long-term oscillation in Pacific Ocean temperatures. It is one of several known swings in ocean temperature between two phases, a “cold” phase and a “warm” phase. The most well-known natural oscillation like this is the El Nino-Southern Oscillation, which changes phase every 3-5 years. The PDO is…
-
Have humans already changed the climate of earth? As Cliff Mass of the University of Washington describes in his blog this week, “The answer is emphatically yes.” But the changes are due to much more than just the addition of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Our changes also have to do with…
-
April 2015 marks the 200th anniversary of the most powerful volcanic eruption in modern times, the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. This eruption is discussed in awe in climatology classes because of what we now know about the impacts of volcanic activity on climate–it depresses global temperatures for up to five years after a…