Climate science
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This week is the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society, the main professional organization for meteorologists and climatologists in the US and beyond. It is all online this year (a shame since we were supposed to be in New Orleans, but that’s life) so all their activities are available on the web. They offer…
Posted in: Climate science -
Rising temperatures from increased greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane are affecting many aspects of life, including sea level rise, rising costs of utilities, and production management for agriculture. Agriculture is often blamed for the increase in greenhouse gases, although in reality there are other factors that contribute just as much. But agriculture has…
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Since late December, the atmosphere 18 miles above the North Pole has undergone a dramatic warming of as much as 100 F. This event is called a “sudden stratospheric warming” and has the potential to affect weather near the ground. SSWs occur about six times per decade and vary in strength and timing, although almost…
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In past blog posts I have discussed the use of proxy data to determine temperatures and precipitation from the past. Tree rings can go back hundreds of years, ice cores can go back thousands to 100,000 years or more, and other records like pollen in lake deposits can also provide clues to climate at particular…
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If you read climate summaries often, you know that most descriptions of what the climate was like in a particular month or year is put in terms of a departure from normal. But what is ‘normal’? For climatologists, ‘normal’ is a 30-year average of temperature or precipitation which is intended to describe the expected climate…
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The warming of the global atmosphere over time is well known, although individual areas of the globe vary in what they are experiencing. Humidity is another variable that is changing, but in harder to discern ways. We know that as air temperature increases, it has the potential to hold more water vapor. But according to…
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Here is an excellent description of climate models and how they work, for those of you who get asked this or just have wondered yourself. It was published in 2018 in Carbon Brief and provides a detailed look at how climate models work, how accurate they are, and what shortcomings they have. You can read…
Posted in: Climate science