Climate science
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Fog is a mysterious thing. I love the quiet mystery of a foggy morning. But you might not know that there are several different types of fog that form in different ways, although they all result in reduced visibility due to high levels of water vapor in the atmosphere. Here is a short article on…
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The best forecast clue for what winter is likely to be like in the Southeast and other parts of the US is whether El Niño or La Niña is present in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. This year we have neutral conditions, which makes a winter prediction tougher. But NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center still issued a…
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The latest ENSO update from NOAA shows that there is no El Niño or La Niña occurring in the Eastern Pacific Ocean at present. Temperatures there are fairly close to the 1981-2010 average. Neutral conditions are likely to continue for the next few months, so short-term climate variations will come from other variations like the…
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It’s ten days until the end of the Atlantic hurricane season, and as I write this, named storm #19, Sebastien, is moving through the Central Atlantic (no threat to the Southeast, happily). It’s predicted to become a hurricane on Thursday. It’s been a busy year, which was predicted by NOAA and other groups, but what…
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A friend passed along this story about a beautiful covering of rime ice along Skyline Drive west of Washington DC. Rime ice is formed when the air is cool and moist and when the temperature drops to below freezing super-cooled water droplets condense right on contact with the cold trees. The rime ice may not…
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The BBC produced a short timeline which describes some of the important events in expanding our knowledge of how humans are changing climate, going back to 1712 and the invention of the first steam engine that used coal and 1824, the first scientific mention of the earth’s natural greenhouse effect. If you think that scientists’…
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Proxy data are measurements from things like tree rings that contain a time series of changes documenting variations in weather or climate at a specific location. These data, which include ice cores, ocean sediments, and pollen from bogs, can tell us how the climate changed over a long period of time, which eventually will help…
Posted in: Climate science