Climate science
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When we look at sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, we are commonly looking for signs of El Niño or La Niña, which can greatly affect the climate of the Southeast, especially in winter. But recently the most interesting part of the Pacific has not been near the equator where we usually see ENSO…
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As I was looking at my Facebook feed, it reminded me of a photo I took out my office window in 2014 showing the trees outside in their fall colors. This year, the color is barely showing yet. A lot of that can be attributed to the extremely warm September we had. Here are a…
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Yale Environment 360 has a really interesting article which describes some of the ways that climate zones are shifting on earth. This has profound implications for agriculture as well as ecosystems because the climate zones (defined by a combination of temperature and precipitation characteristics) determine the kinds of crops you can grow and when you…
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Measurements of sea level across the world show rising waters along most ocean coastlines, including the United States. But according to a story by WRLN in Miami, the regular forecasts for high and low tide do not take that rising water into account yet, leading to bigger errors in tide forecasts than would normally be…
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Every fall, deciduous trees in the Southeast (and elsewhere in the country) change color. Every year, we get asked why. The North Carolina Climate Office has a good description at https://climate.ncsu.edu/climateblog?id=302&h=5666e5c1. Will this year’s drought impact the leaf color in the Southeast? WSB addresses that in a recent article here.
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A flash drought is a severe drought which comes on suddenly, usually through the combination of a near total lack of rainfall and much warmer than normal temperatures. We are seeing a flash drought in the Southeast now, and conditions are rapidly worsening because of the July-like weather. Flash droughts are hard to predict and…
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Historical records of hurricanes only go back a few hundred years and are captured mainly in places where people lived in coastal areas. How do climatologists learn about hurricanes which occurred before humans were there to record their occurrence? It turns out that hurricanes leave recognizable patterns of mud and sand deposits in coastal areas…