Climate science

  • The latest blog post from Deke Arndt in Climate.gov’s Beyond the Data discusses the state-by-state extremes in weather reported by the National Centers for Environmental Information. These include tidbits like the lowest low temperature, the highest high, the biggest hailstone, the strongest wind, etc. Are all of these records reliable? How do we know? Read the…

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  • I am working on a talk that I will be giving at the UGA Extension Winter School on Wednesday about freeze protection for fruit; my co-presenters are Drs. Erick Smith and Tim Coolong. In my part of the talk I describe the difference between advective and radiative freezes. Advective freezes occur when cold and (often)…

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  • Photos: Antarctica ice

    Time magazine posted an interesting photo essay recently describing changes in ice taking place around Antarctica. Climatologists know that the high latitudes (both in the Arctic and Antarctic) are the most likely places to see the impacts of changing climate because of the albedo effect, which affects how much sunlight is absorbed by the ground…

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  • Video: Singing Ice

    The CoCoRaHS blog posted this interesting video from National Public Radio about the sounds that ice can make in cold weather. You might enjoy watching it. You can find it at https://cocorahs.blogspot.com/2018/01/singing-ice.html.

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  • I am at home today enjoying a snow day, and thought you might enjoy this post from colleague Dr. Marshall Shepherd of UGA on four interesting things about snow from his blog at Forbes.com. I knew there was snow on the ground when I woke up at 2 am because the light was different than…

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  • If you are interested in learning more about how climate models work, you can check out this fairly long and detailed explanation from Carbon Brief at https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-how-do-climate-models-work. In many ways the climate models are similar to weather forecast models except that weather forecast models are designed to work really fast (to get the forecasts out on…

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  • Here’s an interesting story about a group led by University of Arizona scientists studying jet stream position using tree ring analysis. By looking at the density of wood produced late in the growing season, the scientists were able to produce a long history of high-summer jet stream locations dating back to 1725. This time series…

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