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Last week I reported that the Oroville Dam in northern California was in danger of losing its capacity to hold back water from the reservoir there, the second biggest one in California, due to a damaged spillway and water overtopping the emergency overland spillway due to heavy rains in the area. Hundreds of thousands of…
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The latest Drought Monitor shows the expansion of abnormally dry conditions across Florida and the Carolinas this week, due in part to low rainfall amounts and also to the very warm temperatures the region has experienced this past week. Areas of moderate drought have also been added to parts of northern Virginia and southern Florida. …
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I gave a talk on projections of future climate today to a group of farmers and other interested folk in LaGrange, GA. One of the things we discussed in the talk is how weather and climate forecasts are similar and how they are different, because they are really designed to do different things even though…
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Today is Groundhog Day (or Candlemas Day, depending on which calendar you use). News outlets across the US are reporting on whether we are going to have six more weeks of winter or if spring will come early based on the shadow of a marmot. All while the flowering plum trees here in Athens in…
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Earlier in January I was fortunate to see “Hidden Figures”, a movie about brilliant African-American women mathematicians who helped NASA successfully launch astronauts into space. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should, and take your kids with you. This week Dr. Marshall Shepherd discusses some of the hidden women in atmospheric sciences in his…
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The CoCoRaHS blog this week has a good description of how recent rains in California have affected the drought there. While northern California is now drought-free, southern California is still in drought, with a few areas even still in exceptional drought. You can read the blog at https://cocorahs.blogspot.com/2017/01/no-such-thing-as-free-lunch.html.
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Meteorologists use Doppler radar to track precipitation across the country. It provides not only information about falling rain and snow, but also a sense of the direction of the winds, which can help provide information about potential severe weather such as tornadoes. But Doppler radar can also track other things in the sky, such as…