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This morning at 11 am the National Hurricane Center began issuing advisories on Tropical Storm Matthew, which formed from Investigation 97L. The NHC has been watching this investigation cross the Atlantic for several days but it has finally developed the closed circulation that allows it to be designated as a tropical storm. Currently Matthew is…
Posted in: Tropical weather -
As I’ve posted in previous entries, parts of the Southeast have been suffering from a shortage of hay as drought stopped the growth of pasture and forage plants, especially in northwest Georgia and northeast Alabama. Armyworms have taken advantage of the weakened plants and have attacked in larger than usual numbers, further reducing the amount…
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A new study in Nature magazine describes a new very-long-term temperature record assembled by a scientist at Stanford University from 61 different proxy climate records. Proxy records are climate records based on things like tree rings, ocean sediments and ice cores which change depending on climate factors like temperature. The new record shows temperatures for…
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After yesterday’s post on the record number of days with a warm night in New Orleans, some of my meteorologist friends and I have been discussing why there might be such a drastic change. My friend Scott Lindstrom from the University of Wisconsin-Madison posted the graph below, which shows a step function change in the…
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The Southeast Regional Climate Center has a new product available: a summary of summer 2016, published as a colorful and concise two-page fact sheet. You can view it at https://www.sercc.com/SERCC_quarterly_report_summer_2016.pdf. It describes the general weather pattern for the season as well as impacts on agriculture as well as flood and drought events.
Posted in: Climate summaries -
The Capital Weather Gang posted an interesting story today about the unprecedented heat record that New Orleans has experienced this hot summer. On 43 nights this year, the temperature did not drop below 80 F. This blows the previous record of 13 nights in 2010 out of the water. Unusually warm nights are associated with…
Posted in: Climate and Ag in the news -
One question that folks who are skeptical about global warming have is whether or not natural solar activity could be affecting the rise in temperature seen in recent decades. A number of research programs have attempted to determine if there is a relationship between sunspots or cosmic radiation and Earth’s temperature. This recent article from…