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September 10 marks the middle of the Atlantic tropical season, as seen in the graph below. Today we are up to storm H for “Henri”, which is headed northeast and poses no threat to the US. There are currently three “X’s” in the Atlantic, with one at 50% chance of developing into a tropical cyclone…
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A few years ago, I was sitting in the stands watching my son’s high school football game. From the bleachers, I could see thunderstorms approaching the area. Finally, I saw a lightning stroke just to the south. By counting the seconds from the visible strike to hearing the thunder, I could tell it was just…
Posted in: Climate and Ag in the news -
Did you know that the vast majority of weather data that goes into weather forecast models comes not from ground measurements, but from satellite observations? This increase in global data, plus the increased power of computers, has improved weather forecasting dramatically over time. It’s hard to believe that satellite meteorology only started in the 1960’s,…
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If you follow tropical forecasts closely, as I do, you will be interested in this post-storm analysis of Tropical Storm Erika. The National Hurricane Center provides a report here which explains why Erika’s forecast was not as good as predictions of tropical storms in previous years.
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The latest Drought Monitor was released today and shows that severe drought (D2) expanded slightly in the Southeast as a whole in the past week. Most of the expansion was in the Carolinas and Georgia; extreme drought was eliminated and conditions improved to “severe drought” in southern Florida due to the rain from the remains of Tropical…
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The State Climate Office of North Carolina released an article today describing some summer student research on drought indices they have undertaken. You can read the article at https://climate.ncsu.edu/climateblog?id=150&h=5666e5c1. The researcher looked at two different datasets of temperature and created a new drought index to compare to the standard Palmer Drought Severity Index to see how…
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In conjunction with the NOAA climate report released today, NOAA has provided a report on nuisance flooding at coastal stations along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts based on their coastal data sets. Nuisance flooding is minor coastal flooding driven by higher than normal tides coupled with unusually storm weather, not major flooding from storm surges.…