ClimateSignals

Weekend tornado swarm continues unusual fast pace to 2012 season

Hunter Cutting — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 17:22:34 +0000

Generals meet to deal with melting Arctic

Hunter Cutting — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 17:04:25 +0000

Defense chiefs from eight Arctic nations agreed on Friday to cooperate more closely to deal with disasters and search and rescue operations in the remote resource-rich region, Canada’s top soldier said.

As the Arctic warms up, major nations are jostling for influence in a frozen part of the world believed to contain vast reserves of oil, gas, gold, diamonds, zinc and iron.

Canada’s chief of the defense staff told Reuters that the inaugural meeting of top Arctic military officials had vowed to work together in a region where there is little infrastructure and coping with a disaster could be very difficult.

As well as Canada, the United States and Russia – which account for the vast majority of the Arctic – Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden also attended. Natynczyk said the defense chiefs had agreed to meet once a year from now on.

“The climate … is changing and therefore areas that heretofore have been inaccessible really are now open for much longer in the year,” Natynczyk said in a phone interview.

Warmest March ever, warmest year-to-date ever, for U.S.

Hunter Cutting — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 23:46:00 +0000

Due to the extraordinary heat wave that sent temperatures soaring to summer-like levels across the eastern two-thirds of the country, March was officially the warmest such month in history for the Lower 48 states, the National Climatic Data Center NCDC announced Monday. The heat wave was unprecedented in its scope and magnitude for so early in the year, with many locations breaking longstanding records by up to 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

Several top climate scientists interviewed by Climate Central said global warming may have made the heat wave more likely to occur and more intense than it otherwise would have been, as some argue has happened with other recent heat waves, such as the deadly Russian heat wave in 2010 and the European heat wave in 2003. A new analysis from scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration NOAA concluded that global warming “appreciably increased the odds of a record March heatwave occurring,” and contributed to the intensity of the event, along with the influence of natural climate variability.

In recent years, record daily highs have been outpacing record daily lows in a pattern that has been shown to be inconsistent with natural climate variability alone. So far in 2012, the daily record-high to record-low ratio has been about 17-to-1. For monthly record highs compared to monthly record lows the ratio has been a lopsided 33-to-1 in favor of warm temperature records. If the climate were not warming, one would expect the ratios to be, on average, closer to 1-to-1.

The year-to-date is running as the warmest such period on record for the contiguous U.S., with an average temperature that was 6 degrees above the long-term average, and 1.4 degrees above the previous record.

As a sign of how extreme this year has been so far, the Climate Extremes Index, which tracks the temperature, precipitation, drought and hurricane-related extremes in the U.S., was the highest value on record for the period, at nearly twice the long-term average. The unusually warm temperatures were the main reason for this, according to the NCDC.

March tornadoes racked up $1.1 Billion in insured losses

Hunter Cutting — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 02:18:36 +0000

Severe weather in the U.S., led by tornadoes in the Midwest and Tennessee Valley, caused more than $1.2 billion of insured losses in March, according to Aon Corp. AON, the world’s biggest insurance broker.Insurers reported more than 170,000 claims tied to storms from March 2 and 3, London-based Aon said in a report today. The insured losses exceeded $1.1 billion. Severe weather in the Great Lakes region in the middle of the month cost the industry more than $150 million, according to the report.

Storms lead to 15% jump in losses for insurance companies

Hunter Cutting — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 23:31:29 +0000

For homeowners insurance, direct-written premium rose 3.5 percent to more than $71.6 billion for [2011]. The increase indicates “that rate increases—stemming from recent years’ unexpectedly high weather-related losses—are gaining traction.” Storm losses accounted for a 14.8 point increase in the direct-loss ratio to 75.8 “likely motivating continued rate increases in 2012,” according to Shields.

98% of Colorado in drought

Hunter Cutting — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 01:19:05 +0000

Climatologists at Colorado State University are confirming what many Coloradans already suspect — almost the entire state is consumed by drought.

About 98 percent of the state is experiencing varying levels of drought, according to CSU, with the most severe in the Arkansas Basin, where drought ranges from D1, or “moderate” drought to D3, or “extreme.” Last summer’s Texas drought is also still affecting Colorado, CSU said.

A newer area of D2 or “severe” drought has recently been added to the Yampa/White Basin in northwestern Colorado due to lack of sufficient snowpack this season.

Most of the northeastern plains are designated as “abnormally dry.” Conditions changed drastically since October, when 60 percent of the state didn’t have any drought categories.

That has shrunk to 2 percent, said Nolan Doesken, the state climatologist who is based at CSU.

“Even though the reservoir levels are still strong and northeast Colorado soil moisture is still pretty good, we just don’t usually start out quite this warm and dry at this time — so this is very concerning,” Doesken said.

Heat records in U.S. outnumber cold records 35 to 1 in March

Hunter Cutting — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 23:13:43 +0000

U.S. daily record high temperatures continued to surge into the end of March, with new heat records overwhelming cold records by the incredible ratio of 35.3 to 1. The total number of heat records was 6,182, nearly double the number in the sweltering month of August last year. The monthly count for March was also more than the entire year’s total of cold records in either 2011 or 2010. The year-to-date ratio is now at 22 to 1, nearly double last summer’s pace.Included in the total were 340 new all-time March high temperature records vs. only 8 low temperature records, a ratio of over 42 to 1. Over 110 official climate reporting locations ASOS stations in 27 states also reported record high average temperatures for March. This represents roughly one-fourth of the total number of such stations.

New analysis: All weather events affected by changes to the climate

Hunter Cutting — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 17:56:33 +0000

The atmospheric and ocean environment has changed from human activities in ways that affect storms and extreme climate events. The main way climate change is perceived is through changes in extremes because those are outside the bounds of previous weather. The average anthropogenic climate change effect is not negligible, but nor is it large, although a small shift in the mean can lead to very large percentage changes in extremes. Anthropogenic global warming inherently has decadal time scales and can be readily masked by natural variability on short time scales. To the extent that interactions are linear, even places that feature below normal temperatures are still warmer than they otherwise would be. It is when natural variability and climate change develop in the same direction that records get broken. For instance, the rapid transition from El Niño prior to May 2010 to La Niña by July 2010 along with global warming contributed to the record high sea surface temperatures in the tropical Indian and Atlantic Oceans and in close proximity to places where record flooding subsequently occurred. A commentary is provided on recent climate extremes. The answer to the oft-asked question of whether an event is caused by climate change is that it is the wrong question. All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be.

“Surreal heat” jump starts early asthma season with record pollen counts

Hunter Cutting — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:45:10 +0000

The surreal heat that’s baking much of the central and eastern USA has unleashed an unusually early and intense blast of tree pollen, making life miserable for tens of millions of people who suffer from seasonal allergies.

Forecasters and allergists blame the unseasonably warm weather, and few cold snaps, for causing plants to bloom weeks earlier.

Atlanta, for example, smashed an all-time record of 9,369 particles of pollen per cubic meter on Tuesday, coating the city with a thin, yellow layer of pollen.

“Over 1,500 is in the high range,” notes allergist Stanley Fineman, president of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, about Atlanta’s pollen level. The previous record for Atlanta was about 6,000, he says.

Fineman says his allergist colleagues elsewhere in the South as well as in parts of the Northeast and Midwest are all reporting patients with severe allergy symptoms, due to the recent warm weather.

“It’s a very early start to the pollen season,” he says.

The USA just had its fourth-warmest winter on record, and more than 2,000 record high temperatures have been set already this month, according to the National Climatic Data Center.

AccuWeather reported Wednesday that moderate to very high pollen levels were recorded from coast to coast, with particularly high levels in parts of Utah, the mid-Mississippi Valley, and along the east coast of Florida.

One of out five Americans — roughly 50 million people — have allergies, says Angel Waldron, a spokeswoman with the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America. Waldron adds that the earlier starts to spring are leading to a longer period of time that patients are dealing with their symptoms.

“We don’t foresee an early end to the pollen season,” Fineman says. “Unfortunately for patients, there is no end in sight.”

“Mind-boggling” temperatures across U.S. says NOAA

Hunter Cutting — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 17:04:48 +0000

With temperatures soaring in many places around the United States, many might be wondering if this is a sign of another sweltering summer.

On Wednesday (March 21) alone, more than 70 major cities were within sight of record highs, according to the Weather Channel.

Quite a few of those cities have already broken the previous record high — some by a little, some by a lot.

New York City broke its record high of 68 degrees, set in 1979, by two degrees.

In Chicago, temperatures have hovered in the low to mid-80s for more than a week. On Wednesday, it reached 85. The notoriously chilly city has shattered previous record highs for the last eight days. [Weirdo Weather: 7 Rare Weather Events]

“Our records go back to 1873, so you’re looking at quite a bit of time there,” said Amy Seeley, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Chicago office.

And on Monday (March 19), in International Falls, Minn. — known as “The Nation’s Icebox” and one of the coldest places on Earth — the low temperature, 60 degrees, tied with the previous record high for the day, set in 1918. (Temperatures climbed to a balmy 78 degrees.)

When low temperatures are the same as previous record highs, “that’s incredible — to me, that’s just mind-boggling,” said Mike Halpert, deputy director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center.

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