Widespread and potentially catastrophic areal flooding and river flooding is expected this afternoon through Wednesday morning in Eastern Oklahoma, Western Arkansas, Western Louisiana, and Southwest Missouri, warns the National Weather Service in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in their latest flood watch for the region. The storm system responsible is a massive, slow-moving trough of low pressure over [...]
Signal: warmer temperatures
New record highs outpacing new record lows in U.S. at 14:1
The surge of early spring heat records reached over 400 yesterday alone in preliminary reports from the National Climatic Data Center. This includes 68 official National Weather Service locations out of 290 possible records. In other words, over 23% of all official reporting locations in the entire U.S. set new daily records for March 15. [...]
Summer in March: “one the most extreme meteorological events in U.S. history”
Each year, when the list of coldest U.S. cities is compiled, International Falls, Minnesota regularly winds up at the top of the list, earning its title as “Icebox of the Nation”. The city once hit -55°F (on January 6, 1909), and takes pride in the distinction of being the coldest city in the U.S., having [...]
LA Times: “U.S. seems to have largely escaped winter”
The temperature in Minneapolis didn’t fall to zero degrees this winter until Jan. 12. On Jan. 5., the daytime high in Rapid City, S.D. (a record-setting 71 degrees), was higher than in balmy Miami (69 degrees). And just a couple of days before New Year’s, visitors to Park City, Utah, skied on man-made snow and [...]
2011 the warmest La Niña year on record
When compared to previous La Niña years, the 2011 global surface temperature was the warmest observed during such a year.
Texas has hottest June-August on record in the U.S.
Texas just finished the hottest June through August on record in the U.S., the National Weather Service said Thursday. Weather service meteorologist Victor Murphy told The Associated Press that Texas’ 86.8 average beat out Oklahoma’s 85.2 degrees in 1934. That Dust Bowl year is now third on the list for the three-month span, behind No. [...]
Major cities in U.S. warming up due to climate change
We evaluate changes in climatic indices for the 100 largest U.S. urban areas and paired surrounding non-urban areas. During the period 1950–2009, we find that there were statistically significant changes in as many as half of the urban areas in temperature-related indices, such as heating and cooling degree-days and number of warm and cool nights, [...]
Record high temps for the U.S. outnumbered record lows 5:1 in March
Last month, temperatures and precipitation in the contiguous United States averaged above normal, according to scientists at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. The average temperature in March was 44.0 degrees F, which is 1.4 degrees F above the long-term (1901-2000) average. March precipitation, while record dry in areas like Texas, was overall [...]
2010 the hottest summer for European continent in at least 500 years
The heatwave that scorched eastern Europe in 2010, killing thousands of people and devastating crops, was the worst since records began and led to the warmest summer on the continent for at least 500 years, a new scientific analysis has revealed. Searing temperatures in July and August 2010 across Russia are estimated to have killed [...]
January 17th warmest on record despite cooling La Niña trend
Last month was the 17th warmest January for combined global land and ocean surface temperature since records began in 1880. La Niña, with its cooling effect on the central and eastern tropical Pacific, continues to be a factor in global ocean temperatures. NOAA’s National Snow and Ice Data Center reports that the January 2011 global [...]
