You wouldn't know it to look at the snow falling in the Mid-Atlantic, but according to meteorological convention, winter ended in February. In today’s "Beyond the Data" post,  we’ll pull some fun regional trivia out of the national climate summary for February/winter.  Bonus: there’s at least one lesson about the climate system in each nugget.

In an ironic exclamation point to swift regional climate change in and near the Arctic, the average temperature observed at the weather station at Utqiaġvik has now changed so rapidly that in November 2017, it triggered an algorithm designed to detect artificial changes in a station’s record and disqualified itself from the NCEI Alaskan temperature analysis. 

It’s been a tough few weeks weather and climate wise. Big events generate lots of questions, so this edition of Beyond the Data will address several I’ve heard recently, and several I asked myself.

Just a few days ago, on January 26th, 2017, we saw something in the U.S. climate that we hadn’t seen since March 2011.

Drought has broken out across the southeast and southern plains this summer and fall. What got us to this situation, and how do we deal drought, which is unlike many of our weather hazards?