Beyond the Data Blog

By now, you’ve probably heard that July was the warmest month on record for the planet’s surface. We live in a warming world and with that comes a surge in global-scale temperature. In my office, though, we often remind each other that nobody was harmed by “global average temperature.” It’s an important indicator of change, to be sure, but the consequences of a warming world show up locally. One such consequence came to light in July, the warmest month of Earth’s recent history: an anthrax outbreak in western Siberia. The outbreak was traced, at least preliminarily, to a reindeer carcass that had thawed after being frozen for several decades. I won’t pretend to know all the details or …   Read article

It might seem strange to be talking about Northern Hemisphere Snow cover during the heat of summer, but July 1st was “Snow New Year”: the end of the 2015-16 meteorological snow year and the start of the 2016-17 “snow year.”  As most people do at the start of a new year, we’re reflecting on events from the past year to understand where we have been and where we might be going. In this Beyond the Data blog post, we will dig deeper into the Northern Hemisphere snow cover extent during the 2015-16 snow season and explore change in snow cover over time. History of snow mapping To understand Northern Hemisphere snow cover extent, it helps to examine its history. Thanks to the hard work …   Read article

What a difference the day makes In the last Beyond the Data entry, we investigated the role that late-spring rainfall plays in summer temperatures. The short, short version: For much-to-most of the contiguous United States (CONUS), summer temperatures have a relationship with (they “listen to”) late spring precipitation. Wetter places in June tend to be cooler through summer, but the tendency is slight. The relationship is not very strong to begin with, explaining about a quarter of the variance, and diminishes to zero away from the south and interior parts of the CONUS. I subsequently got a note from a great colleague from back in my state climate office days. Jim Angel, the Illino…   Read article

In climate monitoring, we often use the term “outcome” to describe the results of a season. For example, “For most of the United States, seasonal outcomes during spring 2012 included a record-warm March and a record-warm spring.” Outcomes in climate—like in life—are a combination of factors. And at certain times of year—like certain times in life—different factors emerge as relatively more important to an outcome. In climate, spring dampness is one of those factors that emerges as important for warm season outcomes, particularly for the interior of the continent. This week, we’ll go Beyond the Data to examine how spring precipitation influences summer temperatures, and why this mat…   Read article

This week, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (and several other institutions) reported April 2016 to be the warmest April on record for the planet. If broken temperature records seem to you like, well, a broken record, you’re onto something: all of the last twelve months now hold the “Warmest [INSERT MONTH HERE] on Record” title. That’s twelve months in a row, and that’s never happened. But that global average is just that: an average. Each month—even the warmest ones—bring pockets of cold. Conversely, they also bring regions that are colossally warm. This is true over time, too. In recent decades, as month-to-month weather fades into a clearer signal of climate, regio…   Read article