Blogs

NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) tracks U.S. weather and climate events that have great economic and societal impacts (www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions). Since 1980, the U.S. has sustained 219 weather and climate disasters where the overall damage costs reached or exceeded $1 billion (including adjustments based on the Consumer Price Index, as of December 2017). The cumulative costs for these 219 events exceed $1.5 trillion. During 2017, the U.S. experienced a historic year of weather and climate disasters.  In total, the U.S. was impacted by 16 separate billion-dollar disaster events including: three tropical cyclones, eight severe storms, two inland floods, a …   Read article

Our climate is changing and one of the most straightforward ways to understand these changes is by examining linear trends. In climate, to determine the linear trend we plot data values by when they occurred in the past and then determining a “best fit” line through that data. The slope of the line gives us the trend. Using this method we know that since 1895 the contiguous U.S. temperature has warmed at a rate of 1.45 °F per century. However, temperatures are not warming uniformly in space or time. The cold parts of the day (nights), cold parts of the year (winter), and cold parts of the world (high latitudes) tend to be warming the fastest. To help our users understand how diff…   Read article

Our second La Niña year in a row is in full swing now, and is forecast to last through the winter. In November, the average surface water temperature in the Niño3.4 region of the central Pacific Ocean was about 1.0°C cooler than the long-term average. A “double-dip” La Niña is not uncommon—seven La Niña winters in the 1950-present historical record followed La Niña the previous winter: 1955, 1971, 1974, 1984, 1999, 2008, and 2011. In fact, two years, 1975 and 2000, were third-year La Niñas. Only four years, 1964, 1988, 1995, and 2005, were single-year La Niñas. This graph illustrates something interesting about our current La Niña. During multi-year La Niñas, the surface temperature i…   Read article

It was bound to happen. In fact, my colleagues have planned for this. More on that later. On December 4th, the folks in the Climate Monitoring group at the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) did what we do pretty much every 4th of the month: we processed the previous month's data to prepare our initial US climate report. The data from Utqiaġvik, Alaska, was missing, which was odd. It was also missing for all of 2017 and the last few months of 2016. This was even weirder, because we knew we’d kinda marveled at how insanely warm the station had been for several weeks and months during 2017. What happened? The short version: in an ironic exclamation point to swift re…   Read article

This is a guest post by Dr. Stephen Baxter who is a NOAA Climate Prediction Center (CPC) meteorologist and does applied research on subseasonal-to-seasonal climate variability.  In particular he specializes in understanding how the middle-to-high latitude circulation is influenced by the tropics versus other processes. He also has a lot of opinions on Siberian snow cover and the role of the western tropical Pacific in forcing seasonal climate over North America.  Recent cold air outbreaks over the north-central and northwestern U.S., along with record cold on Veterans Day in parts of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, should have people excited about (or dreading) the upcoming win…   Read article