Beyond the Data Blog

The climate system we share is big and complex. Assessments like the State of the Climate depend on expertise from around the world and around the sciences. This year's "Meet the Author" profile features two contributors to the African section of the "Regional Climates" chapter. Their leadership and perspective make the report stronger. Both are involved in international work, often with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), that brings their expertise to the regional and global arena. Fatou Sima is the Principal Meteorologist overseeing the Meteorological Division and Climatological unit in The Gambia's Department of Water Resources. She received her M.Sc. in Applied Meteorol…   Read article

Raining on your parade NOAA’s National Weather Service will soon be issuing forecasts for Independence Day (find your local forecast), but here’s a look at the historical probability that your Fourth of July picnic will be rained on, based on observations from 1981-2010.  If all we had to go on was history, this map says the best chances of clear skies in the contiguous United States (CONUS) would be found, not surprisingly, in the West. Based on past Fourths of July, chances for rain are 10 percent or less for a large area from interior Washington to northwest New Mexico. In the CONUS, the highest chances for rain on your parade would be in southern Florida (40-50%), foll…   Read article

A few weeks ago, NCEI updated its U.S. climate trends maps with the data from 2018. Most months and places are getting warmer over time, especially over the very long (century scale) term. But some regions and seasons are not changing in lock-step with the big picture. For January, considering all 124 years spanning 1895 through 2018, much of the South and Mid-South has cooled slightly. That regional/seasonal exception to the rule is a feature of and testament to the complexity of the climate system. We’re going to look at January trends to tease out some nuances with how these trends are computed. Let’s go Beyond the Data. Linear trends: the duct tape of statistics …   Read article

Borrowing one of meteorology’s great euphemisms, this spring has been “an active one” in much of the country. The Plains and Upper Midwest experienced huge events in back-to-back months. March brought an explosive winter storm to much of the region, and a cascade of events that led to historic flooding from Nebraska to Wisconsin. April gave us a more canonical blizzard, a winter storm with snowfall measured in feet. So what happened? How does this fit into history? How does April bring the huge storms? Some answers follow. Let’s go Beyond the Data. The March Cyclone and Floods Understanding what happened in March requires going back several weeks in time to examine the condition…   Read article

As Adam Smith wrote about in his recent billion-dollar disasters post, 2018 saw an unusual number of amazing—and deadly—weather events. Some had national coverage, especially Hurricanes Florence and Michael and their impacts on the eastern U.S., and the drought and heat triggering record fires in California and other parts of the western U.S. Many networks across the U.S. collect air temperature and precipitation observations we use to characterize these events. As the nation’s official climate scorekeepers, scientists at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NOAA NCEI) receive, quality control, store, and make these data accessible to the public. Almost all of tho…   Read article