Beyond the Data Blog
Is El Niño the Marcia Brady of climate variability? No doubt that El Niño is the sexiest, most popular, and most studied aspect of climate variability. And we do continue to talk about El Niño events decades after they seem relevant, much like Marcia.
Now that the U.S. has just finished its warmest winter on record, we naturally ask ourselves just how influential the strong El Niño was. But how did other factors in the earth’s climate system contribute to the record-breaking season? How did Greg and Bobby and Cindy—or even Jan—influence the hit TV show from yesteryear? Was the success of the show solely due to Marcia, and was our warmest winter on record solely a result …
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Most people in the East who remember historical snowstorms consider the March 1993 “Storm of the Century” to be the biggest snowstorm to ever affect that part of the country. It’s no wonder: 270 people were killed in the U.S., damages were in the neighborhood of $5.5 billion, every major airport on the east coast was shut down, and most interstates north of Atlanta were closed.
Using our Regional Snowfall Index (RSI), the March 12-15, 1993, event had a raw score of 22.12, making it a Category 5 storm. Yet when we look at the ranking of all historical Northeast snowstorms, the “Storm of the Century” only finishes in second place. No way! How can that be?
Trying to be objective about…
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It’s early February, and many of us just dug out—literally and figuratively—from the blizzard of January 2016. We got 6-12 inches here in Asheville; the totals varied from mountain to mountain, like they always do. The snowstorm also buried me under 25 feet of snow-related paper, and that’s what inspired this week’s blog.
Putting today’s big weather events into perspective is one of our responsibilities here at NCEI. People and businesses are naturally curious about whether today’s Big Event is dwarfed by history, repeats history, or makes history. This helps us map it out in our minds and in our strategic plans, and that helps shape our actions going forward.
We need&nbs…
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Welcome back—belatedly—from the holidays. For those of us east of the Mississippi, it didn’t feel like the holidays. Well, it did feel like a holiday—Memorial Day, maybe. In fact, for some of us, the weather felt a lot more like Memorial Day than the holidays we celebrate as the year closes.
The year ended with an unprecedented warm run in the United States. The last 5-6 weeks of 2015 were very warm east of the Rockies. But how unusual was it?
Just how warm, nationally?
On a national scale, December was both the warmest and wettest December on record for the contiguous United States, or CONUS. That in itself is a feat. It’s the first time since the CONUS record reached statistic…
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