Beyond the Data Blog

This week, Beyond the Data looks at one of the more well-grounded “rules of thumb” for understanding climate change. This one is pretty simple to put your thumb on: on average, cooler places and cooler times are warming more quickly than warmer places and times. But first, let’s clarify–and emphasize–what we mean by a “rule of thumb.”  Just like in its common usage, a rule of thumb here refers to something generally true often enough to be useful and informative, but not universally reliable–kind of a “two-out-of-three” or “three-out-of-four” kind of situation. So, it's nothing to thumb your nose at, because it’s true more often than not. But it’s also not the case everywhere. &nb…   Read article

Many factors contribute to the climatology of a given location, including how close to the equator you are, proximity to the ocean, and elevation. But when it comes to what causes climate to vary over seemingly short distances, few things can compare to the influence of topography. Take my city, for example. I live in Asheville, in western North Carolina, a small city in the heart of the Southern Appalachians. I can drive ten minutes and be in one of the driest locations east of the Mississippi, or drive an hour and be in one of the wettest. That the temperature and precipitation patterns that we experience here can be so different from somewhere just a few miles away is due not just to e…   Read article

Let’s face it: El Niño is the life of the party. He’s the Most Interesting Child in the World. The good folks over at The ENSO Blog have filled up a whole blog, and still there are enough leftovers for Beyond the Data, where we don’t always blog about teleconnections, but when we do, we prefer El Niño. We’ve already written about how El Niño will push the needle toward 2015 being the warmest year on record. But thinking a little more directly about the state of the climate in the U.S., how might a strong El Niño impact things here? Will it put a dent in the Western U.S. drought, one of the defining climate events of the decade? What about the rest of the country? If you’ve been followi…   Read article

Anthony Arguez1, Scott Applequist1, Michael C. Kruk2, Michael F. Squires1, and Russell S. Vose1 Global surface temperatures have remained at or near record-warm levels throughout 2015, leading many to prognosticate that 2015 will eclipse 2014 as the warmest year on record1-3, perhaps by a relatively large margin. Based on the latest data from NOAA’s global surface temperature dataset (NOAAGlobalTemp), the 2015 global temperature average through July is running 0.09°C (0.16°F) above the 2014 average and 0.13°C above the January-July 2014 average. That might not seem like a lot, but 2014 eclipsed 2010 as the warmest year on record by an even smaller margin, 0.04°C. The strong …   Read article

The State of the Climate is a rather huge report―in the neighborhood of 270 pages―that updates the status of major climate variables and recaps regional climate conditions around the world every year. The report just celebrated its silver anniversary: 25 years of annual publications. The first report was written by 29 scientists from 3 countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, and the former Soviet Union. Impressively, six of those scientists just celebrated their 25th anniversary of working on this report. This year, more than 400 authors and editors from 58 countries joined those original six to help bring together the State of the Climate in 2014. We release each year’s rep…   Read article