Beyond the Data Blog

The record cold temperatures in the Midwestern United States in late-January led to over 20 fatalities and economic impacts likely to exceed $1 billion, according to one insurance industry estimate. Just how common are these cold records, and how do they compare to occurrences of warm records? What can these records tell us about climate change? Fleeting—but record-setting—cold One way we can answer these questions is to look at daily high and low temperature data from the Global Historical Climatology Network – Daily database. For this analysis, we only included stations from the Global Climate Observing System Surface Network that are at least 80% complete from 1951-present, resu…   Read article

NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) tracks U.S. weather and climate events that have great economic and societal impacts. Since 1980, the U.S. has sustained 241 weather and climate disasters where the overall damage costs reached or exceeded $1 billion (including adjustments based on the Consumer Price Index, as of January 2019). The cumulative cost for these 241 events exceeds $1.6 trillion. During 2018, the U.S. experienced a very active year of weather and climate disasters. In total, the U.S. was impacted by 14 separate billion-dollar disaster events: two tropical cyclones, eight severe storms, two winter storms, drought, and wildfires. The past three yea…   Read article

Daytime highs were in the negative teens in parts of the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes at the end of January, and the chill extended across much of the East. By the first week of February, temperatures in parts of the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast had plowed right past spring and into summer-like warmth. If the weather whiplash has left you wondering how U.S. winters are changing over time, the maps below tell the story.  (Apologies Alaska, your statewide historical record doesn’t go far enough back to be included in these analyses). The large map at left shows average temperature change during winter (December-February) from 1895-2017. The smaller column of maps at right shows indi…   Read article

Most of us learned as children that the age of a tree could be found by counting its rings. Rings of trees growing in temperate climates can indeed tell their age through their annual rings and also help determine the age of wood used to construct buildings or wooden objects. The ages of wooden objects can be revealed by cross-dating, the process of matching ring patterns between wood samples of known and unknown ages. What do tree rings tell us The underlying patterns of wide or narrow rings record the year-to-year fluctuations in the growth of trees. The patterns, therefore, often contain a weather history at the location the tree grew, in addition to its age. In dry environments…   Read article

For about 20 years, the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI; formerly known as the National Climatic Data Center) has released a monthly Global Climate Report. The report can be described as Earth’s health assessment, where we as climatologists look into Earth’s "vitals" and place them into context by explaining what happened and how the recent vitals compare with older records. The current vital signs addressed in the report are temperature and precipitation. Climatologists don’t make house calls, but we do provide answers about why keeping track of Earth’s vitals is so important. Here’s a quick Q&A. Why is it important to have a monthly global climate report?…   Read article