Beyond the Data Blog

Welcome to the sprung forward part of our calendar. (yawns) I'm really sorry about that. I didn't sleep well last night. If you’re one of the thousands of Americans who strolled into your first appointment about 56 minutes late today, I feel your pain. Been there, done that! So, let’s protest the onset of Daylight Saving Time by springing back. Take that, clocks! Today’s Beyond the Data will look back into some of the supplemental information attached to our February / Winter State of the Climate reports. Insider tip: the fun stuff is always in the supplemental information. We’ll pull out some fun regional trivia, but there’s at least one lesson about the climate system…   Read article

In the last few weeks, my colleague Karin Gleason and her colleagues around the country finalized a number of state climate extremes records and reports. Some of these were recent record-breaking events; some were recently discovered as data continue to be liberated from paper into the digital world; and some were backlogged because somebody had let them linger too long (here’s where I blush and stare at my shoes). Here’s what Karin and Friends determined in the last month or so: The 4.75” diameter hailstone that fell in Minooka, Illinois, in June 2015 was indeed the largest retrieved and reported in the Illinois record. The 199 mph wind gust observed on Ward Peak in Febr…   Read article

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

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