Beyond the Data Blog

In mid-March, a cold air outbreak brought freezing temperatures to the Southeast devastating crops and causing over $1 billion in agricultural losses. For those of us who love fruit this is bad news and potentially means higher prices at the supermarket and farmers’ market. In this Beyond the Data post, we will explore some of the impacts of the freeze and why it was so devastating even though freezing temperatures in mid-March aren’t that unusual for the Southeast. Setting the Stage Across the eastern half of the U.S., winter was fairly warm. Most states had December-February temperatures that ranked among the five warmest in the 123-period of record. February was record and near-reco…   Read article

Yet another warm February has left apple growers worrying if their crops will survive below-freezing spring temperatures, a substantial concern given the annual value of the Northeast apple crop exceeds a quarter of a billion dollars.  February 2017 temperature departures, as measured by Global Historical Climatology Network (GCHN) stations in the region, were eerily similar to those in 2012, when abnormally high temperatures in February and early March accelerated bud development before temperatures in the low 20s later in March and again in April severely damaged the blossoms, resulting in significant crop losses.  Similar conditions last winter also resulted in abnormally high f…   Read article

In keeping with the spirit of our blog, we’ll take a look at something obvious from the NCEI monthly climate analysis, then dig a little harder into some even more pertinent climatological truths.  1. March was warm - a lot warmer than you might think. Our monthly State of the Climate report found that March 2017 was the second-warmest March on record for the globe. Just about any way you slice it, it was second only to 2016 in the history of global-scale temperatures for March. But, as we’ve pointed out in this space before, sometimes it’s human nature - or perhaps American nature - to interpret “second warmest” as “not all that warm.” But it’s worth a closer look, in two dime…   Read article

Recently, the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) identified February 2017 as the second-warmest February on record for the contiguous United States (CONUS). According to NCEI’s report, the CONUS average temperature for the month of February was 41.2°F. Compared to the twentieth-century average (1901-2000), the CONUS was 7.3°F warmer than average, indicating February 2017 was an abnormally warm month. The same can be said for January 2017, with a CONUS average temperature of 33.6°F, which is 3.5°F above average. The warmer than average temperatures so far this year have already led to an early blooming period in the southern and eastern parts of the United States. …   Read article

The United States has experienced some intense weather patterns lately, including flooding in California and a Nor’easter in New England. We can’t trace these back to a butterfly flapping its wings on the other side of the world, but we can connect them to tropical rainfall patterns that seem just as far away. The tropical Pacific and Indian Oceans have some of the warmest oceans temperatures in the world. They provide plenty of heat and humidity for heavy rain and thunderstorms — storms that are so strong they can change global wind patterns and affect weather around the globe. El Niño and La Niña are the best-known examples of how shifts in those rainfall patterns can have global effect…   Read article