Atmospheric

Hurricane forecasts were way off again last year so if you're still wondering if a trained chimp 'can predict hurricanes better than NOAA'(1) a Nature Geoscience article has good news for you; forecasts can still be wrong 75% of the time but now can be wrong for years in advance too. A group of researchers hope to make forecasting a lot more predictable.  Currently, when hurricane predictions are wrong, scientists say 'climate modeling is complex' which really does not earn climate science a lot of credibility with climate change deniers, but hurricanes are a lot trickier than the simple…

Anyone in their late 20s who lived in Minnesota in 1991 remembers the record-setting Great Halloween Blizzard, which dropped several feet of snow across the state and bestowed upon children a few rare snow days.1 For folks living in the upper Midwest today (particularly the Great Lakes region), we're experiencing what one of my colleagues called a "land hurricane" and Mother Nature is setting more records. It is already becoming one of the strongest storms on record, and it's just getting going. When the skies of October turn gloomy2Local news meteorologists were trumpeting their warnings…

Global Warming and Me The NOAA reports that "we are currently tied with 1998 as the warmest January–September period on record." Having now experienced a near-record-breakingly warm summer and fall, I can now report what the effect of global warming will be in St. Louis, Missouri: the normally irritating plague of backyard mosquitos will become an insatiable horde that renders our backyard thoroughly uninhabitable well into October and possibly November. Read the feed:

It's known that water vapor and clouds are by far the major contributors to the 'greenhouse effect' on Earth but since those have had a predictable range the planet's temperature ultimately hinges on atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, according to a new model by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, which sought to analyze the nature of Earth's greenhouse effect and clarify the role that greenhouse gases and clouds play in absorbing outgoing infrared radiation.  Notably, the team identified non-condensing greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous…

Obviously some things about the Sun's relationship to Earth are known - if we get too close or too far away all life disappears.  But other aspects, like the activity of the Sun related to heating and cooling, are less clear. It has long been known that the Sun's activity waxes and wanes over an 11-year cycle and that as its activity wanes, the overall amount of radiation reaching the Earth decreases. A new study looked at the Sun's activity over the years 2004-2007, when it was in a declining part of its 11-year activity cycle. Although the Sun's activity declined over this period, a…

Climate science is in a difficult position.   On the one side, climate scientists like James Hansen say that the data behind IPCC media talking points is too easy to misinterpret so people shouldn't have it, but to hard science people, climate science accuracy, in the science data sense, is far too inaccurate for claims that its people make.    No one in physics could get away with the accuracy levels climate scientists regard as settled.  Witness Tommaso Dorigo's Rumor About A Light Higgs article, which included discussion that Fermilab had a 30% chance to find a 3-sigma…

'Dry' water, which resembles powdered sugar yet consists of 95 percent water, was discovered in 1968 and got attention in the cosmetics industry.   Each powder particle contains a water droplet surrounded by modified silica, which is much like ordinary beach sand. The silica coating prevents the water droplets from combining and turning back into a liquid so the result is a fine powder that can soak up liquids - or gases - which chemically combine with the water molecules to form a hydrate.  Scientists 40 years later have begun to try and expand its range of potential…

Weird World Weather There is a lot of happy talk out there that is premised on the belief that you can't tell the public the bad news because it’ll scare them and they'll not do anything, or they will fall into despair.David W Orr You've all seen the Hollywood disaster movies: the hero is an engineer or scientist who wants to warn people of impending danger.  But there is always some politico / company man / jobsworth who thinks it's a really bad idea to alarm the public.  Well, of course, if the mayor evacuates the town and it all turns out to be a false alarm then he's going to…

Boston had 8 days of above-90 degree Fahrenheit heat temperatures last month, while New York City had 14, Philadelphia had 17 and Washington, DC had 20. While those numbers are above historical averages (5, 7, 11, and 13 days, respectively) they are beneath consensus projections for the average July by just the middle of this century, assuming nothing is done to reduce pollution of heat-trapping gases.   Under that scenario, Boston can expect an average of 12 July days above 90, New York can expect 16, Philadelphia 21, and Washington, DC 22. Using a different measure, the monthly average…

Variations in the Earth’s atmospheric oxygen levels may be closely linked to the evolution of life, with feedbacks between uni- and multicellular life and oxygen, say scientists from Royal Holloway, University of London and from The Field Museum in Chicago.    Writing in Nature Geoscience, they say over the past 400 million years, the level of oxygen has varied considerably from the 21% value we have today and the amount of charcoal preserved in ancient peat bogs, now coal, gives a measure of how much oxygen there was in the past. Scientists have relied on geochemical models to…