Winter WeatherMonday, 28 January 2013I’ve been a fan of snowstorms since I can remember, probably because I grew up in the Willamette Valley of Oregon where significant snow is a once-per-decade event (at least there was one storm of consequence in the 10 years that I remember). I moved to Silver Spring in June 1961 and rewarded with consistently snowy winters – the 60s averaged almost 2’ per year at National airport (DCA). Occasionally we would have a winter without much snow, but it was rare to get two in a row. Last Mathematics of Planet Earth 2013: (Friday 01/11)Friday, 11 January 2013I am attending the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego, where I was convinced to help organize a special session on environmental mathematics focused on evaluating past climate changes and modeling of future variations. I am a meteorologist by training and a climate scientist by virtue of spending the past 35 years doing research in observing and understanding of climate variability. (This may surprise people from CICS and ESSIC, who know me almost solely as a manager, but I Mathematics of Planet Earth 2013Thursday, 10 January 2013In January I am normally in a southern US city attending the American Meteorological Society annual meeting. This week, I am in San Diego attending a different AMS – the American Mathematical Society Joint Mathematics Meetings. I am helping to organize a special session on environmental mathematics during which mathematicians and environmental scientists describe methods for modeling and observing climate. Our session is a part of Mathematics of Planet Earth 2013 ESSIC Snow Prediction Pool, Winter 2012-13Wednesday, 28 November 2012The Washington Post recently released their 2012-13 winter outlook for the Washington D.C area, predicting near normal conditions in the nation's capitol. So, now it's ESSIC's turn. Do you have any idea how much snow may fall this winter season? On what date will the first measured inch of snowfall occur? Enter your predictions below. The winner will be recognized on the site, as well as the ESSIC Facebook page. Note: The official snowfall totals Climate ObservationTuesday, 20 November 2012Climate is challenging to define, and maybe even more difficult to observe. In fact, to some degree the term “climate observation” is meaningless – we observe properties of the climate system, including the atmosphere, the oceans, and other components of the system on short time scales and from those observations construct, by averaging or in some other way, measures of “climate”. In addition, it’s nearly impossible to experience “weather” without taking into consideration What is Climate?Friday, 16 March 2012A truly startling (to me) number of people are described as, or call themselves, “climate scientists” these days – Wikipedia has a list of them, which includes no one that I would argue with but omits a very large number of those who clearly are practicing climate scientists (no one at ESSIC is on it, for example, even though just about everything we do could be so called). While programs in Climate Science have begun to appear, this is not a field like physics, in which only those with Review of Winter ForecastsFriday, 09 March 2012Since winter (meteorological winter, which is December – February) has just ended, we can look back at the various forecasts that were made to see how well they did. I took a look at 4 relatively serious winter forecasts for the College Park area that can be validated (this isn’t meant to be a serious scientific evaluation, obviously – more of an introduction to what forecasts are available and some of their characteristics). These are climate forecasts, and therefore contain only the Introduction to Climate TodaySaturday, 03 March 2012Welcome to Climate Today, an occasional column/blog/discussion intended to entertain, illuminate and sometimes provoke visitors to this site. This initial effort is meant to provide some of the background and context to posts that will follow, hopefully on something like a weekly schedule. When Mark Baith, who leads the team responsible for the re-design of the ESSIC website asked me to do this a number of months ago, I reacted as I do to most such appealing but of the distant future (more |
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