Blogs

As Adam Smith wrote about in his recent billion-dollar disasters post, 2018 saw an unusual number of amazing—and deadly—weather events. Some had national coverage, especially Hurricanes Florence and Michael and their impacts on the eastern U.S., and the drought and heat triggering record fires in California and other parts of the western U.S. Many networks across the U.S. collect air temperature and precipitation observations we use to characterize these events. As the nation’s official climate scorekeepers, scientists at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NOAA NCEI) receive, quality control, store, and make these data accessible to the public. Almost all of tho…   Read article

After several months of flirting, the tropical Pacific ocean and atmosphere appear to have coupled just in time for Valentine’s Day and now meet the criteria for El Niño conditions. Is it true love? Time will tell, but forecasters expect weak El Niño conditions to persist through the spring. Say yes For a few months now, the tropical Pacific has met the first two criteria of our “Is It El Niño Conditions?” decision tree. That is, the sea surface temperature in the Niño3.4 region of the tropical Pacific Ocean has been more than 0.5°C above the long-term average, and models were predicting it would stay that way for the next several seasons. What’s new over the past month i…   Read article

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