Blogs

Last week’s Beyond the Data post examined the extreme temperature climates in the United States, as defined by station “normals.” We promised to come back and look at the precipitation extremes, and here we are. First, a reminder: this information, for a subset of about 450 stations across the United States, is available through this tool. We’ve left the settings at the default “don’t give me stations within 20 miles of each other” setting.  Jump in and play with the data yourself! The Wettest and Driest Places in America The tables below list the ten wettest and ten driest locations in the United States. Again, these are annual normals, or what would be expected in the mythica…   Read article

What a difference a month can make! Since my last post, the tropical Pacific has changed gears, and now forecasters think there’s a 70% chance that La Niña conditions will develop this fall. However, any La Niña that develops is likely to be weak, and forecasters aren’t quite as confident that La Niña conditions will persist long enough to be considered a full-blown episode, giving it a 55% chance through the winter. Ch-ch-ch-changes When I wrote last month, the tropical Pacific wasn’t giving us much evidence that the atmosphere was responding to the slightly cooler-than-average ocean surface, and most of the computer models were predicting that sea surface temperatures would head back…   Read article

We’ve been going Beyond the Data for a year and a half now (time flies!). Sometimes, on a long journey, it’s good to revisit the basics. What got us here? That’s the theme for this edition. We’re going old school, and just look at some good old climatology adages and truisms, through the lens of a sturdy, reliable warhorse of a dataset. One question that we get here at NCEI’s Center for Weather and Climate, more so than you might think, are questions about superlatives. “What is the hottest place in America?” and so on. I call these the “Mostest Questions.” To respond to these recurring questions, we set up a handy viewer that helps describe just that. Today’s edition of Beyond the …   Read article

Near the anniversary of Beyond the Data's most popular post, we've given the map an interactive upgrade. Click to zoom in on an area of interest and drill down to see the date by which the chances for the first snow of the season at your location rise to at least 50%. Will this year's first snow come earlier or later than the historic "first date" of snow? See what the climate record has to say and keep up with your local forecast. This map shows the historic date by which there’s a 50% chance of at least 0.1” of snow on the ground, based on each location’s snowfall history from 1981-2010, based on the latest U.S. Climate Normals from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Informat…   Read article

I’m back with yet another GIF animation because I think I’ve developed a mild addiction to them [Editor’s note: that’s a classic denial by a serious addict]. Words mean one thing, but movies, well, they can reveal a lot. In this case, we wanted to show you every single North American multi-model ensemble forecast for ENSO over the past year and a half. This does not include every model that forecasters consider when developing their consensus outlook, but it includes a lot of them.    This particular animation displays once-a-month data of sea surface temperature departures averaged in the Niño-3.4 region in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, which is one key location to monitor ENSO…   Read article