5-9 July 2010

• Eye on the Tropics -- During last week, Tropical Storm Alex intensified into the first hurricane of the 2010 North Atlantic season as it moved to the northwest and then west across the Gulf of Mexico after traveling across Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. Before making landfall along the northern Mexican coast at midweek, Hurricane Alex had intensified to a category 2 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale. [USA Today] For additional information on Hurricane Alex and satellite images, please see the NASA Hurricane Page.
• State and city weather extremes for May 2010 -- The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) has posted a listing of some of the notable extremes in temperature, precipitation and other weather elements across the nation for the recently completed month of May in "Selected U.S. City and State Extremes for May 2010." Note that this site may be updated during the following several weeks as more data are received and analyzed.
• Satellite-estimated rainfall totals for deadly Chinese flooding--A graphic generated by data collected from the instruments onboard NASA's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission and processed by the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center shows the rainfall that fell across southern China during the week of 15-21 June 2010 resulting in the deaths of at least 379 people. [NASA Earth Observatory]
• Smoke from Canadian fires tracked by satellite--A MODIS image from NASA's Terra satellite early last week shows the thick smoke being carried by the winds from wildfires in the boreal forests of the Canadian Arctic. [NASA Earth Observatory]
• Satellite monitors carbon dioxide-- Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and colleagues have been able to use the data collected over a three-year period by the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) onboard NASA's Aura satellite to determine the concentration and distribution of atmospheric carbon dioxide gas in the upper troposphere (approximately 10 miles altitude). This instrument was not intended to detect carbon dioxide originally. [NASA JPL]
• European ice satellite exceeding expectations --Scientists with the European Space Agency have found that the ice-thickness data collected by their agency's CryoSat-2 satellite have far exceeded expectations in terms of the amount of high quality information. This satellite, launched earlier this year, has a radar altimeter that measures the polar ice caps and sea ice. [ESA]
• NASA Center for Climate Simulation introduced --Officials at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center recently introduced the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS), a group that employs supercomputers along with visualization and data interaction technologies to support the climate modeling community in climate prediction research. [NASA GISS]
• Ancient hunters may have contributed to global warming and cooling-- Researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, CA claim that their evidence from approximately 15,000 years ago would suggest ancient hunters at that time would have reduced the number of mammoths, which would have caused a change in the surface reflectivity (or albedo) as forests invaded the grass lands in the subarctic. These albedo changes may have created conditions that led to increased global temperatures at the end of the last Ice Age. [AGU] However, another group of researchers from the University of New Mexico suggests that the extinction of the mammoths in western North American may have resulted in the generation of less methane, which eventually led to a cooling across the globe during the Younger Dryas at about 12,800 years ago. [USA Today] Scientists from UCLA and Oregon State University claim that human hunters put pressure on the ecosystem, resulting in the extinction of the mammoths and other large animals during the Pleistocene. [USA Today]
• New vehicle temperature table designed to help reduce heat-related deaths in closed cars -- Researchers at the University of Georgia have produce an easy-to-use temperature table that they claim should help reduce the number of heat-related deaths, especially among children, in closed vehicles. The vehicle temperature table, which was constructed from observations along with output from a human thermal exchange model called the Man-Environment Heat Exchange Model (MENEX), shows the change in the interior temperature for a set of initial outdoor temperatures over a time intervals ranging from 5 to 60 minutes. Temperatures associated with National Weather Service heat advisories and excessive heat warnings are also indicated. [University of Georgia]
• NASA Center for Climate Simulation introduced --Officials at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center recently introduced the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS), a group that employs supercomputers along with visualization and data interaction technologies to support the climate modeling community in climate prediction research. [NASA GISS]
• Study conducted on carbon-based aerosols -- As many as 60 scientists from NASA, the US Department of Energy and other research institutions have been conducting a field experiment called Carbonaceous Aerosol and Radiation Effects Study (CARES) in California's central valley near Sacramento during the month of June to study how carbon-based ("carbonaceous")aerosols that produce the sooty haze affect the climate. These scientists used a variety of instruments along with several aircraft to sample the human generated aerosols. [NASA GISS]
• Arctic may be more sensitive to climate--Scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder and colleagues claim that their research indicates that the Arctic could be more sensitive to changes in climate than previously thought, even warning that the current levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide could have brought the Arctic to a "tipping point." At this point, serious and irreversible changes in the Arctic ecosystems could occur due to changes in climate. [USA Today]
• An All-Hazards Monitor -- This Web portal provides the user information from NOAA on current environmental events that may pose as hazards such as tropical weather, fire weather, marine weather, severe weather, drought and floods. [NOAAWatch]

• Global and US Hazards/Climate Extremes --A review and analysis of the global impacts of various weather-related events, to include drought, floods and storms during the current month. [NCDC]
• Earthweek -- Diary of the Planet [earthweek.com] Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader.

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Prepared by Edward J. Hopkins, Ph.D., email hopkins@meteor.wisc.edu
© Copyright, 2010, The American Meteorological Society.