10-14 January 2011

DataStreme Earth's Climate Systems will return for Spring 2011 with new Investigations files starting during Preview Week, Monday, 17 January 2011. All the current online website products, including updated issues of Weekly Climate News, will continue to be available throughout the winter break period.

• Space Station and Moon pass across solar disc -- A photograph made by an astrophotographer near Muscat, Oman, shows the International Space Station passing across the solar disc last week at the same time as the Moon was also passing in front of the Sun to form the first solar eclipse of 2011. Note several sunspots that also appear on the surface of the sun. [NASA Earth Observatory]
• Icebergs seen off the East Antarctica coast -- An image obtained last month from the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) sensor on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite shows icebergs along with sea ice along the Princess Ragnhild Coast in East Antarctica. [NASA Earth Observatory]
• Sounding rocket launched to study aurora -- An instrumented four-stage sounding rocket was launched last month from a site near Andenes, Norway to study the aurora and associated flow of heat, particles, and electromagnetic energy in the Earth's magnetosphere as part of the NASA-funded Rocket Experiment for Neutral Upwelling (RENU). The rocket's instrument package reached an altitude of approximately 900 miles above the launch site. [NASA Earth Observatory]
• Addressing the effects of dust on snow -- Dr. Thomas Painter of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an expert on snow hydrology and water resources was interviewed to describe how dust layers falling on snowpack can affect the snowmelt and the spring runoff in areas such as the Southwestern US and other areas of the world that rely on winter snowpack for water. [NASA's Global Climate Change Team]
• Reminiscing about upper air research in polar regions -- Bob Benson, an ionospheric researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, recently described his more than 50 years of collecting ionospheric data from various polar locations, such as Alaska and the South Pole. [NASA GSFC]

• Flooding in Australia linked to a strong La Niña event -- Scientists claim that the current La Niña event, reportedly the most intense in nearly 50 years, has been a contributing factor in the recent heavy rainfall that has plagued Australia. An image obtained from the ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) instrument on NASA's Terra spacecraft portrays the recent extensive flooding in Queensland, Australia.
  An image made from ocean surface topography data over the Pacific Ocean collected by the Ocean Surface Topography Mission (OSTM)/Jason-2 satellite image in late December shows the current status of the La Niña event. [NASA JPL]
  Images obtained from the MODIS sensor on NASA's Aqua satellite in mid December and late last week over southeastern Australia show the flooding that has occurred in Queensland and in New South Wales. [NASA Earth Observatory]

• 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, including drought, floods and storms during the current month. [NCDC]

• Plasma jets may keep Sun's corona hotter than its surface -- Solar physicists at Lockheed Martin’s Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and the University of Oslo propose that plasma jets emanating from the Sun's surface appear to be responsible for maintaining a hot corona or outer atmosphere that is at least a million degrees higher than temperatures at the solar surface. [UCAR/NCAR]
• Study made of the atmosphere's self-cleansing capability -- An international research team led by NOAA scientists recently reported that their chemical analyses of various gaseous pollutants in the atmosphere indicates that despite variability, the atmosphere’s self-cleaning capacity is rather stable. [NOAA News]
• Volcano watch from space -- An image made last week from data collected by the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite shows the steam and ash plume from Mexico's Popocatépetl volcano. [NASA Earth Observatory]
• Methane releases from freshwater affect estimates of greenhouse gas exchanges -- An international team of scientists that included a limnologist from Iowa State University reported that methane release from inland waters is higher than previous estimates, resulting in lower amounts of greenhouse gas uptake by continents than previously determined. [Iowa State University News]

• New website available to create your own planet -- NASA's Virtual Planetary Laboratory at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory recently unveiled the interactive "Extreme Planet Makeover" website. This site allows you to create your very own planet by modifying one or more of five factors deemed critical to the habitability of planets that include distance from a star (sun), size of planet, star type and planet age. [NASA JPL]

• Fluctuations in oceanic oxygen presented challenge to early life -- Biogeochemists at the University of California, Riverside and their colleagues at other research universities report finding evidence indicating that rapid and large fluctuations in the oxygen levels the ocean appear to be the most likely explanation for what drove the rapid evolutionary turnover found in the fossil record for the Cambrian Period (540 to 488 million years ago). [University of California, Riverside Newsroom]

• Carbon taxes may be best approach to reduce emissions -- Writing in a recent issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, a leading climate economist at Yale University, William Nordhaus, argued that carbon taxes appear to be the best approach to achieve significant emissions reductions, as well as serving as a useful means to cut budget deficits. [EurekAlert!]
• Website for human dimensions of climate change -- An interagency effort within the US federal government that included NOAA, the Bureau of Land Management and the US Forest Service, has resulted in a website called HD.gov (for HumanDimensions.gov) that provides users, such as natural resource managers, with information on the human dimensions on a variety of topics of interest such as climate change. [HD.gov]
• Earthweek -- Diary of the Planet [earthweek.com] Requires Adobe Acrobat Reader.

• 10 January 1800...Savannah, GA received a foot and a half of snow, and ten inches blanketed Charleston, SC. It was the heaviest snowfall of record for the immediate Coastal Plain of the southeastern U.S. (David Ludlum)
• 10 January 1949...Snow was reported at San Diego, CA for the first and only time since 1882. Snow was noted even on some of the beaches in parts of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. (David Ludlum) (The Weather Channel)
• 11 January 1911...The temperature at Fort Vermilion, Alberta fell to 78 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit), which is Alberta's lowest temperature on record. (Weather Doctor).
• 11 January 1942...Rhode Island's record low temperature of 23 degrees below zero was set at Kingston. (Intellicast)
• 12 January 1912...The morning low temperature of 47 degrees below zero at Washta, IA established a state record for the Hawkeye State. (The Weather Channel) (This record was tied in February 1996 at Elkader).
• 12 January 1981...The temperature fell to 35 degrees below zero at Chester, MA, setting an all-time record low temperature for the Bay State. (NCDC)
• 12 January 1985...A record "snowstorm of the century" struck portions of western and south central Texas. The palm trees of San Antonio were blanketed with up to thirteen and a half inches of snow, more snow than was ever previously received in an entire winter season. Del Rio measured 5.5 inches, which was also their most snow ever in 24 hours as well as for any season. (Weather Channel) (Storm Data) (Intellicast)
• 13 January 1862...The "Noachian flood of California" created a vast sea in the Sacramento Valley. San Francisco had a January rainfall total of 24.36 inches. (Intellicast)
• 13 January 1871...The mercury plunged to 41 degrees Fahrenheit at Key West, FL, the lowest reading ever at this farthest south location in the contiguous US. The mark was tied on 12 January 1993. (The Weather Doctor)
• 13 January 1888...The mercury plunged to 65 degrees below zero at Fort Keogh, located near Miles City, MT. The reading stood as the all-time lowest temperature record for the continental U.S. for sixty-six years. (David Ludlum)
• 13 January.1912...The temperature at Oakland, MD plunged to 40 degrees below zero to establish a state record. (Sandra and TI Richard Sanders - 1987)
• 14 January 1863...The greatest snowstorm of record for Cincinnati, OH commenced, and a day later twenty inches of snow covered the ground. That total has remained far above the modern day record for Cincinnati of eleven inches of snow in one storm. (David Ludlum)
• 14 January 1972...A 24-hour temperature for the United States occurred at Loma, MT when the temperature rose from 54 degrees below zero at 9 AM on the 14th to 49 degrees on the 15th, which represented a 103-Fahrenheit degree temperature change in 24-hours. This record was not acknowledged until 2002, when it was recognized due to recommendation of the National Climate Extremes Committee. (Accord Weather Guide Calendar)
• 14 January 1979...Chicago, IL was in the midst of their second heaviest snow of record as, in thirty hours, the city was buried under 20.7 inches of snow. The twenty-nine inch snow cover following the storm was an all-time record for Chicago. (David Ludlum)
• 15 January 1952...A six-day snowstorm was in progress in the western U.S. The storm produced 44 inches of snow at Marlette Lake, NV, 52 inches at Sun Valley, ID and 149 inches at Tahoe CA, establishing single storm records for each of those three states. In addition, 24-hour snowfall totals of 22 inches at the University of Nevada and 26 inches at Arco, ID established records for those two states. The streamliner, City of San Francisco was snowbound in the Sierra Nevada Range, near Donner Summit. (David Ludlum)
• 15 January 1988...A small storm over the Atlantic Ocean produced heavy snow along the coast of North Carolina. The five inch total at Wilmington, NC was their third highest for any storm in January in 117 years of records. (National Weather Summary)
• 16 January 1881...The temperature at Markree Castle (County Sligo) fell to 2 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit), Ireland's lowest temperature of record. (Accord Weather Guide Calendar)
• 16 January 1889...The temperature at Cloncurry, Queensland reached 128 degrees F, the highest ever reported in Australia. (The Weather Doctor)

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Prepared by Edward J. Hopkins, Ph.D., email hopkins@meteor.wisc.edu
© Copyright, 2011, The American Meteorological Society.