Bits of ScienceBits of Science

Boreal winter 2013: La Niña cold SST for NE Pacific & weakening solar max allow for negative Arctic Oscillation, ambivalent NAO – high pressure Siberia, cold air for Northern Europe & NE US

Rolf Schuttenhelm — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 16:27:10 +0000

NOAA NCEP’s temperature anomaly forecast for North America and Eurasia for February 2013 – higher than average chances of cold spells for Northeastern US and Northern Europe, comparable to current mid-January weather charts. Skill mask shows forecast reliability is relatively … Continue reading →

Picture of the day: flower meadow in Californian plant biodiversity hotspot

Rolf Schuttenhelm — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 16:38:28 +0000

California has exceptionally high plant biodiversity. It is home to 5,500 different plants species and – what is more remarkable – some 40 percent of these occur nowhere else. The reason is not that evolution would happen faster here, but … Continue reading →

Extreme heat wave Australia adds new colour to weather chart – forecast up to 54 degrees Celsius!

Rolf Schuttenhelm — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 14:07:43 +0000

As red tones cannot get much darker when you approach black, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology had to resort to introducing new colours on their weather forecast maps for next week, when inland temperatures in South Australia can locally reach … Continue reading →

Both historical and 60-year trend show Dutch winters are warming – these graphs tell you how, why – and what to expect

Rolf Schuttenhelm — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 00:48:16 +0000

Falling snow flakes are humbling. Not just because of their beauty, but also because of their gentle ability to completely paralyse a developed and overpopulated country with traffic jams, clogged railroad switches and closed runways. But although that (together with … Continue reading →

Graph of the day: European winters and summers warm equally fast

Rolf Schuttenhelm — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 19:07:22 +0000

European land temperatures according to combined climatic datasets of Met Office Hadley Centre, NOAA and NASA. (Click for comparison to world land temperature graph according to the BEST study.) European winters are strongly influenced by the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), … Continue reading →

Latest ENSO forecasts: +0.3C average for Niño 3.4 during approaching boreal winter (2012-2013) – Australia and New Zealand will have driest summer in years

Rolf Schuttenhelm — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 12:43:32 +0000

That means for this equatorial Pacific region* during the 2012-2013 winter temperatures are not sufficiently elevated to meet the criterion for a proper El Niño. [*) In other East Pacific regions this could be different – although at present for … Continue reading →

60-year trend shows tropical trade winds weakening in Pacific too – ENSO inclination towards El Niño state

Rolf Schuttenhelm — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 22:23:17 +0000

It is a question that has puzzled climate scientists for a long time: Under global climate warming, how will the El Niño/La Niña Southern Oscillation (ENSO) respond? There had been suggestions before that a warmer world would see more dominant … Continue reading →

Photo of the day: mid-level flare on yesterday’s Sun – solar activity remains ‘averagely elevated’

Rolf Schuttenhelm — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 12:22:33 +0000

Handout picture by NASA (credit: Credit: NASA/SDO/Goddard Space Flight Center) shows the beauty of a mid-level solar flare on 13 November 2012 captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in three different wavelengths: in 304 Ångstrom (left), which shows light … Continue reading →

Superscale volcanic eruptions can disappoint as climate coolers, Pleistocene record shows

Rolf Schuttenhelm — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 03:15:05 +0000

Yes, during ice ages it can be a bit chilly. That’s why stuff that happened in the Pleistocene is easily linked to climate cooling. Like asteroids falling from the sky. Or volcanoes erupting. Matching sulphate peaks from Greenland and Antarctica … Continue reading →

Solar activity from 2012 to 2013: sunspots lingering under cycle forecasts

Rolf Schuttenhelm — Sun, 04 Nov 2012 20:48:26 +0000

About a year ago we took a look at the NASA forecast for the Sunspot Cycle 24 (meaning the 24th recorded cycle since the year 1755 – it is as random as that) which started with the sunspot minimum of … Continue reading →

Alpine meadows and subalpine meadows – equally beautiful and equally threatened by decreasing snowcover

Rolf Schuttenhelm — Sun, 04 Nov 2012 11:11:07 +0000

Do you like to go for a hike in the mountains on a sunny summer day? Do you then enjoy stepping out of the forest into one of those flowery meadows? In many cases this would not be an actual … Continue reading →

Dinosaurs were pretty big – and yes, that’s how evolution had them in mind

Rolf Schuttenhelm — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 22:43:43 +0000

All the leaves are brown and the sky is grey – which means it’s time for the Geological Society of America annual meeting. A couple of days packed with discussions and research presentations about stuff you did not know in … Continue reading →

Bird evolution faster than thought, but still 300x too slow to outlive present human-induced extinctions

Science News Releases — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 21:30:47 +0000

Doesn’t the Tree of Life make for a beautiful infographic? Shown is bird evolution according to the Hackett backbone tree – one of two studied by the researchers. Using the world’s first family tree linking every known bird species, scientists … Continue reading →

GSA meeting tries to define the ‘Geomorphology of the Anthropocene’

Science News Releases — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 20:46:42 +0000

How have humans influenced Earth? Can geoscientists measure when human impacts began overtaking those of Earth’s other inhabitants and that of the natural Earth system? Responding to increasing scientific recognition that humans have become the foremost agent of change at … Continue reading →

Forthcoming presentation shows climate feedbacks increase future sea level rise

Science News Releases — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 20:26:17 +0000

Sea levels are rising faster than expected from global warming, and University of Colorado geologist Bill Hay has a good idea why. The last official IPCC report in 2007 projected a global sea level rise between 0.2 and 0.5 meters … Continue reading →

Scientists of Stanford University build world’s first entirely carbon solar panel

Science News Releases — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 23:48:20 +0000

Stanford University scientists have built the first solar cell made entirely of carbon. It may present a promising alternative to the expensive materials used in photovoltaic devices today. The results are published in the Oct. 31 online edition of the … Continue reading →

Ticks in Switzerland transmit new bacterial disease to humans

Science News Releases — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 21:22:19 +0000

Until now, we knew that ticks primarily transmit two pathogens to humans in Switzerland: the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi – which causes borreliosis – and the early-summer-meningoencephalitis virus, which can cause cerebral inflammation. Now, microbiologists from the University of Zurich confirm the existence … Continue reading →

NASA: Antarctic winter sea ice extent has 3 decade growing trend – does polar ozone depletion stabilise the climate?

Rolf Schuttenhelm — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 00:05:52 +0000

September 2012 Arctic summer sea ice loss record compared to September 2012 Antarctic winter sea ice expansion record. Are we witnessing the Anthropocene equivalent of the Pleistocene Arctic-Antarctic bipolar seesaw? Image credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio and … Continue reading →

Arctic solar geoengineering options modeled – feasibility investigated, including seasonal approach

Science News Releases — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 00:11:00 +0000

Scientists are slowly starting to get practical on geoengineering. Cooling the entire planet with stratospheric solar geoengineering could cost only 5 billion dollars per year. And opting for artificial clouds saving the Arctic with geoengineering could be as cheap as … Continue reading →

Triassic paleoclimate lesson: a baking planet is a dead planet

Rolf Schuttenhelm — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 14:50:57 +0000

Something about heat is intrinsically bad for life. Shown is the state of our planet from 252-247 million years ago, following the end-Permian mass extinction. The 40+C Triassic Dead Zone could not be conquered by 5 million years of evolution. … Continue reading →