April 3-7, 2023 Weather & Climate News

[Mid-Atlantic Weather Station (MAWS) Mailing List]

(Source:  AMS, 4/3/23)

WEEKLY WEATHER AND CLIMATE NEWS 3-7 April 2023

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Items of Interest:

• High-quality maps of April temperature and precipitation normals across US available -- The PRISM Climate Group at Oregon State University's website has prepared high-resolution maps depicting the normal maximum, minimum and average air temperatures, the daily average dewpoint temperatures, precipitation totals and several solar radiation elements for April and the other 11 months across the 48 coterminous United States based upon the current 1991-2020 climate normals interval. These maps, with a 800-meter resolution, were produced using the PRISM (Parameter-elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model) climate mapping system.
• April weather calendar for a city near you -- The Midwestern Regional Climate Center (MRCC) maintains an interactive website that permits the public to produce a ready to print weather calendar for any given month of the year, such as April, at any of approximately 270 weather stations around the nation. (These stations are NOAA's ThreadEx stations.) The entries for each day of the month include: Normal maximum temperature, normal minimum temperature, normal daily heating and cooling degree days, normal daily precipitation, record maximum temperature, record minimum temperature, and record daily precipitation; the current normals for 1991-2020.
  MRCC also maintains a page titled "Weather on Your Birthday" where you can generate a printable certificate showing the weather data (maximum, minimum and average temperature; precipitation and snow) on the day you were born as observed at a close weather station.
• Select your special place for #SafePlaceSelfie Day and send a selfie -- NOAA's National Weather Service (NWS) and their Weather-Ready Ambassadors are encouraging the public to select a special place where they, along with family members and co-workers, can seek shelter from weather hazards on Wednesday, 5 April 2023, as part of the NWS #SafePlaceSelfie campaign. At 11:11 AM Local Time, the public is asked to post an individual or group selfie in their safe place to Twitter (no addresses or geolocation tags, please) with the hashtag #SafePlaceSelfie. NWS will share selected selfies on Twitter @NWS and their other social media feeds throughout the day. [NOAA NWS Weather Ready Nation]
• Turning up the heat on the baseball season -- Last Thursday was the start of the 2023 Major League Baseball (MLB) season and all 30 MLB teams were able to play on Opening Day as weather did not hamper play. Last year winter-like weather was reported at several games, with snow falling in Detroit, MI and temperatures were in the upper 30s as the Chicago Cubs opened at home at Wrigley Field. Climate Central, a non-profit organization of scientists and science journalists, put together an Opening Day feature in recognition of the start of the 2023 MLB season. They compiled the average temperatures for each baseball season (30 March - 1 October) starting in 1970 in the 27 MLB cities represented by the 30 MLB teams. The results of this study indicate that the MLB cities have warmed since 1970, as the average season temperatures have increased by 2.2 Fahrenheit degrees. Graphics showing the temperature trends for the individual baseball teams are available. The Climate Central team noted that as temperatures increase, the atmospheric humidity would increase, along with the frequency of heavy rain events and bouts of extreme heat—weather conditions, which could postpone games and impact the health of players and fans. Furthermore, higher humidity could also reduce the atmospheric density, which could lead to more home runs. [Climate Central]
• Masters Golf Tournament climatology -- The 2023 Masters Golf Tournament, the 87th edition of one of professional golf's four major championships, is scheduled to be held this coming week (Thursday, 6 April through Sunday, 9 April) at the Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, GA. The Southeast Regional Climate Center has produced a Masters Climatology for 1934-2022 that includes the daily maximum and minimum temperatures and the 24-hour precipitation totals for each day of the four-day event in early April, extending over all the Masters; for completeness, the weather data for the 2020 Masters that was postponed to November 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic are also included.
  Current weather data and forecasts for Augusta, GA can be obtained from the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Columbia, SC (https://www.weather.gov/cae/).
• Tsunami Awareness in Hawaii -- The month of April 2023 is Tsunami Awareness Month in Hawaii. The theme for this year's Tsunami Awareness Month is "#Get2HIGround #GetTsunamiREady". This year marks the 77th Anniversary of the magnitude 8.6 Aleutian Island earthquake and tsunami on 1 April 1946. The tsunami propagated across the North Pacific, reaching the Hawaiian Islands in four hours, where 158 people were killed. This tsunami led to the establishment of the U.S. Tsunami Warning System in 1949.
• Celebrating Citizen Science Month -- The month of April is "Citizen Science Month," an annual month-long event designed to celebrate and promote the various aspects of citizen science that include amazing discoveries, inspiring projects and dedicated volunteers. The event is hosted by SciStarter, an online citizen science hub, and Arizona State University. A list of upcoming events throughout the month is provided. [CitizenScience.org]

Weather and Climate News Items:

• Eye on the tropics ---After two weeks with no tropical cyclone activity, a named tropical cyclone developed and traveled across the across the waters of the South Indian Ocean during the last week:
  • At the start of last week, an area of convection had formed over the waters of the eastern South Indian Ocean approximately 35 miles to the south-southeast of Australia's Cocos Islands. Over the next two days this area of convection began organizing as it headed east and then toward the east-southeast. By Wednesday afternoon (local time), the tropical low that had developed from this low-level convection had been upgraded to Tropical Cyclone Herman as maximum sustained near-surface winds had reached tropical-storm-force of 45 mph. At this time, Herman was tracking toward the southeast at a distance of nearly 1050 miles to the west-northwest of the RAAF Base Learmonth that is on the north-west coast of Western Australia. Herman continued intensifying, becoming a category 1 tropical cyclone on the Saffir-Simpson Scale late Thursday. Over the next twelve hours, Herman underwent rapid intensification as it headed toward the south-southeast. By Friday afternoon Herman had reached peak intensity as a major category 3 tropical cyclone with sustained surface winds of 125 mph. Herman weakened rapidly to a category 1 tropical cyclone on Saturday as it curved toward the west. By Sunday, the circulation and convective clouds surrounding Herman became disorganized as this former major tropical cyclone weakened to become a minimal tropical storm as it entered an unfavorable environment. Tropical cyclone warnings were discontinued on Herman as it was approximately 575 miles to the west-northwest of Learmonth as Herman would was expected to become a post tropical cyclone or remnant low by late Sunday.
• Hurricanes Fiona and Ian names are retired -- The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Hurricane Committee, which is charged with maintaining the list of names of tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic basin, announced late last week that the names of Fiona and Ian from the rotating lists of Atlantic in tropical cyclone name, The names were retired because of the death and destruction these hurricanes caused during 2022 in Central America, the Caribbean, the United States, and Canada. Hurricane Fiona hit communities in the Lesser Antilles, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic and the Turks and Caicos in September 2022 before moving northward over the western Atlantic to strike Canada as a strong post-tropical cyclone. Ian was a category 4 hurricane that struck western Cuba as a major hurricane and then made landfall in southwestern Florida as a category 4 hurricane, where it caused a devastating storm surge in southwestern Florida that was responsible for over 150 direct and indirect deaths and over US$112 billion in damage, the third costliest in the United States.
  Since current Atlantic naming convention began in 1953, a total of 96 names have been retired from the rotating list of North Atlantic basin names. Farrah will replace Fiona in the list of names that will be used in 2028, while Idris will replace Ian. [WMO Press Release]
• First-quarter (March) 2023 Regional Climate Impacts and Outlooks reports released -- During the last week, NOAA and its partners released a series of eleven regional climate overviews for meteorological winter of 2022-23 (December through February) that are designed to inform the public of recent climate impacts within their respective regions. In addition, these reports provide regional future climate outlooks that span the three months of April through June 2023. This series of quarterly summaries and outlooks from NOAA's Regional Climate Services began in 2012. [NOAA NCEI News]
• Ranking atmospheric rivers could help communities compare and prepare -- A team of researchers associated with the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and Scripps Institution of Oceanography claim that a rating system they recently developed to track atmospheric rivers can provide a consistent global benchmark for these potentially dangerous events, allowing communities time to better prepare. An atmospheric river (AR) is a narrow corridor, filament or plume of humid air and clouds in the atmosphere that transports large quantities of water vapor from the tropics and subtropics to the areas of the globe outside the tropics in a manner akin to a "river in the sky." The researchers built a database of global AR events from 1980 to 2020, using a computer algorithm to automatically identify tens of thousands of the events from a NASA re-analysis of historical atmospheric observations. They ranked these AR events according to a five-category AR scale that was developed in 2019, where 1 is the weakest and 5 is strongest. This new study reveals that higher-ranked systems lasted longer and traveled farther than those with lower ranks. However, higher-ranked storms (AR 4 and AR 5) were less common and tended to begin their life cycle closer to the tropics while ending in colder, higher-latitude regions. Although ARs were found originally over the North Pacific basin, now they have been found to be located over other ocean basins. Furthermore, the scientists detected an increase in atmospheric river frequency during strong El Niño years. [NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory News]
• New water-tracking satellite sends back its first views of water on Earth's surface -- The Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission has sent back some of its first glimpses of water on Earth’s surface, including a detailed view of the Gulf Stream off the North Carolina coast in January 2023. This SWOT mission, which was launched in December 2022, is a satellite altimeter onboard a spacecraft that is in low-Earth orbit (at an altitude of 533 miles above Earth). Developed and operated by NASA and CNES, the French space agency, SWOT has been designed to monitor how inland waters and the oceans on Earth change over time. The satellite will survey over 90 percent of the globe. Two onboard instruments measure the surface of the ocean using radar altimetry: The primary instrument on SWOT is the Ka-band Radar Interferometer (KaRIn) that uses synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) technology. The other instrument is a conventional nadir radar altimeter that will measure beneath the satellite, [NASA Earth Observatory ]
• Canadian national seasonal outlook issued for April-June 2023 -- Forecasters with Environment Canada issued their outlooks for temperature and precipitation across Canada for the three months of April through June 2023, which represents the last two months of meteorological spring and the start of meteorological summer.
  • The temperature outlook indicates that southern and northwestern sections of Canada should expect below-normal (1991-2020) temperatures for these next three months. The southern region would extend along the U.S.-Canadian border from Alberta eastward across the Prairie Provinces. Ontario and Quebec to the lower St. Lawrence Valley to New Brunswick. The northwestern region of Canada that could experience cold conditions during the next three months would be in interior sections of the Yukon and Northwest Territories. On the other hand, three sections of western, northern and eastern Canada could have above-average temperatures for the remainder of spring and the start of summer. One of these areas would run along the Coastal Range of western and northern British Columbia. Another area that could have warm conditions would run across the Canadian Archipelago in the Nunavut Territory. The third area that could have above normal temperatures would be in eastern Canada running from southern Baffin Island in the Nunavut Territory across northern Quebec and most of Labrador. The remaining areas scattered across Canada could have near-normal spring and early summer temperatures.
  • The Canadian precipitation outlook for April through June 2022 indicates that below-normal (1991-2020) precipitation should prevail across large sections of Canada, stretching from Saskatchewan eastward to Quebec and northward to northeastern sections of the Canadian Archipelago in the Nunavut Territory. Another area that could have dry conditions during the next three months would be in the Maritime Provinces. Conversely, several smaller areas where above-average precipitation could occur during the next three months would be in western Canada and along coastal Labrador in the east. Those western regions that could be wet would be primarily in British Columbia and across coastal areas along the Beaufort Sea in the Northwest Nunavut Territories. The remaining areas of Canada could have near-normal precipitation for the months running from April through June.
  • [Note for comparisons and continuity with the three-month seasonal outlooks of temperature and precipitation generated for the continental United States and Alaska by NOAA's Climate Prediction Center, one would need to use Environment Canada's probabilistic forecasts for temperature and precipitation.]
• NOAA's annual science report for 2022 is released -- NOAA Science Council recently released its "2022 NOAA Science Report," an 81-page report that includes more than 60 stories that represent a selection of NOAA’s 2022 research and development accomplishments in climate, weather and ocean science that extend across the range of NOAA’s mission. More than 60 stories are included in the report that include discovery of the remains of a 207-year-old whaling ship on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, the advancement of air-quality forecasts, the improvement of storm surge and wind forecasts, and the deployment of the first-ever drone-based tagging of endangered whales. Updates were included on NOAA’s peer-reviewed contributions to science between 2017 and 2021. NOAA scientists either authored or co-authored with colleagues from numerous institutions more than 10,000 publications about weather, water, and climate science. [NOAA Research News]
• Ocean and weather data from along Oregon coast is combined into new long-term data set -- A new study of the highly biologically productive northern California Current System incorporates two decades of ocean and weather observational data collected by NOAA and Oregon State University from moorings installed along the central Oregon coast in the 1990s and 2000s. Moorings are permanent structures anchored to the sea floor and have been outfitted with instruments to measure water flow velocity throughout the depth of the ocean, temperature, and conductivity of the ocean water along with meteorological observations. These data have been made publicly available for the first time. [NOAA Climate.gov News]
• An All-Hazards Monitor -- This Web portal provides the user information from NOAA's National Weather Service, FAA and FEMA on current environmental events that may pose as hazards such as tropical weather, fire weather, marine weather, severe weather, drought and floods. [NOAA/NWS Daily Briefing]