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April 20, 2012 | 3:46 PM | By

Foghorns and the Changing Coastal Soundscape

Technology and politics are changing the tune of the maritime chorus

Read the full text version of this story at KQED’s QUEST site.

Craig Miller

East Brother Island, with the 19th-century lighthouse on the left and fog signal building on the right.

On foggy mornings, I wake up to a faint symphony of foghorns. From my condo on a windy bluff above the Mare Island Strait, the horn on the Carquinez Bridge is the bassoon in the back row, accompanied by the assorted boops and beeps of all the other fog signals within earshot of where the Sacramento River empties into San Pablo Bay.

But the orchestra plays a different tune than it did in decades past. Technology and politics are changing the navigational soundscape of coastal America. Complaints from coastal residents about the repetitive blasts of sound and modern electronic navigation aids have relegated the foghorn to a lesser role in the maritime chorus. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: East Brother Island, fog, maritime, weather
March 26, 2012 | 1:40 PM | By

Wet Enough For Ya? California Precip Makes Sprint for the Finish Line

The rainy weather has helped, but the state’s still in deficit for the year

John Huseby

Heavy rain flooded the parking lot at San Francisco's Ocean Beach over the weekend.

California’s water supply is in better shape after this weekend’s storms and the wet weather earlier in the month (though the parking lot at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach is in worse shape). The water content of California’s snowpack is hovering around fifty percent of what’s considered “normal” for this time of year — not quite cause for celebration but much better than it had been; on February 28, the date of the most recent manual snow survey, water content was only 30% of normal.

So this winter isn’t going to be the driest on record, or even the second-driest, but it’s bound to be on the dry side, regardless of what happens now. It’s just too late in the year to catch up, even with more storms heading our way this week.

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Water, snowpack, water supply, weather
March 13, 2012 | 9:13 AM | By

This Winter Looking Like Fourth Warmest for Lower 48

Could be second-driest winter on record for California, Pacific Northwest

Craig Miller

Rain comes late to Northern California: A March storm front hovers over San Pablo Bay, north of San Francisco.

Last week’s State of the Climate report issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that this winter is stacking up as the warmest since 2000 and the fourth warmest on record in the contiguous United States.

According to NOAA, 47 of 48 states experienced above-average temperatures in the period between December and February, with the greatest increases seen in the Northeast and Midwest.

Only New Mexico saw below-average temperatures. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: The Science, Drought, temperatures, weather
January 10, 2012 | 9:17 AM | By

We’re Not Alone: Wimpy Winter Weather Across the Country

Some atmospheric scientists think that could change soon.

By Andrew Freedman

While some may be cheering the lack of snow as welcome relief, the widespread lack of it spells trouble for the ski industry, which pumps billions into the wintertime economy in states from California to Maine, and requires cooperation from Mother Nature to stay in business.

Craig Miller/KQED

Snow from last year's big winter storms could still be seen on the mountains near Lake Tahoe on August 30th. This winter has been one of the driest on record.

Ski area operators across the country are already reporting drops in lift ticket sales, and are hoping for a major change in the weather pattern to bring colder, snowier weather. So far, die-hard skiers have been forced to either ski on man-made snow or travel to one of the few far-flung areas that have benefited from the unusual weather, such as the mountains of New Mexico or Alaska (where one town has had 18 feet of snow).

Compared to last winter, this wimpy winter weather is coming as quite a shock.

Snow was so widespread last winter that at one point in January, every state except Florida had some snow on the ground. But this year, the U.S. had the 11th least extensive December snow cover in the 46-year satellite record, said David Robinson, the director of the Global Snow Lab at Rutgers University.

“Is it fair to call it a snow drought? We’re getting there,” Robinson said. “It’s certainly an early season snow drought.”

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Water, Climate Central, La Nina, Lake Tahoe, Sierra Nevada, weather
November 16, 2011 | 12:58 PM | By

A Year-Long Sky Journal as Video Mosaic

A motion mosaic of our ever-changing, endlessly fascinating atmosphere

Ken Murphy / Murphlab

Detail from Ken Murphy's video sky mosaic

About two years ago, Ken Murphy set up a tripod on the roof of San Francisco’s Exploratorium science museum and aimed his video camera at a particular patch of sky. He’s spent the two years since shooting time-lapse sequences from his makeshift observatory and has stitched them together into this wonderful visual tableau.

Murphy, who is a web developer at KQED and a former artist-in-residence at the Exploratorium, says the project grew out of — well — boredom. He became restless with his experimentation with art works using LED lights. He says he was looking for more natural movement. So Murphy went dumpster-diving for parts and cobbled together a computer-controlled camera that would record the same sky segment every ten seconds, around the clock. He says it took two years of shooting to stitch together one full year of images. Eventually he found himself sorting through three million video frames for the mosaic. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Get Involved, atmosphere, weather
October 12, 2011 | 2:26 PM | By

Global Warming May Worsen Effects of El Niño, La Niña Events

Precipitation outlook for winter 2011-12, showing the likelihood of below average precipitation in Texas and other drought-stricken states.

Does this mean Texas is toast?

By Michael D. Lemonick

As most Californians know, El Niño is a periodic unusual warming of the surface water in the eastern and central tropical Pacific Ocean. Actually, that’s pretty much a lie. Most people don’t know the definition of El Niño or its mirror image, La Niña, and truthfully, most people don’t much care.

What you do care about if you’re a Texan suffering through the worst one-year drought on record, or a New Yorker who had to dig out from massive snowstorms last winter (tied in part to La Niña), or a Californian who has ever had to deal with the torrential rains that trigger catastrophic mudslides (linked to El Niño), is that these natural climate cycles can elevate the odds of natural disasters where you live. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: The Science, El Nino, La Nina, weather
October 11, 2011 | 12:15 PM | By

Snow in Tahoe Already: How Weird is That?

Meteorologists say it’s the shortest Sierra “summer” in four decades

Matthew Green

An early snow in the Grouse Lakes area of the Sierra Nevada

By Matthew Green

For months now, I had reserved the second weekend in October for my annual grand finale “summertime” backpacking trip. Culminating an unusually short warm season, this was to be the ceremonial final alpine lake swim, the last mosquito bloodletting until well after next year’s thaw. Which is why, as my partner and I proceeded to pitch our tent in about 10 inches of snow last Friday evening, I couldn’t help but feel I’d been had.

Last week’s storm, which swept across the northern half of California early Wednesday, dumped up to a foot of snow in the Sierra’s high peaks, with accumulation as low as 5,000 feet. According to the Central Sierra Snow Lab, this is the first snowstorm in 96 days – since July 1 – marking the shortest duration between storms in the Sierra since 1969. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Sierra Nevada, snow, weather
August 26, 2011 | 6:01 PM | By

Climate Study Predicts Deadly Heat for Older Californians

California’s heat waves are going to be getting longer and hotter in the coming decades, according to a new climate modeling study commissioned by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) and the EPA. The authors predict that heat-related deaths among California’s 65-and-over population could spike more than nine-fold by 2090. According to the study, currently more than 500 elderly people die annually from heat-related causes.

Using IPCC climate projections, the study models how climate change will impact California up and down the coast, including coastal cities like San Francisco and inland cities such as Riverside and Fresno.

Lead author Scott Sheridan, a geographer at Kent State University, says that the projected increase in heat-related deaths among those 65 and over are due in part to physiological reasons, but also to growing population size of this age group. By the end of the century, he says, the state’s population of people in this age bracket will increase from 4 million to 15.7 million. Sheridan says California communities that are already used to dealing with hotter temperatures, like the inland city of Fresno, may be better prepared to deal with the heat than relatively cooler coastal cities. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Government & Business, The Science, adaptation, CARB, heat, heat waves, Temperature, weather
July 19, 2011 | 1:01 PM | By

What’s Up With This Weather?

While most of the nation bakes, California keeps its cool–and not just along the coast

Climate scientist Phil Duffy and meteorologist Jan Null joined Michael Krasny on KQED’s Forum to discuss California’s cooler-than-usual summer and what it might reveal about climate change in the region. The upshot? We don’t really know.

“I think we’re seeing plain old climate variability,” said Duffy, who is a visiting scholar at Stanford and the Carnegie Institution for Science and chief scientist for Climate Central, a Climate Watch content partner.

Null agreed with Duffy, saying that in any given year, “stuff happens,” which can’t necessarily be attributed to a larger trend.

“It’s hard to take an individual year and say ‘This is the result of climate change’,” said Null. “It could be just the roll of the dice. If we see a lot of stuff happening over the next decades, then we’re talking about climate change.”

Null said this summer’s cool weather is due to a persistent trough of low pressure along the west coast.

“Anytime you have that for an extended period of time, you get what people call ‘unusual’ or ‘freakish’ weather,” he said. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: The Science, cooling, extreme weather, Warming, weather
July 8, 2011 | 3:14 PM | By

Climate Change and the Phoenix Dust Cloud

Hotter temps could set the stage for more — but the science is complex

On July 5, a massive dust cloud, or haboob, swept across Phoenix, Arizona, brought by the North American monsoon. (Photo: Greg Gorman/Flickr)

By Alyson Kenward

On Tuesday night, a massive dust storm rolled into Phoenix, Arizona knocking out power in much of the city, reducing visibility to nearly zero, and grounding flights overnight. Photos of the 100-mile wide dust cloud swallowing the city circulated yesterday, and the event looked practically apocalyptic. In fact, if the photos weren’t in color, and there weren’t YouTube videos of the dust storm, I would have thought I was looking at old-timey images from the 1930’s dust bowl. Now, a couple days later, lingering dust in the air has triggered allergy-like symptoms for many people. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: The Science, extreme weather, Impacts, weather