Dusting off the blog

It sure has been a while since I last thought about this blog. Over the last couple of days, I have been dealing with a statistics college class project. This project, I figured I would do some weather analysis for Maine.

One of the biggest stories in the news today is Global Warming or Climate Change. You can catch up on it on Wikipedia. As part of my project, I wanted to evaluate whether we can see evidence of it here in Maine.

My data source was the National Climatic Data Center which holds climate data recorded in the United States. I chose Augusta, Maine's surface observations to explore since they had an observational record from 1948-present.

My first interest was determining if the Month of July was getting hotter over time. After compiling the data, I graphed this chart:

The trend line shows that July is not getting hotter. Although, some early 1950 years did throw this off, namely the heat waves in July 1952 and 1955. But in general, we can't easily see if global warming is impacting the month of July.

So, I fell back to looking at this more broadly. What if I simply averaged the highs for the entire year? This produced a chart:

In this data, the linear trend line clearly indicates a warming trend. While the 1950s were warm, they are fewer in number than compared to the years 2000 and beyond.

The IPCC report states the following:

From 1906 to 2005, Earth's average surface temperature rose by 0.74±0.18 °C. The rate of warming almost doubled in the last half of that period (0.13±0.03 °C per decade, against 0.07±0.02 °C per decade). ("Climate Change 2007: Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis". IPCC AR4. 2007.)

Does this data set relate to the IPCC's observation that the global temperatures have been rising 0.126°F (0.07C) every ten years? Yes, but not quite at the same rate. In this data set, annual high temperatures at Augusta, ME have been rising 0.1°F (0.05C) every ten years. A slightly lower rate than observed by the IPCC.

I have yet to compile the probability and confidence interval statistics, but I thought this was interesting enough to share.

Spring in South Korea

Spring in South Korea is a mixed blessing. It is beautiful when the trees turn green and the blossoms are blooming. However, it is just the calm before the summer rains return. South Korea is located on the northern edge of the East Asian Monsoon. This flow draws in warm, moist tropical air from the Western Pacific Ocean. Temperatures and humidity both stay in the 80s (°F and %, respectively). This easily keeps the heat index in the 90s for most of the summer. Additionally, rainfall averages 28" from June to August.

More Snow?

Is there snow on this picture?


Courtesy, NASA/GSFC, MODIS Rapid Response.

If you said no then congratulations. Yes, there is a lot of white in this picture, but they are mostly small puffy white clouds.

Why does it look so isolated? Well, we are looking at Mindanao island in the Philippines. Mindanao island is a very mountainous island. The mountains were formed because of the island's location near the Pacific and Philippine tectonic plates. Just as how the Appalachian mountains were born, these mountains are younger and higher.

Because of all the mountains, wind and air is constantly in motion, going up and down the mountains. When air is transported up the mountain, it takes with it some of the humidity or moisture. This water vapor condenses in the cooler air at the top of the mountains and forms clouds. The whole process is called orographic lift.

Snow in 49 states?

Happy snow day. It doesn't happen very often but there is snow in 49 states. The loner? Florida. See the map below for the details. Who has the most snow on the ground right now? Alpine Meadows, high in the Sierra Nevadas in California, with 288.999 inches or 24 feet. Yikes.

Moving from Guam

Sorry for not updating this in a while. After the busy year in 2009, 2010 actually ended up being very quiet for Guam. There were no significant storms that impacted the island this year. This was mainly due to a switch from El Nino to La Nina in a very short time frame. La Nina generally allows storms to form near Guam and flow to the west towards the Philippines, Taiwan, and Japan.

So as the title states, I am moving from Guam. I will still brief the about the Pacific and Maine when I can. So stay tuned.

The Power of Three

Well, after Typhoon Choi-wan I didn't think the weather could get any crazier around here. But alas, this week we had not one Typhoon but THREE Tropical Storms. The first one started 10 days ago and in the space of 24 hours there were three all in the space of 1000 miles. To put that distance into perspective, that is the distance from Maine to Indiana.

The first storm we had to deal with was actually what is now Typhoon Parma that is clipping the Philippines. That storm formed directly to the south and brought us some rain and moderate wind for about three hours. After that we had a storm just to our southeast move directly northwest and pass between Guam and our neighboring island Rota. Luckily, that storm was only a weak tropical depression, which again brought us rain but thankfully little wind.

Finally, the last storm started further to the east and slowly made it's way west. This storm is called Typhoon Melor (Malaysian: Jasmine Flower) and brought strong winds all day today. Thankfully, it was far enough away from Guam that the winds did not cause any damage.

Overall, we had three storms we had to watch over ten days. It was a very busy time and I am glad it is over for Guam. Unfortunately, there are still two more months of the main Typhoon season here and it is far from quiet in the ocean.

Not so quiet weather in Maine

The opposite of High Pressure is Low Pressure. You can easily see that Maine is now covered in clouds (look to the center right of the picture, New Brunswick is visible in the center). This is associated with a weak cold front that extends from the Low Pressure. Interestingly enough, the low pressure center is located in Canada, near the Hudson Bay.

The cold front generates the weather for Maine. In this particular case, it brings the chance of showers. It also, brings cooler temperatures during the day and warmer temperatures at night. The temperature shift comes from the cloud cover. We will explore the effects of cloud cover on the Earth in a another post.