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Category Archives: Seasons
Do oceans have heat waves?
As with the atmosphere, oceans can experience heat waves. The National Weather Service defines an atmospheric heat wave as a period of abnormally hot weather generally lasting more than two days. To be considered a heat wave, the temperatures must be outside the historical averages for a given area.
Marine heat waves are defined as any time the ocean temperatures are warmer than 90% of the previous observations for the region at a given time of year. Marine heat waves can last for weeks, months and even years. Continue reading
How can the Upper Midwest get such high dew points every year?
The dew point temperature is a measure of the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere and is also a good way to tell how uncomfortable you might feel on a hot day. Hot days and high water vapor contents are a serious health risk for some. Also, high water vapor content is a key fuel for severe thunderstorms.
There are three primary sources of water vapor that address this question: advection of water vapor largely from the Gulf of Mexico, evaporation over the Great Lakes, and transpiration from corn fields. The contribution from the Great Lakes in summer is minimal in comparison to the other factors, except maybe near the shorelines. Continue reading
How does our late spring/early summer precipitation stack up historically?
If you think the first half of the summer has been unusually wet, it is not merely your impression — it is a measured fact. Between May 1 and July 15, Madison received 21.85 inches of precipitation, punctuated by the … Continue reading
What happens to the wintertime cold pool in summertime?
We have commented a number of times in the past few years about the areal extent of the hemispheric cold pool of air at 850 millibars (about a mile above the surface) during the winter. As one might expect, that pool expands dramatically from October through February and then begins to contract as we move toward spring and summer.
Our analysis uses the minus 5 Celsius isotherm (line of constant temperature) and has shown that the average winter cold pool area has systematically shrunk for at least the past 76 years. One might reasonably wonder if this cold pool survives at all during the height of Northern Hemisphere summer. As it turns out, some summers have a number of days in mid-July on which there is absolutely no air at 850 mb that is as cold as minus 5 Celsius. Roughly half of the last 76 years have had such a “vanishing” cold pool, with the pool getting very close to vanishing many of the other years. Continue reading
What is a heat dome?
“Heat dome” is a term used by the news media to explain extreme heat conditions across large geographic regions.
The American Meteorological Society maintains a glossary of meteorological terms and added the term “heat dome” and this definition in March 2022: “An exceptionally hot air mass that develops when high pressure aloft prevents warm air below from rising, thus trapping the warm air as if it were in a dome.” Continue reading
