Tag Archives: drought

Global 2015-2016 winter forecast: comparing NCEP model runs to NOAA’s ‘typical El Niño patterns’ – Brazil in for shock, little relief for California

Normally we think of droughts over South East Asia (i.e. Borneo) and north-eastern Australia (Queensland) associated with strong El Niño events. This for instance led to dramatic fires through the tropical rainforests of Borneo, during the last ‘Super El Niño’ … Continue reading →

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

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 →

Local Indonesian El Niño progression, possibility strong wildfire season Borneo, Sumatra

Over the course of 2012 ENSO has moved from La Niña to El Niño state. Various ENSO forecasting models (see NOAA NECP, IRI ensemble below) now show Pacific equatorial SSTs anomalies will remain positive for the remainder of 2012 – … Continue reading →

Photo of the day: the old climate versus the new, according to Nature Geoscience study

The picture below shows Pinyon pine forests in New Mexico – and the progressive consequence of the large drought that hit western North America between 2000-2004. The left image is from 2002 and already shows some browning of pine trees halfway … Continue reading →

Closing in on African drought prediction thanks to climate and vegetation data

What might happen if droughts were predicted months ahead of time? Food aid and other humanitarian efforts could be put together sooner and executed better, say UC Santa Barbara geographers Chris Funk, Greg Husak, and Joel Michaelsen. After over a decade of gathering and analyzing climate and vegetation data from East Africa, the researchers, who are part of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET), say there is enough evidence to associate climate conditions in the region with projected rainfall deficits that could lead to food shortages.

Continue reading →

Graph of the day: weather extremes are on the rise

weather extremes graphWhy write a full news story when a single graph tells you everything: ‘unprecedented records in monthly mean temperature’ between 1900-2000 for 17 weather stations across the globe.

Continue reading →

When the ice goes, so does the rainforest – boreal warming linked to Amazon droughts

We knew there must have been a connection between climate warming and damaging droughts in the world’s largest rainforest, as the two globally hottest years on record (2005 and 2010) coincide with the two record droughts in the Amazon – … Continue reading →

African trees dying due to climate change

The Sahel, one of the hottest regions on Earth ranging from the Atlantic coast south of the Sahara Desert to the Red Sea to the east and the Horn of Africa to the southeast, is getting drier and drier and … Continue reading →