Related Research Articles
Climate is the long-term weather pattern in an area, typically averaged over 30 years. More rigorously, it is the mean and variability of meteorological variables over a time spanning from months to millions of years. Some of the meteorological variables that are commonly measured are temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind, and precipitation. In a broader sense, climate is the state of the components of the climate system, including the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere, the lithosphere and the biosphere and the interactions between them. The climate of a location is affected by its latitude/longitude, terrain, altitude, and nearby water bodies and their currents.
Weather is the state of the atmosphere, describing for example the degree to which it is hot or cold, wet or dry, calm or stormy, clear or cloudy. On Earth, most weather phenomena occur in the lowest layer of the planet's atmosphere, the troposphere, just below the stratosphere. Weather refers to day-to-day temperature, precipitation, and other atmospheric conditions, whereas climate is the term for the averaging of atmospheric conditions over longer periods of time. When used without qualification, "weather" is generally understood to mean the weather of Earth.
Extreme weather or extreme climate events includes unexpected, unusual, severe, or unseasonal weather; weather at the extremes of the historical distribution—the range that has been seen in the past. Often, extreme events are based on a location's recorded weather history and defined as lying in the most unusual ten percent.
Climatology or climate science is the scientific study of Earth's climate, typically defined as weather conditions averaged over a period of at least 30 years. This modern field of study is regarded as a branch of the atmospheric sciences and a subfield of physical geography, which is one of the Earth sciences. Climatology now includes aspects of oceanography and biogeochemistry.
A heat wave, or heatwave, is a period of excessively hot weather, which may be accompanied by high humidity, especially in oceanic climate countries. While definitions vary, a heat wave is usually measured relative to the usual weather in the area and relative to normal temperatures for the season. Temperatures that people from a hotter climate consider normal can be called a heat wave in a cooler area if they are outside the normal climate pattern for that area.
Robert C. Balling, Jr. is a professor of geography at Arizona State University, and the former director of its Office of Climatology. His research interests include climatology, global climate change, and geographic information systems. Balling has declared himself one of the scientists who oppose the consensus on global warming, arguing in a 2009 book that anthropogenic global warming "is indeed real, but relatively modest", and maintaining that there is a publication bias in the scientific literature.
The Arctic oscillation (AO) or Northern Annular Mode/Northern Hemisphere Annular Mode (NAM) is a weather phenomenon at the Arctic pole north of 20 degrees latitude. It is an important mode of climate variability for the Northern Hemisphere. The southern hemisphere analogue is called the Antarctic oscillation or Southern Annular Mode (SAM). The index varies over time with no particular periodicity, and is characterized by non-seasonal sea-level pressure anomalies of one sign in the Arctic, balanced by anomalies of opposite sign centered at about 37–45° N.
The effects of climate change span the impacts on physical environment, ecosystems and human societies due to ongoing human-caused climate change. The future impact of climate change depends on how much nations reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change. Effects that scientists predicted in the past—loss of sea ice, accelerated sea level rise and longer, more intense heat waves—are now occurring. The changes in climate are not expected to be uniform across the Earth. In particular, land areas change more quickly than oceans, and northern high latitudes change more quickly than the tropics. There are three major ways in which global warming will make changes to regional climate: melting ice, changing the hydrological cycle and changing currents in the oceans.
Heidi M. Cullen is the Director of Communications and Strategic Initiatives at MBARI, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Cullen was previously the chief scientist for the non-profit environmental organization, Climate Central, located in Princeton, New Jersey. In addition, she is a guest lecturer at nearby Princeton University, and the author of the book, The Weather of the Future. An expert and commentator about issues related to climate change and the environment, she was an on-air personality at The Weather Channel, and is a senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn).
The climate of Delhi is an overlap between monsoon-influenced humid subtropical and semi-arid, with high variation between summer and winter temperatures and precipitation. Delhi's version of a humid subtropical climate is markedly different from many other humid subtropical cities such as São Paulo, New Orleans and Brisbane in that the city features dust storms and wildfire haze due to its semi-arid climate.
The Climate of Illinois describes the weather conditions, and extremes, noted within the state of Illinois, United States, over time.
Uruguay has a humid subtropical climate. It is fairly uniform nationwide, since the country is located entirely within the temperate zone. Seasonal variations do exist, but extremes in temperature are rare. As would be expected by its abundance of water, high humidity and fog are common. The absence of mountains and other weather barriers makes all locations vulnerable to high winds and rapid changes in weather as fronts or storms sweep across the country. Weather is sometimes humid.
The Gore effect or Al Gore effect refers to coincidence between occurrences of unseasonably cold weather and some events associated with global warming activism, particularly those attended by former Vice President of the United States and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Al Gore, which was created and "amusedly" used by global warming deniers.
The effects of climate change on human health include direct effects of extreme weather, leading to injury and loss of life, as well as indirect effects, such as undernutrition brought on by crop failures or lack of access safe drinking water. Climate change poses a wide range of risks to population health. The three main categories of health risks include: (i) direct-acting effects, (ii) impacts mediated via climate-related changes in ecological systems and relationships, and (iii) the more diffuse (indirect) consequences relating to impoverishment, displacement, and mental health problems.
Hurricane Sandy was the sixth-costliest Atlantic hurricane on record. It lasted for over a week in late October-early November 2012. Classified as the eighteenth named storm, tenth hurricane, and second major hurricane of the annual hurricane season, Sandy originated from a tropical wave on October 22. Performing a small loop over the central Caribbean Sea, the system intensified into a tropical storm a day later and became the final hurricane of the season before briefly coming ashore the coast of Jamaica on October 24. After emerging between Jamaica and Cuba, Sandy began a period of rapid intensification into a Category 3 hurricane on the Saffir–Simpson hurricane wind scale, with maximum sustained winds of 115 mph (185 km/h). It made landfall at this intensity near Santiago de Cuba on October 25.
Clifford F. Mass is an American professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington. His research focuses on numerical weather modeling and prediction, the role of topography in the evolution of weather systems, regional climate modeling, and the weather of the Pacific Northwest. He is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, past-president of the Puget Sound American Meteorological Society chapter, and past chair of the College of the Environment College Council.
In 2018, several heat waves with temperatures far above the long-time average and droughts were recorded in the Northern Hemisphere: The earth's average surface temperature in 2018 was the fourth highest in the 140 years of record keeping. It is assumed that the jet stream is slowing down, trapping cloudless, windless and extremely hot regions of high pressure. The jet stream anomalies could be caused by polar amplification, one of the observed effects of global warming.
Friederike (Fredi) Elly Luise Otto is a climatologist who as of December 2021 works as a Senior Lecturer at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London. Previously she was Associate Director of the Environmental Change Institute (ECI) at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on answering the question whether and to what extent extreme weather conditions change as a result of external climate drivers. A highly recognized expert in the field of attribution research, she examines the extent to which human-caused climate change as well as vulnerability and exposure are responsible for events such heat waves, droughts and floods. Together with climate scientist Geert Jan van Oldenborgh she founded the international project World Weather Attribution which she still leads. In 2021, she was included in the Time 100, Time's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. She was also one of ten scientists who had had important roles in scientific developments in 2021 highlighted in the scientific journal Nature.
Climate migrants are a subset of environmental migrants who were forced to flee "due to sudden or gradual alterations in the natural environment related to at least one of three impacts of climate change: sea-level rise, extreme weather events, and drought and water scarcity." Climate change is often described as a threat multiplier that compounds crises over time and space. The United Nations Global Compact on Refugees states that “while not in themselves causes of refugee movements, climate, environmental degradation, and natural disasters increasingly interact with the drivers of refugee movements.” Still, climate migration relates to matters of political instability, conflict, and national security. First, displaced people may be relocated to regions geographically vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Second, there are both short- and long-term effects of climate change. The cumulative impact of longer-term effects may lead to political conflict, insurrection, poverty, and other socioeconomic disparities.
Extreme event attribution, also known as attribution science, is a relatively new field of study in meteorology and climate science that tries to measure how ongoing climate change directly affects recent extreme weather events.
References
- ↑ Michiko Kakutani. Warming Is Real. Now What? New York Times, August 2, 2010.
- ↑ Carl Hartman. Climatologist urges reduction of man-made carbon dioxide emissions to limit global warming The Examiner, 2 August 2010. [ dead link ]
