Jay Lawrimore

• NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information

The latest version of NOAA’s Global Surface Temperature Dataset improves coverage over land and sea and improves the treatment of historical changes in observational practices.

We highlight improvements to the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS) in the latest Release 3.0 (R3.0; covering 1662–2014). ICOADS is the most widely used freely available collection of surface marine observations, providing data for the construction of gridded analyses of sea surface temperature, estimates of air–sea inte...

Changes in diurnal temperature range (DTR) over global land areas are compared from a broad range of independent data sets. All data sets agree that global-mean DTR has decreased significantly since 1950, with most of that decrease occurring over 1960–1980. The since-1979 trends are not significant, with inter-data set disagreement even over the si...

It has been a decade since changes in diurnal temperature range (DTR) globally have been assessed in a stand-alone data analysis. The present study takes advantage of substantively improved basic data holdings arising from the International Surface Temperature Initiative's databank effort and applies the National Centers for Environmental Informati...

Global trends of sea surface temperature (SST) are assessed for the existing and new experimental SST analyses that incorporate Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) observations from NOAA polar orbiting satellites. These analyses show that globally and annually averaged SST trends over the 21st Century (2000-2015) are similar to the tre...

The uncertainty in Extended Reconstructed SST (ERSST) version 4 (v4) is reassessed based upon 1) reconstruction uncertainties and 2) an extended exploration of parametric uncertainties. The reconstruction uncertainty (Ur) results from using a truncated (130) set of empirical orthogonal teleconnection functions (EOTs), which yields an inevitable los...

Much study has been devoted to the possible causes of an apparent decrease in the upward trend of global surface temperatures since 1998, a phenomenon that has been dubbed the global warming "hiatus." Here we present an updated global surface temperature analysis that reveals that global trends are higher than reported by the IPCC, especially in re...

This paper describes six different temporal climate regimes of the contiguous United States (CONUS) according to interdecadal variations of surface air temperature (SAT) and precipitation using the United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) monthly data (Tmax, Tmin, Tmean, and precipitation) from 1895 to 2010. Our analysis is based on the...

Described herein is the parametric and structural uncertainty quantification for the monthly Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature (ERSST) version 4 (v4). A Monte Carlo ensemble approach was adopted to characterize parametric uncertainty, because initial experiments indicate the existence of significant nonlinear interactions. Globally, th...

The monthly Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature (ERSST) dataset, available on global 2° × 2° grids, has been revised herein to version 4 (v4) from v3b. Major revisions include updated and substantially more complete input data from the International Comprehensive Ocean–Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS) release 2.5; revised empirical orthogona...

Sea surface temperature (SST) observations from satellite-based Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) instrument exhibit biases. Adjustments necessary for removing the AVHRR biases have been studied by progressive experiments. These experiments show that the biases are sensitive to various parameters, including the length of the input da...

NESIS uses snowfall and population information from the entire storm?both within and outside the Northeast?so it provides a measure of the total impact of a snowstorm, calibrated by the 30 largest Northeast storms from 1950 to 2000. NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) began calculating NESIS operationally in 2006. Since that time there have...

Described herein is the first version release of monthly temperature holdings of a new Global Land Surface Meteorological Databank. Organized under the auspices of the International Surface Temperature Initiative (ISTI), an international group of scientists have spent three years collating and merging data from numerous sources to create a merged h...

The 100 most severe snowstorms within each of six climate regions east of the Rocky Mountains were analyzed to understand how the frequency of severe snowstorms is associated with seasonal averages of other variables that may be more readily predicted and projected. In particular, temperature, precipitation, and El Nino/La Nina anomalies from 1901...

Air and water quality are impacted by extreme weather and climate events on time scales ranging from minutes to many months. This review paper discusses the state of knowledge of how and why extreme events are changing and are projected to change in the future. These events include heat waves, cold waves, floods, droughts, hurricanes, strong extrat...

During June–November 2012, pronounced differences in tropical Pacific sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies were observed between three widely used SST products: the extended reconstructed SST version 3b (ERSSTv3b), and the optimum interpolation SST version 2 analyses (OISST), produced weekly (OISSTwk) and daily (OISSTdy). During June–August 2012...

The International Surface Temperature Initiative (ISTI) consists of an end-to-end process for land surface air temperature analyses. The foundation is the establishment of a global land surface Databank. This builds upon the groundbreaking efforts of scientists in the 1980s and 1990s. While using many of their principles, a primary aim is to improv...

The aim of International Surface Temperature Initiative is to create an end-to-end process for analysis of air temperature data taken over the land surface of the Earth. The foundation of any analysis is the source data. Land surface air temperature records have traditionally been stored in local, organizational, national and international holdings...

The U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) is a network of climate-monitoring stations maintained and operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to provide climate-sciencequality measurements of air temperature and precipitation. The stations in the network were designed to be extensible to other missions, and the Nation...

The performance of US national climate reference network was assessed after operating for ten years. The US Climate Reference Network (USCRN) performed the task of benchmarking source of climate data on behalf of the decision makers. The USCRN was conceived in response to these challenges of station changes to the climate record. The main goal of t...

The state of knowledge regarding trends and an understanding of their causes is presented for a specific subset of extreme weather and climate types. For severe convective storms (tornadoes, hailstorms, and severe thunderstorms), differences in time and space of practices of collecting reports of events make using the reporting database to detect t...

Since the 1990s a number of national institutions have developed and maintained global data sets of land surface air temperature [Peterson and Vose, 1997; Hansen et al., 2010; Jones et al., 2012; Menne et al., 2012]. These efforts have led to great advances in understanding how Earth's temperatures have varied and changed. They also serve as essent...

This paper described the new release of MLOST (version 3.5), the global surface temperature product used by NOAA in monitoring and assessment activities. The primary motivation for the release was the inclusion of a new land dataset (GHCN-M version 3), which contains improved adjustments for changes in station location, instrumentation, and siting...

Climate science has a key role to play in informing strategies for adapting to and mitigating the effects of climate change. However, given the magnitude of the issues involved and their implications, it is imperative that the scientific process is–and is seen to be—rigorous, defensible, and transparent so as to ensure trust in the results. A key e...

This paper estimates the sampling error variances of gridded monthly U.S. Historical Climatology Network, version 2 (USHCN V2), time-of-observation-biases (TOB)-adjusted data. The analysis of mean surface air temperature (SAT) assesses uncertainties, trends, and the rankings of the hottest and coldest years for the contiguous United States in the p...

For decades NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) has collected, quality controlled, and archived data from the COOP Fischer & Porter (F&P) network of more than 2000 stations. This dataset, commonly referred to as DSI-3240, is produced through ongoing quality control processing that includes extensive manual review and intervention by a train...

Using the Palmer drought severity index, the ability of 19 state-of-the-art climate models to reproduce observed statistics of drought over North America is examined. It is found that correction of substantial biases in the models' surface air temperature and precipitation fields is necessary. However, even after a bias correction, there are signif...

Several topics that were covered during a meeting that took place at Met Office, on behalf of the UK government, in Turkey in February 2010, are presented. The meeting focused on the changing interests of climate scientists in the datasets. One of the requirements is openness and transparency of the data that involves hard work to ascertain provena...

Since the early 1990s the Global Historical Climatology Network-Monthly (GHCN-M) data set has been an internationally recognized source of data for the study of observed variability and change in land surface temperature. It provides monthly mean temperature data for 7280 stations from 226 countries and territories, ongoing monthly updates of more...

Rutgers University's Global Snow Lab and NOAA's National Climatic Data Center are collaborating on an effort to develop regional snowfall indices that gauge the societal impact of snowstorms. The indices are based on the spatial extent of the storm, the amount of snowfall, and the juxtaposition of population and snowfall. This effort expands on the...

This paper describes a new regional snowfall impact index that is being produced operationally on an experimental basis by NOAA's National Climatic Data Center. The Regional Snowfall Impact Scale (ReSIS) is based on the spatial extent of the storm, the amount of snowfall, and the juxtaposition of these elements with population. Including population...

NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites measure time variations of the Earth's gravity field enabling reliable detection of spatio-temporal variations in total terrestrial water storage (TWS), including groundwater. The U.S. and North American Drought Monitors rely heavily on precipitation indices and do not currently inco...

NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) is collaborating with Rutgers University to develop a new suite of regional and national snowstorm indices. The indices use the area of snowfall, amount of snowfall, population affected by snowfall, and the juxtaposition of these elements to define an index that attempts to measure a snowstorm's impact on...

The combined land and ocean surface temperature in 2007 fell within the 10 highest on record, while the average land temperature was the warmest since global records began in 1880. In the low to midtroposphere, the annual global mean temperature was among the five warmest since reliable global records began in 1958, but still cooler than the record...

Observations of sea surface and land-near-surface merged temperature anomalies are used to monitor climate variations and to evaluate climate simulations; therefore, it is important to make analyses of these data as accurate as possible. Analysis uncertainty occurs because of data errors and incomplete sampling over the historical period. This manu...

A revised framework is presented that quantifies observed changes in the climate of the contiguous United States through analysis of a revised version of the U.S. Climate Extremes Index (CEI). The CEI is based on a set of climate extremes indicators that measure the fraction of the area of the United States experiencing extremes in monthly mean sur...

Drought is an important climatological phenomenon which has significant socioeconomic and environmental impacts. Several drought indices have been developed to quantify drought, but all of them rely on meteorological observations taken at instrumented weather stations. The instrumental record for drought monitoring in the U.S. extends back only abo...

Drought in the continental United States (U.S.) is a recurring phenomenon that has shown large natural variability on both the instrumental and paleoclimatic time scales. Recent research examining global changes in drought suggest that drought conditions have increased globally in the last 50 years (Dai et al. 2004). In the U.S. as a whole there is...

The contiguous United States has experienced both warming temperatures and a general increase in precipitation during the period 1950-2006. During that time drought has been a recurring phenomenon with a number of large droughts occurring, starting with the major drought in the 1950s in the Central United States and culminating with the persistent...

Drought is an environmental hazard which results in billions of dollars in economic losses as well as societal suffering and increased mortality in many parts of the world each year. No country is immune from its effects and there is documented evidence of an increasing trend in droughts in many regions since the 1970s. There is also a high likelih...

The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report and other climate assessments have documented an increasing trend in temperature and precipitation extremes, including hot days and nights, heavy precipitation events, and area affected by droughts. Extreme weather and climate events such as these often result in significant socioeconomic and environmental costs wi...

This paper briefly summarized a number of climate monitoring issues of specific interest to the broadcast community. Included were details on NCDC's State of the Climate reporting process, scientist interaction with media outlets, and additional types of data and products of most interest to broadcasters and other media sources. The climate informa...

Drought is an important climatological phenomenon which has significant socioeconomic and environmental impacts. Several drought indices have been developed to quantify drought, but all of them rely on meteorological observations taken at instrumented in situ weather stations. The instrumental record for drought monitoring in the U.S. extends back...

189AT Times Cited:1 Cited References Count:15

This paper summarized the global and U.S. climate conditions in 2005, focusing on year-to-date and seasonal values of temperature and precipitation. Additional data and information are available on the National Climatic Data Center website (2005). It should also be noted that this work is a prelude to the much larger effort of preparing the State o...

1] Global surface temperature is a critical measure of climate variation. Here the averages of a new surface-temperature analysis are compared to an estimate of the global average which has been used for monitoring surface-temperature variations at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) since 1998. As a replacement to the existing method, this...

Over the contiguous United States, precipitation, temperature, streamflow, and heavy and very heavy precipitation have increased during the twentieth century. In the east, high streamflow has increased as well. Soil wetness (as described by the Keetch-Byram Drought index) has increased over the northern and eastern regions of the United States, but...

Two climate indices that are useful for monitoring the impact of weather and climate on energy usage and crop yields in the United States have been developed at the National Climatic Data Center. The residential energy-demand temperature index (REDTI), which is based on total population-weighted heating and cooling degree days in the contiguous Uni...

La Niña and its Impacts. Facts and Speculation EDITED BY MICHAEL H. GLANTZ xviii + 271 pp., 23.5 × 15.5 × 1.7 cm, ISBN 92 808 1071 5 paperback, US$ 21.95, Tokyo, Japan: United Nations University Press, 2002 - - Volume 30 Issue 3 - Jay Lawrimore

Neutral ENSO conditions at the beginning of 2002 gave way to a strengthening El Niño episode during boreal summer. Weather patterns in many areas of the world reflected the warm phase conditions.The average global temperature in 2002 was 0.45°C above the 1961-1990 mean, which places 2002 as the second warmest year on record. Land temperatures were...

Over the contiguous United States, precipitation, temperature, streamflow (in particular, base streamflow), heavy and very heavy precipitation and high streamflow in the East have increased during the 20th century. In the past 50 years, in addition to these changes, increases in evaporation, near-surface humidity, total, low, and convective cloudin...

It is the thirteenth year that the Climate Assessment has been written to summarize the state of the earth's climate, and the third year that the National Climatic Data Center has taken the lead in its production. It is a cooperative effort that includes contributions from scientists around the country and the world. Neutral ENSO conditions at the...

Drought experts from the United States, Canada, and Mexico met at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina, for a three-day workshop in late April 2002 to discuss the U.S. Drought Monitor program and to develop a plan for initiating a new program of drought monitoring for North America. Since its inception in 1999, the U.S. Dr...

Global temperatures in 2001 were 0.51°C (0.92°F) above the long-term (1880-2000) average, which places 2001 as the second warmest year in the 122-year instrumental record. Land temperatures were 0.75°C (1.35°F) above average and oceantemperatures were 0.40°C (0.72°F) above the 1880-2000 mean. This ranks them as the second and third warmest on recor...

The objective of NOAA's RATPAC project is to develop climate-quality global, hemispheric and zonal upper-air temperature time series from the NCDC radiosonde database. Lanzante, Klein and Seidel (LKS) have produced an 87-station adjusted radiosonde dataset using a multifactor expert decision approach. Our goal is to extend this dataset spatially an...

The climate assessment for the year 2001 was presented. Global temperatures were 0.51°C placing 2001 as the second warmest year in the 122-year instrumental record. Land temperatures were found to be 0.75°C above average and ocean temperatures were 0.40°C above the 1880-2000 mean. The temperature of northern hemisphere continued to average near rec...

Observed decreases in pan evaporation over most of the United States and the former USSR during the post-WWII period, if interpreted as a decrease in actual evaporation, are at odds with increases in temperature and precipitation over many regions of these two countries. Using parallel observations of actual and pan evaporation at six Russian, one...

The global climate in 2000 was again influenced by the long-running Pacific cold episode (La Niña) that began in mid-1998. Consistent with past cold episodes, enhanced convection occurred across the climatologically convective regions of Indonesia and the western equatorial Pacific, while convection was suppressed in the central Pacific. The La Niñ...

Observed decreases in pan evaporation over most of the United Stares and the former USSR during the post-WWII period, if interpreted as a decrease in actual evaporation, are at odds with increases in temperature and precipitation over many regions of these two countries. Using parallel observations of actual and Dan evaporation at six Russian, one...

Decreasing pan evaporation trends in many regions of the world have been viewed as evidence of a decrease in the terrestrial evaporation component of the hydrologic cycle. However, some researchers suggest that the relationship between pan evaporation and terrestrial evaporation depends on the environment in which the measurements are recorded and...

The global climate during 1999 was impacted by Pacific cold episode (La Niña) conditions throughout the year, which resulted in regional precipitation and atmospheric circulation patterns across the Pacific Ocean and the Americas that are generally consistent with those observed during past cold episodes. The primary La Niña-related precipitation a...

Using rural/urban land surface classifications derived from maps and satellite observed nighttime surface lights, global mean land surface air temperature time series were created using data from all weather observing stations in a global temperature data base and from rural stations only. The global rural temperature time series and trends are ver...

The EPA's Chemical Mass Balance Receptor Model (CMB7) was used for analysis of nonmethane hydrocarbon source-receptor relationships in the Raleigh, North Carolina Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). Three hour integrated ambient samples collected 15 km southeast of downtown Raleigh from 5–8 AM weekdays during August, 1993 were analyzed for speciat...

As part of an effort by the state of North Carolina to develop a State Implementation Plan for ozone control in the Raleigh Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), vertical measurements of C2-C10 hydrocarbons were made, in and above the surface inversion layer (SIL), as inputs to the urban airshed model (UAM). Three-hour integrated ambient air samples...

NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites measure time variations of the Earth's gravity field enabling reliable detection of spatio-temporal variations in total terrestrial water storage (TWS), including groundwater. The U.S. and North American Drought Monitors are two of the premier drought monitoring products available to...

Drought is an environmental hazard which results in billions of dollars in economic losses as well as societal suffering and increased mortality in many parts of the world each year. No country is immune from its effects and there is documented evidence of an increasing trend in droughts in many regions since the 1970s. There is also a high likelih...