Climate Data Information

Global Snow and Ice A recent post called "Water Behaving Badly" by Willis Eschenbach looked at the change in sea ice at the poles. He concluded that the change were marginal when both Arctic and Antarctic ice were considered. In this post I have taken this a stage further looking at global sow and ice cover.  The main data sets I have used are the NSIDC sea-ice data set and the global snow cover from Rutgers University. The first of these deals with snow lying on ice and the second deal with snow lying on land. In both case I have used the monthly data. The following chart shows the global snow and ice cover from the end of 1978 to the near present.  Add caption The chart has monthly values and a 12-month moving-average. The main message from the chart is that snow cover area is, indeed, tending to reduce. However, it is difficult to argue that the rate is is any way approaching catastrophic. The trend line plotted through the 12-month average values repr...

Climate Change Impact Part 9: Example –Kyrgyzstan Summary Kyrgyzstan has a continental climate with cold winters and hot summers. Most of the rain falls in the summer months and temperatures are below freezing for most of the winter months. It is projected that storm rainfall will increase by up to 20% and that the duration of lying snow will decrease. Introduction Kyrgyzstan is in central Asia and has severe winters with temperature below zero for many months, particularly in mountainous areas. Figure  1  Map of Kyrgyzstan showing project road Climate change can affect roads in many ways. The most obvious is storm rainfall; an increase in storm rainfall could require modification to current design for culverts and longitudinal drains. Other factors include daily temperature range, which could affect expansion joints, and maximum temperature, which could affect the choice of binding agent. Once current values of these parameters have been ...

The Georgia Institute of Technology has recently released details of a study of the relationship between Arctic Sea Ice and Northern Hemisphere Snow Cover. The press release summarises it as “The researchers analyzed observational data collected between 1979 and 2010 and found that a decrease in autumn Arctic sea ice of 1 million square kilometers -- the size of the surface area of Egypt -- corresponded to significantly above-normal winter snow cover in large parts of the northern United States, northwestern and central Europe, and northern and central China.” This goes some way to explaining the fact that whereas Arctic Sea Ice has been tending to decrease (at 53,000 km2/year) snow coverage has declined more slowly (at 22,000 km2/year). The importance of snow and ice is their role in the albedo feed-back mechanism. Snow reflects almost all the incoming energy, water and land (at least the northern boreal forests where most snow falls) reflect about 10%. So, other things being equ...