AMS Student Assistantship

Posted on 2012-11-01 by Brian Magi

Daniel Cunningham received the Student Assistantship award for AMS 2013 in January. so he’ll get room and board in a hotel right next to the conference for the whole week of the conference. This is in addition to his presentation at the AMS 2013 Student conference. Congratulations!

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Interdisciplinary speaker series

Posted on 2012-10-17 by Brian Magi

Since I’m on the committee that is organizing our department Speaker Series, I thought I’d pass along the announcement of the upcoming speakers. 3 in the fall semester, but 6 or 7 in the spring. one of our committee goals was to find speakers with a range of expertise that matched the breadth of disciplines in the GeoEarth department. I think we met that goal, and just as importantly, all the talks sound like they’ll be really interesting. UPDATED 2012-12-10 to reflect the Geography and Earth Sciences move to a new web server (I’m also on the GES committee that helped manage that move).

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Remembering the warmth with temporal averaging

Posted on 2012-10-15 by Brian Magi

It’s been cool in North Carolina and in Charlotte in August and September 2012, as I talked about on one of my posts. In that post, I said that if you really want to know whether the temperatures you are experiencing are representative of the bigger picture, you can “zoom out” from the city level (or Climate Division) to the state level and even to the country level. This is easy with the NCDC website which archives USA climate data. Another way to think about the temperatures in a particular month (like September 2012) is to zoom out in time. In other words, take a longer time average to see whether the temperature averaged over the last few months or even the whole year are at all like the temperature you are experiencing in the here and now. (we’re still talking about monthly temperature, not the weather).

Using figures that you can get at NCDC, I made the animation above. The figure shows the temperature averaged over progressively fewer months (starting with 12 months up to Sep 2012 and going down to just Sep 2012). I think the data in the figure shows that the temperatures departures over the last year (Oct 2011 to Sep 2012) in North Carolina were dominated by unusually large warm anomalies back in the winter months, from about Oct 2011 to Mar 2012. Starting in May 2012, the temperature anomalies in NC were below average, but these below-average temperatures we’ve been experiencing are swamped by the above-average temperatures from the what we did experience (but may have forgotten). When you look at the trend in the country as a whole, and focus on the Oct 2011 to Sep 2012 image when it pops up, you can see that most of the country is very warm compared to average.

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Cool in North Carolina, but not the USA

Posted on 2012-10-10 by Brian Magi

Between all the various climate excitement in the news – like record-low Arctic sea ice – temperature measurements continue to be collected. A really great webpage to actually examine the temperature data is at the NOAA National Climatic Data Center. The NCDC data shows that in 2012

           North Carolina   NC Climate Division 5*  Contiguous USA
     July  80.5 (+3.2)      81.1 (+2.4)             77.2 (+3.3)
   August  75.7 (-0.4)      76.1 (-1.3)             74.6 (+1.7)
September  69.8 (-0.9)      70.3 (-1.6)**           67.0 (+1.4)

*includes Charlotte and Mecklenburg County
**corrected after an NCDC website glitch which originally had values of 74.1 (-1.5)

where the bigger number under each header is the avereage temperature for the particular month in degrees Fahrenheit, while the number in the parentheses is the departure (or anomaly) of the month to the average temperature for that month for the 20th century (1900-1999). North Carolina, like most of the USA, had a really warm July 2012 and the country experienced the warmest July in the 118 years of records. On the other hand, August and September temperatures in North Carolina this year were about a half degree to nearly a full degree less than the 20th century average temperatures. These much cooler-than-average temperatures were even more pronounced in southern North Carolina, which I show above as NC Climate Division 5. This climate division includes Charlotte and Mecklenburg County.

This is a great example of how even when the local temperature for a particular month is below or above average, this may not be true when you examine other parts of the country, or in the case of Charlotte, other parts of the state. This same analogy is true when comparing regional (like USA) to global temperature trends. The summary is that even though NC had a cooler than average Aug-Sep, the USA on the whole still experienced a warmer than average August and September to pile on to the warmest July on record.

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Presentations at AMS 2013

Posted on 2012-10-05 by Brian Magi

Both Daniel and I will be travelling to Austin Texas for the 2013 American Meteorological Society meeting. Thousands of students and scientists attend this meeting to discuss topics ranging from weather forecasting to climate modeling to air quality. My research on fire-climate interactions may not seem to fit at first, but one of the key inputs to my fire model is lightning and it turns out there is a very large number of presentations by experts in all aspects of lightning. That’s the group of scientists I’ll be presenting to in a talk called “The Role of Lightning in Simulations of the Spatiotemporal Distribution of Global Fire“. I’m looking forward to getting feedback from the people who study lightning more rigorously than I do. Daniel will present “Extending the Time Series of Satellite-Based Lightning Observations” as a poster at the AMS student conference. This is the research he is doing for his Honors thesis.

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Changes to Global Environmental Change webpage

Posted on 2012-08-24 by Brian Magi

just a few notes about the changes to my teaching webpage for my Global Environmental Change (ESCI 3000 this semester – Fall 2012, expected to be ESCI 3101 by Fall 2013) webpage. i updated just about everything there so the interface would be more useful for students, but there are many links to climate-related internet sources for discussion, books, visualizations, and of course DATA related to climate science. i will point out that the NCDC websites and the CMIP5 websites are especially useful. CMIP5 is family of model experiments that will support IPCC AR5 which is being written and revised this year and expected to be published sometime in 2013. CMIP3, I think, were the model experiments that supported IPCC AR4 publications in 2007.

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More lightning and fire research

Posted on 2012-08-17 by Brian Magi

Daniel Cunningham will continue his research from the CRS program during the 2012-13 academic year with Dr Magi in the form of Independent Study. He presented a poster at the CRS Symposium on 25 July 2012 and discussed his research experience with a China-US exchange program at UNC Charlotte as well. We plan to move the research forward and present our results at the AMS Annual Meeting in January 2013.

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Fire seasonality paper published in Biogeosciences

Posted on 2012-08-10 by Brian Magi

We had some very useful suggestions by reviewers which prompted revisions that I think better emphasized the methods and results. The paper is now officially published in Biogeosciences in html or as a pdf.

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Examining Geospatial Correlations in Lightning Frequency

Posted on 2012-06-26 by Brian Magi

Cross posted from Charlotte Research Scholars blog.

The goal of our research this summer is to explore the possible correlations between lightning frequencies below 40˚N and above 40˚N in the boreal regions of Canada. We are using 15 years of lightning data measured from instruments on NASA satellites.

During the first two weeks of the program I read journal articles related to the satellite instruments and learned about different ways to explore large datasets. I learned how to use a program called Panoply to study the full 15 years of data (Figures 1-2 are from Panoply), and am now learning about MatLab, a program that can be used to calculate statistics for large datasets. Devoted global lightning observation began in 1995 with the Optical Transient Detector (OTD) aboard the MicroLab-1 satellite (Figure 1), but this detector fell out of orbit in 2000.

Figure 1

A second lightning detector, called the Lightning Imager Sensor (LIS) on the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM) satellite, has been collecting data since 1998 and is still in operation. LIS collects lightning data between 40˚S and 40˚N (Figure 2). As a result, there is a gap in the data above 40˚N after 2000, which can be seen by comparing Figures 1 and 2.

Figure 2

Using MatLab, I hope to determine whether correlations exist between the latitudes with data from 1996-present and the latitudes with data from 1996-2000. I can then use the statistical relationships to extrapolate the dataset beyond the year 2000.

— Daniel Cunningham

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Charlotte Research Scholars 2012

Posted on 2012-06-10 by Brian Magi

Daniel Cunningham (junior in Meteorology BSc program) is one of the 50 UNC Charlotte undergraduates selected from a pool of over 170 applicants to receive funding for summer research from the inaugural Charlotte Research Scholars (CRS) program, sponsored by UNC Charlotte Academic Affairs. Daniel will be working with Dr Magi from June-July 2012 on a project titled ‘Lightning and Fires’. We will work on enhancing a lightning dataset, test a couple of hypotheses, and develop a better understanding of how lightning and fire interact. More news as it develops, but congrats to Daniel!

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