The Weather Almanac

A Reference Guide to Weather, Climate, and Related Issues in the United States and Its Key Cities

Steven L. Horstmeyer

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780470413258
• eBook ISBN: 9781118015209
• Edition: 12
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Science General
• Index: Biological Sciences

The Weather Almanac, 12th Edition is a resource for a variety of climate and meteorological data including both domestic and international weather trends, historical weather patterns dating back 1000 years, natural disasters, and a 20 page glossary of weather terminology. The book is complete with detailed maps, pictures, and tables compiling climate data from a variety of sources, including the National Weather Service and the US Geological Survey.

Separate sections in The Weather Almanac are devoted to tornadoes, hurricanes, thunderstorms, and lightening, flash floods, and winter storms, and they have been edited from official reports by governmental agencies. The new edition has been updated to include recent disasters such as the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami that devastated Indonesia as well as 2005's Hurricane Katrina. These chapters serve as a basic reference for severe weather and extreme conditions, which can assist in preparing for a weather emergency.

1

Climate Maps of the United States

WHAT IS CLIMATE?

Weather is the day-to-day, sometimes minute-to-minute, changes in the atmosphere. Everyone has an intuitive idea what weather is. But when the time period is extended to months, seasons, years, decades, and longer, we talk about climate. Climate is the long-term state of the atmosphere. It is how you expect the atmosphere to behave.

The change of seasons is part of what climate is. In the Midwestern United States, residents expect hot, humid summer weather to gradually yield to autumn, characterized by cool mornings and toasty warm afternoons dominated by blue sky. In southern and central California, residents know that the brown hillsides that dominate the landscape from late spring into late autumn will begin to green as seasonal rains replenish soil moisture and plants begin to grow.

In Hawaii there is hardly any seasonal temperature change at all, but there are subtle differences from summer into winter in wind and rain events.

Climate is much more than seasonal change. It has been called the “average” of all weather, but it is still more. It can also be the daily, weekly, monthly, or annual range of a weather variable. Climate can be the frequency of occurrence of any weather event such as lightning. In addition there are more complex statistical measures, such as standard deviation that measures the variation about the average, that can help define climate.

Climate can be the average relative humidity at a specific hour of the day or the number of days the relative humidity drops below a certain value. The number of days snow fall exceeds a given amount gives you an idea of the frequency of traffic snarls, while the number of hours the average wind exceeds a given value during a year may help decide about the placement of a wind-powered turbine.

Climate can be defined however you need it to be. You decide what weather variables affect your project and develop a climatology that describes what to expect. The average afternoon temperature for a given place may give you an idea of how comfortable the location is but including a humidity variable and wind speed will give you a better idea of the “comfort climate.”

If you are projecting the heating cost of locating a new office facility, you would want detailed information about lowest temperatures, how long the temperature is colder than a particular value, how sunny the location is, and how windy it is. Each weather variable is part of the “natural gas for heating” climatology, and each affects the demand for natural gas for heating.

In summer a “residential cooling” climatology would include the same variables as for heating along with a humidity variable to account for electrical power demand.

Think of it this way: weather is a rainy day, while climate is a rainy place. All US cities have rainy days, but Seattle has a rainy climate. Portland, ME, has occasional hot days, but Orlando, FL, has a hot climate.

THE CLIMATE MAPS

The 42 maps in this chapter represent a detailed picture, a climatology, of what you can expect over the long term in the lower 48 states.

The data were prepared and quality-controlled by the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for the Climate Maps of the United States (CLIMAPS) database. The maps were redesigned and replotted for grayscale reproduction in this volume.

If you have experience with using or creating contour maps, you may be accustomed to having a fixed data interval between contour lines. That almost never works when creating climate maps because the distribution of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Climate Maps of the United States
• Chapter 2: Renewable Energy
• Chapter 3: Extreme Weather—Disasters, Records, Floods, Heat, Cold, and Blizzards
• Chapter 4: Thunderstorms, Lightning, Hail, and Tornadoes
• Chapter 5: Tropical Cyclones
• Chapter 6: El Niño, La Niña, and the Southern Oscillation
• Chapter 7: Global Warming and Climate Change
• Chapter 8: Air Pollution
• Chapter 9: Climate Data from Around the World
• Chapter 10: Local Climatological Data Annual Summaries 2009
• Chapter 11: A Time Line of Meteorology: 9000 b.c.–2000 a.d.
• Index of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• General Index
• Index
• Index of Select Storms and Events