CSI, or Climate Scene Investigators, include Asheville NCDC personnel

Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

1

Story from the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Heavy snows, cold snaps and heat waves may not be crimes exactly, but CSI is ready to track down the culprits.

This CSI is not on television yet, but the government’s Climate Scene Investigators are on the job.

Recall the blizzardy winter along the East Coast this year? Inquiring minds wanted to know how that could happen in an era of global warming.

Enter the Climate Scene Investigators. They say they found no fingerprints of human-induced global warming in the storms. So they held a lineup of suspects and narrowed it down to two co-conspirators — El Nino and the North Atlantic Oscillation, a pair of changing weather patterns in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

…

The group — whose name echoes the title of the popular CBS TV series, “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” — was formed in 2007 in the aftermath of what they describe as “chaotic” media coverage of record heat the year before. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration needed a team of experts who could investigate weather-related events and quickly report their causes to policymakers and the press, said Martin Hoerling, a meteorologist who heads the group of NOAA climate experts.

Today, the team includes weather and climate experts from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center in Washington; the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina; the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey; and Hoerling’s office.