Jason Sandford
Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
This whole climate change thing is getting really confusing. Informative story here from the Cleveland Plain Dealer:
You just knew it was cool this summer — and you were right. Well, at least across most of the country.
For the second day in a row, the nation’s top weather and climate agency released a report sure to stoke the fires of debate among climate change believers and non-believers.
On Wednesday, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a new report that said there was greater certainty that aerosols — the material more commonly known as “haze,” the tiny airborne particles from pollution and burning of biomass — are leading to a net cooling of the atmosphere that is in competition the green house gases causing warming.
Today, NOAA’s climate arm, the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., announced that the average June-August 2009 summer temperature for the contiguous United States was below average – the 34th coolest on record.
The preliminary analysis is based on records dating back to 1895.
For the 2009 summer, the average temperature of 71.7 degrees F was 0.4 degree F below the 20th Century average. The 2008 average summer temperature was 72.7 degrees F.
NOAA’s climate officials said a “a recurring upper level trough held the June-August temperatures down in the central states,” where a number of states came near their record low for the three-month summer: Michigan (5th coldest), Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Dakota (all 7th coldest), Nebraska (8th coldest) and Iowa (9th coldest).
There were more than 300 low temperature records (counting daily highs and lows) set across states in the Midwest during the last two days of August.
