Snow comes to an end in Central Illinois
The National Weather Service in Central Illinois has issued a Winter Weather Advisory for Champaign, Edgar and Vermilion Counties for Monday from 2:00-9:00 a.m. Meteorologists expect 2 to 3 inches of snow and winds gusting as high as 35 mph. Morning drivers are warned that bridges and overpasses may be slick and hazardous.
The National Weather Service in Chicago has issued a Winter Weather Advisory for Ford, Iroquois and much of the Chicagoland area from now until Monday at noon. Slippery travel conditions are expected due to lake enhanced snow with snowfall totals between 1 and 5 inches.
Click here for the latest road conditions from the Illinois Dept. of Transportation.
Monday morning forecast from Meteorologist Andrew Pritchard:
ANDREW PRITCHARD: A Winter Weather Advisory is in effect for Champaign County and surrounding portions of East Central Illinois until 9:00 on Monday morning. An intense band of lake-effect snow delivered a quick coating of snow and blustery winds to the region overnight, with some areas seeing an inch or two of accumulation. Strong northwest winds gusting to 40 miles per hour, along with continued falling and blowing snow will create dangerous travel conditions through the morning, especially in rural areas. Conditions will improve on Monday afternoon, as snow and gusty winds begin to fade with warmer temperatures returning to Central Illinois through the rest of the week. For Illinois Public Media news, I’m meteorologist Andrew Pritchard.
School closings/delays for Monday, November 9
CHAMPAIGN COUNTY
Rantoul City Schools will have a one-hour delayed start. Morning PreK is cancelled. All other schools and their bus routes will start one hour late. Afternoon PreK will start at regular time.
DeWITT COUNTY
Clinton Community School District #15 will be closed Monday due to a power outage. The superintendent’s office says this will not be an E-Learning Day. All after-school activities will continue as scheduled. And officials are confident school will resume on Tuesday.
VERMILION COUNTY
Salt Fork South Elementary & Junior High in Sidell will have an E-Learning Day.
Georgetown-Ridge Farm CUSD #4 will have an E-Learning Day.
Hoopeston Area School District #11 in Hoopeston will have an E-Learning Day.
A trio of space weather satellites blast off together to study the sun’s violent side
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A cluster of space weather satellites blasted off Wednesday morning to cast fresh eyes on solar storms that can produce stunning auroras but also scramble communications and threaten astronauts in flight.
The three satellites soared from Kennedy Space Center shortly after sunrise on the same SpaceX rocket. They aimed for a sun-orbiting lookout 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth, each on its own separate mission.
Altogether, the satellites from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, plus related costs, are worth about $1.6 billion. NASA’s Joe Westlake calls it “the ultimate cosmic carpool” by sharing a rocket to save money.
Heading the lineup is NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, the first to be deployed. It will scrutinize the outer limits of the heliosphere, the protective, solar wind-driven bubble of gas around our solar system.
As a bonus, IMAP will be capable of providing advance notice of solar storms — a valuable 30-minute heads-up — for astronauts exploring the moon under NASA’s Artemis program. Officials expect the observatory to be fully operational by the time four astronauts fly around the moon and back next year.
NASA’s smaller Carruthers Geocorona Observatory is also flying, focusing on Earth’s outermost, glowing atmosphere that extends well beyond the moon. It’s named after the late scientist George Carruthers, who invented the ultraviolet telescope left on the moon by the Apollo 16 astronauts in 1972.
The satellite was designed at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
NOAA’s newest space weather observatory will be pushed into full-time, around-the-clock forecasting service. It will keep tab on the sun’s activity and measure the solar wind to help keep Earth safe from threatening flares.
Officials expect NASA’s satellites to be in position and operational by the beginning of next year, and NOAA’s spacecraft by spring.
NASA is kicking in more than $879 million for its two missions, while NOAA’s share is $693 million.
While NASA already has a fleet of sun-observing spacecraft, science mission chief Nicky Fox said these newer missions offer more advanced instruments that will provide more sensitive measurements.
“Just being able to put all those together to give us a much, much better view of the sun,” she said.
The goal is to better understand the sun in order to better protect Earth, according to officials. As spectacular as they are, the northern and southern lights will not be the missions’ focus.
During a preview of NASA’s upcoming Artemis mission around the moon, science officials said Tuesday that these new space weather missions will enhance forecasting and provide vital alerts if major solar activity strikes. If that happens, the four astronauts will take temporary shelter in a storage area under the capsule’s floor to avoid the heightened radiation levels.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
The Midwest is getting warmer, even though summer highs are dropping. Here’s why
Summer afternoon temperatures have cooled off in the middle of the country in recent decades. But hotter nights and winters are still driving more overall warmth in the region.
By one measure, summers in the middle of the country have actually gotten cooler.
The Midwest and Great Plains are in what some scientists call a “warming hole” — summertime high temperatures have gotten measurably cooler in recent decades.
“Our climate is changing, but just a little bit differently than the general trend that we talk about nationally or globally,” said Missouri’s state climatologist Zack Leasor. “We’re still seeing these warming temperatures, but it looks different than other locations.”
From eastern Texas and Louisiana up through the Dakotas and Minnesota, the average high daily temperatures have been cooler in recent decades than they were in the middle of the 1900s.
But these same areas have still seen an average warming trend, mainly driven by hotter overnight temperatures and winters. Local climate scientists say this is an example of the Midwest’s unique flavor of climate change.
What’s behind it
Globally, average temperatures have spiked in recent decades and scientists say the increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is to blame.
Last year was the warmest year on record, but warming has not happened evenly across Earth. The Midwest stands out.
“There’s this area of the United States that hasn’t seen a lot of warming during the summertime, particularly during the day,” said Zachary Labe, a climate scientist at the nonprofit Climate Central.
Labe and a group of other scientists looked into why that might be happening in an article published in the American Meteorological Society Journal of Climate.
“Admittedly, there are still some uncertainties, but I think the clues are starting to come together,” Labe said. “Like most things in Earth’s weather and climate, you know, it’s never a simple answer.”
There are a few factors that seem most likely to create this “warming hole” in the Midwest, Labe said. The main one is a change in moisture.
In recent decades, there has been an increase in cloud cover, rainfall and moisture in the Midwest, which are all coming together to keep daytime high temperatures lower.
Scientists think one ingredient in the warming hole recipe has to do with the ocean.
“It’s likely that the cause of some of the increases in precipitation and cloud cover might be related to changes in ocean temperatures in the Pacific Ocean,” Labe said.
Those ocean temperature changes might be a mix of both climate change and natural variability, Labe said.
Increases in agricultural land could also play a part through a phenomenon that has gotten a lot of attention lately — corn sweat or evapotranspiration.
“There’s so many articles written about corn sweat these days that I think probably people can kind of get this idea,” said Illinois state climatologist Trent Ford. “The large-scale conversion of Savannah forest, or, in the northern part of the Midwest, just straight up mixed hardwood forests, or prairie, to cropland agriculture has increased the local contributions to humidity.”
Large swaths of land that are now irrigated crops like soybeans and corn can make things more humid as the plants release water vapor, and humidity has a leveling effect on temperatures. When the air is thick with moisture, temperatures can’t spike as high.
“We have seen in the summertime more humid conditions,” Ford said. “What that humidity does is it makes it a little bit harder for the actual air temperature to heat up once the sun comes out, and it makes it a little bit harder for that air temperature to cool down once the sun sets.”
Sticky humidity
Despite the cooler daytime highs, the Midwest’s summers are still getting warmer on average. That has been driven by dramatic increases in nighttime temperatures.
“We’re seeing more and more of these really hot nights where sometimes the low temperature doesn’t even fall below 80 degrees,” Labe said. “That really stresses the body, causing a multitude of health issues in people.”
The same humidity that keeps afternoon temperatures lower also holds onto heat in the air overnight.
“Just as we’ve seen a decrease in those 90 degree days, we’ve seen an increase in the number of nights where the temperature doesn’t cool below 70,” Leasor said about Missouri.
Those warm nights have offset the cooler afternoons, Leasor said, leading to slightly increasing average summer temperatures in Missouri overall.
Last month, multiple states also broke their records for the most humid July, including Missouri, Illinois and Michigan.
Humid heat has also led to summers feeling warmer in the Midwest. Climate Central has found a pattern of more humid, hot summers in the middle of the country when considering equivalent temperature, a measure of humidity and temperatures that is different than the heat index.
Rethinking heat
These hot, muggy days and abnormally warm nights can actually be more dangerous for human health. That’s why scientists think the Midwest needs to rethink its approach to heat.
“How we think about heat, how we communicate that … and then how we build out those systems, has to be more nuanced than just, ‘How hot is it during the day?’” Ford said.
Extreme heat communication like warnings from the National Weather Service are often built around the highest possible temperature and highest possible heat index. But in the Midwest, researchers have found heat-related health issues actually happen at lower temperatures.
Scientists say factors like humidity, total hours of consecutive extreme heat and overnight lows need to be taken into account to protect the public.
“Often the records are what captures people’s attention, both in the media and just day to day conversation,” Labe said. “But really, I think things like nighttime temperatures, to me, are extremely concerning.”
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.