1. Regional Climate Change Detection What is a climate? How does one define a climate in terms of measured variables? After defining it, how does one measure actual change in a statically defensible manner. Most of local climate change is simply assumed to be occurring because global change is occurring

2. Anecdotal Evidence Often Used More frequent extreme-heat days A longer growing season An increase in heavy rainfall events Earlier breakup of winter ice on lakes and rivers Earlier spring snowmelt resulting in earlier high spring river flows Less precipitation falling as snow and more as rain Reduced snowpack and increased snow density

3. Use an Indexing Method Climate is largely a monthly/seasonal phenomena – not annual Take a weather site and say it has 100 years of data for all 12 months and pick a variable like max temperature. Use all 100 months of January to compose the average max. For each month then in each year, compute the Z-score for that month/year Z-Score = (x - µ) / 

4. Now Generate a Composite Index  NEI yr = (Zmx yr + Zmn yr + Zrn yr + Zsw yr ) / 4  Can then weight each of the 4Z’s  The result is a wave form some given site for one of the Z parameters

5. DEFINE THE INDEX SEASONALLY: Each Arrow Is separated by Exactly 40 years

6. BASIC CLIMATE LITERACY 6

7. 4 DIFFERENT CLIMATES: ½ THE TIME THERE IS A LARGE SCALE DROUGHT 7

8. Our Approach to Baseline instability problem Each site has a monthly Z-score generated compared to a 100 year baseline. Combined /weighted 4 months of all sites produces that years Z-score (index). Adaptive Kernel Smoothing which gives the most weight on proximate years. Gaussian Kernel width = 7 years. Produces a waveform with decadal scale “features” that emerge from the noise 8

9. Climate Signal from Recovered Waveform (positive values represent warm wet) 9 NE Summers significantly Warmer and wetter  higher humidity  more effective DTC

10. Feature of Interest: Winter Time Precip 10 The rectangular box starts in the year 2000. The total integrated area (below zero) is larger than any other 13 year period in the data, including the droughts in the late 1920’s and the WW II years. The box is also not a strongly peaked drought event. Moreover, the volatility within that box is low and comparable only to the 1955-1967 window of low volatility. Within the last 50 years, this box is a significant departure from a period marked by large winter time precipitation volatility on time scales of approximately 10 years and hence represents CLIMATE CHANGE. Sept 2013 Prediction that upcoming Winter season will see 1/3 of normal; currently at 16%

11. Policy Debate 11 "Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present," the National Climate Assessment says, adding that the evidence of man-made climate change "continues to strengthen" and that "impacts are increasing across the country.“ Today’s global warming doomsayers simply lack the scientific evidence to support their claims. A host of leaders in the scientific community have recognized that the argument for drastic anthropogenic global warming is no longer based on science, but is being driven by irrational fanaticism.”