Two paleoclimatologists at the University of North Carolina have found a way to track a storm—or, at least, track the average of all storms across the season—325 years in the past, according to an article in the latest The Atlantic magazine.  The scientists used tree ring data from ponderosa pines in the Pacific Northwest to identify the average seasonal storm track each year based on the array of tree ring variations in the trees across the region. It’s a really fascinating story about how you can put together data in new ways to provide information which not only informs us about past climates but gives us a glimpse of what it might look like in the future. You can read the article at https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/dendro-cascades-tree-rings-wise-pacific-northwest/531747/.

Photo: M. Simmonson, USFS via Commons Wikimedia