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The technical achievements of Lewis and Clark have been celebrated in fields ranging from cartography to zoology. As America commemorates the bicentennial of their historic journey across the continent, this paper shows that their meteorological data and personal weather-related observations also are worthy of celebration. While the primary goal of the mission, as described by then-President Jefferson to the Congress, was economic and strategic, both Jefferson and cocaptains Lewis and Clark showed an interest in and capacity for scientific understanding of the meteorology of the then-unknown West. The seasonal evolution and variability of temperatures recorded for the first time by Lewis and Clark on the High Plains can now be shown to be quite close to average, thanks to many decades of collection of modern data by the U.S. Cooperative Observer Network stations along their route. While the diets, lives, and experiences of these early explorers and their men were profoundly different from those of modern Americans, the climate that they documented for the first time with care and accuracy remains familiar to us today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about several papers discussed at a symposium on Arctic sea ice and climate in November 2008 at the Woods Hole Oceanographie Institution, Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Topics include anthropogenic change and natural variability in the climate of Arctic region. The symposium featured several scientists who discussed the Arctic system in the context of climate change.

Attribution of extreme events is a challenging science and one that is currently undergoing considerable evolution. In this paper are 19 analyses by 18 different research groups, often using quite different methodologies, of 12 extreme events that occurred in 2012. In addition to investigating the causes of these extreme events, the multiple analyses of four of the events, the high temperatures in the United States, the record low levels of Arctic sea ice, and the heavy rain in northern Europe and eastern Australia, provide an opportunity to compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of the various methodologies. The differences also provide insights into the structural uncertainty of event attribution, that is, the uncertainty that arises directly from the differences in analysis methodology. In these cases, there was considerable agreement between the different assessments of the same event. However, different events had very different causes. Approximately half the analyses found some evidence that anthropogenically caused climate change was a contributing factor to the extreme event examined, though the effects of natural fluctuations of weather and climate on the evolution of many of the extreme events played key roles as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]