National Weather Forecast

Two main areas of precipitation will impact the nation as we head through Saturday. One across the eastern United States will bring showers and storms from the Gulf Coast to the Northeast, with mixed precipitation/snowfall in New England back into parts of the Upper Midwest. Another system will impact the Pacific Northwest with heavy rainfall and copious mountain snowfall.

Two areas of heavy precipitation are expected through the weekend – one in the Southeast and another in the Northwest. In both areas, rainfall totals of 3-6” are possible.

As we continue to see rounds of snow in the western United States through the weekend, several feet of snow could accumulate within the mountain ranges. The Sierra, unfortunately, will mostly get missed.

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Nations pledge millions to new climate damage fund at COP28, US criticized for its small contribution

More from CNN: “Global delegates at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai formally adopted a damage fund that was decades in the making, and several countries pledged millions of dollars to it to help nations hit hardest by the climate crisis – an early success on the first day of talks that allows more time to discuss the thorny issues around slashing fossil fuels. But the United States is receiving criticism for contributing an “embarrassing” amount of money to the fund, less than a fifth of the United Arab Emirates’ contribution and 14 times less than the European Union’s. Demand for a fund to channel money to developing countries to help them cope with the impacts of climate change has for years stymied progress at the annual negotiations. The details of the fund were agreed to earlier this month at a pre-COP meeting and were formalized Thursday, in the hope it would allow for progress in other areas at the summit.

The University of California has all but dropped carbon offsets—and thinks you should, too

More from MIT Technology Review: “In the fall of 2018, the University of California (UC) tasked a team of researchers with identifying tree planting or similar projects from which it could confidently purchase carbon offsets that would reliably cancel out greenhouse gas emissions across its campuses. The researchers found next to nothing. “We took a look across the whole market and did deeper dives into project types we thought were more promising,” says Barbara Haya, director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project, housed within UC Berkeley’s Center for Environmental Public Policy, who led the effort. “And we came up almost empty.” The findings helped prompt the entire university system to radically rethink its sustainability plans. In July, UC announced it would nearly eliminate the use of third-party offsets, charge each of its universities a carbon fee for ongoing pollution, and focus on directly cutting emissions across its campuses and health facilities.

Antarctica’s ancient ice sheets foreshadow dynamic changes in Earth’s future

More from the University of Wisconsin: “Nineteen million years ago, during a time known as the early Miocene, massive ice sheets in Antarctica rapidly and repeatedly grew and receded. The Miocene is widely considered a potential analog for Earth’s climate in the coming century, should humanity remain on its current carbon emissions trajectory. Identifying how and why Antarctica’s major ice sheets behaved the way they did in the early Miocene could help inform understanding of the sheets’ behavior under a warming climate. Together, the ice sheets lock a volume of water equivalent to more than 50 meters of sea level rise and influence ocean currents that affect marine food webs and regional climates. Their fate has profound consequences for life nearly everywhere on Earth. While fluctuations in Antarctica’s ice sheets have, over the span of millions of years, grown and diminished at regular intervals tied to natural oscillations in Earth’s journey in orbit, researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and their collaborators around the world have uncovered evidence that Antarctica’s ice sheets grew and shrank more frequently during the Miocene epoch than was previously known.

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– D.J. Kayser