This assessment is designed to provide a timely summary of the current state of the global climate system. It is the seventh in an ongoing series of annual climate assessments produced by the Climate Prediction Center. The assessment documents global climate variations, oceanic and atmospheric anomalies in the global Tropics and extratropics, and selected significant regional climate highlights.
Issues related to global and regional climate change are addressed in section 2, including atmospheric temperatures and precipitation, ozone, methane, carbon dioxide, and snow cover. An analysis of several phenomena that exhibit substantial interannual variability and influence the short-term climate on timescales of months to seasons is presented in section 3. The analysis includes 1) the Southern Oscillation (section 3a), with a focus on cold episode conditions in the tropical Pacific during 1996; 2) tropical intraseasonal (Madden-Julian oscillation) activity (section 3b), which played an important role in the tropical and extratropical circulation features during the year; and 3) the North Atlantic oscillation (section 3c), which exhibited a strong negative phase during the year. Section 4 documents regional climate highlights and provides a summary of the major monsoon systems during the past year. Topics include flooding (drought) in the northwestern (southwestern) United States, a cold and snowy 1995/96 winter in the eastern United States, a summary of the African rainy seasons, major rainfall and temperature anomalies over Australia, and the Indian monsoon. Finally, section 5 shows seasonal maps for temperature anomalies, precipitation percentiles, and 500-hPa heights and anomalies. These maps are included for reference and to continue the set of maps that have appeared in the previous six Annual Climate Assessments.
A variety of data sources were used in the compilation of this assessment, including 1) gridded analyses from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction/National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP/ NCAR) Climate Data Assimilation System/Reanalysis Project (Kalnay et al. 1996), 2) surface data obtained over the operational Global Telecommunications System (GTS), 3) satellites, 4) radiosondes, and 5) ship reports. Selected analyses were also obtained from international climate data centers. It should be noted that due to the variety of different data sources used throughout the assessment, it is not possible to maintain a consistent base period among all fields when computing anomalies.