This beetle paid me a brief visit a couple of days ago, and then moved on to a Bidens bipinnata, Spanish Needles, apparently for a brief rest.



At first I thought it might be a Typocerus zebra, a Zebra Longhorn, which we have seen before. But it is glossier, without hairs, a much sleeker body shape, yellow head and antennae, and the pronotum has those two black longitudinal stripes. No, not a zebra longhorn.

So it seems to be a Strangalia luteicornis, a flower longhorn, yes, but no further common name that I can find. Very common, inhabiting deciduous forest margins. Apparently the children like decaying dead wood; the parents go after nectar. There are some nice photos at the bottom of Valerie’s Austin Bug Collection that show the resemblance between zebra longhorn and a Strangalia species closely related to this one.



As for the scientific name, I have no idea where Strangalia comes from but the luteicornis would probably be “yellow horns,” referring to the antennae. Valerie notes that the species she photographed was attracted to coreopsis, which we certainly have enough of around here, as well as gloriosa daisies, identifiable in the first of her photographs.

It’s The Month of June, Number 41 in a series. After three months of normal weather, it had to break, and it did in favor of hot and dry. How about you?

From the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center, this is a plot of high and low temperature anomalies for the US. That’s the difference in the average temperature for this June above or below the average for June over many years, plotted in colors. The anomalies are in Fahrenheit.



Once again the northern tier of states from Montana to the Great Lakes were unusually cool for at least the fourth month in a row, this month by 3-6 degF below normal. The northeastern states were also 2-3 degF cooler than normal. This was also true for inland southern California east into Arizona. The southeast US, other than southern Florida, achieved just the opposite polarity of anomaly, 2-3 degF warmer than usual.

The National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center usually hides these precipitation plots here, but this time they just didn’t have them. I found similar plots accrued at the ENSO Summary page.

Though smaller, these do have the advantage of showing both 30 and 90 day anomalies.



Lots of bright green for some of California, and much of the Rocky Mountain states, sprinkling throughout the center of the US eastward to the Atlantic. Not so much for the southeast, with ugly brown dotting much of it. This seems to have been a consequence of a high pressure area over the southeast that diverted moisture from the Gulf of Mexico into the West, while simultaneously preventing cooler air from flowing into the southeast from the North.

For Athens:

Summer arrived. We could leave it at that, but let’s look a little deeper.

Here is my plot of high temperatures for the month of June in Athens. (It seemed appropriate to present high temperatures this time.) As usual, the black dots are for the 18 years 1990-2007 (black dots), 2009 (green line), and 2008 (red line).



After the first week, our high temperatures cruised along like last year’s, generally a few degrees higher than average, which matched the anomalous temperature graphic above. At least we weren’t in Alabama! We broke no records.

This time around, we had 11 days of high temperatures that were at least one standard deviation higher than average. We had only one night below the standard deviation for our usual lows.

For rainfall, the figure below shows the Athens data which are official for our area. As usual the green line shows our actual rainfall, the red shows the average accumulation expected. The black dots are rainfall over the last 19 years, the vast river of peach shows the standard deviation. For the first time since February we fell below average, but it was highly dependent on where you were in the local area. This was also the case for May, but sort of reversed.



I wrote, in June, about several little storms that blew up and indundated our Wolfskin area but didn’t touch Athens. That was reflected in the totals for June rainfall: Athens officially got only 1.66 inches of rain, compared to 3.94 normal inches for June, well below 50%. Here we got 3.20 inches for June, still below average but not by that much.

Still, no one around here has had significant rain for two full weeks now, and with high temperatures several degrees above normal, things are dry enough to trigger red flag warnings. Those are fire hazard days. Over the weekend into Monday we expect a 20-30% chance of rain, but you know how that goes.

And so the improvement we saw in the drought through the spring has somewhat reversed itself. For the year, we are officially 2.1 inches below normal now.

I’ll continue to link to this neat prognosticator in which you can get variously timed precipitation and temperature outlooks. This time around, I’d like to emphasize running your mousie over the various forecasts - California and a lot of other places are due for some changes over the next one to three months.

Geekstuff:
NOAA’s weekly ENSO update indicates that we’re progressing smoothly into a potentially intense El Niño. This may last well into 2010, and so we may be having an El Niño winter with all the various fun that that brings, depending on where you are.

For some reason, the ENSO cycle seems not to excite most of my students - I can’t understand why since the effects can be so profound. However, this semester I have a student from Chile, who already knew about what they call the Niño and Niña currents. He was aware already that the Niño current, pumping heat into the atmosphere on a global scale, had started up, and we entertained each other with our apparently erudite knowledge while the ignorant American students looked on. This is kind of refreshing.

Here’s one reason why it matters: El Niños tend to suppress North Atlantic hurricane development. That’s not to say there won’t be a big one; these things have happened. It’s a tendency.

Here’s another: We haven’t had a strong El Niño since the early 2000s. We have had a couple of modest La Niñas. La Niñas expose to the atmosphere a cold sea surface, capable of absorbing atmospheric heat. As a result, global temperatures tend to not rise as fast and so that’s why you’ve been hearing for the last couple of years from deniers that we’re cooling. Let’s sit back and watch them scramble as the opposing El Niño pumps stored ocean heat back into the atmosphere.

Relive your favorite weather events of the year 2008, courtesy of NOAA. NOAA has a neat State of the Climate product. By clicking on the year, such as 2008, you can get to monthly and even weekly reports and zero in on regional descriptions that are much nicer than my own.

Today is Canada Day, and as you know some of my favorite people are Canadians.

So Happy Canada Day, and glad you’re there to set a good example for some of the rest of us!

This is a topic that I am merely somewhat informed about, as a layman, but since we’re at a critical point, the minimum, in the solar cycle, I thought I’d mention it. I should say that none of these figures is my own, but I believe I’ve referenced them appropriately.

I ran across this 2-page article by Richard A. Kerr in the current issue of Science (Science 324, 1640-1641 (2009), subscription wall) probing our readiness for the next solar maximum. We’re currently at a solar minimum, and the sun is just about ready to start acting up. It’s currently predicted to reach its peak intensity around May, 2013.

The sun goes through 11-year cycles of high and low activity. We’re now beginning Cycle 24. While the actual monthly average irradiance varies only around 0.07% from high to low, periodic ejections of high energy particles do occur during active years.

It’s these ejections that have solar physicists concerned (and excited, of course). As Kerr points out, the ejections seldom point toward earth in its orbit around the sun, but on 28 Aug 1859, a massive billion-ton blast did hit earth. At the time, auroral displays as far south as Mexico were the main perceived effect. The only disruption was to the telegraph system for a day or two, but that was 1859.

By 2009, well, I don’t have to tell you how enormously our civilization depends on a vast array of modern electronics and computers, communication and navigation satellites, cell phones, and even electrical power grids. Just think about how many more people use cell phones, GPS navigation, and wireless internet now than they did at the last maximum in 2000.

So there’s some effort being put to detection and prediction. At the moment it seems to be about on par with hurricane seasonal predictions.

To the right the Yohkoh Solar Observatory, “Sunbeam,” placed into earth orbit in 1991. Until it failed in 2001, it examined the sun. Below is a beautiful photomontage lifted from Wikipedia that shows a soft x-ray image of the sun every few months between Cycle 22 maximum in 1991 (left) and its minimum in 1995. Those were taken by Yohkoh, while it was still alive. Soft x-rays give a good impression of how active the sun is, and you can see how the brilliant sun on the left slides down the descending leg of Cycle 22 to its minimum on the right.

There are a number of ways of measuring solar activity, and one of them is to count sunspots. A little paradoxically, increased sunspot activity is also associated with increased solar activity. As we’re at the minimum right now, there are no sunspots visible. By the time of the maximum in 2013, there may be as many as 90 sunspots at once.

Here’s an example of the count for the descending leg of the last Cycle 23, which peaked in mid-2000. The figure and predictions come from NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center, where you can get all your solar activity needs taken care of.



Also from the Center, here’s the sunspot count for the last ten cycles since 1900. Note the very large activity in 1958, 50 years ago.



Satellite warnings are pretty much out, as far as solar ejections are concerned. From earth, we’ll see those 8 minutes after they occur, and the mass will arrive not much later than that, they travel so fast. No satellite could do better than that.

Reliance then, is on prediction, by theory and by statistical projection. (Did I mention hurricane prediction?) Currently the prediction as of May by the SWPC is for Cycle 24 to be below average. As they point out, this is a consensus opinion, not a unanimous decision.

So now here is this: this NASA article is over three years old and that’s a long time in terms of research progress.

As far as I know, there’s still no certainty as to what causes sunspots, or the sun to go through cycles of activity. As the article states, some think it may be tidal effects from the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, and I’d guess that has to do with Jupiter’s 12-year orbit, approximating the 11 years of a solar cycle.

But the article does mention a solar conveyer belt that, like the oceanic conveyer belt on earth, sinks into the interior of the sun, recycles old sunspots, regenerates them, and returns them to the surface 30 or 50 years later. How long this takes depends on how fast the conveyer belt is moving. If so, it provides something of a basis for prediction: a massive number of sunspots 40 plus or minus 10 years ago would be predicted to arise again. (That’s an interesting revelation to me - I had not thought of sunspots as discrete entities that could be regenerated. I still don’t know if that’s the case, and I have the feeling that someone is going to tell me.)

In that article, it’s suggested that since we had a very large number of sunspots (and activity) at the peak in 1958 (see the next to last figure above), and since no such unusual peak appeared in 2000, we’re due for the unusual number of reincarnated sunspots this time around. (On the other hand, if you look 30-50 years before the 1958 peak, you don’t see any unusual peak in activity. Did I mention hurricane prediction?)

Now that prediction then, in 2006, is at variance with the one made a couple of months ago. What the reality is, we’ll just have to wait and see. And, to get back to the most recent Science, are we ready? Apparently not. But how could we be? I’d guess the GPS and communications and navigation satellites we depend on for far more than most people know are hardened against radiation as best they can be. To be ready there would be to have backups ready to be launched in case of failure, and that seems like a nonstarter.

Coronal ejections during peak activity can occur anywhere on the surface of the sun, in any direction, but I’d guess they’re more or less along the equator in the plane that the earth orbits. I’m not sure how focused such ejections are, but even if by the time they get to earth’s orbit they’re 10 degrees wide (pretty damned focused!). That gives us a 1/36 chance of being hit with any random ejection, of which there may be many over a period of several years. What a crapshoot!

Here we have a couple of golfball-size groundnuts, Apios americana,also known as indian potato, potatobean, hopniss. The plant is a large perennial climbing vine, producing large racemic clusters of reddish brown wisteria-like flowers, and beanlike fruits. This is a native legume that contributed substantially to the diets of native Americans and in turn to that of early European colonists. It’s the swollen tubers that are of interest here, for that is the main edible portion of the plant. The “stem” connecting the two tubers is in fact a kind of a stem, a rhizome, a stem that runs horizontally underground. Here we have a true rhizome, as opposed to a stolon (also an underground stem, but formed a little differently). White potatoes, Solanum tuberosum, form from a stolon, so the tubers are a little different in their origin.

The yellow white stem coming out of the upper tuber is a shoot that started up a few days ago. It’s about a foot long now, and here’s the other end of it. While the leaves haven’t started to expand it looks like that’s what this part is going to become, the aerial portion of the plant.



Let’s sacrifice one of these tubers. Unlike a white potato, the outside skin is more woody, and a bit thicker. I can attest that the description of the white starchy material inside is correct: it is crunchy, more fibrous than granular, as in a raw white potato. It has a sweetness to it, too, and a slightly bitter aftertaste. Actually you’re not supposed to eat them raw.



For some reason, mostly that I haven’t really thought about it, I’ve long conflated groundnut and peanut (Arachis hypogaea), imagining that the two were related. And they are, since they’re both legumes, but not as closely as I’d thought. Though they’re in the same family (Fabaceae) and subfamily (Faboideae = Papilionoideae), they’re in different tribes. The tribe that contains peanut has little else that we’d immediately recognize but the tribe Phaseoleae that contains groundnut also contains common beans, cowpeas, mungbeans, and soybeans. Wisteria is also in this tribe, and if there were a common plant I’d invoke that most reminded me of the habit and appearance of groundnut, it would be that.

Here’s another difference, from USDA Plants. Groundnut is a North American native, well adapted to a huge southern to northern range. Peanut is an introduction from Central South America, probably Bolivia, and confined to a more southerly, semitropical climate.

Groundnut is also a perennial, and peanut is an annual.



But a little thinking about how the edible parts of the plants are different from each other would have told me they’re not closely related.

The storage tubers of groundnuts derive from the underground stems, similar to white potato. Culinarily we’d think of this as a “vegetable”, since it is not a seed-containing fruit.

And that’s exactly what peanut is. The papery peanut shell with the several edible seeds inside is the fruit of the plant. It just happens to be found underground, and that’s because the fertilized yellow pea-like flowers will then grow into the ground, where the fruit will form.

The fruits of the groundnut, not usually considered the edible part, are much more like the pods of a bean or pea, or wisteria, and like those form above ground.

I was hearing, at meetings years ago, from research groups, especially in Lousiana, trying to isolate cultivars of Apios americana that produced larger tubers, with less objectionable side tastes. They seem to be having some success there.

This is a good opportunity to talk about storage organs of flowering plants, and there are many. Let’s talk about onions, carrots, radishes, sweet potatoes, white potatoes, and groundnuts. We think about these the most, around here, since we eat them. And the parts we eat are none of them fruits, since none of these parts contains seeds.

Onions and their Allium relatives (and of course they’re monocots, very distantly related to any of the above), store their excess energy in bulbs. Bulbs are modified basal leaves. As you peel an onion or a garlic, you can see the leaflike structure in the layers that peel off.

Carrots and radishes are swollen taproots. The swollen portion is inline with the shoot above and the smaller roots below. The two examples are in completely different families, Apiaceae and Brassicaceae, respectively. In the latter family we also find turnips, similarly a swollen taproot.

The remaining ones we refer to as tubers, but that’s an imprecise word that encompasses storage organs formed in distinctly different ways and from different tissues of the plant.

Sweet potatoes are the swollen tubers that form on true roots. Sweet potatoes are in the morning glory family, Convolvulaceae, distinct from the last two.

And as mentioned before, white potatoes and groundnuts are swellings of underground horizontal stems, stolons and rhizomes, respectively. White potatoes are in the Solanaceae, the nightshade/potato/tomato/eggplant/green pepper/petunia/tobacco family. And groundnuts, of course, are legumes, Fabaceae.