Freezing rain is an especially hazardous type of adverse weather and is frequently observed in Churchill, Manitoba. The goals of this study were to assess the climatology of freezing rain in Churchill, assess the synoptic climatology of the Hudson Bay region using a multi-level synoptic classification scheme, assess the relationships between the synoptic climate and freezing rain events, and assess the trends in synoptic types and to discuss the implications of climate change in relation to the expected changes in freezing rain. For the years 1953 thru 2009, freezing rain was observed during 796 hours, an average of approximately 15 hours per year. A 34-type multi-level synoptic classification consisting of five NCEP/NCAR reanalysis datasets was constructed. Type-20 was associated with a majority of the freezing rain cases. More research is needed to understand how climate change may impact the timing, frequency and intensity of freezing rain in Churchill.

Freezing rain is an especially hazardous type of adverse weather and is frequently observed in Churchill, Manitoba. The goals of this study were to assess the climatology of freezing rain in Churchill, assess the synoptic climatology of the Hudson Bay region using a multi-level synoptic classification scheme, assess the relationships between the synoptic climate and freezing rain events, and assess the trends in synoptic types and to discuss the implications of climate change in relation to the expected changes in freezing rain. For the years 1953 thru 2009, freezing rain was observed during 796 hours, an average of approximately 15 hours per year. A 34-type multi-level synoptic classification consisting of five NCEP/NCAR reanalysis datasets was constructed. Type-20 was associated with a majority of the freezing rain cases. More research is needed to understand how climate change may impact the timing, frequency and intensity of freezing rain in Churchill.

Research has demonstrated that equivalent temperature (TE), which incorporates both the surface air temperature (T) and moist heat content associated with atmospheric moisture, is a better indicator of overall heat content. This thesis follows up on a study that used TE to determine the impacts of land use/land cover and air masses on the atmospheric heat content over Kentucky during the growing season (April-September). The study, which used data from the Kentucky Mesonet, reveals that moist weather types dominate the growing season and, as expected, differences between T and TE are smaller under dry atmospheric conditions but larger under moist conditions. For example, the lowest TE-T difference was 10.04 °C on a dry weather day on the 18th of April, 2010 (T = 8.91 °C and TE = 18.95 °C). On the other hand, the highest estimated difference for a day of moist tropical weather was 46.54 °C on the 11th of August, 2010 (T = 26.54 °C and TE = 73.08 °C). Since land cover type influences both moisture availability and temperature in the lower atmosphere, the research shows that TE is larger in areas with higher physical evaporation and transpiration rates. Results support the hypothesis that the influence of different weather types over a region is a likely cause of interannual variation in TE.

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