Climate and Weather

The Road to Paris is a web site created by the ICSU, "...a non-governmental organization representing a global membership that includes both national scientific bodies (121 National Members representing 141 countries) and International Scientific Unions (30 Members)," founded in 1931. If the ICSU had not existed when the UN was formed, the UN would have formed it. Think of the ICSU as the UN of Science. More or less. (Follow Road to Paris on Twitter.) Anyway, Road to Paris refers to the 2015 international meetings on climate change, and the purpose of the web site is to provide excellent…
The term "Polar Vortex" was thrown around a lot last year, in reference to the persistent mass of very cold air that enveloped much of southern Canada and the US. As you will remember, Rush Limbaugh accused climate scientists and librul meteorologists of making up the polar vortex to scare everyone into thinking climate change is real. You may also remember Al Roker pointing out on national TV and on Twitter that the term "polar vortex" has been in meteorology textbooks for decades. This year, with a new wave of cold air arriving unseasonably in the upper middle part of the US, the term is…
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has released its official prediction of what this winter is going to be like. And yes, it is in ALL CAPS!!! I've pasted it below, but first a summary of the relevant points. According to NOAA El Nino There will be a weak El Nino, late Autumn or Winter. Or, there could be a moderate EL Nino. Or, there could just be this thing that might someday be an El Nino but doesn't quite do that for an indefinate period of time. November, December, January Temps Warmer along the West and Northwest, all the Northern State and New England, and the…
Did you ever leave your freezer door slightly open on a humid day only to find chunks of new ice formed at the gap? When that happens, did you conclude "Oh, my freezer is colder than usual, I wonder how that happened?" No. You concluded that you had left the door slightly open, some cold got out, and vapor froze on your gasket. Sea ice is hard to make. The sea is salt water, so it has a lower freezing point than fresh water. The sea has potentially large waves and lots of currents. This is just not a situation where ice can easily form. Yet, it does form on the oceans near the Earth's…
The Arctic Sea is covered with ice during the winter, and some of it melts off every summer. Over recent years the amount of melt has been increasing. This is the time of year we may want to look at Arctic Sea ice because by late September it has reached its annual minimum and is starting to reform. Looking at JUST surface area, which is one indicator of how warm the Arctic has become with Global Warming, we can see (above) that this years march of melting has been extreme, hugging the two standard deviation limit for all of the data from 1979 to 2010 (almost the present). Here you can…
In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Steven Koonin, former Department of Energy Undersecretary and BP scientist makes the case that global warming is caused by humans, important, that we must do something about it, and that further research on key topics is necessary to help guide policy. He states, The crucial scientific question for policy isn’t whether the climate is changing. That is a settled matter … We know, for instance, that during the 20th century the Earth’s global average surface temperature rose 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit. Nor is the crucial question whether humans are…
The Polar Vortex hurt. We who lived in it, through it, with it, are like farm animals that got zapped by the electric fence a couple of times ... notice all that long grass growing by the fence. Stay away. It hurt! So we are worried that this will happen again. It is a reasonable worry, from a scientific point of view. The Polar Vortex visitation last winter was the result of changes to trade winds and jet streams that has characterized our weather for the last few years. One of the big questions on my mind is this: Are wavy jet streams and corresponding changes in the distribution of…
Odile was the strongest hurricane to strike the Baja Peninsula during the period of available data, roughly similar to Hurrican Olivia (1967). The storm reached Category 4 strength but was then weakened because of interaction with the effects of a prior hurricane in the area (Norbert). At the moment, Odile is a tropical storm and still in the Baja. There was flooding, and two fatalities, including a lightning strike and a nine year old boy taken by floodwaters. Several building in Acapulco were damaged. There has been a lot of damage and disruption in the Baja region. Tropical Storm Polo…
A new paper advances our understanding of the link between anthropogenic global warming and the apparent uptick in severe weather events we’ve been experiencing. Let’s have a look at the phenomenon and the new research. Climate Change: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. It is mostly bad. Sometimes it is ugly. I was looking at crop reports from the USDA and noticed an interesting phenomenon in Minnesota, that is repeated across much of the US this year: Fewer acres are in crops but among those acres that are planted there is a high expected per-acre yield. The higher yield will make up for the…
Lots to talk about here: Published on Aug 1, 2014 Arctic Emergency: Scientists Speak On Melting Ice and Global Impacts (1080p HD) This film brings you the voices of climate scientists - in their own words. Rising temperatures in the Arctic are contributing the melting sea ice, thawing permafrost, and destabilization of a system that has been called "Earth's Air Conditioner". Global warming is here and is impacting weather patterns, natural systems, and human life around the world - and the Arctic is central to these impacts. ------------------------------------------------- Scientists…
Maybe yes, maybe no. Good chance, yes. It is too early to call, but the blob I mentioned the other day has turned into a spiral and is starting to get organized. Forecasters at NOAA think there is an 80% chance this low pressure phenomenon will be a tropical storm by the 4th of July. They are also, somewhat vaguely, saying that it will move south, then northward, then northwest, which puts the storm off the coast of the US Mid-Atlantic or Southeast somewhere. Given that the storm is not moving in a consistent direction steered by well defined one directional forces, this should be very…
I made a movie you might enjoy. There may be something else out there like this, probably better than this one, but it is still cool. I downloaded all the PDF files from the US Drought Monitor archives, using the version of the connected US that has only the year, month, and day on the graphic. Then I slapped them in iMovie and sped the animation up by 800% over the default 1 sec. per pic. I do not have today's rather horrifying image on it, which I've placed above. Here's the movie:
This Sunday morning, on Atheist Talk radio, I’ll interview Paul Douglas, America’s favorite meteorologists (at least when the weather is good). When I first moved to Minnesota, which happened to be during a period of intense Spring and Summer storminess for a few years in a row (including this event which wiped out Amanda’s dorm long before I ever met her), I spent a bit of time while searching for a place to live watching the local news, to get a feel for the place. Coming from the Boston area, where the main local news stations aggressively compete with each other using their…
... and by that I mean the El Niño phase of the El Niño Souther Oscillation climate pattern. We have been in an ENSO neutral phase for a while. Climate scientists have a hard time predicting El Niño, which arrives in Summer, Fall, or Winter, this early in the year, but nonetheless most prediction sources, and most models, now tell us that we are likely to have one staring, really, any time, but most likely Summer or Fall. Here's a graph of several models. The bottom colored area is Le Niña, who we assume was Jesus Christ's sister, and the top colored area is El Ninño, with the middle part…
The last hurricane season in the Atlantic was anemic, being one of least active periods on record. This was attributed to extra dust blown off the Sahara which inhibits hurricane development. Right now, the various forecasting agencies around the world are agreeing that there is a greater than 50% chance, perhaps a 70% chance of an El Nino event happening this year, starting in the Summer or Fall. Traditionally, we think of El Nino events as inhibiting tropical storm and hurricane formation in the Atlantic. Today, a group that predicts hurricane activity in the Atlantic every year has used…
I grew up (and beyond) in the US northeast. There, the weather was pretty good at coming at us from the West, though a nor'easter blowing in from the North East (unsurprisingly) was not uncommon in New England. Although I had studied sea level rise and some Pleistocene climate reconstruction, when I first went to the field in Central Africa I was pretty unschooled in areas of climate and weather. I remember the first several days in the Ituri Forest. I though I knew which way was North, South, East, etc. but then I would get turned around because the big storms -- that came in every single…
There's a thing I've been doing every Spring for a few years no, privately. This year I decided to tell you all about it because I think you might find it useful. I call it the "Hope Graph." I moved to Minnesota from a slightly warmer climate. The winters here are long, and they are made longer by the local culture. For example, in Minnesota August is a relatively cool month. One gets the impression Fall is coming during the month of August, and the occasional tree or bush that has something wrong with it so it turns red early does not help. (Personally I think we should find and kill…
Here's the thing: Shauna Theel has a video on the Polar Vortex vs. Rush Limbaugh: Published on Jan 9, 2014 Media Matters Climate & Energy Program Director Shauna Theel debunks Rush Limbaugh's conspiracy that the "polar vortex" was created by the media to lie to you about climate change. Peter Gleick previously posted this Google Ngram on the term "Polar Vortex" and al Roker tweeted about it as well: .@alroker @kaleekreider Here is the actual history of the use of term "polar vortex". I looked it up. pic.twitter.com/9ZtoDLawyD — Peter Gleick (@PeterGleick) January 8, 2014 Here's a…
A new study has been published demonstrating, among other things, that the climate of Middle Earth has strong analogies in certain areas of Modern Earth. In particular, climate modeling indicates that The Shire is most similar to either Lincolnshire or Leicestershire in the UK or the vicinity of Dunedin in New Zealand. Mordor is most analogous to Los Angeles and western Texas or Alice Springs in Australia. Radagast the Brown But I think the most interesting conclusion of this research is about forest cover in Middle Earth. Based on advanced climate modeling, the paper's author,…