Dan’s Wild Wild Science Journal

Pileus clouds form as air is lifted above a rapidly rising thunderstorm. The holy grail of Pileus clouds are the ones that have blue sky between the cloud and the top of the cumulonimbus. The storm usually blasts right through the Pileus in a few seconds, so getting a pic before this happens is rare. If you do, the story goes, you will get your pic on the cover of Weatherwise Magazine! You can see one here: http://severewx.atmos.uiuc.edu/01/11-clouds/08-pileus2_romine.jpg

Thermodynamically, what is happening is this. The layer of air above a rising storm tower is lifted and cools. The cool air cannot hold as much moisture and a strati-form type cloud forms. The storm usually pushes right on through it, and it slowly evaporates.

Enter NASA and the International Space Station.

The ISS Astronauts took this incredible photo of an erupting volcano in the NW Pacific a few weeks ago.

Sarychev Volcano on Kuril Island of Matua (Japan)

Yes, That is one incredible pileus cloud. A pyroclastic flow?? is visible on the slope of the volcano as well.

According to NASA, there has been a lot of discussion among Geologists, and Meteorologists about the hole in the cloud around the island. (This is just the type of thing we weather geeks love to argue about too!)

The question is whether the erupting volcano “punched” a hole in the cloud deck, or was it already there. If it did punch the hole, what was the process by which it did so?

NASA rightly points out that many times air being lifted over an island, will cause clouds to evaporate as they are pushed into the dry air above the marine layer. I think this is not likely the case here. The volcano did it.

This happened in one or two ways. Probably both. The rising plume of hot volcanic ash lifted the air, and any cloud quickly evaporated. The other likely scenario is that the plume of ash lifted the air around it. The atmosphere strives for hydrostatic balance, and so air descended around the plume. This causes adiabatic warming, and the clouds would again disappear as the humidity dropped below 100%. The curve of low cloud seems to match the plume, so this seems likely to be part or most of the answer.

Either way, it goes down in history as the most INCREDIBLE pileus cloud ever photographed. I’ll bet you a pizza it makes the cover of Weatherwise!

The Copenhagen Climate Conference report is now out. In it, the consensus opinion is that we must hold CO2 levels to 400 ppm, IF we are to stay below 2 degrees Celsius of warming. The current CO2 level is 385 ppm and rising at 2 ppm per year. You should read this report. It’s an excellent summary of the current knowledge.

Do the math. We may have less than 15 years.

The House of Representatives here in the U.S. passed the Waxman-Markey climate bill. It faces a huge hurdle in the Senate before becoming law.

IF it becomes law.

It barely passed the House, in spite of the dire straits we are now in.

You will see almost nothing in my previous posts about this legislation and for good reason. When it comes to climate change, I write about the science, and avoid the politics. What I can comment on is this. The science is overwhelming.  It’s very clear that we are running out of time to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Is the Waxman Markey approach the best policy??

I DON’T KNOW.

Your guess is as good as mine, and perhaps better! Converting science to policy is a very messy process.

I just returned from Portland in Oregon where I presented at a short course on Climate Change. The course was part of the 37th annual Conference on Broadcast Meteorology sponsored by the AMS. In my talk, I made the point that since those of us who do weather on TV are the only science person the average person sees each day, we should avoid the policy, and stick with explaining the science.

I’ve written before about the fact that many on air weather folks have been skeptical about the IPCC conclusions. I came away from Portland with a much different feel. I think that the pendulum has begun to swing big time. (At least among those of us who have a college level background in atmospheric science. Read my previous post for more info on why there was so much skepticism.)

I expected some intense questions from the audience, and really the questions were more in the vein of understanding the science better, instead of the usual claims that have long since been dismissed.

Without doubt, the policy IS important. I can highly recommend reading Joe Romm’s Climate Progress, and Only in it for the Gold by Micheal Tobis. They have an excellent discussion about the pros and cons.

Different views on how we solve the emissions problem are natural, and we should respect them. It should be intensely debated. The issue is one that will impact us and our descendants.

What I have little patience for is the absolutely silly, and even ignorant statements made during the debate by two elected officials. Those members of Congress who called Climate Change a hoax should be ashamed of themselves.

So lets be clear here. When Jim Inhofe (and others in the Senate and House) say climate change is the greatest hoax in history perpetrated on the American public, they are showing ignorance of basic science. This is nothing less than an embarrassment to the people of Oklahoma he represents.

I grew up in Oklahoma, and we are not ignorant. (We just talk with a funny twang!). Is it time for the people of Oklahoma to tell their senator to clean up his act, and quit making a fool of himself?

Yes.

Talking with the scientists at the seminar last week, it was very clear, that since the last IPCC report in 2007, the science has shown that we have less time than we thought. The greenhouse gas levels are rising even more rapidly than the worst case scenario envisioned by the IPCC in 2007. Sea level is also rising more rapidly than predicted. You likely already know about the Arctic Ice.

Imagine the frustration of a solar physicist like Dr. Judith Lean of the Naval Research laboratory. She, and others like Ben Santer of Lawrence Livermore National labs have produced conclusive science that the sun is not to blame for the warming we have seen in the last 50 years. Make no mistake, this kind of research is very difficult and time consuming. Their science has been published and lauded in the top peer reviewed journals in the world. Yet, elected officials still stand up on the floor of the Senate, and House and proclaim silly statements like “It’s the sun stupid”.

Dr. Mark Serreze the director of the National Snow Ice Data Center was right when he called these kind of statements “Breathtaking Ignorance”.

Perhaps the best way to fix climate change is to elect representatives based on intelligence, not party.

So my opinion, pro or con, on Waxman Markey is not the subject matter of this post. Nor will it be in a future post. What to do about climate change is a policy issue, but the science should not be. I will stick with the science here, and on air. It’s fascinating, and also rather alarming. I still believe that if we can educate the world on the real science, the planet will collectively make the right decisions.

Am I naive??

Perhaps, but it’s not because I’m an Okie.

The American Meteorological Society has thousands of members in all types of atmospheric disciplines. The smallest group is likely the broadcast Meteorologists. We have a little over 100 attendees here in Portland at the the 37th annual AMS Conference on Broadcast Meteorology. I know what you are thinking. A room full of 100 people with very good haircuts.

You might be surprised though. We come in all colours, shapes and sizes. I even have a slight green tint to my hair due to a hotel pool in Seaside Oregon. It’s a long story, and believe me, it was a real shock, considering I was three days away from presenting at a Climate Seminar that kicked off the conference!

Online remedies included white vinegar, and crushing a bunch of aspirin up, and mixing with shampoo. Mixed results, but it seems a bit better. Apparently this is a result of my attempt to hold off my rapidly greying hair with a grocery store product! I haven’t told my News Director about this yet, but someone at the station will read this and pass it on I suspect!

The conference has been quite good today. We had an update on the GOES satellite program. Almost all of the weather satellites you see on TV, or online are from the GOES. GOES stands for Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite.

They are at the same altitude as the satellites that are used for TV signals. At 35,780 km high they take exactly 23 hours, 56 minutes and 47 seconds to orbit the Earth. This is precisely how long it takes for the Earth to turn once on it’s axis. They therefore, hover over the same spot, and with infrared sensors, you can get satellite images of any spot in the USA, every 15 minutes. Around the clock. In rapid scan mode, every 7.5 minutes. (The more observant of you might be wondering why your clock takes exactly 24 hours to go around, not 23 hours 56 mins. and 47 secs.! You should!- Here is a hint: SUN)

A new GOES will be launched in a few days. GOES O will likely become Goes 14. They are given a letter before launch, but once operational, they are given a number. The current GOES satellite, that covers much of the Eastern 2/3rds of North America, is designated as GOES 12. GOES 13 is already in orbit, but in storage. This new GOES will not significantly improve our abilities to monitor the weather.

The big improvement will come with the GOES R series in 2015. The next generation of satellites will have higher resolution and sensors capable of “seeing” much more, in the non visible wavelengths. It will also be able to give a close to true colour look at the Earth. The reason you cannot get true colour now, is that there is no sensor for the green wavelengths. (True colour requires Red, Green and Blue) Money is the reason. Big cost for little gain according to what was said today by James Gurka, of NOAA NESDIS.

Perhaps the greatest advance will be the new GLM. That stands for Geostationary Lightning Mapping sensor. We will be able to see real time lightning data across the entire western hemisphere. Not just cloud to ground data like you see on TV during stormy weather now, but cloud to cloud, and in cloud lightning. (Yes that is what it’s really called, I am not simplifying names here!)

I am asked often about the lack of lightning warnings. We warn for severe storms and tornadoes, but why not for lightning?? It’s a good question and there is not one single answer. The gist of it though, is that we do not have enough data or knowledge to do a decent job of it. We should though, because lightning kills more people in the USA, in an average year, than hurricanes or tornadoes.

Portland sunset Monday night from my balcony. Click for full pic.

That is changing though, and by the end of the next decade, I think we will indeed have the ability. Frankly, we should have already had GOES R in orbit. The USA is falling behind Europe in remote sensing. Many grad students now go there to work on their research, because they have satellites with the newest technology up already.

A satellite built to gather information on climate crashed into the ocean recently. Who knows if a replacement will be built. Science has truly suffered in this country. I have written before about the war on science, the fact that GOES 14 will not go up for 6 years is at least partially a result.

These satellites cost each American a few pennies per day to operate, and it has been said that if they could see only hurricanes and nothing else, the cost would have been worth it, ten times over! They see much more though. I will do a post soon and show you just how much information is available in one satellite image!

G’nite from a cool and green Portland. Green, in more ways than one!

ps “colour” is correct with or without the u, and I like it with the u. So get over it!

The American meteorological Society is having it’s Broadcast Meteorology Conference in Portland next week. There is a short course on Climate Change on Sunday and I was asked to present by Bud Ward, of the Yale Climate and Media Forum. Since this part of the world is one of my favourites, I took the opportunity for a MUCH NEEDED break, and took some holiday time along with the conference.

View Thursday, from Ecola St. Park Near Cannon Beach, OR (Dan's pic)

So that explains the title and the fact that I am typing this with the sound of Pacific Ocean tide coming in, coming through an open window. This has also been a day to try out my Fathers Day present of a new Canon DSLR.

My only real hobby other than weather/Earth Science, is photography. I am actually not very good. My wife has a much better eye for composition, but she never reads the manual for the cameras. I memorize the manual. Guess who takes the better pics! Yea, she does…(You can always tell our pics apart- mine have more clouds in them!)

I rode a bicycle down the Oregon Coast in the Summer of 1977, and it’s one of my fondest memories. Cannon Beach was a sleepy town then, but the developers moved in long ago… sigh..

I read the other day somewhere that “Growth for the sake of growth is the mantra of a cancer cell.” I think Bobby Kennedy said that. Oregon is a very Green state, literally, and figuratively, so the coast is still beautiful in spite of a few billboards touting helicopter rides around Seaside.

Back to the climate conference.

It comes along just after the release of the U.S. Global Change report that was the subject of my last post. There were a few graphics in this report that are rather alarming. The drop in precipitation over the West and the Plains is drastic.

There seems to be growing evidence that this has already begun in earnest. Have you seen Lake Mead and it’s now famous bathtub ring? There is not enough water in Nevada, for Las Vegas to double in size again, no matter that politician say there is. Unless of course, you take it from someone else.

There has been some great science in the last 15 years showing that mega droughts are common in the West, even without climate change. The water allotments in place now were based on flows through the Colorado River in it’s wettest decades, not the average, and not the driest. They just didn’t know it at the time!

They know it now.

Even if Climate change was not arriving (and it is, believe me) the West was facing it’s day of judgment. Climate change is just going to speed it up, and make it much, much worse. The graphics below speak for themselves. This report is the first time that Climate experts have been able to publicly predict regional scenarios. The methods to do this have been developed largely in the last 10 years, and I have had the pleasure of talking with some of the scientist who have done it.

The two images above on this page are from the U.S. Global Change report. You should look at it.

Lake Mead is showing signs of continuing drought. (from NASA)

My Grandmother clearly remembers wetting sheets and hanging them over the windows to keep out the dust bowl in the 1930’s. She said they would be dripping with mud in an hour. Oklahoma may see that return in spades, if we don’t figure out how to drastically slow the amount of fossil fuels we burn.

The residents of the western USA had better hope they”re wrong. I seriously doubt they are though. Unlike the junk I recently got from the Heartland Institute, this is peer reviewed science..

I frequently get asked about local effects of climate change, and my response before now has been that there isn’t a lot of good information on this. The main reason has been that global climate models do not have the resolution to make that prediction. There has been a lot of work underway in that regard and I saw some of it at a conference on climate in Chicago in April. New techniques have now made regional predictions much more possible.

Today, the U.S. Global Change Research Program released it’s long awaited report. This report deals with climate change on the level in which we all interact with our environment and ecosystem. LOCALLY.

The news is not good, and I will write more once I have had a chance to go through it. I am lucky to know some of the brilliant scientists who have had a hand in this research. It has taken years of hard work to come up with these projections. Below is a 20 page pdf summary with graphics that will likely surprise you.

Here in North Alabama for instance, we have about 45 days a year with a maximum temp. of 90 or above. This new research forecasts that number to nearly triple to near 120 by the last decade of  THIS century. The climate of Illinois will resemble the climate of West Tennessee and North Mississippi by the 2090’s. Yes it’s that bad.

It’s important to understand that these projections are based on society continuing to use fossil fuels at the present rate of increase, with no change toward cleaner energy for decades. The sooner we change to cleaner renewable fuels, the lower the impacts.

Read a summary here: