Dan’s Wild Wild Weather Journal

I have read some great books on science this year and I want to share them with you. If you saw my Quick Science report on Sunday morning, then these are the books I was talking about.

Two of them are by one author: Kerry A. Emanuel, Ph.D.

Doctor Emanuel is a professor of Atmospheric Science at what is arguably the best engineering school in the world. MIT in Boston. In my opinion he is the world’s greatest expert on hurricanes. His book Divine Wind is the best I have read on the subject. He has done the impossible in writing a book that is loved by scientist and non scientist alike. Buy it..you will not regret it.

Here is a link to the book on Amazon: Divine Wind
His newest book is about climate change and it is here: About Climate Change

Last but not least is another book on climate. The Two Mile Time Machine is not about the future climate but instead it covers the climate of the past… deduced from ice cores in Greenland. It is a much better and more interesting read than you think it is!

I link to Amazon for convenience, but you can order them from any book seller!

I talked a lot about the disappearing Arctic ice pack in the North of 60 special. When we put it together, there was talk of the summer ice disappearing by the middle part of this century! This is well ahead of even the most aggressive climate models a few years ago.

This week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in California there was a stunning presentation about the ice. Professor Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval Post Graduate School informed the meeting that the climate models were underestimating the heat being brought into the Arctic from ocean currents. He showed new projections that estimated the ice may disappear in less than 10 years!

Is he right? Dr. Mark Serraze of the Snow and Ice Data Center is an expert on the ice and he thinks these new projections are a bit fast, according to an interview with the BBC. Still, he also thinks that models forecast may not be off by much. The climate models have severely underestimated the rate of loss, and this new paper may have hit on the reason why. The ramifications may be that we do not have the time we thought we had to fix our greenhouse gas problem before we make serious changes to our climate. NASA Scientist Dr. Robert Hansen (One of the smartest climate scientists on the planet) says we could be at the tipping point. Not a point of no return, but a point at which we are going to suffer some dramatic changes. Changes that will occur no matter what we do in the future.

Later,

Dan

Our 6pm producer came back to the weather office this afternoon to ask me about a story on the wire about major cuts in the polar orbiting weather satellite program. I was unfortunately very familiar with the problems.

The National Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) provides a ton of data for researchers and weather forecasters like myself.

You have seen these images on my weathercasts many times. While most of the satellite pictures you see on TV weathercasts are from the much higher GOES satellites, the much lower NPOESS images provide very high resolution views in full colour of weather systems.

What you do not often see is images and data from other sensors on these satellites. This data is critical to our understanding of the Earth’s heat budget. Thousands of students and researchers around the world use this data to improve the long term climate models that are so important to our understanding of climate change.

I attended a couple of sessions on the NPOESS problems back in January at the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society. These meetings were packed with stunned scientists who were getting the bad news that many instruments that they depended on for their research would not be put onboard the next generation of satellites because of budget cuts.

There are strong rumors that the program has been mismanaged. One researcher told me it was “Badly mismanaged”. Frankly, I am not close enough to these programs to know whose fault (If any) that is.

There is definitely an overall feeling in the science community that the United States is no longer the leader in Earth Observation research. The European Union has plans for several satellites that will have these sensors so hope is not lost.

However, As a local scientist told me today, the students and their tuition will go to the universities in the counties that pay for this data…and that will be Europe.

Before you make up your mind on whether this research is worth the taxpayer money it will cost…spend some time to understand it.

Here is a link to more information on the NPOESS program:

I invariably get emails from people when we have a cold snap. They usually contain something along the line of “how can you say the globe is warming when we have weather like this?”

The explanation is that people often confuse weather and climate. Weather is what you get. Climate is what you expect.

It is a very cold night across most of the Eastern parts of North America as I write this. It is not that cold everywhere however! A real dry and warm spell is underway out west.

The jet stream is kind of like a rubber band. You push it down with cold air in one place and it bulges North with warm air somewhere else. Usually when we are cold in Alabama, It is warm from the Rockies to the Pacific and in Western Europe. That is the case right now with the UK having a very mild and sunny Easter!

There is little doubt anymore that the planet is warming, and most likely due to the carbon dioxide we are dumping into the atmosphere.

The amount of science done on climate change has increased exponentially in the last few years, and what we can say with a fair amount of certainty has also increased dramatically.

The world we live in IS getting warmer. As it does though, we will still have cold outbreaks. Just not as many of them!
Stay warm (for now!)

Dan