Dan’s Wild Wild Weather Journal

Occasionally a paper is published by a renowned expert or a group of experts in a field that summarizes what we know about a particular topic. These papers are usually destined to be referred to many times and cited by other papers for years to come. Dr. Micheal Mann and Dr. Phil Jones wrote one in 2004 that you should read.

While I realize most readers of this journal may not read papers in the Science journals often, I think this one should be an exception. This is a high tech town, and there are a ton of folks here that DO read things like this. Many others  write papers that are an order of magnitude more complex. Teachers as well around the world should add this to their reading list.

Even if you are not included in the above, this is a great paper to read. Nothing would make me happier than to hear from a young student that read this entire paper.

Michael Mann is one of this country’s top climate scientists, and Phil Jones is head of the famous Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in the UK (Hadley Center).

This paper summarizes what we know about the Earth’s climate over the past 1000 years. It also shows how ridiculous some of the claims in online junk science sites really are. You can read more about climate on my new Wild Wild Climate Page.

The paper can be accessed by clicking on the image below.

You may have heard me mention CoCoRahs on a weather cast a couple of times, and did not pay much attention. Well you should have! If you are the type of person who is interested in science (Why are you reading this if you’re not? You certainly cannot be expecting news about that Brittany person) then you really should check it out.

CoCo Rahs stands for community Collaborative Rain and Hail Study. What it boils down to is this. With the Internet, we can now collect very valuable rain, hail, snow data from across the nation in real time!

This is not only valuable to synoptic forecasters like myself, but to climatologists and hydrologists as well. Both now, and in the future!

It takes 5 minutes a day at most. Less if there has been no rain or snow. Best of all, you will have the good feeling of knowing that your making a valuable contribution to science!

You will have to fork out $28 for a rain gauge but that is the only cost. Just go online and type in your precip..hit submit and you’re done! The reason for the special rain gauge is simple. Your gauge is not accurate! Hold on you say. You have a $500 tipping bucket gauge running on solar power! Nope, the plastic CoCoRahs gauge is better. It is even better than the VERY expensive gauges that NOAA puts in at airports!

Have I talked you into it?? Check out cocorahs.org and look at the power point below!

Here is a link to a power point with tons more info:

I spent last week in Denver at the American Meteorological Society conference

on Broadcast Meteorology.

You should know that of all the Meteorologist who belong to the AMS in this
country, very few work on TV! There are many many more who work for NOAA, NASA,
and private firms. Researchers, climate scientists, university professors etc.

Having the conference in Denver gave us the ability to visit two key research
facilities. The first was NCAR- The National Centers For Atmospheric Research.

NCAR is funded by Universities, NOAA and the National Science Foundation. Almost every person working in the field of Atmospheric Science knows someone who worked at or works now at NCAR. I have two friends who work there. Some of the first research into dual polarimetric radar was initiated there.

NCAR has a nice audio tour with exhibitions, so if you find yourself in Boulder, bring the kids up and take the tour. They even have stromatolites..the very oldest fossils of life on earth. They are thought to have developed very early on the evolutionary time line.

After NCAR I went down the road a bit to ESRL. The NOAA facility at the Earth Systems Research laboratory. We had a nice briefing on the latest Climate Change research and I saw the fabulous Science on A Sphere invented by Dr. Sandy McDonald the director of ESRL. We must get one of these in Huntsville!!! I hope to talk some big local high tech company into donating the $161,000 to get one at Sci Quest. NOAA will provide it at cost.

http://sos.noaa.gov

Imagine walking into a dark room and in front of you hanging in space is the Earth is all it’s colour! The sphere makes it possible to show everything from real time images from the GOES satellites to plate tectonics and climate models. I think it is one of the best educational tools I have ever seen. Imagine following Alabama’s place on the earth through 550 million years of earth history. Radically cool dude!

Last but not least is the bad news. The updates on our climate are full of bad news. In spite of the junk science on internet sites and blogs, the peer reviewed science is full of data indicating the planet is perhaps approaching a tipping point in our climate. Arctic sea ice is diminishing at a much more rapid pace than the IPCC forecasted. Sea level is also rising at a rate above the IPCC midlines.

The public in general is very confused on climate change issues because they have difficulty in picking out science from opinion. The way to do it is Peer Review, and my next blog entry is going to be on just that topic!

Forecasting is my job..Science is my passion….Email me anytime with a science question..I iwill try and find the answer for you!

Later,
Dan

You probably do not recognize the name Ed Lorenz. If I tell you that he was a Mathematician and Meteorologist you probably still would not know who I am talking about. He was famous in science circles though, and you have heard of him too.

You know him for what he discovered.

Back in the early 1960’s Lorenz was running a computer model and made a mistake while inputting the initial data. The mistake was very very small. He misplaced a number after a decimal point.

Kind of like adding your grocery bill up and instead of 49.25cents it was 49.25. and 1/100th of cent. No big deal right. Tell the grocer to keep the change.

Well Lorenz found that when he looked at his computer model, the answer he was expecting was very, very different. He found that in some systems- like the Atmosphere, a very small change in the initial state can lead to a vastly different outcome.

He wrote a paper about it in 1972 called “Can The Flap of a Butterflies Wings in Brazil, Set off a Tornado in Texas”.
Now I bet YOU HAVE heard of that before.

It has come to be called CHAOS theory, and more than one person has said that it was one of the most important discoveries in Physics in the 20th century. One writer at MIT where he was a professor says it ranks right beside Relativity and Quantum mechanics.

Ed Lorenz died last month at the ripe age of 90.

Weather is a chaotic system. This means that a small change in the initial state can lead to dramatically different results in the future.

This is bad news for weather forecasters like me, it means that since we do not know the precise state of the atmosphere everywhere, we will never be able to make perfectly accurate forecasts. A little job security for me I guess!!

Later,
Dan

Here is a press release from NOAA that you may find interesting. Yet another year of unusually warm weather in the USA and worldwide.

NOAA: 2007 a Top Ten Warm Year for U.S. and Globe

The year 2007 is on pace to become one of the 10 warmest years for the contiguous U.S., since national records began in 1895, according to preliminary data from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. The year was marked by exceptional drought in the U.S. Southeast and the West, which helped fuel another extremely active wildfire season. The year also brought outbreaks of cold air, and killer heat waves and floods. Meanwhile, the global surface temperature for 2007 is expected to be fifth warmest since records began in 1880. Preliminary data will be updated in early January to reflect the final three weeks of December and is not considered final until a full analysis is complete next spring.

U.S. Temperatures

The preliminary annual average temperature for 2007 across the contiguous United States will likely be near 54.3 degrees F- 1.5 degrees F (0.8 degrees C) above the twentieth century average of 52.8 degrees F. This currently establishes 2007 as the eighth warmest on record. Only February and April were cooler-than-average, while March and August were second warmest in the 113-year record.

The warmer-than-average conditions in 2007 influenced residential energy demand in opposing ways, as measured by the nation’s Residential Energy Demand Temperature Index. Using this index, NOAA scientists determined that the U.S. residential energy demand was about three percent less during the winter and eight percent higher during the summer than what would have occurred under average climate conditions.

Exceptional warmth in late March was followed by a record cold outbreak from the central Plains to the Southeast in early April. The combination of premature growth from the March warmth and the record-breaking freeze behind it caused more than an estimated $1 billion in losses to crops (agricultural and horticultural).

A severe heat wave affected large parts of the central and southeastern U.S. in August, setting more than 2,500 new daily record highs.

Global Temperatures

The global annual temperature − for combined land and ocean surfaces – for 2007 is expected to be near 58.0 F – and would be the fifth warmest since records began in 1880. Some of the largest and most widespread warm anomalies occurred from eastern Europe to central Asia.

Including 2007, seven of the eight warmest years on record have occurred since 2001 and the 10 warmest years have all occurred since 1997. The global average surface temperature has risen between 0.6 degrees C and 0.7 degrees C since the start of the twentieth century, and the rate of increase since 1976 has been approximately three times faster than the century-scale trend.

The greatest warming has taken place in high latitude regions of the Northern Hemisphere. Anomalous warmth in 2007 contributed to the lowest Arctic sea ice extent since satellite records began in 1979, surpassing the previous record low set in 2005 by a remarkable 23 percent. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, this is part of a continuing trend in end-of-summer Arctic sea ice extent reductions of about 10 percent per decade since 1979.

U.S. Precipitation and Drought Highlights

Severe to exceptional drought affected the Southeast and western U.S. More than three-quarters of the Southeast was in drought from mid-summer into December. Increased evaporation from usually warm temperatures, combined with a lack of precipitation, worsened drought conditions. Drought conditions also affected large parts of the Upper Midwest and areas of the Northeast.

Water conservation measures and drought disasters, or states of emergency, were declared by governors in at least five southeastern states, along with California, Oregon, Maryland, Connecticut, and Delaware at some point during the year.

A series of storms brought flooding, millions of dollars in damages and loss of life from Texas to Kansas and Missouri in June and July. Making matters worse were the remnants of Tropical Storm Erin, which produced heavy rainfall in the same region in August.

Drought and unusual warmth contributed to another extremely active wildfire season. Approximately nine million acres burned through early December, most of it in the contiguous U.S., according to preliminary estimates by the National Interagency Fire Center.

There were 15 named storms in the Atlantic Basin (Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico) in 2007, four more than the long-term average. Six storms developed into hurricanes, including Hurricanes Dean and Felix, two category 5 storms that struck Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and Nicaragua, respectively (the first two recorded category 5 landfalls in the Atlantic Basin in the same year). No major hurricanes made landfall in the U.S., but three tropical depressions, one tropical storm and one Category 1 Hurricane made landfall along the Southeast and Gulf coasts.

La Niña conditions developed during the latter half of 2007, and by the end of November, sea surface temperatures near the equator of the eastern Pacific were more than 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C) below average. This La Niña event is likely to continue into early 2008, according to NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.

Links to data, graphics and analysis, in addition to further national and global data are available online at: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2007/ann/ann07.html

NOAA is dedicated to enhancing economic security and national safety through the prediction and research of weather and climate-related events and information service delivery for transportation, and by providing environmental stewardship of our nation’s coastal and marine resources. Through the emerging Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), NOAA is working with its federal partners, more than 70 countries and the European Commission to develop a global monitoring network that is as integrated as the planet it observes, predicts and protects.

On the Web:

NOAA: http://www.noaa.gov

NOAA’s Satellite and Information Service: http://www.nesdis.noaa.gov

NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov