Dan’s Wild Wild Weather Journal

If your reading this blog from anywhere  in the Northern Hemisphere, you know how crazy the weather has been in December. Here in the Southeast USA, we have had warm and dreary conditions, with nearly 11 inches of rain in Huntsville. This is not a record though. Back in 1990 we had over 18 inches!

The West, and North have had bitter cold, and snow for most of the month. Blizzards in Seattle, Detroit, and heavy lake affect snow in Michigan, and New York.

Here in the Tennessee Valley, we finally got just a dose of what has been the rule up North. Bitter cold arctic air has moved in, and as I type this on Sunday night the first day of Winter, it is -7C!

So what happens next you ask? Well first let me explain why it has been so warm here, and cold elsewhere.

The storm track locked into a pattern in early December. (See below). This kept us wet and mild, while most of the country had snow, and cold.

The pattern broke this weekend, and the cold made it into the East and South.

It will not last though. The long range guidance is all advertising a return to the storm track of the last two weeks, with cold and snowy weather in the North and West, and mild wet weather in the southeast.

The image below is the storm track forecasted by the WRF model, for Christmas Eve. The upper left panel is the storm track, and the bottom right is the forecast of precipitation for the 12 hour period during the day. I’m always happier with the jet stream to my south….I love SNOW!

Later,

Dan

The map below is courtesy Penn State Meteorology.

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