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.

Everyone in this country has politics on the mind these days. No matter how you vote, everyone agrees it is an historic election.

While both candidates have said they support clean coal, I wonder exactly what that is!

I see lots of ads on TV and online about clean coal. These ads are sponsored by lobbying groups hired by the coal industry.

You can clean up the air pollution coming out of coal. You can drastically reduce the amount of soot, and sulphur, and other pollutants coming from coal fired power plants. Most plants have almost no emission controls at all. Why? Isn’t the clean air act requiring it?

Here is a dirty little secret. The Clean Air Act in 1972 required power plants to install emission controls when they rebuilt their plants. So they have not rebuilt them in 30 years! Well they have, but they have managed to use the acts wording to replace just about everything in the plant, without having to add emission controls!

The only way to make coal truly clean is to mine it in such a way that we do not totally ruin streams, and massacre millions of acres of hardwood forest. If you have not seen what is currently happening to the mountain tops in West Virginia, then you cannot really understand how dirty, and damaging coal is.

Let’s just pretend for a minute that we figure a way to stop lopping off mountains, and polluting streams with toxic materials. We still have the problem of Carbon. Coal is carbon and when you burn it, CO2 goes into the atmosphere. Until we find a way to capture that CO2 and store it, coal will still be very, very dirty.

In spite of the junk science on talk radio, and online, almost every expert on climate on this planet now believes we have less than 30 years to begin reducing our emissions. The world’s leading climate scientist Dr. James Hansen of NASA believes we have even less time than that. He thinks we are on our way to an ice free planet if we do not do something is less than 20 years!

The Sierra Club has a nice site explaining the options here:

http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200701/coal.asp

It MIGHT be possible to capture the CO2 and mine coal in a way that is sustainable to our environment. Current estimates put the cost of coal done right at a price more expensive than wind, and solar.

So the next time you see one of those clean coal ads on TV, or online, Or either presidential candidate says they support clean coal technology. Just say what I tell my Environmental Science class at a local college. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS CLEAN COAL. Period.

One last thing. I have mentioned James Hansen several times in this journal. Jim Gandy, a good friend of mine, and one of the best Meteorologists on TV in Eastern America, got an interview with him last Friday. You can see the raw video courtesy WTLX here

Later,

Dan

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!

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

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