Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal

View of the Iceland ash cloud taken Saturday midday by NASA Terra Satellite. Click image for full res.

The winds aloft are blowing the ash mainly over the Atlantic today.

Wind flow at around 18,000 feet (500hpk) for Midnight Sunday. NOAA Numerical Weather model (GFS). (The red and blue shading is vorticity-weather geek stuff, just look at the black lines and my arrow toward the UK.)

Some of it is rotating around an upper level low and causing problems in Spain. The wind flow in the mid levels of the atmosphere will blow it more toward the UK and Europe starting late Sunday.  Heathrow and Gatwick could very well be affected.

The ash is up to around 5,000 meters today. Transatlantic flights can get above it. If it gets higher (above 30,000 feet), then more widespread disruptions are likely.

The same satellite also passed over the Gulf just before Noon. It got a great shot of the oil.

See below.

Oil slick is visible at the middle bottom of the pic. Click image for full resolution.

Late word tonight is that the attempt to put a cover over it has failed. Ice is forming in it.

This is probably from the sudden drop in pressure as the oil escapes the sea bed. The tremendous pressure differences between the sub surface and the sea bed are likely involved. The same differences in pressure from the sea floor to the surface will also make this EXTREMELY difficult.

You can demonstrate this to yourself by rapidly letting the air out of your car tires while holding onto the valve. Feel how cold it gets??

Dan

Micahel Tobis, over at Only In It For The Gold, is always a worthy read. Today, he had the image below in a post:

Image courtesy of Only In It For The Gold. Click to go there.

For a much more detailed answer, the go to person is Michael Pollan. Here are two article Dr. Pollan wrote for the NY Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/opinion/10pollan.html

The second one is best but much longer. It will make your jaw drop.

Open Letter to President Elect Obama

Image of Seismogram at Nevada Seismic Lab in Nevada. The quake in Chile was so strong it is pegging the meters on seismograms world wide this morning.

An 8.8 Magnitude quake has hit Chile. It was recorded at a depth of only 35km. This is very shallow and likely means that  catastrophic damage is possible. Large aftershocks are already being recorded.

Data and images from USGS- about 300,000,000 people were close to the quake. 6 million felt a magnitude 7 quake.

The quake hit when most people were in bed asleep.

The USGS says this quake occurred 230 km north of the location of the 9.5 quake of May 1960. That quake holds the record for the largest magnitude quake measured with instruments. It killed over 1600 people.

Update Saturday afternoon:

A Tsunami Warning remains in effect for many areas of the Pacific. The BBC web site as usual has the best coverage world wide. The pictures of roads and bridges in Chile are frightening. We live on a very dynamic planet. It’s easy to forget that sometimes.

Note: The images in this post are not related to it. They are from a new update on Climate Science published jointly by a large group of climate experts. It’s based on the most recent published papers and is an unofficial, but peer reviewed update of the last IPCC report. I think they match well with the subject of this post. Hopefully they will make the point I’m trying to make.

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I’ve had a bunch of emails and calls this week over the stolen emails from the U. of East Anglia. A thief hacked into a server at the University of East Anglia in the UK. They grabbed a bunch of private and personal emails from some of the climate experts and released carefully selected (cherry picked) bits online. The selections were made to fit the agenda of those who subscribe to the belief that climate science is all an international conspiracy. They also tried to hack into a blog site run by some NASA scientists here in the U.S.

Let me make it clear that I do not deal in stolen material and none of that will be published here. I doubt very many reputable news organisations will either. The thieves will be caught, and I strongly suspect the way it will happen is by tracing back who had what snippet when.

Thousands of papers, by thousands of scientists have led to every major scientific society on the planet endorsing the IPCC reports. So you can believe them, or a gaggle of thieves releasing cherry picked snippets of stolen property.

Yes I used the word thieves not thief. Ask any cop. They will tell you that knowingly dealing in stolen merchandise makes you a thief.

Does it really matter?

No.

What matters is the science.

The science in the journals. Not the fake science written by those with a political cause. Having trouble telling which is which. See Where NOT to get your science.

The AMS put out a statement on this as well Friday. Update: James Hansen the top NASA Climate expert has weighed in with what I think are very sane words.

I’m an optimist and believe most people have a fundamental ability to make logical choices. While the junk science may confuse them initially, when it comes down to it, the choice is simple. To believe the same very small set of shrill voices, or the thousands of peer reviewed papers that have led to every major scientific society on the planet endorsing the IPCC reports.

That’s the choice.

Yes, some will side with the  gaggle of thieves releasing cherry picked snippets of stolen property. Some people distrust anything to do with science and they will side with those who are always looking for a government conspiracy to expose.

Most, however, will make the logical choice.  A few will email me asking for places to get reliable science info without the politics. That I can do, and if I can’t I have a bunch of friends who are much brighter than me, who can.

Just writing this post is not something I planned to do, but I have come across a couple of very well written posts, that are  telling about those using  shrill claims of hoax and global conspiracy.

The first is a post on Real Climate by Dr. Gavin Schmidt of NASA GISS. He is one of the World’s top experts on Climate Physics. It’s well worth reading: (I’ve inserted a few line breaks for formatting)

“…let’s examine what is actually happening in the public sphere. There are undeniably people who fervently do not wish for results of the science to be true. This can be motivated many things – vested interest, inclination, background etc. Regardless of why that exists, it undoubtedly does.

However, among the scientific community no-one doubts that humans are causing CO2 (and other GHGs) to rise, no-one is confused about the fact that there is a greenhouse effect and that we are enhancing it, and no-one is in denial of the fact that the temperatures (as predicted) are in fact warming. This information, and the vast amount of ancillary data, theory and modelling that exists has led the science community to warn that continued emissions of GHGs risk changing the climate substantially. Given the first group of people’s inclination to not want this to be true, there have been (and continue to be) determined efforts to undermine the scientific conclusions.

One of the most effective tactics is to continually claim that data is being hidden and that the process is not open and transparent. This is successful, not because anything is actually being hidden, but because regardless of what data is available you can always ask for more.

Five years ago it was a demand than Mann make his code and data available – it was, and nothing changed. A couple of years ago the demand was for the GISTEMP data and code – that was made available… and nothing changed. The requests then moved to CRU, who because of their agreements with the Met Centers, can’t release everything in the public domain. This fact has been greatly exploited by people who conveniently ignore it when making ever more harassing demands for ‘the data’.

Whether they get it or not, nothing will change. The target will simply be moved. Meanwhile, the real need for openness and transparency is set back because the vast majority of demands are very clearly partisan and insincere.

… As for the peer-reviewed literature, bad papers (such as are described in the emails) sometimes make it through the process due to various events. Note that the papers in question are just bad – they come to unjustified conclusions based on faulty reasoning, bad analysis, and (often) a desire to get the ‘right’ result. This is not unique to papers that go counter to the mainstream (there are many bad papers on the other side too), but these are the ones that get picked up by the denial-o-sphere and are loudly touted in Senate hearings as if they undermined a century of work.

Improving the functioning of the peer-review system so that this happens less often is a good idea – because it will lessen the chance of bad papers of any stripe wasting everyone’s time. Note that peer-review is simply an (imperfect) filter that allows scientists to focus on work that has passed a least a basic screening (usually). When we have to respond to obviously flawed, but highly publicised, papers it takes us away from doing real research and focusing on issues about which there is genuine (as opposed to manufactured) uncertainty.

… If people want genuine public debate over issues that matter, the way is clear: Stop fuelling fake witchhunts looking for evidence that GW is a hoax, stop continually going back to long debunked talking points, and instead engage with scientists, here and elsewhere, on real questions.

You will actually find scientists of all stripes remarkably keen to talk about their research and it’s implications once you get past the ‘when did you stop hiding your data’ type accusations. Not everyone has unlimited patience in dealing with constant attacks on their integrity that comes with being in the public eye on these issues, and so many choose not to be involved in that public debate at all. That is a shame, but it’s not a mystery.”

There is another rather long piece you really should read as well. Written by Dr. Jeff Masters the co-founder of Weather Underground. It’s a real eye opener.

Read it here.

OK, that’s it.

Back to the science.

It’s really a lot more interesting.

Dan

A Boat goes over Desoto Falls in Dekalb County Alabama. Sent to the station website by Cynthia Stinson a professional photographer.

Usually when I am asked a question about whether a weather event was caused by climate change, I respond with the standard answer of “You cannot blame any individual event on climate change, you can only say whether climate change made it more likely to occur.” I see Hurricane Katrina blamed on Climate change frequently and the same applies.

Six Flags Under Water- from CBS/AP

That said, what about the incredible flooding rains over the Southeast United States the past two weeks? Atlanta had a foot of rain in the metro area over the last weekend. Here in the Tennessee Valley, large areas have had over 10 inches of rain in the past 10 days. Flooding this time of year is very rare except from a tropical system coming up from the Gulf.

Was this pattern boosted by climate change?

You can make a decent case for an answer of YES.

First of all let’s talk about the direct cause of the flooding. You can blame that on a very unusual pattern for September that developed three weeks ago. While you see surface maps with fronts on TV weathercasts, meteorologists spend much of their time looking at the wind patterns much higher in the atmosphere.

Instead of looking at a certain height, we tend to look at maps that show the winds at a certain pressure level. For example, as you climb higher, the pressure decreases. Near the surface, the pressure is usually around 1000 millibars, or 100 hectopascals for those of you in countries that use that term. They are interchangeable. At around 5,600 meters above the ground you reach a pressure of 500 millibars. Half the atmosphere is below you. This is a good place to track weather systems, for reasons that are a bit too detailed for this blog. If you are real geeky, look up the “level of non divergence“.

Take a look at the 500 millibar image from this past week below. Notice the strong high pressure aloft over SW Canada with a big low stuck beneath it over Western Kansas. This is called a cutoff low, because it’s cutoff from the main atmospheric flow pattern. These cutoffs will usually move little and last for a long while. Up to a month is possible. Forecaster slang for this High and low combination is to call it a “block”. When they develop they block the flow, and the flow in the atmosphere goes around it.

500 MILLIBAR FLOW courtesy NCAR.

In Idaho this evening, the weather balloons had to climb to 5,930 meters to reach the 500 millibar level. The warmer the atmosphere, the more the pressure levels spread out, so this indicates a large dome of hot air aloft over the Pacific Northwest. Let me just say that a 593 decameter height extending into Canada in late September is nearly  unheard of!

My friend Stu Ostro, a Meteorologist at the Weather Channel in Atlanta has been following this pattern closely and is researching just how unusual it is. It may turn out to unprecedented in 30 years of data, or longer. Stu has been noticing what he believes is a growing frequency of these blocks, and hypothesizes they may be an atmospheric response to the warming troposphere. You can see his on air piece about this weird pattern here.

Without doubt, we have warmed over the past 30 years, and it would not make sense to see that manifest itself in surface temps. alone.

Now let me throw in a little fact that you may not know. If the air warms by one degree celsius, it can hold 7% more water vapor. That is a huge increase when you get up to temps. near 30C.

Now the main reason for the flooding rains over the south is this pattern you see on the chart above. The Low over Kansas is steering moisture up from the Gulf of Mexico into the Southeast. The developing El Nino n the Pacific also may very well be affecting this area, because heavy rains in the southeast are a common occurrence with El Nino’s. However, this is usually seen more in the winter and not early autumn.

Now, let me show you another image. The image below is showing just how warm the oceans are around the globe right now. The Oceans in August were the warmest ever recorded in 130 years of records! That warm ocean water heats the air above it and evaporates into it. (Remember the 7% increase per degree.)

August Temp. Anomalies. from NCDC (NOAA). The larger the red dot, the warmer it was above average.

The ocean waters in August were especially warm over the Eastern Pacific and this wind flow pattern is bringing that moisture into the Southeast USA.

June through August temperatures worldwide were the 3rd warmest on record as well. This means the atmosphere can hold more water vapor.

Last, but not least, let’s look at how some recent research supports the possibility of a climate related link.

You may remember back in the early summer when the U.S. Global Change report was released. This report marked years of research into the affects of climate change over different regions of the world. Until this report, most imapacts could only be talked about in global terms.

Climate experts developed new techniques to downscale the global models to estimate how day to day and seasonal weather would change in different regions. I wrote a post about it a few months ago called Climate Change in Your Backyard.

Take a look at one of the images from this report.

Autumn rain has increased markedly over the southeast over the last century. At the same time  the global temperature has risen .7C. Here are some quotes from the U.S.Global change report:

“Floods and droughts are likely to become more common and more intense as

regional and seasonal precipitation patterns change, and rainfall becomes more

concentrated into heavy events (with longer, hotter dry periods in between).”

(Global Climate Change Impacts, page 44)

“One of the clearest precipitation trends in the United States is the increasing

frequency and intensity of heavy downpours. This increase was responsible for

most of the observed increase in overall precipitation during the last 50 years.”

(Global Climate Change Impacts, page 32)

So there you have it. Did climate change cause the flooding rains in the American Southeast? No.

Did it make it more likely to happen and contribute extra rainfall? Very possibly yes.