Dan’s Wild Wild Science Journal

This happened last night in Dekalb County, Alabama.

Hail Damage in Rainsville Alabama. Sent in by a viewer.

The storms kept me up until 5am. It was a real dark and stormy night!

The hail punched through to the insulation! It was one 25cm deep in some places!

Notice the grill on the window A/C unit!

The size was not that big- there was just a LOT of it.

Later,
Dan

The mean sea level pressure and precipitation forecast from the NOAA Global Forecast System model. (GFS). The forecast is valid at Noon Central USA time on 3 March.

The long range weather models have been indicating that a major blizzard will develop in about 8 days and hot the East Coast of America.

First of all, you should know that numerical weather models are NOT reliable this far into the future. Things can, and will be, different than what the image above shows. That said ,the guidance is a lot better than it was 10 years ago. It’s much better than it was in 1993, when the super storm of March 1993 brought all time record snowfalls to Alabama and Georgia. I measured 17 inches in my backyard with that storm in Birmingham Alabama.

The early indications are showing some real similarities to that storm. It develops in the Gulf of Mexico and deepens into an intense storm as it moves into the Appalachians. The 93 storm was in mid March. This one, if it develops, will be very early in March.

The big question is will the southern jet which has been strong all winter, due to El Nino, will phase with the polar jet. The polar jet has been much further south this year than what we would expect to see. Especially in a winter with a moderately strong El Nino like this one.

I still remember looking at the weather charts the week before the 1993 blizzard. The long range models were surprisingly consistent with that storm. Similar to this one- so far.

200 millibar forecast for March 3. This pressure level is around 9 km above the ground at jet stream level.

The image on the left is the 200 millibar chart for early next week. This is a chart showing the winds and storm track at around 9,000 meters high in the atmosphere. This is the jet stream level and it’s a good chart to look at to see if the jet streams are likely to phase.

This model run is showing that there IS phasing between the southern and northern branch of the jet streams. This would produce a much stronger storm.

The fact that the oceans are unusually warm globally will be another factor. January saw the second warmest oceans on the instrumental record. This is very likely due to the El Nino and the increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The significance of a phased jet stream is this. It allows the storm to develop in an area with very cold and very warm air surrounding it. Warm moist air is to a storm as gasoline is to a fire. It can turn a small one into a big one very quickly.

We forecasters will be looking at the daily model runs this week. We will compare the newest model runs from the USA with those from Environment Canada and the European Centre for Medium Range Forecasting (ECMWF). If I see all three of those models still showing a big blizzard by Wednesday of this week, then I’ll have much higher confidence that it will happen.

It’s just not possible to say anything more at this long range than it might happen. Oh, and if your local meteorologist looks a little harried on TV this week, now you know why!

Later,
Dan

Joe Vaughn has.

I received an email over the past weekend with a picture and a question. What is this??

Ice Ribbon- Image by Joe Vaughn at Huntsville, in Alabama

What you are looking at is an ice ribbon. They are also sometimes called a frost flower. It’s been about a decade since a viewer sent me a picture of one. I have only seen them myself once.

So what are they? Are they natural? Are they really ice?

The answer is yes. They are ice and they are indeed natural.

They form when liquid water inside a stem seeps out into the open air and freezes. Capillary action inside the plant pumps more water out so a continuous stream of ice is formed. Almost like a tiny glacier!

So why does the water inside the plant not freeze too?

The most likely answer is that the water is coming up from the ground where the temperature is above freezing. If the water is under pressure, the freezing point is lower so the water could be super cooled. Water only freezes at 0C at standard atmospheric pressure of 1013.25mb (29.92” of Hg on the old scale).

You can even get pure water down to -20C in your freezer if you freeze it very slowly in a clean container with no movement. Once any piece of dust or crystal is introduced it will suddenly freeze in front of your eyes! Even changing the pressure slightly will trigger an instant freeze as crystals form in rapid succession.

(They don’t get it, but you do!)

Supercooled water is the rule in the atmosphere, not the exception. Many clouds you see are made up of water droplets that are well below freezing and yet still liquid. If it were not for dust and other atmospheric aerosols, cloud drops would rarely coalesce into the much bigger rain drops that give life to the land below.

We are used to living in a world where the pressure is near 100 hectopascals of pressure and the temperature between -10 and 40C. If we lived in a world that deviated from these norms, we would see many, many things that we would call strange, yet are perfectly normal! I will not live long enough to witness the exploration of the planets in our solar system and beyond, but I cannot imagine the strange objects and sights that await future explorers.

The other climber is in shadow.

Here is an example. I took the picture above of two ice climbers in the Canadian Rockies. They were about 1500 meters away. (Zoom lens). The temperature was -25C and the wind was dead calm.

So what was so unusual?

The two climbers were talking to each other and I could hear them clearly. They were talking in a normal tone of voice and I could hear them easily 1500 meters away! The sound was reflected by the frozen ice and traveled a long way in the calm and frigid air.

These frost flowers tend to happen after a heavy rain event in mild weather. A sudden blast of arctic air will bring air temperatures well below freezing, but the ground will stay warm. The sudden freeze will cause water in stems to freeze and expand. This causes tiny slits to form in the stem. The warm water then seeps out of the slits due to capillary action. The water freezes quickly in the cold air and forms the ice ribbons/frost flowers. (Addition: Cool video for fellow geeks interested in capillary action in terms of physics.)

This exact sequence of weather happened here in the Southeast USA this past week. The result is that Joe Vaughn who has been hiking the beautiful mountains around the Huntsville area for many years, got a real surprise!

The 1997-1998 El Nono was the strongest on record. The combination of this, and rising greenhouse gases made it the warmest year on record.

NASA GISS has the Summer global temp. data online now. August 2009 was the Second warmest on record globally. The Northern Hemisphere meteorological summer of 2009 was the third warmest on record. Only 1998 was warmer. The reason 1998 was so warm is easily explained. The Pacific ocean was incredibly warm that year. The reason?  The greatest El Nino event on record.

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

That much warm water heated the surface temperature of the entire planet. The warmth over the tropical pacific, caused the jet stream to blow faster from west to east. This, in turn, slowed the rotation of the planet! The days were actually a few thousands of a second longer in 1998!

Some of these junk science sites use 1998 to claim that the planet is cooling. They start their graphs in 1998 and yell global cooling. Doctor Mark Serreze of NOAA’s National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said it best. Amazing ignorance. I wrote about El Nino earlier in the summer in this space.

One more picture. The great melt in the Arctic. I spotted it on the One Blue Marble blog. It was taken by Michael Nolan a well known environmental speaker.

If a picture paints a thousand words...

Later,

Dan

A few weeks back there was a riveting summary in NATURE, of the science surrounding the Ozone hole. Quirin Schiermeier tells the story of how we averted an environmental catastrophe in the absolute nick of time.  It’s also a great example of how looking at unexpected observations in a logical way, can lead to a better knowledge of how the planet works.

First some background.

While most people have heard of the ozone hole, they get confused about whether it’s good or bad. They hear about high ozone levels in the daily air quality report , and then hear there is a hole in the ozone over the South Pole!

It’s easy to explain. Ozone near the ground is bad. It’s formed due to a chemical reaction between sunlight and the exhausts from internal combustion engines.

The Ozone layer would have been nearly gone by the 2060, if rapid and coordinated action had not been taken by the nations of the World. Image from NATURE Aug 13, 2009. The Nature piece is highly recommended!

Ozone in the stratosphere is good. It blocks most of the dangerous UV rays produced by the sun, from reaching living organisms near the Earth’s surface. What little does get through, is responsible for that bad sunburn you got at the beach last Summer.

The first the world heard of the ozone  problem was in 1985. It was a paper published in NATURE. Researchers had discovered that a very widely used class of chemicals called Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC’s) were destroying Ozone in the frigid stratosphere above Antarctica. The hole had already been detected by instruments, but was dismissed as bad data. Scientists monitoring the Ozone layer in Antarctica originally thought the drop on Ozone in the Austral spring was an instrument error.

How wrong they were.

If the discovery had been made 20 years later, it would have likely been too late to avoid a massive increase in skin cancers and perhaps a catastrophic damage to the atmosphere that protects us from the dangerous radiation just 20 miles above us. You would think those who discovered it would get a Nobel Prize.

They did.

What happened next is a great example of how the countries on this planet CAN work together when they have to. The Montreal Protocol in 1987 began a rapid phase out of CFC’s. There have been several follow up agreements that have strengthened the regulation of CFC’s. While the Ozone hole is still there, the amount of chlorine in the atmosphere is no longer climbing and the Ozone hole should begin closing around the middle of this century. It will not happen as quickly as thought a few years ago though, and this is where things get even more fascinating.

One of the predictions of global climate models is, that as greenhouse gases increase, the bottom of the atmosphere (the troposphere) will warm, while the stratosphere will get colder. This is certainly happening, and is yet another of the many separate verifications that the planetary warming is not natural. It’s unequivocally us.

Ozone actually warms the stratosphere when it absorbs ultra violet radiation. Over Antarctica, the lack of Ozone, is leading to an even colder stratosphere, and this may explain why Antarctica has been behaving somewhat differently than what was initially forecasted by global climate models.

The ozone layer should start recovering by mid century, IF we take action to keep CFC's and Bromine compounds out of the atmosphere.

The cooling stratosphere is causing more ozone to be depleted.  There is now talk of a new treaty to strengthen the previous agreements and include stringent limits on the chemical Bromine. Why? Bromine is far more capable of destroying Ozone than CFC’s.

We may not be out of the woods just yet. The Ozone hole reached a new record low in 2006. The colder stratosphere is actually causing more destruction of Ozone, and many researchers believe the Ozone hole will recover more slowly than anticipated. Current thinking is that it may not recover until the 2060’s.

The colder stratosphere is having an affect on the ice shelves of Antarctica as well. The polar vortex, is a strong semi permanent low pressure center in Antarctica. It’s gotten stronger, as a result of the colder stratosphere. This in turn, has caused warmer air and ocean water to reach the Antarctic Peninsula, causing the rapid rise in temperatures observed there. The opposite is happening to the Ross Ice Shelf. The vortex is steering colder air over the Ross shelf, causing it to grow!

Image from NOAA.2006 Saw a record low in stratospheric Ozone

One of the most common claims to be found on junk science sites is that Antarctica is getting colder, and that this somehow means that all that science published on climate change is wrong. Ask yourself this: Does it makes sense that everything we have learned about climate is all wrong, because 1/12th of the planet, is not behaving like the rest?

That’s what they would have you believe on some of these silly junk science sites!

Instead, it’s much more logical to look for an explanation that fits with the science that has built up from the time of Svante Arrhenius, and John Tyndal to Roger Revelle, and James Hanson. The history of what we know, and how we know it is a great way to understand any field of Science.

There is an excellent book that does just that. It’s THE DISCOVERY OF GLOBAL WARMING by Spencer Weart. You can read it online for free.

It’s frightening to know just how close we came to destroying our ONLY protection from the harsh reality above our thin layer of air. As the Duke of Wellington said about the battle of Waterloo, It was a damn near run thing.

Later,

Dan

Sources:
FIXING THE SKY- NATURE  Quirin Schiermeier 13 Aug 2007

Interpretation of Recent Southern Hemisphere Climate Change
David W. J. Thompson, Susan Solomon
^{Science 3 May 2002:
Vol. 296. no. 5569, pp. 895 – 899
DOI: 10.1126/science.1069270}