Dan’s Wild Wild Weather Journal

About 5 years ago the TV station I work for decided to auction off some of it’s older vehicles.

One car in particular had a very troubled past. A 1995 red Corsica. It seems that one time the steering wheel came off in a reporters hand while driving down the road. Then the transmission fell out of it as well. All those things were fixed and with 120,000 miles it was to be given to the highest bidder.

Enter Dan. I have NO knowledge of cars. I met my wife because she showed me where to check the oil in my car while I was at University. (It had very little to none at the time too.)

I needed a cheap car for my daughter and bid $700 on a lark. Well you guessed right. No one else was that stupid.

Now here is the rub. That little car ran great for 5 years with only one major repair costing 600$. All I care about in a car, is that it starts, and has a COLD air conditioner. It met the bill!

Until yesterday!

I drove home from a class I am teaching at Calhoun Community College here in Huntsville, and when I went back out to start it later that day, it made a tremendous noise.

The engine is toast. Dead as an Egyptian door nail. It did not quite make it to 238,000 miles. (The average Earth - Moon distance)

The mechanic said that I should have heard something strange as a warning. (To quote a famous actor: “He don’t know me very well, do he”. B. Bunny)

My 13 year old son is Autistic, and spent many a happy hour on the boot watching the world go by. He will miss it too.

So long little red car, slowly rotting from the inside out, I will miss you. (I bought a Kia Rio 2007 that gets 38 mpg!) I just need a new Apple sticker.

Andy Revkin the science writer at the New York Times has an interesting article on Arctic sea ice today. The ice reached a new record low last September and is approaching the same level again this year.

You should realize that the ice cover is disappearing at a much faster rate than the IPCC models have been forecasting.  Now, a majority of scientists who study the ice, feel that we are at, or very near a tipping point. Beyond the tipping point, the Summer ice will disappear very rapidly. Perhaps in a decade or two.

To understand why this is so, read up on the following: Ice Albedo Feedback.

The other article is about Dr. Jeremy Jackson the noted Ocean Scientist. His web site shiftingbaselines.org is getting  a lot of attention. It is amazing to him (and many others, including me) that the story of collapsing fish stocks in the oceans, is getting so little attention.

It may be because people cannot fathom (pun intended) how it is possible to deplete such a huge resource.

Keep in mind that most of the tropical oceans are biological deserts. The life zone in the oceans is very thin. Only the top 300 meters get any real sunlight. The rest of the oceans are dark, and frigidly cold places with comparatively little life. The ocean temperatures in the deep are just above 0C.

Back to the sea ice one more time.  The La- Nina last Winter, acted to cool the planet slightly, from the year before. So many scientists expected the ice would not melt as fast in the Arctic this year, and another new record would not be likely.

The fact that the record is again in jeopardy, is nothing less than stunning.

Later,

Dan

Looking at the satellite imagery this evening is a scary prospect. Hannah is now a hurricane east of the Bahamas. The numerical weather prediction (NWP) guidance brings it into Savannah or S. Carolina as a minimal hurricane by Friday afternoon.

A new tropical storm has formed in the middle of the Tropical Atlantic. This system looks very healthy, and is now named Tropical Storm Ike. I suspect it will become a hurricane and approach the Bahamas and perhaps the USA in 7-10 days.

Looks like a busy September, with a lot of tropical troubles….

Later,
Dan

I have a screencast update on Hurricane Gustav. It was recorded at 12:30 am (0530Z). I’m still getting used to this software, and it will get better.

This is a chance for you to get an in depth look at what I am seeing in the maps as I go through the forecast process.

Video is here: GUSTAV UPDATE

On the brighter side of things. Meteorological Summer ended at midnight!!

Dan

ps: You will need the Quicktime movie player to view it. It will play much fast if you are on a mac. I recorded it on my Imac at home. If you are on Windows PC, download the file to your desktop before playing. File is 23 megbytes, so broadband is needed.

It seems tonight that the numerical weather prediction (NWP) guidance is starting to come together on Gustav. Up through this morning, there was still a lot of spread among the different models. This tells a forecaster that any one solution is not likely to be correct, and that leads to a low confidence forecast.

Sometimes you will see a few outliers and know that you can ignore them due to bad initiliazation or a poor track record with tropical systems in general. Other times it is much more difficult. The NHC usually give a great deal of credence to a model called the GFDL. This model is designed specifically for tropical cylones, and the Physics in the model is tuned to best predict track and intensity.

I usually give a great deal of credence to the forecast track from the National Hurricane Center.

Why?

I deal with a couple of hurricanes a year along with the rest of the weather here in the Valley. The folks at the NHC do nothing but forecast tropical cyclones. The local NWS offices also base their local forecasts heavily on the track guidance.

I will sometimes disagree, and it is my decision on what to put on air. When this happens I will put both forecasts on to let viewers know that there is uncertainty. When it comes to hurricane forecasting, uncertainty is almost always large.

Forecasting the location is actually easier than forecasting intensity. We still have a long way to go there! Dr. Kerry Emanuel of MIT has done some ground breaking research on this. He has developed equations that can tell us how strong a hurricane the ocean water can make.

It all depends on the heat content of the water.

That may sound like an easy thing to measure, but it isn’t. See, it does not matter just how warm the water is, but how thick the layer of warm water is! A shallow layer of warm water is not nearly as important as a thick layer of warm water at the surface. We call this Tropical Cyclone Heat Potential. It is also referred to as Upper Ocean Heat Content.

Gustav will pass over an area of high TCHP in the next two days and that heat will probably turn Gustav into a dangerous hurricane.

After Gustav comes Hannah.  This one may be headed toward Florida, and even perhaps in our direction. My sleep deficit will likely increase in direct proportion to the intensity of Hannah!

Later,
Dan