Tag Archives: Severe weather

More on weather whiplash and the Polar Vortex

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Extreme weather events of all kinds seem to be more common now than they were then. By now I mean the last five to ten years, approximately, and by then I mean … well, before that. This is because of global warming.

The current Colding caused by a wandering Polar Vortex (which I’ve heard Rush Limbaugh has declared to be a liberal plot … thanks Obama!) is probably a result of changes in the nature and configuration of the jet streams and related air masses, as discussed here. Warming caused by the release of fossil carbon, mainly as Carbon Dioxide, has affected the Arctic more than most of the rest of the planet, and this has changed the nature of major air mass movement which, in turn, has disrupted the jet streams, which has caused what we call weather whiplash. If you would like to see an example of weather whiplash, you can probably do so by looking outside because it is happening all over the place all the time. Well, it seems that way anyway. Let’s just say that it is happening often enough that the lack of weather whiplash may well be newsworthy.

Peter Sinclair of the Yale Climate Forum has a post and a new video that puts a lot of this together. Here’s the video:

Hey, if you are local to the Twin Cities, come on over to Stillwater on Monday and we’ll talk about it. Unless you are that one guy who wants to put me on trial and execute me because I think global warming is real! You stay home!

A rollicking adventure through the rift valley and rain forests of Central Africa in search of the elusive diminutive ape known locally as Sungudogo.
A rollicking adventure through the rift valley and rain forests of Central Africa in search of the elusive diminutive ape known locally as Sungudogo.
More on climate change HERE.

Also, check out my novella, Sungudogo, HERE. It is an adventure story set in Central Africa which ultimately turns out to be a parody of the skeptics movement. It seems to have struck a nerve with a few of the skeptics, while others seem to have enjoyed it. Who knew?

Go home, Arctic, You're Drunk.

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If global warming is real, then why is it so cold?

We are hearing this question quite often today and it will be asked many times by many people over the next few days as record low temperatures are set in many parts of the United States. Here in Minnesota, for example, we have a good chance of setting a record low daily high beating the previous record of 14 degrees below zero F. We may or may not beat the record daily low but we are going to get close. (Donald trump is probably the most famous person to have gotten this wrong over the last few days.)

Global warming is real. The apparent contrast between extreme cold and global warming is actually an illusion. If we look at the local weather in many parts of the US we see a giant blob of cold “Arctic air” moving south to engulf our humble hamlets and cities, as though the Arctic Coldness that we know is sitting on the top of our planet, like a giant frosty hat, is growing in size. How can such a thing happen with global warming?

Actually, if you think about it, how can such a thing happen at all? Imagine a somewhat different scenario. Imagine the giant global hulu-hoop of warmth we know of as the tropics suddenly expanding in size to engulf the United States, Europe, Asia, and in the south, southern South America, southern Africa, Australia, etc. for a week or so, then contract back to where it came from. How could that happen? Where would all the heat necessary for that to happen come from? That seems to be a violation of some basic laws of physics. Now, cold is not a thing — it is the absence of heat — but the same problem emerges when we imagine the giant frosty hat of arctic air simply getting many hundreds of percent larger, enough to engulf the temperate regions of the planet. As easy as it might be to imagine such a thing given the images we see on regional weather maps, it is in fact not possible. The physics simply does not work that way.

What is happening instead is the cold air mass that usually sits up on the Arctic during the northern Winter has moved, drooped, shifted, gone off center, to engulf part of the temperate region. Here in the Twin Cities, it is about 8 below zero F as I write this. If I go north towards the famous locality of International Falls (famous for its cold temperature readings often mentioned on the national news) it will in fact be colder. If I go even farther north, at some point it will start to get warm again, as we leave the giant blob of cold air that has engulfed us. In fact, it is relatively warm up on the North Pole right now. Alaska and Europe are relatively warm as well.

The graphic above from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts shows what is happening. The Polar Vortex, a huge system of swirling air that normally contains the polar cold air has shifted so it is not sitting right on the pole as it usually does. We are not seeing an expansion of cold, an ice age, or an anti-global warming phenomenon. We are seeing the usual cold polar air taking an excursion.

So, this cold weather we are having does not disprove global warming.

In fact, the cold snap we are experiencing in the middle of the US and adjoining Canada may be because of global warming. The Polar Vortex can go off center any given winter, but we have been having some strange large scale weather activity over the last few years that is thought to be related to global warming and that may have contributed to this particular weather event (explained here). This may be an effect of this strangeness, though the jury is still probably out on this particular weather event.

UPDATE: Chris Mooney has THIS on the drunken Arctic.

Other items of interest:

Norwegians trying to act like nothing’s wrong while Global Warming ruins their day!

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Storms these days are universally enhanced by Global Warming, and right now we are having one of those Jet Stream Blocking thingies which is doing some amazing weather making. In Norway, Storm Ivar did a pretty good job of messing up these people’s shopping plans:

I assume they started out with arms full of gift wrapped packages …

Hat tip: Miss Cellania who always has funny stuff for you.

How to not look like an idiot

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The best way to not look like an idiot is to shut up. Works every time. Why just a few minutes ago I said something really stupid because I confused UPS and USPS. Should have just kept my mouth shut, but I didn’t.

This time of year a lot of people start sounding like idiots, quite possibly because they are idiots (but see below for alternative explanations), when it comes to global warming. For example, someone who may or may not be a “global warming denier” (i.e. a person who does not believe in physics) sent me, out of the blue, this string of tweets:

SomeGuyOnTwitterClimateChangeDenier

First he tells me that the ice in the Northern Hemisphere in mid December is extensive. He says that I can see “the recovery” and points out how extensive the recovery is, and how much snow there is too.

This is the somewhat more elaborate version of, “It is cold out today therefore there is no global warming.”

This is December, which means we have data through last November for the last several year compiled on a monthly basis by NASA. Here’s the last several years of Novembers, showing that Novembers are getting warmer (for background click here):

HottestNovemberOnRecord_2013

Turns out it’s the hottest November in this extensive database of Novembers, globally. Still, though, November was very cold in the northern hemisphere compared to July! That, of course, is because July is pretty near the middle of the warm season, and November is getting close to the cold season, in that hemisphere. I predict that when the data come out, December will be even colder than November!

The “recovery” my twitteriffic friend points to is the idea that Arctic Sea ice has recovered after having a couple of bad years. Here’s the story on the sea ice (click here for background). First, let’s look at Arctic Sea ice as it melts and reforms every year, in surface extent, for something close to ten years in a row a bunch of years back. The thick like is for reference. All the thinner squiggly lines are each for one year, back in the day:

Sea_Ice_Graph_Old_Pattern

Then, a thing happened we call “Arctic Amplification” in which global warming caused the northern regions to get warm, just like the entire surface of the Earth is getting warm, but relatively more so. This includes reduced sea ice that forms and melts every year, like in the graph, as well as permanent melting of the thicker multi-year ice, decrease in overall snow cover, and increase in the temperature of the northern sea. The effects on sea ice is seen in the following graph, which shows through 2011. The thick line is still there for reference. Notice that the pattern from 2002 to 2011 is distinctly different from, with less ice all the time, than the pre-2002 pattern. This is because of global warming, and it is an excellent signature of “Arctic Amplification.”

Sea_Ice_Graph_New_Pattern

Notice that the last chart only goes through 2011. One thing that happened last year, for the 2013 melt season, is that a lot of science denialists such as my tweety friend (see above) went on and on and on about how Arctic sea ice had “recovered” in 2013. They used this series of data to make their case. Look at this graph:

Sea_Ice_Graph_2013-640x530

Notice that when we look at the march of melt and formation of Arctic sea ice for 2013, it looks like one of the worst years of the worst. Yet climate science denialists called this a recovery. They are still calling it a recovery, and now, apparently, they are even calling “Winter” a “recovery.” This, without a doubt, makes them look like idiots.

There is a reason that they do this. Not good enough of a reason to make them not look like idiots. Rather, if you look at this reason they look even more like idiots than you might have been thinking unless you want to give them the benefit of the doubt and call them dishonest instead. Either description seems to fit. Here’s the thing. If you add the year 2012 on to that last graph, it looks like this:

Sea_Ice_Graph_2012_and_2013

The year 2012 is the dotted line that is way way more intense in terms of melting than any other year ever seen. If we remove that year from consideration, we can see that Arctic sea ice has been melting more and more with every year being highly likely to be worse than any previous year at least for several months (but not always) right up to and including the present year. But if you add 2012 into the mix, we can easily say the same thing but then we also note that 2012 was an exceptional super-melty year.

Going back to all messed up and melty from an unbelievable extreme year is not a “recovery.” Not even a little.

Tweety Bird (the guy cited above) makes the mistake of thinking that if it gets cold or snowy during the Winter than global warming is over. But actually, the extreme snow cover we’ve seen in some areas, and some of the extreme cold, is probably due to global warming. Confused? It is, in fact, a little confusing but you can learn why this is and not look like an idiot! Let me show you.

We’re not completely sure of this, but here’s what climate scientists are currently thinking and all indications are that it is likely true. Normally the air around the Earth can be thought of as being in large rotating bands demarcated by jet streams, and weather patterns move along those bands bringing dry, wet, whatever, conditions as they do so. The bands and the jets form because the tropics are warm and the poles are cold and weather is all about the movement of tropical heat towards the poles. But if you change some of the key variables in this system, like the size of the planet or the amount of the atmosphere, for example, the system looks different; perhaps a different number of these big bands forms (Earth has several, Mars has two, for example) or some other attributes change.

It turns out that if you decrease the amount of difference from tropical and temperate regions vs. the poles, in terms of temperature, the jet streams get all wiggly and cause northerly air to reach far to the south in some places and southerly air to reach farther north in other places. This causes unexpected weather like snow in Egypt. It also may facilitate the formation of nasty storms. More importantly, perhaps, is that the wiggles in the jet stream stay in place for long periods of time, or move very slowly, and this causes storms to stall in place and we get weather events like the flooding we saw in Colorado, Calgary, Central Europe and other places over the last year. Or Sandy’s being steered int NY/NJ/Conn last year. That sort of thing.

So if it was Summer and it is now Winter, that does not mean that global warming isn’t real. If there is a strange weather event that causes snow in Cairo or a “500 year flood” in Boulder, that is an effect of global warming, not evidence that global warming is not real. For global warming to not be real some very basic physics need to not be real. The basic physics are real. Your idea that global warming is a fiction is not real. You might have good intentions (this is doubtful, more likely you are a jerk for wanting our children to suffer the consequences of your actions) or you might be misinformed (this is doubtful — if you know enough to use dog whistles such as “recovery” you can’t claim this honestly) or you might be economically motivated (there are those who are paid to deny global warming, millions have gone into this form of science denialism). Or maybe you really are an idiot. In any event, remember that there are consequences. Short term, you’re not going to be taken seriously. Long term you are helping to ruin the planet. Either way, please consider the advice given at the beginning of this post.

Here are a few related items from here and elsewhere on the internet:

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  • Why you sound so stupid when you say “global warming has stopped”
  • Weather Whiplash Is Like My Old Broken Sprinkler
  • Linking Weather Extremes to Global Warming
    • <li><a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/09/28/global-warming-and-extreme-weather-climate-agw/">Global Warming and Extreme Weather – #climate #agw</a></li>
<li><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/12/09/3038631/arctic-warming-extreme-weather/">Arctic Warming Drives More Extreme Summer Heat Waves, Droughts And Deluges, Study Finds</a></li>

    I’m Giving A Talk On The Global and Local Impacts of Climate Change

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    Please join us. It will be at the West Metro Critical Thinking Club on Saturday, December 28, 2013, at 10:00 AM at the RidgePointe Senior Apartments on 12600 Marion Ln. W, Minnetonka, MN.

    I know these people. This will be a tough audience. This is a well educated and thoughtful group. Also, there are many climate skeptics in the group, and a talk given last September that questioned the strength of the evidence for Global Warming was well received. So, this is going to be interesting and fun!

    Here’s the writeup for the talk, and more info can be found HERE:

    NASA_jet_stream_image_-resized_rev1

    The Global and Local Impacts of Climate Change

    Anthropogenic climate change, also known as “Global Warming,” has emerged as a significant reality affecting societies and economies around the world and at home. In this talk we’ll examine the contentious questions of changes in weather patterns and sea level rise. Both of these effects of warming have already had impacts and these impacts are expected to increase in the future. What does the science say about “weather whiplash,” severe storms, and the rise of seas in the near and longer term future, how certain are we of what may happen, and how severe might these impacts be?

    Greg Laden is a science communicator and teacher who has studied the relationship between human evolution and ecology, climate change during the Holocene, and African and North American prehistory. He has addressed, mostly through his writing on National Geographic Scienceblogs, the science of climate change, and has presented several talks and workshops on this issue. He is currently teaching at Century College and is writing two books, one on fieldwork in the Congo and the other, a novel, on life in the upper Midwest and Plains in a post-climate change world. He strongly hopes that the novel remains fiction rather than prediction. Greg lives with his wife and two children in Coon Rapids, Minnesota.

    I’m purposefully not going to address the following things beyond a brief mention:

    <ul>
  • Atmospheric CO2 has increased and this increase is because of the burning of fossil fuels by humans.
    • <li>This change in the chemistry of the atmosphere has caused the warming of the atmosphere and oceans in accord with expectations from the physical science, and continues apace.</li></ul>

    These are facts so well established by science that I don’t need to drive across town to tell them to people. Within that second fact is the question of the so-called “Hiatus” and I’ll address that briefly but really, it is just a Fox News meme and need not demand the energy and time of this thoughtful group of well educated people.

    Sea level, storms, and weird weather, on the other hand, are a different thing. There are aspects of this feature of climate change that climate scientists argue about among themselves, and the there are differences between what the IPCC officially said in its recently released report and what many groups of mainstream climate scientists say. The differences are not deep or huge … we are not talking about science denialism here. But there is uncertainty and we are approaching new territory. This makes the science interesting, and the potential consequences of climate change make it important.

    See you on December 28th, come hell or high water. As it were.

    What about those tornadoes?

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    Are there more tornadoes because of global warming? Are they stronger? Do they occur more frequently outside of the usual tornado season, or are they more common in areas that formerly had few tornadoes?

    There are problems with all of these questions, and the main problem is the fact that the tornado data isn’t very informative.

    Here’s the raw data from the NOAA tornado database, showing the number of tornadoes per year of all intensities greater than one mile long on the ground:

    Screen Shot 2013-12-05 at 8.49.06 AM
    (Click on the graph to see the whole thing in case it isn’t showing for you.)

    This looks like more tornadoes are happening. We could leave it at that but we’d be doing bad science if we did so. The problem is that over time, the way tornadoes are observed and measured has changed, and owing, probably, to changes in population distribution in the region that gets most of the tornadoes in the US, there may be a number of tornadoes in the earlier years that were not observed. But, we don’t know that. In fact, we have no idea whatsoever how to make these data useful. These data could represent a reasonably accurate picture of tornado frequency over time in the US, or they might not, but we have no quantification of how biasing effects might work over time.

    A while back I tried to see if I could make the data speak more clearly by measuring the total length and width of tornadoes in the database and adding them up for the period 1990 to 2012. This eliminated the problem of missing tornadoes because I was only looking at recent times when the data would be better. The resulting graph looks like this:

    Screen Shot 2013-05-30 at 11.11.53 AM
    (Click on the graph to see the whole thing in case it isn’t showing for you.)

    This seems to show a dramatic increase in overall effects of tornadoes. But, it turns out that the way “width” of tornadoes was measured was changed during this period, so these data are still not that useful.

    Why am I showing you bad data? Here’s why. Consider the possible interpretations of graphs like these. For example:

    1) There are more tornadoes over time, possibly because of global warming.

    2) There are fewer tornadoes over time, despite global warming.

    3) We can’t say anything about changes in frequency, severity, or land coverage of tornadoes over time because the data suck.

    4) The evidence shows that there is no effect of global warming on tornadoes over time.

    If this was a multiple choice question, the correct answer would not be 1, because the data are not useful. The correct answer would not be 2, because the data are not useful. The correct answer would be 3, because the data are not useful.

    But often, we hear people who want to minimize the effects of global warming and deny the importance of climate change claim that number 4 is true. But we can’t say this because … wait for it … the data suck! The data as presented here are not sufficient to say that there are more tornadoes, but the default fallback null model is NOT that there is no relationship between climate change and tornado frequency, severity, or landscape coverage.

    Peter Sinclair has a post linking together the tornado question and a spate of climate science denialism in this post: Tracking the Truth About Tornadoes. Go have a look.

    In that post Sinclair quotes Michael Mann:

    Actual atmospheric scientists know that the historical observations are too sketchy and unreliable to decide one way or another as to whether tornadoes are increasing or not…

    So one is essentially left with the physical reasoning…

    That physical reasoning is, from a livescience’s piece by Michael Mann:

    …warm, moist air is favorable for tornadoes, and global warming will provide more of it. But important, too, is the amount of “shear” (that is, twisting) in the wind. And whether there will, in a warmer world, be more or less of that in tornado-prone regions, during the tornado season, depends on the precise shifts that will take place in the jet stream — something that is extremely difficult to predict even with state-of-the-art theoretical climate models. That factor is a “wild card” in the equation.

    So we’ve got one factor that is a toss-up, and another one that appears favorable for tornado activity. The combination of them is therefore slightly on the “favorable” side, and if you’re a betting person, that’s probably what you would go with.

    I’d like to add to this: Storminess in “Tornado Alley” is likely to increase. It may be more straight line winds and severe thunderstorm, more ALH (amazingly large hail), or more tornadoes. Personally, I suspect it will be all of this but with the actual rate of tornado formation varying a great deal from year to year, depending on effects such as wind shear, but that’s just a gut feeling. Vertical wind shear may help attenuate the development of tornadoes when it is happening, but it won’t make the energy go away, and that energy may be manifest in other ways through storms that don’t happen to form tornadoes. We’ll see, I guess.

    Will Global Warming Induced Weather Whiplash Strike The Northeast Next Week?

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    There is a storm (this one) moving across the southern part of the United States that forecasters predict will turn north over the Atlantic and menace the east coast somewhere between Northern New England and Washington DC or Virginia, possibly much of that area. The storm may develop, forecasters say, into a Nor’easter. I looked at the predicted Jet Stream configuration for next Wednesday and I noticed that is will be all curvy-durvy like it has been so often lately. This curvy jet stream is so much more common these days because, climate scientists think, of the phenomenon of Arctic Amplification. This is when the Arctic warms more than other parts of the globe, relatively, causing a shift in the way large scale weather patterns set up. The curvy jet stream blocks weather patterns, making them stay in place for much longer than they otherwise would. Flooding in Calgary and Colorado this summer, and a number of other major weather disasters, were caused by this.

    I’m not a meteorologist so I feel comfortable going out on a limb to make a prediction about the weather because you can’t possibly think less of me as a weather forecaster if I’m totally wrong. Usually, we make note of the “Weather Whiplash” events, extreme weather caused or enhanced by climate change, after they happen. Here, I’m going to suggest that this curvy jet stream is going to enhance the storm and an especially bad Nor’easter will be closing in on the US east coast just in time to really mess up Thanksgiving; this storm will be bad because the jet stream will pull together southerly moist air and northerly cold air, and keep it all churned up in place for a relatively long time.

    And no, I’m not going to bet any money on it. Hell, I might delete this post if I’m totally wrong. Feel free to yell at me in the comments.

    Here’s the Jet Stream prediction for next Wednesday from HERE:

    ThanksgivingJetStream

    (The image at the top of the post is a random bad weather photo of no particular significance.)

    Storm Boreas: Thanksgiving Nor’easter?

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    If you are in, going to, or coming from New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, or as far south as Maryland/Virginia/DC area, on or around Thanksgiving, you better keep track of Boreas, a storm heading in that general direction that long-range forecasts suggest might be a snow-dumping rainy windy Nor’easter.

    Jeff Masters says:

    (Boreas) is bringing snow and difficult travel conditions to Arizona, and will spread a variety of dangerous winter weather across Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and Utah over the weekend. On Monday and Tuesday, the storm will dump heavy rains over the Southeast U.S., before emerging over the coastal waters of the Mid-Atlantic on Wednesday morning. The models are in fair agreement that Boreas will then intensify into the season’s first significant Nor’easter on Wednesday afternoon, bringing heavy rain to coastal New England and the Mid-Atlantic, snow farther inland at higher elevations, and minor coastal flooding due to strong winds…

    We’ll have to have to keep an eye on boreas.

    Haiyan is an example of climate change making things worse

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    Update on Haiyan/Yolanda Death Toll

    The final figures are not likely in but the numbers have stabilized and we can now probably put a number to the human toll of this storm that will not change dramatically in the future, at least in terms of orders of magnitude. The current “official” death toll in the Philippines from Typhoon Yolanda/Haiyan is 6,009 with 1,779 missing and 27,022 injured, with the largest concentration of casualties in Eastern Visayas. This comes from a December 13th report of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council, which you can (probably) download here. If you do download it expect to see slightly different numbers as the report seems to be updated dynamically. Wikipedia, which references the same report, gives slightly different numbers (higher for dead and injured, same for missing). Regardless of these smaller changes, we can say that the total casualty number for this typhoon is well over 30,000 with over 6,000 dead. With so many people missing we may guess that the number dead is somewhat over 7,000.

    A few days ago a major typhoon struck the Philippines and then Vietnam, with another smaller storm heading in roughly the same direction. At about the same time, a tropical cyclone hit Somalia and killed at least 100 people there. The United States is not unaffected by the impacts of large tropical storms. There is reason to believe that tragedies like these may become more common or more severe with climate change. We must first address the urgent needs of the people in the affected areas, but it is also true that events like these and the voices of the victims must drive our continued commitment to address climate change preemptively.

    Yeb Saño, the Philippines’ negotiator at the UN Climate Talks, found himself in the position of addressing an international body about the damaging effects of climate change while his own family was living in the affected area. We should take our lead from him. When he gave his address to the gathered representatives from around the world, he announced a hunger strike on behalf of his people which he would continue until the UN group completed the job they had convened to do. Saño’s brother, along with his fellow citizens, was occupied with recovering the dead and helping the survivors while Saño himself sought international recognition of the climate crisis; he was moved to say, “The climate crisis is madness.”

    The exact nature of future storms is uncertain, but there are four lines of scientific evidence that hurricanes will be more of a problem in the future than they were in the past.

    First, sea levels continue to rise, so the same storm ten years from now vs. ten years ago will have significantly greater impact.  Sea level rise was a significant factor with Superstorm Sandy and Katrina, and was likely a factor in the high death toll and extensive damage caused by Haiyan.

    Second, large storms are likely to produce more rain over a broader area because a warmer atmosphere contains more moisture; large storms will bring increased inland flooding, a major cause of damage, injury, and death in tropical storms and cyclones.

    Third, increased sea temperatures may generate more intense storms.  This seems to have happened with Katrina and Haiyan; the sea surface temperature drives the storm’s formation, but in these two storms the sea was unusually warm at a greater depth, several meters, causing those storms to become much stronger than they otherwise might have been. Recent studies have shown a strong association between sea surface temperatures in the Pacific and the cumulative strength of the storms that happen in a given year.

    Fourth, and less certain, is the possibility that there will be more hurricanes and typhoons. One of the best models for predicting past hurricane frequency predicts that this will happen in the future, and by the way, that model predicted the current relatively anemic Atlantic storm season with good accuracy.   Major tropical storms occur with highly varying frequency from year to year, so it is difficult to identify any trend over just a few decades for which there are good records, but the climate models are increasingly accurate and they suggest that globally we can expect an uptick in frequency.

    It is often said that it is impossible to link a given weather event with climate change.  This is no longer true, if it ever was.  The typical climate for a region or a season tells us what weather is “normal.” Climate change is pushing us into a new normal; the climate has warmed, there is more energy in the atmosphere, the jet streams have changed their configuration and are thus more likely to stall weather patterns as happened this year in Calgary and Colorado. This is the new climate, and thus, there is a new normal for the weather in any given region or season.  It appears that the new normal is now, and will increasingly be in the future, one with a significantly greater threat of damage, injury, and death from major tropical storms and other severe weather events.

    There are many approaches to addressing this problem, but most of them start with one initial step: stop denying the importance and reality of the accepted science of climate change. This is something individuals must do, the media must do, and politicians and policy makers must do.  This is something that must start now, and really, should have started years ago.

    Bad storms have always happened. But, to ignore the fact that humans are making them worse is certainly, as Saño put it, “climate madness.”

    The Typhoon Haiyan Storm Surge on Video

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    Storm surges are amazing. I’ve never seen one happen but I’ve seen the aftermath. A video has surfaced of a storm surge hitting Hernani in Eastern Samar, shot from the second floor of a house that was a few hundred meters from the coast.

    A storm surge is a mound of water caused by the wind of a hurricane (or other storm) pushing the water ahead of it, and further heightened by the low pressure system of the storm. In a given major storm there can be many, but there seems to be one big one most of the time. If the surge happens at high tide it is worse. If it happens at spring high tide in a high latitude (like New York or Boston, or Bourne) it can be way worse.

    Also, the surge can be significantly enhanced if it forms in open water and pushes into an embayment or restriction of any kind, which is often the case where human settlements occur, as we tend to settle on estuaries or harbors.

    Anyway, here’s the video:

    Impressed? On one hand you should be. That’s a lot of power coming in from the sea. On the other hand, you shouldn’t be. This storm surge left quite a bit standing. It was shot from a house that survived, obviously. As impressed as you might be with this storm surge, it was probably not the biggest one that hit in the Philippines during Haiyan. The people shooting those videos would not have lived to pass them on to us.

    Midwesterners, Take Warn!

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    There is an unprecidented high risk of significant tornado activity in your area TODAY and/or TONIGHT.

    Check with the Storm Prediction Center at the NWS for the latest.

    There will almost certainly be severe thunderstorms in the Mid-Mississippi and Ohio Valleys and up into Michigan today and early evening/night. It is distinctly possible that there will be tornadoes.

    If there is a biggish tornado outbreak today, this may be a highly unusual weather event, and it could count in the Weather Whiplash category of climate-change caused problems.

    We will be watching. But if you live in the affected area, WATCH EXTRA CLOSELY PLEASE.

    Dare I say it? (TS #Melissa in the Atlantic…) UPDATED

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    Added:

    The depression has spun up to form a tropical storm. It will probaqbly remain a storm as it works its way up the Atlantic Ocean avoiding land (though it seems to be aimed ultimately at Greenland). The storm is named Melissa.

    Details here.

    We have had a record breakingly anemic hurricane season in the North Atlantic this year. How anemic? If this year’s hurricane season was a rug, you’d have a floor. If this year’s hurricane season was a car you’d have a bicycle. If this year’s hurricane season was a stack of pancakes, you’d have one pancake. That’s now anemic.

    What is the reason for this poor performance? First, let me point out that expectations were not that high to begin with. The most useful and heretofore accurate model for hurricane frequency had suggested a number of named storms that is pretty close to the actual number that occurred (though higher). Hurricane number varies a lot from year to year in all of the different ocean basins, because hurricanes are rare events to begin with. In fact, I’d even say they are unlikely events because so many things have to be in place for a hurricane (or typhoon as they are called in the western Pacific) to form. Conditions are often enough in place that since 1980 the North Atlantic has had over 400 of them. But during the same period, the United States has had about 3,700 tornadoes. Tornadoes, which are not that common (have you ever actually been in one? Probably not) are an order of magnitude more common than hurricanes. Hurricanes, being much larger than tornadoes, of course, can be much more significant.

    Anyway, there have been very few tropical storms in the Atlantic Basin named this year, the few that have achieved a notable status have been quirky, short lived, and stayed at sea. It is almost like all the Hurricane Gremlins went out to the Pacific to work on Haiyan/Yolanda, which was a masterpiece of a storm, being one of the strongest ever and causing immense damage and tragically huge loss of life.

    One of the most likely reasons for the poor performance of the Atlantic season this year is said to be the huge injection of Saharan dust into the atmosphere over the equatorial Atlantic ocean early in the season. It might also be vertical wind sheer, which is said to be more common in this basin due to global warming. No matter what, it may take a few more years before we can start to see the magnitude of overall increase in either frequency of tropical storms or intensity of tropical storms that is almost certainly one of the outcomes of climate change.

    And now, after many days of virtual inactivity, the North Atlantic has produced an area of disturbance that has a small chance of growing into a tropical storm. It is a non-tropical low pressure system, sitting almost motionless in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Conditions to convert this system into a tropical proto-storm may develop and over the next two or three days there is somewhat less than a 1 in 3 chance that it will become a cyclone. It will be very interesting to see if it becomes tropical before it becomes a cyclone, or not. (Tropical and non-tropical cyclones are different.)

    The NWS is tracking it, and here is the latest update.

    UN COP Delegate Yeb Saño Announces Haiyan Hunger Strike

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    Trigger warning: Truth and pain.

    Published on Nov 11, 2013
    Philippines delegate Naderev (Yeb) Saño, announces his decision to go on hunger strike on the first day of the COP19 Climate Change Summit in Poland, 11 November 2013.

    Making an impassioned plea for action by the conference, he said that he would be fasting in solidarity with his country-folk until action to prevent climate change is forthcoming.

    Saño received a standing ovation after describing the hardship suffered by Filipino’s, including members of his own family, due to the “colossal” typhoon Haiyan which recently hit his country.

    Should There be a Category 6 for Hurricanes?

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    Should there be a Category 6, or even a Category 7, to classify extra bit tropical cyclones like Haiyan?

    Some tropical cyclones labeled Category 5 are much stronger than others. It has been suggested that we would be smart to extend the system to have a Category 6 and maybe even a Category 7 to allow the additional severity of these storms to be indicated when they are being spoken of in the news or by officials in charge of scaring people into doing the right thing, like running away or staying indoors.

    There is resistance to this proposal that comes from two mostly distinct places. One is the community of those who deny the science of climate change, or climate change itself, or science itself. Their motivation is to not allow the so called “alarmists” (those who are alarmed at the changes happening on our planet) to have a tool to point out that severe weather can be very severe indeed. The other is the subset of meteorologists who are actually correct, in a way, when they point out that the Saffir Simpson scale, the scale with the five categories, can’t be extended because of the way it is built, but who are very incorrect, I think, when they point out that extending the scale would damage the most important available tool for scaring people into running away (or staying indoors).

    The reason the Saffir Simpson scale can’t be extended is this. The scale has five categories of hurricanes. The first category, Category 1, is the category a hurricane that is at or near the minimum level of strength can be and still be called a hurricane. The top category, Category 5, is the level of strength at which a hurricane flattens a wood-frame suburban American neighborhood and takes out the overhead utilities to the extent that nearly full replacement, not just putting up a few new lines, is required. In other words, from the point of view of the vast majority of Americans living in regular homes or townhouses around the country, a Category 5 hurricane is total destruction of your way of life. You have to move, rebuild, live in a FEMA trailer for a while, etc. From the point of view of the citizen, the rescue workers and first responders, the parts of the government that are in charge of taking care of the refugees, and the meteorologists who discuss these things on the TV, a Category 5 hurricane is effective at the top category because it is as bad as it gets.

    I would like to point out three reasons that this is wrong. I’m not actually going to suggest that we replace the Saffir Simpson scale with a different measure. Rather, I’m going to suggest that we add new measures and use them (there already are other ways to measure hurricanes).

    The first thing that is wrong is that people are already stupid about hurricanes. The meteorologists don’t want to make a Category 6 or 7 because they don’t want a Category 5, which is total destruction of your American Dream, to look smaller. They want Category 5 to look extra bad because it is, in fact, about as bad as it gets. However, people already don’t get Category 5. For one thing, people think that a hurricane “arrives” when it makes landfall. This landfall thing is a thing Meteorologists use. This is when the eye reaches the shoreline. There are important meteorological things that happen when the eye reaches the shoreline and it is highly convenient and very polite of these monster storms to have something that serves as a virtual point on the map indicating their center so we don’t have to have an endless debate about when the storm “arrives.” But if you are sitting there on the coastline thinking that the hurricane that is bearing down on you hasn’t gotten there yet when the eye is 20 miles away but 130 mph winds are taking off your roof and a storm surge has already broken the dike and all the escape routes are already flooded then you don’t understand that hurricanes are huge. And, I’ve seen meteorologists standing in the 100+ mph winds talking about how the hurricane has not arrived yet, and we’ve all seen the Bush administration claim that Katrina did not cause flooding in New Orleans because the flooding happened before the hurricane arrived, because she had not made landfall yet.

    So, now we might say something like “a Category 3 hurricane will come ashore on the Louisiana-Mississippi border” and people who live a ways away have to be reminded “oh, and there will be hurricane force winds over there where you live too” as though this was a separate thing. Hurricanes are not eyes of hurricanes, and the wind field of a certain category of hurricane can very large or very small, and what you have to do because a hurricane is coming may be very unconnected to to simplified and incorrect conceptualization of the hurricane that the Saffir Simposon scale or the Storm Stud on the beach gives you.

    On top of this, the Saffir Simpson scale refers only to maximum sustained wind, not the size of the wind field, the intensity of storm surge, or the location and extent of coastal flooding, or the rain and subsequent flooding which may depend on topography, and the tornadoes that spin off, etc. etc. It is only telling us one thing, telling it to us poorly, ignoring things that are more important, and ignoring the context of ignorance and confusion that surrounds these storms.

    And speaking of ignorance, there is this: People misunderstand storms. Should a scale of measurement of a storm’s effects be designed to accommodate ignorance, or to accommodate the need to measure the storm’s effects?

    Anyway, those are the first two reasons to not fetishize the Saffir Simpson scale. It is part of the ignorance, not an anecdote to it, and it ignores some of the most imprtant aspects of the storm, or at least, fails to correlate well with those things.

    The third reason Saffir Simpson is sometimes problematic is because it is, explicitly, a level of destruction meter and it sometimes does a poor job at that. Notice that the number of miles per hour that the winds much reach to jump to the next category is not linear. Some of the categories are 19 mph ‘wide’ and some are 24 mph ‘wide.’ This is because Saffir Simpson categories are not wind speed categories no matter how much they look like they are. They use windspeed but they are categories of destructiveness. Here is the Saffir Simpson scale, officially, from the National Weather Service:

    • Category 1: Very dangerous winds will produce some damage: Well-constructed frame homes could have damage to roof, shingles, vinyl siding and gutters. Large branches of trees will snap and shallowly rooted trees may be toppled. Extensive damage to power lines and poles likely will result in power outages that could last a few to several days.

    • Category 2: Extremely dangerous winds will cause extensive damage: Well-constructed frame homes could sustain major roof and siding damage. Many shallowly rooted trees will be snapped or uprooted and block numerous roads. Near-total power loss is expected with outages that could last from several days to weeks.

    • Category 3: Devastating damage will occur: Well-built framed homes may incur major damage or removal of roof decking and gable ends. Many trees will be snapped or uprooted, blocking numerous roads. Electricity and water will be unavailable for several days to weeks after the storm passes.

    • Category 4: Catastrophic damage will occur: Well-built framed homes can sustain severe damage with loss of most of the roof structure and/or some exterior walls. Most trees will be snapped or uprooted and power poles downed. Fallen trees and power poles will isolate residential areas. Power outages will last weeks to possibly months. Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months.

    • Category 5: Catastrophic damage will occur: A high percentage of framed homes will be destroyed, with total roof failure and wall collapse. Fallen trees and power poles will isolate residential areas. Power outages will last for weeks to possibly months. Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months.

    See how I did that without even mentioning wind speeds? Notice that these categories are levels of destruction mainly of human-made structures. Saffir and Simpson did not invent destruction. They did not invent wind speed. What they did was to list levels of destruction that make sense, like how bad the power outages will be or whether or not houses will get knocked down just here and there or everywhere, and how long after the disaster everything will be a mess. Then, Saffir and Simpson linked these categories of destruction to wind speed thresholds that do not form even categories. This is not a set of wind speed categories. This is a set of categories indicating levels of destruction that, of course, go up with more wind speed but not in a linear fashion.

    I note that when asked about a Category 6 storm Simpson had this to say, quoted in Wikipedia:

    According to Robert Simpson, there are no reasons for a Category 6 on the Saffir-Simpson Scale because it is designed to measure the potential damage of a hurricane to manmade structures. Stating that “…when you get up into winds in excess of 155 mph (249 km/h) you have enough damage if that extreme wind sustains itself for as much as six seconds on a building it’s going to cause rupturing damages that are serious no matter how well it’s engineered”

    As brilliant as the Saffir Simpson scale is, there is a problem with categorizing levels of destruction beyond the fact that much of the destruction and death may be flooding which is not addressed directly by the system. A hurricane in a hilly third world country with a lot of erosion due to deforestation, and where people live in homes that can be blown down more easily, are not going to experience the same level of destruction as people who live in a first world country with the experience of a major typhoon and who rebuilt their homes to be concrete bunkers with storm shutters and excellent drainage systems in place (a friend of mine lives in a home on Osaka that is built like this; there was a major typhoon there years ago and this is how people there rebuilt). Saffir Simpson has its uses but these uses to not apply globally or across time as conditions change.

    The reason people are asking about a new category is this: We may need a new baseline. This is true with climate change in general. If we normally get Category 1 through 5 storms and the 5’s are rare and only barely go over the line that defines a Category 5 storm on the Saffir Simpson scale, then we don’t need to change. But if there is an increasing number of storms that turn into super storms and go many tens of miles over the Category 5 line, as Haiyan did (with wind speeds of 195 mph, enough to make it a Category 6 or even 7, if we extended the scale) then we should acknowledge the shifting baseline by adding a category or changing the system.

    I think we should keep Saffir Simpson because it is already in use, but add categories every 20 mph as needed. But in addition we should add or begin to use more of the other ways of measuring a hurricane, that indicate the overall strength and size of the beast. The general public might be too stupid, according to some, to handle even a tiny bit of complexity, but if you live in a hurricane prone area knowing that hurricanes have two or three pertinent characteristics is important and you better know that. Knowing what a given hurricane that is coming your way looks like is important and you better know that. Knowing that the total energy of a storm is X, the likely destructive force is Y (from a modified Saffir Simpson that has more categories), that you are in a zone of likely wind strength of Z and if you are on the coast likely storm surge of F sounds like an awful lot to know, but it is less information and less complicated than the following:

    • The average bread recipe.
    • The variables you used to chose your last car.
    • Using the TV remote.
    • How to use a pull tab or slot machine.
    • Managing death certificates and other paperwork of your relatives who died because they didn’t pay attention to the hurricane.