Tag Archives: Severe weather

WUWT Science Denialist Blog Hits New, Historic Low

At this moment, there is a guest post over at WUWT blog downplaying the size, strength, wind speeds, overall effects, and even the death toll of Super Typhoon Haiyan. Even as the monster storm steams across the sea to it’s next landfall (probably as a huge wet tropical storm, in northern Vietnam and southern China), Anthony Watts and his crew are trying to pretend this monster storm didn’t happen, and instead, that it was a run of the mill typhoon.

At the moment, nobody is really saying that Haiyan’s strength, size, power, or even existence is specifically the direct result of global warming, although it is of course impossible to remove the effects of global warming from ANY weather event because global warming is part of climate change and guess what … weather arises from the climate. The climate has changed, so ALL of our weather is affected by climate change.

This offensive post is preemptive denial, but it is denial that throws the lives and suffering of millions of people … of which thousands have lost relatives … under the bus. So that Anthony Watts and his guest poster Paul Homewood can … can do what? Feel smart? Take a shot at the reality of climate change? Pretend severe weather does not matter? What? Maybe they don’t like people who live in the Philippines.

Haiyan will be measured and remeasured over coming days, but it really is looking like it will be one for the record books. But Watts and Homewood don’t care about a big storm this year, or the fact that there have been several big storms in the Pacific, because there were a lot of Pacific typhoons in 1964, before fossil fuels were discovered by humans and thus unlinked to climate change. … ;( … Haiyan will be measured in terms of the death toll and destruction to property and forests, and it will be one of the worst typhoons ever, probably. But Watts and Homewood don’t want storms to be important for the simple reason that the best models strongly suggest that there will be more storms … especially in the Pacific, where Haiyan struck, over coming decades because of the changes to climate that humans are carrying out and that Anthony Watts and Paul Homewood deny to be real.


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.


Watts needs to take this offensive and absurd post off of his site. Homewood needs to apologize, and to do so sincerely. But before they do that, go have a look. It will probably make you throw up a little in your mouth.

There is one funny thing. Homewood takes the Daily Mail to task for getting numbers wrong and exaggerating the severity of the storm. I don’t know if the Daily Mail got it right or wrong because I don’t read the drivel they publish in that rag, and I don’t normally read the drek Watts publishes on his horrid site, and the two together is just too much, so I skipped that part. But the Daily Mail is one of those rags that often publishes climate science denialism and the nefarious and mean spirited denialists like Anthony Watts often use such sources to make their point. But here apparently the sensationalism of the Daily Mail contradicts the made up crap Watts puts on his blog. Somehow the expression “You gotta dance with the one that brung ya” comes to mind.

Twin Cities Experiences Mini-Boulder: #WeatherWhiplash

Over the last 48 hours or so a weather system slowly moved across the southern Dakotas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota. It was in part shaped and positioned by the jet stream, and it was so slow moving because of the unusually curved nature of the jet stream. This is very much like what happened a few weeks ago in Colorado, but with less of an effect. Nonetheless, there was a damage and injury causing tornado in Nebraska and Iowa, and nine inches of rain in Winona, where there was some very inconvenient flooding. The huge multi-foot snow storm in the Dakotas was part of this system. People died in that storm.

And yes, folks, this is global warming. A warming earth meant a warming Arctic. The Arctic warmed to a certain point and then runaway feedbacks caused the Arctic to suddenly grow much much warmer than it was, and more importantly, the Arctic became relatively warmer compared to the rest of the plant, a phenomenon called “Arctic Amplification.” This changed the way extra heat in equatorial regions moves towards the north pole, and this in turn caused the jet streams to change their configuration so they get all bunched up (in these things called “Rossby Waves”) which causes large weather systems, usually either very dry or very wet, to stall in place or move very slowly. We were getting a mini-flash drought while Boulder and environs were getting flooded. And now we are getting flooded while our neighbors are being buried under three feet of snow. The rapid back and forth between extremes, and the more extreme nature of the extremes, has been termed “Weather Whiplash” by meteorologists.

Welcome to the new normal! Most of the time it will just mean a change in when you water your lawn. Other times it will mean footing the bill to rebuild all the roads, and a death here and there. Sometimes it will mean much more. Stay tuned.

More from Paul Douglas:

We have a hurricane. Almost. Maybe. Probably. never mind

The anemic (perhaps due to climate change, perhaps not) Atlantic Hurricane Season has finally produced a storm that might turn into a hurricane and will hit the Gulf Coast.

Tropical Storm Karen is just north of the Yucatan and is strengthening and heading due north towards Louisana, Mississippi, Alabama or the Florida Panhandle with the current (and very much subject to revision!) bulls eye somewhere around or just east of Mobile.

The current projections indicate that the storm will turn into a hurricane while over the gulf, then weaken to a tropical storm before striking land. But it will still be a near-hurricane force tropical storm at that point and will bring a lot of rain and such with it. Also, it might be big, as in wide.

Your favorite meteorologist summarizes the #IPCC report

Paul Douglas from Weather Nation (and elsewhere):

For the 5th time in 23 years, the world’s leading climate scientists have released an update on the state of the climate. WeatherNation Chief Meteorologist reviews the highlights plus shares the panel’s predictions for the rest of the century.

Global Warming and Extreme Weather – #climate #agw

We call it “weather whiplash.” This is not just meteorologists being funny. It is a phenomenon that perhaps has always been with us to some degree, but that has recently become much more common, apparently. If you were under the impression that there is a lot of strange weather going on out there, you may be right, and weather whiplash may be the phenomenon you’ve noticed. Importantly, there is good reason to believe that weather whiplash is the result of anthropogenic global warming. In other words, it’s your fault, so please do pay attention.

Weather patterns tend to move latitudinally across the globe. You’ll get a period of no rain or snow for a while punctuated by precipitation, then the precipitation moves on and it is dry again for a while. The typical pattern of dry and precipitation in a given region changes by season, but if you compare one season to the next over several years there is normally a pattern. In some areas it is mostly wet with some dry, other areas mostly dry with some wet, other areas somewhere in between. The same can be said of cold vs. warm air masses.

Here in Minnesota, May and June tend to have repeated intense storm fronts moving through every few days for a few weeks, though the exact timing of when this stormy weather starts and ends, and how long it lasts, varies. Also, the nature of the storms varies, with some years having many tornadoes, some years having mostly straight line winds, etc. Meanwhile, in Minnesota, I get the impression that August is usually relatively dry and cool. Many Minnesotans who have cabins way up north regard August as the first month of fall, that’s how cool it is. Where you live there is a pattern, and you’ve probably noticed it.

Weather whiplash is when this happens: Instead of periods of dry and wet alternating as they normally do, one of those two patterns (dry or wet) gets stuck in place for a period of time. I get the impression that dry periods, when they get stuck, get stuck for many days in a row, while wet periods get stuck for less time. The reason for that may be this: The dry air masses that get stuck are larger because high pressure systems are big and tend to be dry, while wet weather systems are smaller. So, if all the weather got stuck all at once in the northern temperate region, more landscape would be under dry, clear skies and less landscape would be under wet, cloudy skies.

And of course, a gentle fluctuation back and forth between warmer and colder conditions is replaced, under weather whiplash conditions, with long periods of cooler or long periods of warmer weather.

Here’s the problem. If the weather is warm-cool-warm-cool over a periods of two weeks, it never gets that warm or cool. But if it is just warm-warm-warm-warm over a period of two weeks, that’s a heat wave. The heat builds and it gets warmer and warmer and warmer until it is just plain stinking hot. Or, conversely, if the weather is cool-cool-cool-cool and that happens mid winter, that’s a cold snap. Or, like happened this year in Minnesota, it can get cool-cool-cool-cool just at the time we should be having some spring rains, so instead we get spring snows for a month. Residents of the Twin Cities feel the pain of this even now, because the entire construction season (we have two season here, “Winter” and “Construction”) was delayed by a month due to weather whiplash, and the Minnesota Department of Public Works and county and local DPW’s have been working extra hard at ruining our commute today so that our commute can be better at some unspecified time in the future, right after the pigs start flying.

If the weather patterns sit in one place for a long time and cold or heat or dry or rain builds up … so you get a cold snap, heat wave, drought, or floods … then one part of weather whiplash is in effect. Then, the weather shifts and where there was once hot and dry, and thus maybe fires that denude the landscape, you have floods, made worse not only because of the stalled system but also because the fires prepped the grounds for greater runoff, erosion, and land slides. That’s the full weather whiplash pattern. Seemingly interminable weather of one kind suddenly replaced by seemingly interminable weather of another, perhaps opposite kind. Snap.

Farmers have to put their crops in late because of a long period of cool and wet conditions. Then the weather clears and everything is nice and dry, so the farmers plant later than ideal, but at least they get to plant. But then the nice and dry conditions are like the proverbial TV in-laws and never seem to want to leave, and good planting conditions turn into a worrying period of not enough rain and that turns into a moderate drought, and that turns into a severe drought. Then, just as you are about to harvest the half dead corn and maybe use it for halloween decorations because it is not good for anything else, the weather whiplashes on you again and your half dead crops are mowed down by a series of hail storms. This is not good for farmers.

Weather whiplash does seem to be a recent phenomenon, even if stalled systems can actually happen at any time. I think this is true because people like Paul Douglas seem to think it is true, people who have been watching the weather every day for years. It is hard to find a simple comprehensive set of data that demonstrates this, however. One way to look at this is to examine the frequency of “natural disasters” of various types over time, according to the people who know most about such things: the insurance industry. Following is a graph just for the US. I assume that weather whiplash is a global Northern Hemisphere phenomenon (maybe also Southern Hemisphere, but for various reasons maybe not; see below). I also assume that while the United States, being fairly large, is thus a good sample of the Northern Hemisphere, weather whiplash might be happening more in Eurasia one year and more in the US another year. However, there is reason to believe that that would not be the case to any large degree because the jet stream waviness is a global thing. Anyway, here’s a data set in the form of a chart from the insurance industry showing natural disasters in the US from 1980 to 2011. It is from this document (PDF).

NaturalDisastersInUS_1980-2011

Clearly there is an increase in the overall number of disasters. Climatological events including extreme temperature, drought, and forest fires increase across the time period of consideration. Floods and mass movement of water also clearly increases across this time period. Storms also increase. Geophysical events on the other hand, don’t. This is, of course, what we would expect if weather related events were having more of an impact. Is this weather whiplash?

One could argue that global warming would increase extreme temperature conditions and drought without anything special like weather whiplash happening. Also, global warming can increase rain and flood related problems because warmer air and seas means more evaporation. And, certainly, that is what has occurred over time.

And this is a very important point that I keep telling people but I’m not sure how well it has gotten across. Adding heat to the atmosphere may add moisture, and it may add drying conditions as well. It might increase storminess, or the intensity of some storms. But that is just a quantitative change in the weather, caused by global warming, and while important it is still a simple matter of degree.

Weather whiplash is not a quantitative change in weather patterns. It is not just a bit more rain or a bit more heat in what might otherwise be a rainy day or a hot day. Weather whiplash is a qualitative change in the patterns of weather. Qualitative, large scale features of climate (and weather) give us things like desserts and rain forests. They give us seasonal patterns. They give us expectations of a wet spring that gets dry enough to plant, enough rain falling in small enough bouts to keep the crops growing over the summer, and a reasonably dry fall so the harvesting machinery can get out in the fields and bring in the sheaves. Or, if there is a qualitative shift in the climate and weather, like weather whiplash becoming a common phenomenon, it might be that you can’t really grow corn where you were thinking you could, or if so, you need a different approach. And since all we eat and grow is corn, we are in big trouble. It might mean that the idea of living in excessively quaint villages next to medium size creeks in very large mountains is simply not an option any more, because “1,000 year floods” can happen any time if weather whiplash happens to aim its cruel cat-o-nine-tails at your quaintness.

The qualitatively distinct phenomenon of weather whiplash … the multi-day or even multi-week long stalling of weather patterns … builds on incremental increases in dryness of air (due to heat) and increased wetness of other air (due to increased evaporation) and increased storms (due to increased energy in the atmosphere) and make all that worse.

Imagine you have the habit of tossing the daily accumulation of spare change that forms in your pockets in random locations around your house at the end of each day. Then, something changes in your pattern of behavior and you end up coming home with more change every day (the price of something you frequently buy goes from 95 cents to $1.05, and you only pay with dollar bills). You still toss the change randomly, but now there is somewhat more spare change on your nightstand, on the table by the front door, in that basket on the desk in your study, in the laundry room. That’s a quantitative increase in spare change due to a change in the nature of making change during the day. It could matter, you might notice it, it may suddenly become worth it for the teenager in your household to volunteer to help clean the house if they can keep all the change. But it is just a matter of degree.

But what if you ALSO change what you do with the change. Instead of randomly dropping the change in a large number of locations, you change your pattern and most of the time you empty most of the change from most of your pockets into the single basket on your desk in the study. In short order you would have a lot of change in one place not only because you are accumulating more every day but also, and really, mainly, because you are putting it all in one place. Soon there would be many dollars worth of quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies in your basket, enough to take to the bank. Now, THAT’s change we can believe in!

Weather whiplash on top of increased moisture in the air brought us drought and fire followed by unprecedented rainfall in Colorado just a couple of weeks ago. It flooded Central Europe and Calgary, Alberta. It brought killer cold and heat waves to Eurasia and North America over the last couple of years. It blocked Hurricane Super-Franken-Storm Sandy and steered it into New York and New Jersey about a year ago. It brought a “Flash Drought” to the US midwest this summer. And so on and so forth.

That, dear reader, is change we better believe in.

OK, but how does weather whiplash happen? I’ve explained this before (here) but I’ll give you a quick run down now in case you are to lazy to click on that link.

There are mysterious processes at work. They are not mysterious to climate scientists who can do calculus, of course, but they are a little hard to explain in a straight forward process without using analogies that ultimately break down. But I’l use a couple of analogies anyway. Feel free to complain about them in the comments, or offer better ones!

First, this: Climate is all about excess heat moving from the equatorial regions to the poles. When it does so across the troposphere, big-giant patterns of air movement are set up. These patterns can be thought of as giant twisting donuts of air encircling the earth (though that is only a rough description, on a simpler planet it would be very accurate). Air at the equator rises, moves away from the equator and cools, then sink, and works its way back towards the equator. Then, the next donut in line does same thing but twisting in a different direction. And so on. In cross section, it looks like this:

jetstream-2

The junctions between these giant twisting donuts, at altitude, are the jet streams.

Weather generally moves along and within these donuts, nudged along and otherwise affected by the jet streams, in the manner described at the beginning of this post. Dry-wet-dry-wet or cool-warm-cool-warm, at the scale of days. Or, should I say, this regular pattern of normal variation happens as long as the jet streams are straight and all normal and stuff.

Here’s a depiction of the jet streams being fairly normal (from here):

652

But it does not always work that way. Visualize a straight river with a flat gravel bottom moving along at a reasonable clip in front of you. Observe the hibiscus flowers released by plants upstream (as happens in some tropical rivers) floating by each in a regular linear pattern. The river is a giant twisting donut, the hibiscus flowers are weather events. Now, drop a big log halfway across the river so one end is on the bank, and the other end is out in the middle of the river and pointing slightly upstream. Now, the water is partly trapped, and forms a vortex upstream from the log, and also, a vortex going perhaps in the opposite direction forms downstream from the log. The hibiscus flowers trapped in the vortex now fail to float by, but rather, spin and spin and spin and remain in the same place. Dozens of these flowers might get trapped in place, and beneath the surface, even the gravel is starting to mound up under parts of the stream that are moving slower, and dug out in other parts. Where that vortex occurs, above the log, will be many hibiscus flowers, or, rain storms, over a period of time. Perhaps below the log there will then be a paucity of hibiscus flowers, or, drought, for a period of time. Eventually the log gets lose, rolls downstream a ways, and gets stuck again. Then, some other part of the river … some other region … gets to experience the stuck vortex.

stock-footage-the-log-in-the-stream

When the gradient in heat between the tropics and the poles is at a certain level, you get a nice straight jet stream most of the time. When the gradient drops, for complex reasons involving calculus and such, the whole donut-jet stream thing gets all messed up like the river with the log dropped across it, and the jet streams fold up in to these big curves called “Rossby waves.”

NASA_jet_stream_image_-resized_rev1

Over the recent years, we have experienced general global warming, and this has caused the sea ice that covers much of the Arctic Sea to melt more in the summer than it usually does. This has caused the whole northern region to become warmer because there is less reflective ice and more open ocean to collect sunlight. This has caused even more melting of the ice, and over the last decade we’ve seen a catastrophic reduction in sumer arctic ice that, while it was expected that this would happen over time, has occurred at a shocking rate of speed that has kinda freaked everybody out. This warming of the Arctic in relation to everywhere else is called “Arctic Amplification.” Arctic amplification has caused the differential of equatorial vs. polar temperature to shift, and this has caused the Rossby waves to form.

The waves themselves don’t move at all or move only very slowly for several days, and form vortex patterns to their north (which are low pressure systems) and to their south (which are high pressure systems). The air moving along the jet stream itself also slows down. So, any wether pattern that might just float by like a hibiscus flower on a tropical river instead sits here and either rains on you for a week or shines bright sun on you for a week, or whatever. Then, the waves move or disappear and reform elsewhere, like the log getting lose and rolling down stream for a ways, and the place that was for several days dry is now for several days wet.

Wether whiplash.

Jet stream all messed up.
Jet stream all messed up.

So, is there any evidence that weather whiplash has been happening more frequently in recent years other than so many meteorologists simply claiming it has?

I asked a number of colleagues who work with climate and weather if there was a readily available database showing jet stream waviness and big storm events that could be converted into a human-understandable picture, or graph, or something, of this change over time. I had already read two recent papers that looked at this phenomenon but they are highly technical and on their own don’t have graphics that do the job. So, I asked one of the authors of one of those papers about a quick little trick (OMG HE USED THE WORD TRICK IN RELATION TO CLIMATE) to convert one of their more complicate graphs into something more obvious. Below, I provide you with the original graphic and the one I generated from it. This shows the frequency over time in a limited size study area (not the whole Northern Hemisphere) of conditions under which Rossby waves would cause weather whiplash conditions. Remember, this is just a sample of the planet in both time and space, not the actual number of times this happens. But, the sampling is uniform over several decades, so if there is an increasing trend of jet-stream curviness at the level that could cause wether whiplash, it will be shown, more or less, here. The numbers are so small that I don’t even attempt a test of significance. This is provisional. Suggesting. For fun. If one can call the outcome of weather whiplash fun, which you really cant. Anyway, check out these two items:

Screen Shot 2013-09-28 at 8.13.57 PM

…and, from this figure, I created the following graphic, counting the number of QR events (the squares) per unit time evenly divided across the sampling period:

QR_conditions_over_time_based_on_Petoukhov_et_al

Here’s the thing. We can’t easily say that there is a qualitatively new climate system in place, because by definition “climate” is what happens over 30 years of time. There is no “new climate” that is five or ten years old. That, however, is not because of a natural process. It is because of how climate science has evolved. It makes sense for climate scientists to think in multi-decade chunks of time because climate really does vary at levels less than 20 or 30 years time, normally. Taking a normal climate science perspective, we can be pretty sure that “weather warming” is a new climate regime some time around the middle of the 21st century when there is enough data!

But this is a problem. If the situation is changing rapidly enough it will be hard for methods that have evolved in climatology to respond to, or even, really, “see” it. Trying to understand weather whiplash by long term study of the climate system is a bit like using the publicly available long term FBI crime stats that were last updated two years ago to assess whether or not your house is being broken into right now.

As you know, the IPCC report on the scientific evidence related to climate change is coming out just now. That report is not so sure about changes in weather severity or storminess or stuff like weather whiplash. Some weather changes are acknolwedged as very likely, others, the IPCC report is much more equivocal about. However, there are very few people in climate science right now that don’t think something like weather whiplash is probably happening, and many are well convinced of it. The problem is that the IPCC reporting process is more like climate than weather in its temporal scale!

The IPCC reporting process has a time lag of several years; the final, most policy related report for this cycle will be out in some 12 months from now, a year after the first report in the cycle, the one with the science in it. In a few years from now, and not likely before, there will be important people sitting in important room in important buildings talking about climate. Someone will say “is drought a thing?” and someone else will say “IPCC says they are only moderately sure at best that drought is a thing.” It won’t matter that the conversation is happening in July 2015 and the last piece of data in the IPCC report is from 2011 and drought has been a dominant result of weather whiplash for five years … enough time to overlap with but not influence the IPCC conclusions.

Weather whiplash is almost certainly for real.

Finally, here are two videos that also go into this topic. From the Yale Climate Forum, “New video couples interviews with two experts — Rutgers’ Jennifer Francis and Weather Underground’s Jeff Masters — to explore the ‘Why?’ of two years of mirror images of weather across North America”

…and “”Wummer.” Just days ago, it looked and felt like winter in many cities across the the Midwest. Then whammo, it’s summer with record breaking heat across several Midwest states. Yes, double digit snowfalls to triple digit heat all within a matter of days. Meteorologist Paul Douglas says this takes Weather Whiplash to a whole new level.”

Weather Whiplash Is Like My Old Broken Sprinkler

There is a strong argument to be made that the recent flooding in Colorado is the result of global warming. Here are three things one could say about the flooding. Think of these as alternative hypotheses to explain that event:

1) Weather has extremes. Sometimes, instead of raining just a bit, it rains a hella lot and you get a big giant flood.

2) Weather has extremes etc. etc. but global warming tends to make some of the extremes more extremes, so instead of getting just a big flood, you get a big giant flood.

3) The storm that brought well over a foot of rain to one mountainous area was qualitatively distinct; it happened because of a configuration in the weather patterns that might have happened at any time over the last several centuries but only very very rarely, but because of global warming, this sort of thing happens far more frequently. The weather patterns in the Northern Hemisphere have shifted in a way that makes the rain event in Colorado a fairly likely thing to happen somewhere in the world several times a year, and it happened to happen in Colorado this time around. Prior to global warming caused changes, this effect would be very rare, now it is common.

The difference between these ways of looking at the weather is very important, because under option 3, we have a problem. Just as people who live along the Gulf Coast or the mid-Atlantic or south need to worry about hurricanes as a thing, or people who live in the middle of the US have to worry about tornadoes as a thing, or people who live in Minnesota have to worry about killer cold as a thing, it may be the case that people who live at latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere now have to worry about this new weather pattern, which some call “weather whiplash,” as a thing. When you build your mountain roads in the Rockies, you’ve got to figure that there is a reasonable chance that during the next few decades there will be a foot of rain in the catchment of the stream that road runs along. Either build the road differently, or plan to replace it now and then. Mountain valley settlements in high mountains like the Rockies may need to measure out a new “high water line” for the creek they overlook and plan for that water line being reached within the lifetime of the inhabitants of the village, once or more.

Similarly, just as dense concentrations of rain are more likely under option 3, dense concentrations of dry conditions are also likely. In other words, weather whiplash is like my old broken sprinkler.

Until recently I had one of those sprinklers that wave back and forth with a couple dozen high power streams of water. The water comes out of a bar, and the bar oscillates back and forth and back and forth so there is a long, linear, gentle rain storm that passes back and forth across the lawn over the zone covered by the sprinkler. But when my sprinkler got old it would get stuck sometimes. The bar would stop oscillating, and the streams of water would create a long linear rain storm on one strip of the law while the rest of the lawn simply got dryer. The broken sprinkler did something that resembles the weather in the middle-ish part of the United States for a week or so during September 2013. The midwest got a “flash drought” during which no rain fell but it as hot and breezy, while the Rockies and other areas got lots of rain from a big storm that sat there for days and days without moving. The main part of the storm was in Colorado but New Mexico got extra rain as well, and after the storm left Colorado it moved north in the Rockies and wet down Wyoming and Montana a bit as well (causing only some flooding).

The jet stream is often a long, linear, fast moving necklace (well, more than one necklace as there is more than one jet stream) that encircles the earth at some distance from the equator. It is associated with the movement of air masses around the globe. These air masses alternately pick up and drop moisture. When the air mass is dry, it dries out the land beneath. When the air mass is wet, and it mixes with some other air along a front, it drops rain. But the rainfall (and correspondingly, the dry spots) are somewhat like an oscillating sprinkler that is not broken. A given area is likely to experience alternating rain and dry.

Some regions experience more dry than wet, some regions are wetter, but the rainfall across a given region is typically doled out in chunks, some of which can be very heavy, but rarely more than a few inches in a given storm.

Lately, the jet stream seems to have been very frequently changing its configuration. Instead of being a relatively straight circle around the globe it is all kinked up in the big “waves.” Where there are waves, several things happen. First, the movement of air along the jet stream slows down, and this interacts with other air masses. More importantly, it seems, is that the kinks create large very slow moving or stationary low and high pressure systems. The high pressure systems are south of the jet stream, the low pressure systems are north of it, but since the jet stream is kinked, these low and high pressure systems end up being next to each other. So, we get tropical stuff moving north, and subarctic stuff moving south, and there are vast differences in moisture and temperature. This can result in two things at the same time. Some regions have dry conditions and some have lots of precipitation. The key thing is this: Since these systems are very slow moving, or sometimes, just plain stuck, like my sprinkler, the dry conditions persist for many days, and the wet conditions persist for many days. Thus, Colorado.

I wonder if is possible that the position of the waves in the jet stream will end up being more frequently located in certain spots. I have no reason to say this empirically, but since air mass movement is linked to the position of mountains and oceans and stuff, it seems a reasonable question to ask. If that ends up being the case, than we could end up with a new climate regime wherein certain areas tend to get repeated stalled rain systems (not every year, but just more frequently than average) while other regions get repeated stalled dry conditions. That might be good news, because it might be easier to adjust to weather whiplash with more predictability. But if this sort of pattern was to be strong, we would probably see it already, so don’t count on it. Most likely, a climate pattern where very rainy weather shows up out of nowhere and sits on top of you for a week while elsewhere dry conditions persist for a few weeks in a row is not good for agriculture or for mountain villages and roads.

I got a new sprinkler. It wasn’t easy. This time of year it is hard to get sprinklers because they tend to stock up on them in the spring. Also, with the drought conditions were’ve been experiencing over the last few weeks in my neighborhood, there has been a run on the few sprinklers that are left. Climate change made it hard for me to find a sprinkler! (First World Problem #212124). But eventually I got one. I’m not sure how hard it will be to get a new climate.

I went to pick the sprinkler up to try to make it oscillate properly and it literally (and I do mean literally) fell to pieces in my hand.  So I went and got a new one.
I went to pick the sprinkler up to try to make it oscillate properly and it literally (and I do mean literally) fell to pieces in my hand. So I went and got a new one.

Atlantic Tropical Update Updated: Humberto is Back

The big, current, story in the Atlantic is, of course, hurrican/tropical storm (there is some confusion on the status of the storm over the last 12 hours) Ingrid. Regardless of how it is classified, Ingrid is going to cause major flooding in Mexico.

But over the next several days a second and potentially very interesting but less threatening story is going to develop. The first hurricane of the season, almost breaking the record for the latest first Atlantic hurricane that we’ve observed, was Humberto. Humberto degraded into an unnamed storm, a bloby stormy thing, moving roughly north way out in the Atlantic south of the Azores. But now exHumberto is expected to get reorganized into a named storm and possibly even turn into a hurricane again. The think is, Humberto is very far north and moving farther north. If Humberto becomes a hurricane, even if only briefly, it could be the most northerly such event in recorded Atlantic storm history. Even if it becomes a tropical storm and never develops to full hurricane status, it may be impressive.

Humberto is currently located between about 25 and 20 degrees north latitude. Here are a few items from Wikipedia’s page on Atlantic Hurricane Records that may pertain to evaluating Humberto’s potential uniqueness.

Update: Humberto has reformed as a tropical storm, and is called “Humberto.” Humberto is moving towards the North Atlantic tropical storm graveyard, but even as the storm moves over colder water extratropical conditions may cause it to increase to near hurricane strength. Meanwhile, there is a disturbance located east of the Yucatan which is expected to move in to the Bay of Campeche over the next couple of days where it has a reasonable chance of turing into a tropical storm, headed roughly in the direction of Ingrid, which has been very bad for Mexico.

1960 – Hurricane Ethel reached Category 5 intensity at 28.1° N, farther north than any other storm in the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean Sea or Atlantic Ocean. Ethel’s intensity is debatable and Hurricane Carla in 1961 may hold the record, becoming a Category 5 at 27°N.

1971 – Hurricane #2 became a hurricane at 46°N, the highest latitude a tropical storm has been upgraded in the Atlantic.

1973 – Hurricane Ellen became a major hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Scale at 42.1°N, further north than any other storm.

1988 – Tropical Storm Alberto was classified a tropical storm off the coast of Massachusetts, which is further north than any other tropical storm on record.

2005 – Hurricane Vince formed at a record northeast point in the Atlantic, however, this record was later broken by Grace in 2009. Vince also became a hurricane further east than any storm in Atlantic history at 18.9°W.

Regarding the north-most record, Atlantic Hurricane #2 (1971) formed into a hurricane so far north that Humberto seems unlikely to beat that record. But Alberto, in 1988, seems to have been the farthest north tropical storm. Alberto became a tropical storm at 41.5 degrees north (last observed as a depression at 40.0 degrees north).

Humberto is moving west-northwest at 10-15 miles per hour and could become a tropical storm as late as four or five days from now. So even if Humberto hurries north (and gets a thousand miles or so in that direction) and delays formation, the storm is unlikely to convert to a tropical storm before it reaches 40 degrees or even 30-something degrees north latitude. But, Humberto may well come in second or third like it did last time on its race to fame.

Ingrid is serious. Humberto tries for new record. And Manuel (UPDATE)

Ingrid is serious and is going to hit something. (UPDATE: Ingrid is the second hurricane of the Atlantic Season.)

A tropical disturbance of one form or another has been hanging around since around the beginning of the hurricane season in or near the southern Gulf of Mexico, and the latest instance of this phenomenon has finally made use of very warm surface water and sup itself up into a real live tropical storm that is doing to turn into a hurricane by the end of the weekend, and hit the east coast of Mexico. This will not be a real strong hurricane but it will be VERY wet and thus dangerous; life threatening flooding and land sides in hilly areas will ensue. From the NWS:

HAZARDS AFFECTING LAND

RAINFALL…INGRID IS EXPECTED TO PRODUCE 10 TO 15 INCHES OF RAIN
OVER A LARGE PART OF EASTERN MEXICO…WITH ISOLATED AMOUNTS OF 25
INCHES POSSIBLE…ESPECIALLY IN AREAS OF MOUNTAINOUS TERRAIN. THESE
RAINS ARE LIKELY TO RESULT IN LIFE-THREATENING FLASH FLOODS AND MUD
SLIDES.

WIND…TROPICAL STORM CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED TO AFFECT PORTIONS OF
THE COAST WITHIN THE TROPICAL STORM WARNING AREA TODAY. HURRICANE
CONDITIONS ARE POSSIBLE IN THE HURRICANE WATCH AREA BY LATE
SUNDAY…WITH TROPICAL STORM CONDITIONS POSSIBLE BY SUNDAY MORNING.

The graphic above shows the tropical storm wind probabilities for Igrid, on the right. Meanwhile Manuel, a Pacific tropical storm with only a small chance of spinning up to a hurricane (just over 10% chance) is coming ashore in Mexico as well.

Meanwhile, Humberto is doing something strange. Humberto was a hurricane, the first one of the season. It is now a tropical storm and is about to transition into a mere depression. But in a few days, the storm is expected to regain strength over warm Atlantic wates and regain tropical storm status, THEN TURN INTO A HURRICANE AGAIN. Indeed, Humberto is so strange that it’s got me using ALL CAPS. Now I understand why the nws does that all the time.

I’m still checking no this, but Humberto’s northerly formation could vie for the record for farthest north hurricane formation in the Atlantic, if we can count reforming from a depression in that category.

Epic, Nay, Biblical Flood.

Almost everything in the bible is exaggerated, including the floods. So when we have a flood that IS exaggerated (as a weather event) it is natural to call it biblical. The National Weather Service is calling this flood BIBLICAL (They always use all caps). Paul Douglas is calling it biblical (see below). I sent my friend the National Weather Service bulletin mentioning the biblical nature of the flood. She read my email on her cell phone while gazing at the wreckage of part of the back of her house down stream in a large river that was never there before and used to be the road, trapped at the base of a canyon, with her husband, a volunteer rescue worker, trapped somewhere over the mountain ridge. She said it was the first time she laughed since the biblical floods began.

Many weeks of rain fell in just a few hours on saturated ground. Expect more news from the vicinity of Boulder, along the east slope of the Rocky Mountains as various communities are rediscovered by civilization, or Doug, as needed, over the next few days.

Here’s Paul’s summary:

Tropical Update: Gabrielle Comes Back Humberto Hesitates (UPDATED)

As you know, if Tropical Storm Humberto, which is out in the eastern Atlantic at the moment, turns into a hurricane AFTER noon tomorrow, September 11th, it will break the record for latest first hurricane in the Atlantic hurricane season for the period of good records. Everyone was expecting Humberto to ramp up hurricane intensity today, but strengthening of the storm has stalled a bit, and Humberto is not as organized as expected.

Officially, the National Weather Service predicts that Humberto will be a hurricane later today. But it is possible that this won’t happen. We will be watching closely.

Meanwhile, Gabrielle, which was a tropical storm that got downgraded to blobby thing, is back as a tropical storm and is menacing Bermuda. Gabrielle is showing unexpected intensity and is larger than expected, and is and will be a very powerful tropical storm, but is expected to stay at sea.

By the way, Humberto is moving northwest but is expected to turn west before falling apart and returning to tropical storm status. Then, it will be a blobby thing that is no longer a named tropical storm out in the middle of the Atlantic. I’m not sure what forecasters thing, but I suppose it is possible that exHumberto could return as Humberto 2.0, like Gabrielle did. This seems to have happened a few times this season. I wonder if we are going to see a new record: Number of times a storm gets unnamed then returns.

UPDATE: Humberto is a Hurricane, and apparently became one over night. Humberto was upgraded in this morning’s 5:00 AM update. In order for Humberto to have broken the record of being the latest first hurricane in the Atlantic over the period of records, this upgrading had to happen after noon time today. So, no record was broken this year, but just barely!

The race is on: Will Humberto break the record or Gustav break Humberto? (UPDATED)

The disturbance off the west coast of Africa that I mentioned earlier is now officially Tropical Depression Number Nine.

It is forecast that Nine will turn into a hurricane in about 72 hours, though one model suggest much sooner.

The last time that no hurricane formed in the Atlantic before September 11th was … well, never (for the period of good records). So if the Nine becomes Humberto (that’s the next name on the list) a little late, on the 12th, Humberto becomes a record storm, of sorts … the first hurricane after the longest delay in the Atlantic. If, however, Nine becomes Humberto on the 10th, which is distinctly possible, then no dice … we have an unusual year but we don’t beat the old record.

But what happens if Humberto forms on the 11th? There’s a pretty darn good chance of that happening.

Well, then, I suppose it will depend on exactly WHEN Humberto becomes a hurricane … or is declared a hurricane?

According to records at the National Weather Service, Gustav, in 2002, was declared a hurricane at the noon update (UTC):

Gust_NHC_Tropical_Cyclone_Report

(And didn’t last long.)

So, what do you think? Will this be a record year or not? Will Humberto displace Gustav? Will Gustav stand? Will they become hurricanes simultaneously (as it were)?

Place your bets here…

UPDATE (9 sept 8:20AM):

The NWS is currently projecting Humberto to become a hurricane on the 11th. Or maybe a tiny bit sooner, but most likely, before noon on the 11th. Here are two projections that are slightly different that came out a few minutes ago:

Tropical_Storm_HUMBERTO

Tropical_Storm_HUMBERTOWindTable

Nearing the record for the latest first hurricane in the Atlantic

We are two days away from the peak day for hurricane season (with many more days of hurricane season coming, of course). Yet there have been no Atlantic Hurricanes. In just a few days (on September 11th) if we don’t have a hurricane, we’ll break the record for latest over the period of record keeping.

There is a storm forming off the coast of Africa that might become a hurricane before September 11th. Or maybe not. The race is on!

Anyway, Paul Douglas of Weather Nation has a video explaining the current situation:

Atlantic Hurricane Update (Updated)

Over the last several days the Atlantic has been very active, producing numerous storm systems that had promise to turn into something. Only one did, Gabrielle, and Gabrielle downgraded to a stormy blob (#1 on the above graphic from the National Weather Service). Gabrielle may well be back as a tropical storm, but there is only a small chance of that. If exGabrielle does turn into something it will most likely go straight north in the Atlantic. The second item is something that the NWS hurricane people have been watching since it was over the Sahara, hinting in their regular updates that something is coming. It isn’t that common that a tropical wave gets that much air time while still over West Africa, so I’m thinking this one is for real. The update from the NWS indicates that there is about an 80% chance of this wave (#2 on the graphic) will become a tropical cyclone during the next five days. This storm, as well, would likely track north across the Atlantic.

So, both storms have zero chance of affecting the Gulf of Mexico, and both have a high chance, if they develop into hurricanes, of tracking more or less harmlessly up the Atlantic.

Of course, Sandy tracked up the Atlantic and then made a left turn into New Jersey/New York. I don’t think the steering conditions for that happening with either of these storms is in place at the moment, though.

Update: That system off the West African coast now has a 90% chance of becoming a named storm. I believe the next name in line is Humberto:

Maybe_Humberto_National_Hurricane_Center

Imperfect Storms: A Controversy In Climate Science

I love it when controversy develops in climate science. It demonstrates that climate science is a science, not dogma. Also, it is interesting. And, ultimately, it is important because we need to reduce uncertainty and addressing controversy eventually does so.

ResearchBlogging.orgThere is a new controversy in climate science about a vitally important issue. Last year, Hurricane Sandy (aka Superstorm Sandy aka Frankenstorm Sandy) devastated coastal New Jersey and flooded the Battery in Manhattan. This was a highly unlikely event. Estimates of how likely it is for a major hurricane to follow the path Sandy followed – a nearly perfect east to west trajectory from the ocean onto the land – range from once in 400 years to once in 800 years. But there was an explanation. A set of unusual large scale moving masses of air related to the jet stream had formed in such a way to shape Sandy’s storm track into a configuration never before seen for any hurricane for which we have accurate storm tracks. This configuration of air masses is best explained as the outcome of two unusual large scale weather phenomena, changes to the jet stream owing to Arctic Amplification and a negative North Atlantic oscillation. These configurations, in turn, are thought to have been made more likely by the effects of anthropogenic global warming.

NOAA's collection of over a century and a half of Atlantic Hurricane tracks.  Note that big storms go from east to west while in the tropics, then if they make it far enough north, go west to east.  Storms that affect the Atlantic Coast of the US tend to move north along the coast, grazing the continent and thus weakening.  A storm that goes up the Atlantic staying over warm waters such as the Gulf Stream, then moves east to west against the coast in non-weakened form, is a monster.
NOAA’s collection of over a century and a half of Atlantic Hurricane tracks. Note that big storms go from east to west while in the tropics, then if they make it far enough north, go west to east. Storms that affect the Atlantic Coast of the US tend to move north along the coast, grazing the continent and thus weakening. A storm that goes up the Atlantic staying over warm waters such as the Gulf Stream, then moves east to west against the coast in non-weakened form, is a monster.
For this reason it has been suggested that increased global warming due to the release of carbon into the atmosphere by widespread and intensive burning of fossil fuels will increase the likelihood of Sandy-like events in the future. A handful of research projects have supported this idea. But, now there is a new paper that suggests the opposite. Elizabeth Barnes, Lorenzo Polvani and Adam Sobel have a paper in PNAS (“Model projections of atmospheric steering of Sandy-like superstorms”) that concludes that future storm tracks in the North Atlantic, under global warming, will be more likely to push hurricanes (or their downgraded senescent forms) to the east rather than to the west ala Sandy. The authors identified the specific atmospheric features that steered Sandy into New Jersey. They then ran a number of very sophisticated climate models into the future to see if these phenomena would be more or less likely, and found that they would be less likely.

This finding, if correct, would be good news for New York and New Jersey and other states along the east coast of the United States north of Florida. (The Sandy-like track could actually happen along a wide stretch of the coast north of the sub-tropics.) This finding (and other research) would be bad news for Western Europe because this new finding also predicts a higher chance of hurricanes, or more likely their downgraded but still significant versions, making landfall there.

Jeff Masters, on his blog at Wunderground, has summarized some of the counter arguments to this finding. He notes that models of future climate change are limited when it comes to the sort of phenomena being addressed in this study. He notes that the current climate models predicted Arctic Sea ice reduction, but were far off the mark in the rapidity of that catastrophe. He cites a personal communication with climatologist Jennifer Francis who notes that the zone in which west to east movement of storms would likely be enhanced is far to the north of where Sandy struck land, while the strongest decreases in west to east steering may be where the steering systems that affected Sandy were, suggesting that the same models could predict an increase in Sandy-like tracks.

Superstorm Hurricane Sandy's track was unique.  First it went, as usual, from east to west in the tropics. Then it went north, then instead of heading north-northeast into the North Atlantic's hurricane graveyard, it turned abruptly to the west and hit the US Coast as a very strong storm. At the last moment, before "landfall" Sandy was downgraded from its hurricane status, but not because it grew weaker.  Rather, it ate a nearby storm and gained strength, and in so doing lost its hurricane-typical organization, much like Bill Bixby lost his humanoid form by turning into the Incredible Hulk.
Superstorm Hurricane Sandy’s track was unique. First it went, as usual, from east to west in the tropics. Then it went north, then instead of heading north-northeast into the North Atlantic’s hurricane graveyard, it turned abruptly to the west and hit the US Coast as a very strong storm. At the last moment, before “landfall” Sandy was downgraded from its hurricane status, but not because it grew weaker. Rather, it ate a nearby storm and gained strength, and in so doing lost its hurricane-typical organization, much like Bill Bixby lost his humanoid form by turning into the Incredible Hulk.
There is another way to look at this controversy. Sandy’s track was nearly impossible. It was not quite as unlikely as all of the oxygen molecules moving, by random chance, to one corner of a room full of people causing everyone to suffocate, but it was unlikely. Imagine that I showed you a device that I claimed would cause all of the oxygen molecules to move to one corner of a room. You would not believe me because that is pretty much impossible. But if I deployed the device and it worked, you would think that my device worked. There is an alternative possibility; it is possible that my device is bogus but I deployed it at the exact moment that the oxygen molecules happen to move to one corner of the room on their own. But you would never conclude that as an explanation because it just can’t be true. Now, if my device had a less unlikely claim, such as that pressing a button on it would cause a certain stock on the New York Stock Exchange to go up instead of down, then your suspicions that my device only seemed to work by chance would be reasonable. If stocks from day to day are more or less random in their price change, my device would appear to work nearly half the time. If I showed this device independently to a dozen people, I could have a couple of them thinking that my stock price mover machine worked, but most likely they would hold on to their money until they saw more proof. But if I had a device that did something we all know has a one in a zillion chance of happening, and I press the button and the thing happens, it would be very hard for anyone to dismiss it.

Sandy’s track was highly unlikely. But it happened. It happened because of the configuration of air masses extant at the time. The air masses were configured as they were, most likely, because of changes in atmospheric circulation owing to the warming Arctic. This happened during the one year in which the Arctic Sea ice melted more than we have ever seen it melt. If I told you that the next time the Arctic Sea ice melted as much, and as quickly, as it did in 2012 that any hurricanes that headed up the Atlantic would have an enhanced chance of following an east to west track before landfall in on the Eastern Seaboard, you’d find that a lot easier to believe than my claim about a device that moves all the Oxygen molecules to one corner of the room.

The new study is internally consistent and uses good methods, so the conclusion is reasonably strong: global warming will not cause events like Hurricane Sandy to happen at increased frequency. Hurricane Sandy did something that was highly unlikely but did so because of conditions attributable to global warming: global warming did cause a Hurricane Sandy like event.

Perhaps the future of hurricanes in the North Atlantic is a bit like divorces and tornadoes in Arkansas. When we consider the East Coast of the US and the West Coast of Western Europe, we’re not sure what is going to happen, but either way, somebody’s going to lose themselves a coastline.

Barnes, Elizabeth, Polvani, Lorenzo, & Sobel, Adam (2013). Model projections of atmospheric steering of Sandy-like superstorms PNAS DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1308732110