First, watch it:
Then, go here to sign the petition!!!!!
A while back a few of us were talking about naming storms and droughts after climate denialists. Maybe this petition will help make that happen!
Tag Archives: Severe weather
Atlantic Tropical Weather Update (Updated)
So, how has the Atlantic hurricane season shaping up so far?
According to data accumulated by the National Weather Service, as shown (with added items) here …
… we should have had about four or five named storms at this point in the season. Since numbers for this time of year are small, variation is large, so this is not too meaningful but it can give us an idea.
So far, we have had these storms in the Atlantic:
Tropical Storm ANDREA
Tropical Storm BARRY
Tropical Storm CHANTAL
Tropical Storm DORIAN
Tropical Storm ERIN
The next storm will be named Fernand, and it may be forming as we speak:
There is a 60% chance that this stormy blob will turn into a named tropical storm over the next few days. Also there are several interesting looking proto-stormy-blobs between the west coast of Africa and the Caribbean that have promise.
This possible named tropical storm, which would be Fernand, is aimed at Mexico.
UPDATE: The stormy blob is now officially a tropical depression, and there is a hurricane hunter heading for it right now. Expect this to become a named storm later today. Then, it will cross the coast in Mexico and turn back into a stormy blog. But for just a short while, very likely (but maybe not), Fernad will exist.
UPDATE: Yup, Fernand formed, is now over land in Mexico, and will dissipate.
So, we have had five named storms. By the end of the month, we’ll probably have six. And that is about right.
From Intellicast, we have a picture of the immediate and near future jet stream:
The arrows-bearing white lines curving up over the rockies, across the upper midwest, and down along the east coast indicate a highly convoluted wave in the jet stream. This convoluted pattern is most likely the result of the Arctic being warmed (via global warming). This reduces the gradient of heat from the equator to the pole. A steeper gradient would result in a straighter jet stream. When you get a bunch of convolutions (waves) in the jet stream, owing to complicated meteorological math stuff, the waves tend to stall in place. Areas “under the curve” (like, right now, the middle of the US) get big high pressure systems that move warm air to the north, for several days at a time. A result of this would be a big giant heat bubble as shown in the following GIF I copied from Paul Douglas’s blog:
Which, in turn, is likely to seriously exacerbate drought conditions in the region, as shown on this map from US Drought Monitor:
So, really, “Tropical Weather” isn’t just Atlantic Hurricanes, but heat waves at places such as the Minnesota State Fair:
Adding that Cat Six Category: Paul Douglas Weighs In
Paul Douglas has also been following the Al Gore OMG Category Six!!1!!! discussion. Here’s what he has to say about the thing I just wrote about:
I’m thinking we might need to add some degrees onto the thermometer next week!
Climate Change, Cat 6 Hurricanes, Al Gore
These things are all connected.
A couple of days ago a good ally in the climate change fight … the fight to make people realize that climate change is not some librul conspiracy to raise taxes on the rich … goofed. It was a minor goof, barely a goof at all. We do not yet know the nature of the goof but it was somewhere between saying something in a slightly clumsy manner and a bit of misremembering something that happened in 2005 during an interview. That’s it. Nothing else to see here.
But that goof has been wrenched form its context and turned into a senseless and embarrassingly stupid attack on science by the likes of Anthony Watts, who really is one of the more despicable people I know of on the internet outside the MRA community (even he’s not that bad, and I’ve even noticed a sense of humor now and then).
It all started when Ezra Klein published an interview with Al Gore on Wonkblog. It was good interview and it was nicely written up. They talked about crossing the 400 ppm mark, electricity prices from alternative energy sources, the nature of technological change vis-a-vis green energy, international climate treaty making and cap and trade strategies, the politics of climate denial and the shift from being concerned about climate to denying the science in the Republican party, what’s going on in the current administration, geoengineering, storms, and all sorts of other things.
But then Jason Samenow, of the Captial Weather Gang, noticed something in the interview that seemed wrong. He wrote a blog post about “Al Gore’s Science Fiction” to make sure that every body knew about this apparent error. Then, the Union of Concerned Scientists, in an apparent paroxysm of well meant, but really, totally bone-headed, intent to demonstrate that people who are on board with climate science can criticize each other so we must all be for real, restated that something Vice President Gore had said to make him look like he was some sort of dummy, which he is not. The Union of Concerned Scientists, realizing their error, issued a pretty standard notpology. The notpology was disappointing. I know that people there understand that they got it all wrong … apparently at the institutional level they can’t just say “oops, sorry” but rather something more like “oh yes, things were misunderstood, but still, our point is valid.” We are reminded once again that institutions do have their limits.
Anyway, Ezra, for his part, dug back into memory and consulted with Vice President Gore and his staff and clarified what he said Al Gore said. But, that was not before lame, mean spirited, ill intentioned, ignorant, and embarrassingly giddy offal started to spew from the denialists. Anthony Watts got into it because that is how Anthony Watts masterbates. He draws cartoon glasses and piles of dog poo on pictures of Al Gore and that gets him off. The Hill jumped in with a piece by Ben Geman about how Al Gore goofed. The Free Republic came in its pants too. Almost nobody made mention of a single other thing in the interview, nobody checked their facts, nobody understood the original meaning of Vice President Gore’s remarks which were, in fact, dead on. But everybody got dirty. Shame on all of them (to varying degrees).
Here’s what actually happened (never mind the interview, the Union of Concerned Scientists concern trolling, or the circle jerk of denialism with Anthony Watts in the middle).
First, storms got worse. Yes, yes, you will hear climate science denialists insisting that they have not gotten worse, but they have. Hurricanes are worse now than they were decades ago, and global warming is implicated in that.
Then, some people, including some scientists and science communicators, discussed the idea of adding a Category 6 to the Saffir-Simpson scale. This conversation happened in and after 2005. The Cat Six storms would be those greater than 151 or 160 knots. Not many storms have ever been this strong, but there are a few. Robert Simpson, of the Saffir-Simpson Scale, suggested that this would not be necessary because the whole idea of the scale was to represent storms in terms of human and property impacts, and a Cat Six storm would not really be worse than a Cat Five storm because a Cat Five storm is bad enough . He said “…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.” (I disagree strongly with that statement, by the way.)
There are indeed reasons to revisit the Saffir-Simpson scale. There is a lot of information lost by just looking at wind speeds. Paul Douglas turned me on to this graphic demonstrating that when it comes to hurricanes, size matters:
Look closely. There are TWO Pacific Cyclones (aka Hurricanes) represented in that picture. Reminds me of the drawings designed to demonstrate the vast range of body size in primates, like this one:
But I digress. The point is, Saffir-Simpson is inadequate for what we need. We should be able to take a metric used for hurricanes and add the metric up at the end of the season and say something pretty accurate about how much energy was packaged in those beasts that year and in that ocean basin. Indeed, people who study hurricanes do this … they measure hurricanes in various ways. But the Saffir-Simpson scale is the most well known, and it only measures maximum sustained winds and nothing else, and the scale is not open ended so the biggest storms look like the second biggest storms.
So, given that storms are getting worse and the scale is inadequate, the discussion of at least adding a Cat Six happened, and this is what Gore mentioned.
But the Union of Concerned Scientists, or should I call them for now the Onion of Concerned Scientists, said this of Gore’s statement (and I quote mine):
Al Gore, Climate Science, and the Responsibility for Careful Communication…
When I was in fourth grade, I wrote Vice President Al Gore a letter … I believed then, as I do now, that he is a strong voice for issues with an environmental component such as climate change. And, importantly, he has become, to many people, the public face of climate science….But unfortunately he recently got it wrong about the science of climate change…Gore inaccurately suggested that the hurricane scale will now include a category 6… this is untrue. There are no plans by the National Hurricane Center—the federal office responsible for categorizing storms—to create a new category….Since writing that letter as a ten-year-old, I’ve earned a degree in atmospheric science and learned to value to the role that science plays in informing public policy. Science—and climate change especially—needs effective communicators…
and so on and so forth. How annoying of Al Gore to be so annoying. What a disappointment. I WAS A CHILD AND I WROTE HIM A LETTER AND NOW HE DOES THIS TO ME!!!
OK, take it down a notch.
Al Gore was referring to the discussion I mention above. Perhaps he made this reference clumsily. Ezra may have quoted him wrong, and he now states that is likely (he’s not been able to check his tape yet) so them message got further garbled. Then, some bloggers including one at Union of concerned Scientists decided to make a case of it. And now we have a nice science denialist orgy going with Head Orgy Master Debater Anthony Watts running the show. Joe Romm has more on the interview and what Vice President Gore said here.
There are three things you need to take away from this:
1) Al Gore is an effective communicator and knows a lot about climate science. If you hear that he said something that is wrong, before you get all “concerned” consider the possibility that he didn’t.
2) We really do need to look at how we characterize hurricanes.
3) The science denialists really have nothing, if this is what gets them so excited. They should get out more.
Things Are Heating Up in the Tropical Atlantic
There are at present two systems in the Atlantic that have a good chance of producing tropical storms and possibly, eventually, hurricanes. One is east of the Yucatan, the other is very near the coast of West Africa.
Here’s the report from the National Weather Service. I’ve used a rough routine to convert case so it is not screaming at you (the NWS has not yet implemented the rumored policy of not using ALL CAPS FOR EVERYTHING.
1. The broad area of low pressure in the northwestern caribbean sea is moving toward the west-northwest at 10 to 15 mph. Cloudiness and showers associated with this low continue to show signs of organization…And a tropical depression could form before the disturbance reaches the yucatan peninsula on thursday. After that…This weather system is forecast to move over the gulf of
mexico…Where upper-level winds will likely be a little less favorable for development. This system has a high chance…60
percent…Of becoming a tropical cyclone during the next 48 hours…And a high chance…70 percent…Of becoming a tropical
cyclone during the next 5 days. Regardless of whether or not a tropical cyclone forms…Heavy rains and gusty winds are forecast
to spread over the yucatan peninsula and belize during the next day or two…And interests in these areas should monitor the progress
of this disturbance.2. Cloudiness and showers associated with a low pressure system located a couple of hundred miles southeast of the cape verde islands
remain well organized…And a tropical depression could form later today or on thursday. This system has a high chance…70
percent…Of becoming a tropical cyclone during the next 48 hours. After that…The low will be moving into a less favorable
environment for development. This system has a high chance…80 percent…Of becoming a tropical cyclone during the next 5 days.
Regardless of additional development…This system will likely bring showers and gusty winds to the southern cape verde islands
later today and thursday as it moves westward at 10 to 15 mph. Interests in these islands should monitor the progress of this
system.
A Picture of Dorian Storm
Dorian is a tropical storm that formed in the eastern tropical Atlantic ago. Dorian is probably going to head almost straight west-northwest and menace the vicinity north of the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas. This is going to take some time. By the end of the weekend, Dorian will be encountering islands in the northeastern Caribbean as a topical storm, most likely. The chance of Dorian remaining as a storm (as opposed to regressing to a depression) or strengthening from storm to hurricane is not at all large. But, unlike some others storms we’ve seen lately, Dorian seems to gain a little strength or add a certain degree of organization rather than the opposite. Over the next few days, Dorian will pass over warmer waters, which should strengthen it, but the storm will also encounter win shear and drier mid-level winds, which may weaken it. Here’s the thing: If Dorian gets strong enough soon enough, the storm will start to make a bit more of its own weather and survive threats from shear or dry conditions.
So what you say? This storm is days away and has little chance of being a hurricane. Well, that’s all true, but there’s more.
First, Dorian formed very far east. That is unusual this early in the year. Second, if Dorian becomes a hurricane and had formed this far east the storm will come close to (but not break) some sort of record, or at least be impressive. Third, and this is highly speculative, but there are some models rumored to project Dorian forming a very large hurricane, traveling up the Atlantic coast, menacing (just barely) New England and hitting Nova Scotia. The chance of that exact thing happening are pretty much zero. That would be close to 2 weeks from now, and we simply can not predict what a hurricane is going to do in two weeks.
But the reason this is interesting is that the hurricane tarot cards have a North Atlantic track in Dorian’s Future, and it’s current track may have Florida in its future. Therefore, we will want to watch Dorian.
If any of this works out, Dorian will be a long-lived hurricane. If warm Gulf waters strengthen Dorian, the storm will then appear younger than it is for a while. Then, at the end, things could get very ugly all of the sudden.
Historic Heat Wave in the US West Next Week
This is just a weather prediction, so it is subject to revision, but the National Weather Service is expecting an historic heatwave in the American West next week, probably peaking next weekend. Temperatures in Death Valley will approach 130 degrees F, and Las Vegas will top 115 degrees F, if predictions pan out. The heat wave may extend to the Canadian Border.
From Andrew Freedman at Climate Central:
The furnace-like heat is coming courtesy of a “stuck” weather pattern that is setting up across the U.S. and Canada. By early next week, the jet stream — a fast-moving river of air at airliner altitudes that is responsible for steering weather systems — will form the shape of a massive, slithering snake with what meteorologists refer to as a deep “ridge” across the Western states, and an equally deep trough seting up across the Central and Eastern states.
…
One study, published in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Sciences in 2012, found that the odds of extremely hot summers have significantly increased in tandem with global temperatures. Those odds, the study found, were about 1-in-300 during the 1951-1980 timeframe, but that had increased to nearly 1-in-10 by 1981-2010.
Records may be broken. Drink plenty of fluids!
Twin Cities June 21st Mega-Storm
The video below has meteorologist Paul Douglas talking about the big storm we had in the Twin Cities a few days ago (from his excellent series of climate change and weather related videos). The storm actually followed on a number of days with a fair amount of rain, and up here in the northern part of the Twin Cities, we had a pretty bad blow with high wind gusts and lots of rain the day before. But on the 21st, a storm swept mainly through the Western Suburbs and Minneapolis, but actually a much wider area than that. I drove down to pick up Julia near Roseville yesterday, a couple of days after the storm went through, and had to change directions four times because of roads being closed, three of those due to the storm (one had to do with a stuck semi, I think unrelated). At present over 10,000 Twin Cities people are without power, and we are having a heat wave. At least one major grocery store in the Western Suburbs (probably several but I only have direct knowledge of one) had to throw out huge quantities of food that they could not refrigerate. Many areas of the city of Minneapolis were left essentially un-navigable, due to down trees and power lines. As Paul points out in his video this was roughly like a 20+ mile wide F0 tornado passing through the area. That’s a great analogy for Twin Cities people because we have tornadoes here. As a person from the East Coast, I might also say it was roughly like a somewhat diminutive Category I hurricane going through (though the hurricane would have lasted an hour or more rather than 20 minutes or more at that intensity).
Anyway, have a look at the video, which is produced by Weather Nation‘s Paul Douglas:
Welcome to the new normal.
Why are we having such bad weather?
I think most people will agree that in North America (and other places) we’ve been having some bad weather. Some of the weather is not necessarily intrinsically bad … so what if it is a little cooler or a little warmer than you expect. Aridity? Deserts are nice! Extra rainfall? Great for the plants. But actually that sort of thing has its down side since important systems like agriculture, the water supply, and Spring Break work reasonably well because of expectations that might not be met if the weather is different.
Other weather is intrinsically bad. I’d mention tornadoes but at the moment climate and weather experts are not at all agreed on whether or not we are having more, worse, bigger, or otherwise badder tornadoes and if there are differences in tornadoes this decade compared to earlier decades, why that is the case. But other things can be pointed to. Superstorm Hurricane Sandy was the hurricane that should not have gone where it went, should not have been so strong, perhaps should not have been at all. Droughts. Widespread wildfires caused by droughts. Lots and lots and lots of rain causing widespread flooding. Heat waves and cold waves. As a category of things that can happen, these things are in the “bad weather” category, and it is reasonable to ask why they are happening so much “these days.”
It is possible that these changes in weather, or more exactly, these examples of rapidly changing weather that have come to be known as “Weather Whiplash,” are caused by global warming which in turn is caused by the unchecked release of large amounts of fossilized carbon into the atmosphere with the burning, by humans, of fossil fuels. But before I get to that argument (short answer: Weather Whiplash is caused by global warming, but hold on just a sec..) I want to point something else out that is very important.
I want to point out the problem of understanding shifting conditions. Let’s say you are a storekeeper and every day you make a certain amount of profit. How much you make each day varies a great deal owing to a large number of factors. I knew a guy who worked in a camera shop just off Wall Street. He would sell no cameras for days on end and then suddenly sell a gazillion cameras. That would be on a day that the stock market went way up and traders felt flush, and went and bought the expensive cameras and lenses they had been coveting for weeks. I know people who had businesses on Cape Cod and how much money they made on a given weekend depended on the weather forecast for “The Cape” shown to Boston area audiences on Friday (regardless of the actual weather itself, generally). But underlying all this is another set of factors that do not vary day to day or hour to hour (or week to week or even seasonally). One is the overall long term state of the economy (how much stuff do people buy, based on how free they feel with their cash). Another is the overall demand for your particular goods, which may vary little if you sell food but a lot if you sell some trendy widget.
In the absence of good information, how do you know if your business is about to either tank, because people stopped buying your goods, or take off, because people can’t get enough of your goods? If your sales shift a great deal in one day, is that enough information? No. If your sales shift for an entire week, does that tell you something? Maybe, probably not. Most likely, you can identify normal pseudo-cycles, ups and downs, that occur in your business and estimate their length. Some factors cause your business to go up and down over scales of weeks, some over scales of days. Perhaps you can estimate that if you get an average amount of business over six months, and that is higher or lower than the previous six months, then you can say that a basic shift has happened.
Weather has cycles and pseudo-cycles just like businesses do, and they run over the course of days, seasons, years, and somewhat longer cycles that have to do with the position and relationships of major high pressure systems that shift around over cycles of five to fifteen years, and a few other thigns.
Now think about what we expect from global warming.
A simple yet usable model is this: More CO2 in the atmosphere = more heat (energy) in the atmosphere = climate change. But the expected climate change is not linear. Models that seem to work together with direct observation show us that more CO2 has resulted in aridity and wildfires in certain areas. But if we go back in time to when there was even more CO2 in the atmosphere, it seems like everything was wetter, so the whole drought and wildfire thing may be something that gets worse and worse through the 21st century, but at some point is replaced by a whole different set of problems. With respect to sea level rise, which I think is one of the biggest problems we face, it is not likely that the continental glaciers will melt steadily. Most likely they will melt, once their melting really gets going, both steadily and in fits and starts, causing the occasional large rise in sea level.
In other ways, the climate system is likely to change rapidly from one state to another. We are seeing the melting of Arctic Sea Ice each year doing this now, going from one system where there was melting and re-freezing at a certain rate, and changing to a completely different system. Along with this we may be seeing a fundamental long term shift in the nature of Arctic air masses from one way of being to another.
It is like making ice cream, or butter, shaking catchup out of a bottle, or going steady. You work on it and work on it and work on it and all you have is cream and ice, or cream in the churn, or catchup stuck in the bottle, or a friend. Then, suddenly, you have ice cream, or butter, catchup spewing out all over the place, and a significant other. There are many things in life that work this way, where there is not a steady change over long periods of time, but rather, a lot of one thing followed by a sudden shift to a whole different kind of other thing.
So, here’s the problem. If cycles of normal climate change are in the order of a dozen years, but a particular true shift in the basic pattern of climate takes, say, five years and thereafter everything is different, how do you know it happened? How do you know that the “new normal” is a long term change rather than a temporary shift?
There are two ways to know this. One is to wait and see, but if you were thinking of doing something about it but only taking action after you are sure, this is foolish. The other is to use reason and science and stuff to figure out what is going on and then make your best estimate of the situation.
And this brings us back to Weather Whiplash, the New Normal, and the nature of the climate change we may very well be experiencing now. There is an explanation for Superstorm Hurricane Sandy, for Nemo and some of the other storms we’ve had over the last year or so, and for the strange spring and early summer we are experiencing now, and please don’t forget, the strange winters and summers we’ve been having for the last few years. This explanation applies mainly to the Northern Hemisphere and has to do with the Arctic and the Polar Jet Stream.
The Earth’s climate operates as a mechanism for moving excess heat form equatorial regions towards the poles in air and oceanic currents. In the atmosphere, part of this happens when warm tropical air rises and moves away from the equator, drops, and then flows back towards the equator. Farther from the equator, a separate cycling of air currents is thus set up, where air moves up then south at altitude, then drops along side that first cycle of air. Then, there is a third similar giant rotating donut of air closer to the poles. At those positions where the air is moving up, there tend to form high pressure systems, and where the air flows away from these high pressure ridges or mounds, low pressure systems develop. If you stand back and look at the Earth from a distance you can see bands of wet and bands of dry, and regions where certain kinds of storms (like hurricanes, for example) tend to be confined.
The jet streams form at the boundaries between these large scale systems, at altitude, near the top of the troposphere. The jet streams don’t really shape the larger scale systems; rather, they exist because the larger scale systems exist. But once they are in place, the jet streams can determine what happens in those systems.
One of the major jet streams is the Polar Jet Stream that separates temperate regions form more arctic regions. This boundary between two major air masses, defined by that jet stream, can be thought of as analogous to the partition that separates the freezer compartment in the top of a typical refrigerator from the fridge part down below. With this partition in place, the stuff in the freezer stays very cold, and the stuff in the refrigerator stays less cold. If you kept all the cooling coils in place but removed that partition, the difference between the freezer and refrigerator compartments of your Frigidair would be reduced significantly.
Another thing the Polar Jet Stream does is to generate the overall shape of the boundary between temperate and more northerly air masses. The jet stream can be straight, like a big ring around the earth, or it can be all wavy, with major undulations north and south. In the latter case, these undulations can move around the planet or they can sit in place. When they sit in place, they may cause an entire region to be habitually wet, or dry, or more importantly cool or warm, for a long period of time. (This is called “blocking.”) The shape and movement pattern of the Polar Jet Stream ultimately determines the overall pattern of weather everywhere in temperate and subarctic regions.
Now, remember that the position and shape, and movement pattern, of the Polar Jet Stream is determined by high pressure ridges and the low pressure systems they set up (more accurately, these things interact). High pressure systems are relative; A warmish region of the earth, warm relative to nearby cooler regions, will set up a high pressure system. So, during the summer, land masses tend to create high pressure relative to nearby oceans, but during the winter, the oceans may create stronger high pressure relative to land.
And at this point we can see how climate change caused by CO2 increases create Weather Whiplash and other effects.
Warming conditions have caused the Arctic sea to have much less sea ice on it for much longer periods of the summer. This, in turn, allows more sunlight to heat the arctic, because less sunlight is reflected away by shiny ice, and more sunlight provides heat to the sunlight absorbing open water. This changes the relationship between high and low pressure areas in the Northern Hemisphere. This, in turn, has caused the Polar Jet Stream to freak out. Sometimes it is very wavy, often it is blocked, and sometimes it is simply weakened to the point that it almost goes away and allows the freezer and refrigerator compartments to meld.
Cool weather in the United States is not really cool wether. It is the more even, less compartmentalized, distribution of heat across the region north to south. Everything is on average warmer (because of warming) but there is not a very stark boundary between the northern colder regions and the more southerly warmer regions. Last April when we were busy getting snowed on every few days in Minnesota, the Arctic was warmer (but still cold) than it normally would be. Last fall, the shape of these weather systems caused Superstorm Hurricane Sandy to be stronger, and to fail to do what these storms normally do: head north by northeast and dissipate. Instead, the storm turned left and blotto’ed New York, Connecticut and New Jersey.
Peter Sinclair of Climate Denial Crock of the Week, famous for his videos, in a post on Weather Whiplash, has produced a video that covers some of this very nicely:
So, lets get back to the original question. Why are we having such bad weather? Because the system that is usually in place, with a strong Polar Jet Stream that tends to be linear during the summer, has changed to a different system where the Arctic Oscillation … a high-low pressure system pattern … has shifted to a “negative” configuration because of warming of the Arctic sea. This different system has a number of effects that combine with other effects of global warming to produce strange weather. Those other effects include there being more energy in the atmosphere, and more moisture concentrated in more discrete dense patches, which therefore also means some very dry conditions. Blocking may have caused dry conditions to persist longer over selected areas than otherwise, and at the moment, blocking and added moisture seems to be causing the midsection of the United States to become the world’s largest water park. And, between storm fronts, the overall weather of the region is cool, yet the storm systems are very energetic.
Weather Whiplash. It makes sense because everything that is happening conforms to expectations based on what we know about climate and weather. Will this really be the “new normal?” Is a few years in a row of a strange acting Polar Jet Stream and that other stuff the result of a fundamental change in the way our climate system works, or is it just a typical variation that we can expect to happen now and then. Well, if this was a typical variation of the type we normally see on occasion, there would be less incredulity among climatologists, meteorologists, and forecasters. It makes more sense to explain Weather Whiplash as a new state that the climate has shifted to (mostly, expect some more back and forth, I assume) because of the unchecked release of fossil Carbon into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels by humans.
How three storm chasers died, and what to do about it
UPDATE (March 2017):
At the time that Samaras, his son, and his colleague, were crushed to death inside their tornado-chasing car, which was apparently rolled by the force of 200-300 mile an hour winds over a distance of a half mile or so, it was said by numerous news sources that this car had been trapped by a traffic jam caused by looky-loos who wanted to see the tornado and/or people sent out on the roads by a local weather reporter to “escape.” So, that apparent fact was part of the underpinning of the original post (below).
Later analysis of the situation indicates that there was indeed a traffic jam enhanced risk for several storm chasers, caused by the ill advised comments from local media (as described below) but that this happened after Samaras and his crew were killed, in a different location, and that this happened to not cause any deaths.
Here is what the tornado did: It grew from a big tornado to a bigger tornado, to what might be the largest tornado ever observed with instruments, in a matter of seconds, and it made a fast jog to the right, not an unusual thing for a tornado to do, but unanticipated by the storm chasers. Samaras’ car was perhaps too slow and too light, and the road was not amenable to fast driving. The tornado caught up with him and his crew and ended them.
Since I wrote this post, I’ve received many emails telling me that the premise is wrong, that traffic from too many storm chases did not contribute to the death of Samaras and others. At the same time, many helpful comments have been added to the post. I decided to let the comments speak for themselves, because, after all, this post was written three or four days after the event, and the comments reflect more recently available information and analysis.
I do regard some of the complaints I’ve gotten, especially some of the really nasty ones I’ve gotten by email, to be excuse making. Amateur chasers don’t want there to be strong evidence that what they do endangers themselves or others, so they want chaser-enhanced traffic jams to be taken out of the picture. They can’t have this, because the traffic is a factor, but yes, Samaras and his crew were not killed this way.
So, regarding the question of traffic: first, I know. I am hereby referring you and all readers to the comments. Also, read the wikipedia on Tim Samaras for more details, and watch this YouTube video (embedded below as well).
Second, the point is still valid. In the case of the El Reno tornado, traffic in combination with road bottlenecks (over a river) did in fact cause a number of storm chasers (and go watch the video to get an idea of how many storm chasers there were!) to get jammed up. They didn’t happen to be overrun by a killer tornado at the time.
Yes, lets get the facts straight, which the comments below and the information added here help do. I appreciate that, it is a good idea. But let us not let the fact that Samaras and his crew were killed in a manner that did not relate to traffic obviate further consideration of the “drive to the fire” problem. Look at that video. Skip Talbot makes this point. Pay attention to what he says.
________________
If you want to walk down Main Street, in downtown America, you can do that, because it is America. This is a free country and public space is public. But if the Acme Office Building, on Main Street, is on fire, broken glass is blowing out of windows and fire trucks and other emergency vehicles are trying to gain access to the building and nearby fire hydrants, and ambulances are trying to get in to pick up injured, and out to bring them to hospitals, you can’t walk down Main Street. The police can close off that street and nearby streets and as annoying or inconvenient as that may be, they are not taking away your rights. They are acting in the interests of public safety.
We’ll get back to that in a moment.
After a large and violent tornado went through Moore Oklahoma a few days ago, several people in various media outlets including CNN mentioned that given the (seemingly enigmatic) lack of good shelter in homes and public buildings in Oklahoma, that a good option to protect yourself in case a tornado comes your way is to drive away. In some but not all cases, this advice was qualified; If you know several hours in advance that there is a high probability that a tornado will come through your area, then it is a good idea to just go away and be somewhere else. This advice sounds reasonable, but it really isn’t. During the United States tornado season, it seems that we experience repeated tornadoes and other severe storms in a given area over several days. That area might include three or four of the several states that make up “Tornado Alley.” However, within that area, the exact location of a killer tornado isn’t predictable at the scale of several hours. So, if you live in Oklahoma City and figure there may be tornadoes coming later in the day, there is nothing to guarantee that driving north to Aunt Millie’s house in Enid, OK will not put you in the path of one of the tornadoes that happen to form that day. A tornado could hit Oklahoma City, or it could hit Enid.
So, the driving away several hours in advance isn’t really smart, because you don’t know that far in advance where “away” might be. Perhaps, the day before tornado-warned storms are expected, you could fly to France, but that is not really an option for most people.
The unqualified version of that advice is “If there is a tornado coming your way now, get in your car and drive away fast.” That is also bad advice. The reason that is bad advice is very simple. If you are directly hit by a strong tornado, ending up in the vortex, and you are in the bathtub of your home on the lower floor, you’ve got a pretty good chance of survival. Despite the horrible fact that some two dozen people died in the Moore tornado last week, there were tens of thousands of people directly in that tornado’s path, hiding out in low interior rooms within their homes or other buildings, who survived. Alliteratively, if you are in a car and hit by the vortex of an F3 or stronger tornado, your chances of survival are much lower. Roughly speaking, this is the equivalent of driving down the highway at several tens of miles an hour and suddenly flipping, three or four times. Or, perhaps, you are driving down the highway at 40 mph along with a dozen other cars also driving down the highway and suddenly you are all flipped. Then, when the car is done flipping, it gets flipped again. And again. And for several minutes you car is shoved around on the surface like you were a puck in a game of air hockey, with the car slamming into other cars and other cars slamming into you, and each car being turned over now and then. To make this point, here are photographs from major media of a handful of examples of cars that got hit with the vortex, most but not all from this latest tornado:
I admit that a flattened house may look pretty bad, may even look worse than a mushed up car, but generally speaking the interior lower floor room in a house that is badly messed up by a tornado is a survivable shelter, while there is no such shelter in your car.
So, let’s go back to the advice again. Say you are sitting in your home and you know there is a tornado coming and you are watching TV and the following breathless reporting is happening. Pay special attention to what the weather forecaster says starting at 4:35:
“… if you can drive south, anywhere around Whitewater Bay, State Fair Park, the Ballpark, downtown Oklahoma City, southwest Integres, US Grant District, Rose State college, Midwest City regional medical center, Midwest City, and Parts of Del city, you need to drive south now….” (approximate transcript)
The Oklahoma City metro district has about 1.3 million people. Of those areas mentioned in this quote, “Downtown OK city” has about 7,600 people living in it. Del City has 21,000 people in it. What this weather forecaster just did was to advice a couple/few tens of thousands of people in the path of a tornado to get in their cars and drive in the same direction.
That wasn’t the only broadcaster telling people to evacuate instead of hunker down.
The thing is, this tornado was heading roughly from west to east into a highly populated area. News casters were telling people in the direct line of the tornado do “drive south.” But then the tornado made a turn and headed straight for the “south” that people were being told to drive to. Here is a compilation of broadcasts and events documenting this:
I have no idea how many of the people in the viewing area of this station saw or heard this report and responded by driving into the path of the tornado. Of those who did I don’t know how many of them were primed to use “drive away” as a strategy by earlier chatter in major media outlets, and elsewhere such as twitter and other social media. I’m not sure how many people actually got in their cars and “drove south.” We do know, however, that the highways in the area became jammed with cars, and the vicinity around the intersection of I35 and I40 was described as a “parking lot.” One thing we do know is that many people who “drove south” to get away from the tornado in fact drove directly into its path, created a traffic jam, and most of the deaths associated with this tornado were among those people in those cars.
Three experienced tornado “chasers” … actual meteorological scientists … were killed when their truck (one of the vehicles depicted above, probably) was destroyed by the tornado. Other professional meteorologists, from The Weather Channel, were injured. As of this writing, the death toll stands at 13 with another 6 (though I’ve also heard 7) people still missing.
In his writeup of this event, meteorologist Paul Douglas made this point:
Every time I went down to Oklahoma [with storm chasers] I was struck by the number of people tagging along. Often scores, even hundreds of chasers would converge on the same cell by late afternoon. It’s a free country – you’re obviously free to drive when and where you want, and I certainly don’t want that to change, but something has to be done to avoid another tragedy like the one that killed 9 motorists Friday evening, including 3 professional tornado researchers Tim Samaras, his son, and intercept partner.
Paul is right. This is a free country, or at least we want it to be a free country, and being able to freely travel on public thoroughfares is part of that. If you want to walk down Main Street, in downtown America, you can do that, because it is America. But if the Acme Office Building, on Main Street, is on fire, broken glass is blowing out of windows and fire trucks and other emergency vehicles are trying to gain access to the building and nearby fire hydrants… you can’t walk down Main Street… you are not really free to walk or drive up and down Main Street to take pictures of the event. Public safety officials have the right and responsibility to restrict access to Main Street and areas nearby in order to save lives and property.
Until proven otherwise, I will assume that the special category of people known as “Professional Storm Chasers” like Tim Samaras and his crew as well as Reed Timmer, and others, are risking their own lives to make observations and collect data that help us understand tornadoes better, to make better predictions about storm behavior, and thus to make better predictions about unfolding storms. Also, their data helps us to better understand the dynamics of what happens in tornadoes which can help make safer structures. Reed Timmer and Sean Casey and their crews modified vehicles that successfully survived being in powerful tornados (for Mythbusters fans, you may have seen these two teams’ vehicles go head to head with a jet engine to see how they would survive tornado strength winds on the episode Storm Chasing Myths
But the hundreds, or even thousands of non-professional “storm chasers” are probably not contributing to the science of tornadoes and tornado safety. Rather, they are jamming roads in the very places where a traffic jam can be deadly if a tornado happens to pass over the gaggle of cars stuck in place. If you watch the Discovery Channel’s Storm Chasers
There is a great irony to the deaths of the three storm chasers from Twistex. Tim Samaras’s strategy was never to get into the direct path of a tornado. Rather, his team would predict the path and drop machines on the ground designed to directly measure variables such as temperature, humidity, wind and so on, but with the team and their vehicles getting out of the way before the tornado comes. It is probably true that Samaras abandoned attempts at dropping probes more often then strictly necessary, cautiously avoiding rain-wrapped tornadoes where they would not have been able to see where the tornado was, in order to be extra safe. It is also true that the relatively cautious “drop and run” strategy meant that they missed getting their equipment in the direct path of a tornado more often than not. I can only assume that Tim Samaras had no intention of being in the path of the the tornado that killed him, his son, and his colleague, but was unable to get out of the way because of the traffic jam.
And that traffic jam was probably caused by the exodus of people following very bad advice, and possibly as well as non-professional storm chasers moving in on the likely path of the storm.
I suggest that law makers in tornado alley states consider legislation making it a violation to intentionally drive into or near the path of known or likely tornados. This is not an especially enforceable regulation but having such a thing on the books would probably encourage amateur storm chasers to think twice about putting others in danger by contributing to blocked roads. Such a law or regulation could be more general, specifying that police have the authority to direct people generally in relation to emergency disaster zones that have not happened yet. In other words, it is now probably legal and appropriate for police or fire departments to close off roads or direct traffic or tell people not to drive in a particular area where there is currently a major fire, explosion, storm devastation, and so on. A new law or regulation merely needs to specify that tornado-related disasters that have not happened yet (because the tornado hasn’t formed or has not yet arrived) can be considered in this public safety action. In fact, one could argue that a new law is not needed and this power is already available to police and emergency response agencies. That might be preferable because making a new law to address particularistic new circumstances that are already covered by existing law, regulation, and best practice is probably a bad thing. But a law or explicit regulation, or even a well publicized set of best practices in the interest of public safety, might make the point that needs to be made, thus discouraging people from making decisions that endanger others.
One might argue that if someone wants to drive their car into the path of a tornado they should be allowed to do so because it is a free country. But once your car is inside an F3 or F4 tornado, that is no longer your problem alone. Because of your action, your car has become a very large and dangerous projectile. You shouldn’t be allowed to do that.
Such a regulation or law would also require consideration of a certification of “professional” status for actual professional storm chasers. This, in turn, would require storm chasers to make their case that they are professionals that are doing something worthwhile, and that they take appropriate action related to their own safety and the safety of others. In fact, we probably need more professional storm chasers, and among storm chasers my feeling is that we need a better more comprehensive research design. For example, most storm chasers are individuals or small teams, and they benefit with direct contacts with actual tornadoes, and often fund their work this way as they sell their video to news outlets. But what about big storms that don’t drop tornadoes? It seems to me that we should be collecting equivalent data from storms that do and storms that do not drop tornadoes, because, after all, one of the things we want to know more about is the difference between those two types of storms.
What do you think?
Three Famous Storm Chasers Were Killed in Oklahoma #twistex
Tim Samaras, his son Paul Samaras and their colleague Carl Young were killed yesterday when their research vehicle was crushed almost beyond recognition by a Tornado they were “chasing” in Oklahoma.
If you ever watched Storm Chasers
It seems that traffic on roads in the vicinity of tornadoes had become an increasingly serious problem for storm chasers working in Tornado Alley. This was due, I think, to a lot of amateur storm chasers flocking to the vicinity where a storm was expected to drop a tornado. But yesterday was worse. According to news reports I saw yesterday, a lot of people in Oklahoma fled oncoming tornadoes in their cars rather than seeking shelter. I’m not sure what possessed them to do this. Certainly, it would not have been recommended by authorities. I’d like to find out what sort of information went around suggesting this to people … Twitter? Ignorant AM radio jockey? … or was it just massy “hysteria.” Anyway, apparently all of the deaths in yesterday’s Tornado were the result of people being in cars in stead of where they should have been. And, it appears that Tim Samaras, his son, and his colleague were killed because they were in the middle of one of these traffic jams.
Yes, people, it turns out that ignorance can be fatal.
Just so you know, a car is not the place you want to be when you are hit by a tornado.
RIPtspscy
Understanding Storms and Global Warming: A Quaint Parable
A quaint New England rocky creek
Imagine standing next to Parable Creek, an imaginary rocky brook in New England. The water is rushing past you from left to right, around the rocks that emerge tall above the surface of the stream, mounding over the top of those that are lower down. The deepest parts of the steam are relatively flat but show ripples that belie the presence of other rocks and sunken branches that are well below the water line.
While you are observing a young boy of about 11 years old comes along, carrying his fishing pole. “Hey mister, how’s it going?” he says, as he steps into the stream. “I’m going fishing over there,” he says pointing in the direction of a mill pond a mile or so away. As he crosses the stream you notice that whenever he puts is foot down, some of the water mounds up on the upstream side as it rushes by him. He continues across the stream and climbs the opposite bank, running off to his destination. You wish him good luck with his fishing and return to your observations.
You can see large eddies here and there that seem to persist though they may change shape or grow or shrink a little. Smaller eddies, mini vortexes, form in certain parts of the stream, and rush down slope only to disappear as the water crashed into an obstruction. Every here and there there is a splash caused by the rushing water hitting a rock or branch just the right way.
Now, imagine that you are a compulsive data collecting scientist standing next to the rocky brook with nothing else to do for a while. So you start measuring things. Every where you see a mound of water built up in the current alongside a rock, that is a bit of kinetic energy (water moving) converted momentarily in to potential energy (water rising against gravity). So you estimate the number of mounds and their collective mass. This is a measurement of one form of energy in the stream.
You make a prediction. If the amount of water coming down this stream increases for a while, the total energy of the stream will increase, and this will be visible as an increase in total potential energy in the mounds you’ve been measuring.
Coincidentally it has been raining heavily upstream and just as you have formulated your hypothesis you see the water rising. Aha! A chance to test your prediction. At first, your hypothesis seems supported. As the water rises, the relative height of the mounds increases, and some new mounds form. You take some quick measurements, by eye, and note that the total potential energy stored in water mounds has increased, presumably as an effect of more overall energy in the stream. You gain confidence in your theory and congratulate yourself on your brilliance.
But then, as the water level continues to rise something different happens. More and more of the stream is now above the obstructing rocks. Therefore, there is less conversion of kinetic to potential energy. Most of the mounds disappear and the overall surface of the stream is much smoother. You take a new set of measurements and estimate that the total potential energy stored in water formed into mounds is an order of magnitude LOWER than your original measurement. Apparently, you think, something is wrong with this stream.
Just then a troop of Brownies comes along. The little girls want to cross the stream to take a short cut to their picnic grounds. They ask, “Hey, Mister, do you think it is safe to cross this stream?”
You had a nice theory linking total energy and a specific observation, which seemed to be confirmed by some of your research. The total energy of stream flow is linked to the total mound-i-ness of the stream’s surface. Now, the stream’s surface is smoother than it was before. Therefore, the total energy of the stream is at the low end of its known variation. A while back you saw a small boy cross the stream with no problem. Clearly, it is safe to cross now.
So, you say, “Actually, I’m sure it is quite safe. Go ahead and cross, and have a nice day!”
The brownies jump happily into the stream and start wade through the water. Half way across the stream, one by one but over just a few seconds of time of time, they are carried away by the water and drown.
“Hmmmm,” you think. “Maybe I had that wrong.”
Rivers Of Air
Air flowing over the surface of the land is a bit like water running down a stream or river. The air interacts with the ground (especially things like mountains). There are different layers, mounds, streams, and eddies of air that interact with each other. The overall form of movement is shaped by the spin of the earth, the tendency of warm air to form in certain areas (i.e., near the equator, or over water during winter and over land during summer, etc.) which causes the air to pile up and spill into nearby eddies. There are all sorts of ways in which batches of air interact, and when you thrown in differential amounts of moisture in different air masses, and things like night vs. day, and so on, you get the surface of Parable Creek. Metaphorically. In real life, we call the The Weather.
When the total energy in the system of air movement changes the way those crazy zany air masses move and what sorts of weather form can also change. For example, there is in total more energy on the hemisphere (north vs south) that is sticking its face towards the sun. It seems that one result of this is that the hemisphere with more energy (the summer end of the earth, as it were) has hurricanes, severe thunder storms, tornadoes, and so on while the hemisphere with less energy has less of that stuff.
However, a tornado is like a small eddy in the stream, and a hurricane like a large eddy, and a line of thunderstorms like the outer edge of one the mounds and the rainstorms are like the splashes at the edge of the log and so on and so forth. As Parable Creek’s level rises, exactly which phenomena are predominant changes, even as the total ability of the stream to wash away Brownies increases to the level where it can also wash away Girl Scouts and eventually Brawny Construction Workers and Bikers. Having said that, while a rocky stream converts to a large and deep river by adding a LOT of water, which may have a smooth surface despite the total energy of the river being orders of magnitude greater than Parable Creek’s energy, the system of air movement is not likely to become smoother owing to various limitations in the system.
Too Much Variability
You can’t measure the energy in the stream by only looking at one of the many phenomena that are the manifestations of that energy. In order to understand the relationship between global warming and storminess, it is minimally necessary to measure all of the storminess and find some way to combine it.
I remember when I first moved to Minnesota. That summer we had numerous straight line wind events of the sort never seen before. Maplewood, a community near where I lived famous for it’s tree lined streets lost almost all of its trees in one storm. That same storm also took out most of the stock of most of the new car companies in that town, famous for its numerous car lots. The cars were pitted with hail stones. Every single home for about three miles along a street right near where I lived had it’s vinyl or aluminum siding drilled with hundreds of holes and dents from large hail stones being driven by a 60–100 mile per hour wind. It was one of the worst weather years in Minnesota, with insurance companies practically going bankrupt.
There were only a few tornadoes in the area that year.
The next year there were hardly any straight line wind storms of the magnitude just described. But that is the year of the Saint Peter tornado. It was one of the largest tornado events ever; It was a twister that lifted and dropped a couple of times, so ‘nato-pedants divide it into multiple events, but that’s absurd. It was an F3 and F4 event, and it tracked for 67 miles and was up to one and a half mile wide.
There were a lot of tornadoes that year.
The atmosphere over central and southern Minnesota had a lot of energy those two years, for whatever reason. If we want to understand the total energy, and its effects on life and property, we would be doing a disservice to our pursuit of understanding if we failed to consider both straight line winds and tornadoes together (though obviously also separately).
The Big Picture
Weather comes in bands. The biggest and most obvious band is the Intertropical Convergence Zone, a band of thunderstorms that rings the entire planet and is pretty much always active. Another band is the arid band that rings the earth; actually there are two of them, one in the Northern Hemisphere and one in the Southern Hemisphere. Almost every major desert on the earth is in one of those bands. In fact, any desert that is not in one of those bands has to explain itself, and the excuse is usually a mountain rain shadow. Conversely, any wettish areas in those bands also have some ‘splainin to do. The southeastern US is in the Northern Hemisphere’s arid band, but the Gulf of Mexico keeps that region pretty wet much of the year.
Severe weather is also patterned in these bands, to some extent. Hurricanes form in the bands just north or south of the Intertropical Convergence Zone. Tornadoes tend to be confined to subtropical and southern temperate bands away from the equator. In a sense, one could say that most tornadoes that are not spinoffs from hurricanes occur in a certain band either north or south of the equator, and if we are going to count tornado activity, measure its total intensity, etc., we should be looking more globally at those zones, not just parts of those zones.
This of course applies to national borders as well. Tornadoes occur in the US but also in Canada, but the most easily available tornado data for North America is always presented as US tornadoes. Also, years are tricky. Events that span Jan 1st are hard to track if we count things by calendar years.
Some have been harping about the “tornado drought of 2012” as evidence that there is not an increase in tornadoes owing to global warming. Well, there are very few US tornadoes in January, but the January with the most tornadoes ever (in our records) was January 2012. Also, Canada had a lot of tornadoes in 2012. Has anyone looked to see what the combined US and Canadian count would be? And, how do you count a Canadian Tornado? The very fact that a tornado forms 1000 miles north from where most occur has something to do with the nature and distribution of atmospheric energy across the plant’s surface. I’m not making a specific claim about the distribution of tornadoes across time and space. I am saying, rather, that counting tornadoes within an arbitrary boundary in space (or time) can be misleading.
Then, there is the problem we have with all of these storm types, especially tornadoes and hurricanes, of how to actually measure them. Even using standard severity scales, tornadoes can be very different from each other in ways that are not counted in the usual statistics. An F3 tornado that is extra wide and stays on the ground for 100 miles involved significantly more energy than an F4 that formed momentarily and disappeared. Indeed, the different kinds of tornadoes (funnel vs. wedge, for example) really may be very different (but closely related) weather phenomena that should be examined separately at the very same time we combine vastly different storm types to measure and understand at a larger, global scale.
Tornadoes are not a good canary, in the canary in a coal mine sense. But they are obviously important. When we see people stating clearly and plainly that we need not be concerned about the frequency of tornadoes increasing with global warming, we should ask why they are saying that. We should be concerned with increasing storminess … there is almost no way that is not going to happen, and likely, it already has. If tornadoes are part of that increase storminess, we may want to get smart about it fast. For instance, we might want to take seriously the problem of schools and workplaces, where people tend to concentrate, having actual storm shelters instead of just hallways that some administrators says is a storm shelter, for protection when a big tornado comes along. Don’t you think?
See also this post which more directly addresses the question of tornadoes and global warming.
Photo Credit: Hamed Saber via Compfight cc
Are there more tornadoes because of global warming?
There are good reasons to believe that global warming leads to more storminess, but the exact nature of that transition is unclear and hard to measure. Part of the reason for this difficulty is that a given type of storm may become more likely under certain conditions caused by climate change, while a different kind of storm may become less likely, with the “storminess” overall increasing but doing so indifferent ways across time. Also, the most severe, and thus possibly the most important, weather events are infrequent so it is difficult to see changes over time with any statistical confidence. I address many of these issues here and here.
Looking at the raw data, it is clear that there are “more tornadoes” over time in the US. Have a look at this graph:
At first glance, his graph makes it look like there are a lot more tornadoes, but there is a strong effect of observer error; earlier tornadoes were simply missed much of the time, so the big increase you see here, while it may reflect an underlying increase in number of tornadoes, is not reliable and cant’ be taken as evidence. However the later years shown here, from 1950-something to the 1990s, seems to show an increase that could be taken as meaningfull
However, when people speak of tornadoes they often show this graph as evidence that there are not more of them over time:
Looking only at this graph it looks like the number of tornadoes per year in the US is pretty variable but not increasing, as one would expect if global warming was causing more of them.
There is a problem with this graph, however. Actually, a couple of problems (other than those pointed out here). The main problem is that the most frequent tornadoes are left off this graph. If we look at F0 grade tornadoes, not included here, we see that they have actually increased in frequency over time. If we include ALL tornadoes, and not just the kinds that don’t seem to increase in frequency over time, we get this graph:
Compare the scales of the last two graphs. It turns out that the number of tornadoes at the smaller end of the scale goes up quite a bit. It might be hard to see. The upper graph goes up to 900, the lower graph goes up to 1900. So, if we add all the data instead of just select data, we get many hundreds more tornadoes per year.
The proportion of tornadoes that are F0 increases over time as shown here:
… and the overall distribution of tornadoes by strength changes over time as shown in this very cool graph: 
As I point out here, one of the contributing factors to variation over time in tornado frequency is the fact that we have somewhat arbitrary boundaries in which we measure them. For instance, the US-Canada border provides an arbitrary line across our data set. By not counting all North American tornadoes the same way, we may be adding unnecessary variability to the data. To demonstrate this, have a look at this graph showing tornado frequency per year in France and Germany, two countries that are right next to each other:
This shows a few things. For one thing, they don’t have too many tornadoes in that part of the world. For another thing, there is an increase in overall frequency over time, and this is not because of lack of reporting. The reporting problem in the US is partly because the western and central states were relatively empty in the old days, and also more technology was available for spotting tornadoes later. But the European and US data have the same shape over a similar time span, but France and Germany do not have the missing observations owing to vast unoccupied (sort of) territories.
But the main thing I want to demonstrate with this graph is the fact that dividing a largish area of land up into arbitrary units can cause your data go go all flooey. Increased variability in data owing to partitioning is a well known phenomenon and this is what it looks like.
Another part of the problem is that the largest storms, which may be the most important ones, have a great deal of variation in their occurrence. Compare any of the graphs above of all tornadoes or all excluding the F0 tornadoes of this graph of just the largest storms:
Not only is there a lot of variation in numbers of tornadoes at the larger end of the scale, but I suspect there is a lot of variability among the tornadoes in each class in terms of overall energy represented. An F4 tornado that lasts five minutes compared to an F4 tornado that lasts 20 minutes are hugely different, but this is not reflected in this sort of data.
Here is a graph showing the amount of storm damagein adjusted dollars over time in the US (pink) with average temperature (blue). Clearly, the total amount of damage goes up, and probably for a number of reasons including there being more stuff to damage, but also, likely overall increases in storminess including hurricanes, tornadoes, severe thunderstorms, etc.
Here is another graph that shows something similar:
There are many who do not want to link increases in severe weather to global warming. They are probably wrong. Global warming seems to increase severe weather overall. The best way to deny this is to cherry pick the data by ignoring variability across space, leaving out entire categories of storms, or focusing on just some kinds of storms. I suspect the size and severity of tornadoes at the larger end is increasing now, but did not start increasing until recently; time will tell if this is right. But overall tornadoes are so variable across time and space that they are not a reliable canary, as it were. But overall storminess seems to be on the increase, in accordance with expectations from the basis physics of climate, under warming conditions.
Why is winter not ending?
Why is it snowing so much in the Northern US States this Spring? Two words: Global Warming. Let me ‘splain.
Weather is all about air and moisture. The distribution of air is uneven, with some places having more air in big piles, other places having less air, into which the extra air from the big piles of air tends to spill. The big piles form because the surface beneath is relatively warm, causing the air to expand more than in adjoining areas. As air falls off these giant mounds of seeming nothingness, it forms low pressure systems that consist of swirling moving masses, made up of air of different temperature and humidities, and this is where many storms come from. Where the high mounds of air form depends on the seasons; since it is the relative temperature that matters, we might expect high pressure systems (mounds of air) to form over water during the winter and land over the summer with the low pressure systems being located over the opposite landform, but it is of course way more complex than that.
Using this simplified model of piles of air pouring into low spots, one can understand the climatic concept of “oscillations.” There are large regions of the earth where high pressure tends to form, and spill its air in a certain direction. That air, somewhat cooled off, may then return to the area of the high pressure where it is re-warmed (by surface conditions) to contribute to the high pressure mound. If this happens over the ocean, the movement of air may also drive the movement of surface currents, which can actually increase the level of heat at the base of the high pressure system. If the earth was simple, i.e., had no continents and a sea of even depth over the entire surface, high and low pressure systems might form and last for very long periods of time, merely changing slightly during seasonal changes. Also, since the overall driving force of the climate system involves the movement of heat (in water and air) and the warm water and air itself from equatorial regions (where the sun has a stronger effect) to the poles, and the earth is spinning, this set of high and low pressure systems should be organized in bands encircling the planet, bands that interact with each other at their edges.
As long as we are on the subject we should note that the Jet Streams can be thought of as places where the dynamics of air hearting, rising, thus becoming less dense and releasing heat (and thus becoming more dense per altitude) and so on and so forth runs into a nasty math problem. If you model (again, I oversimplify) the movement of air molecules that are passing through different conditions of altitude, pressure, temperature, etc. there are places where the math seems to get hinkey, and there are air molecules that are definitely not supposed to be where they are, and there are places where there should be more air molecules as well. This causes air molecules to move very quickly from point A to point B, and the result is a set of high altitude, sinuous very rapidly moving bands of air … the Jet Streams. These tend to occur at the boundaries of the hypothetical (but rarely actualized in any clean and neat way) bands of air that would exist around a simplified version of the earth.
And, of course, the earth is not simple; there are continents, mountain ranges, huge glaciers or ice fields, areas where water in the sea is trapped by continental configurations so it gets extra warm and other areas where currents can circumnavigate a land mass pretty easily and redistribute heat efficiently. You have probably already heard that the dynamics of land ice and sea ice formation and melting in the Arctic and the Antarctic are different. Knowing what you know now (see above) a quick glance at the distribution of land and sea in those two regions should lead you to conclude that the Arctic and Antarctic simply can not have the same climatic details, even though both are polar regions.
Getting back to the oscillations… So, we have these areas which may for years at a time have high pressure in one place linked to an adjoining lower pressure in another area, and air and water currents are both affected by and cause this relationship. But, it is also possible that a different configuration could emerge, perhaps with the same basic layout but with the high pressure zone moving to a somewhat different location nearby, or being more widely or narrowly positioned. Then, this alternative configuration could last a few years.
It is the shifting back and forth between two (or more) such configuration that we call an oscillation (usually). ENSO, the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, is one such system in the equatorial pacific. There is a North Atlantic Oscillation and an Arctic Oscillation, and others.
Very simply put, the fact that we are having coldish and snowy weather in the Dakotas, Minnesota, and nearby areas at the same time that the Arctic Sea’s ice is breaking up and melting early is because the Arctic Oscillation … a big giant climatic feature at the northern end of the Earth, is undergoing its “negative” phase, which is kinda rare, instead of its “positive” phase, which at least in the recent past has been more common.
So, what the heck does this have to do with climate change, or in particular, global warming?
Global warming has caused the Arctic Ocean to lose much more of its ice than it has in the recorded past, which leaves more sea water exposed to sun during the Arctic summer. Sea water absorbs (and later releases) sunlight and stores it as heat, while ice and snow reflect sunlight back into the atmosphere and onward into space. For this reason, the Arctic Ocean is warming, and this causes ice to form more slowly and melt more quickly, which in turn allows the summer ice free waters to absorb more heat, and so on and so forth. The Arctic Ocean’s ice cover, which expands every winter and shrinks every summer, is undergoing a sort of climatic death spiral that looks like this:
Remember the part above about how surface conditions determine the location, intensity, and extent of high and low pressure systems? During the “positive” phase of the Arctic Oscillation, highish pressure systems around the Arctic maintain a large low pressure region known as the Arctic Vortex, over the pole. But the Arctic Ocean, being warmer, says “hold on there, a second, I’m also a high(ish) pressure system, stop vortexing me!”
The high pressure region that encircles the Arctic during the positive phase backs off (goes south) and is less effective in maintaining a nice vortex over the Arctic. The strong gradient between a sub-arctic high pressure encircling the polar region and the strong polar vortex, during the positive phase of the oscillation, keeps colder Arctic air near the poles, and regions like the Great Lakes, Upper Plains, and Norther Eurasia enjoy warmer weather. With the weaker gradient during the negative phase, the Arctic air spreads out and encompasses more of the subarctic and temperate land masses, but the cold, as it were, is now distributed over a much larger region, so is it less cold in places that would otherwise be very cold, and less warm in places where it would be more warm.
One analogy that has been knocked around a bit and works pretty well is the traditional refrigerator, with a freezer on top, and the fridge below. Imagine that your refrigerator occasionally develops a modest hole between the two compartments. The freezer would still be colder because there are more cooling coils up there, but it would not be as cold and your ice would be wet and your frozen beans soft, while skims of ice would form on your milk and cranberry juice. In real live, this means that North Dakota bets to be slushy cranberry juice, wile the Arctic Ocean gets to be a bunch of soft, barely frozen Freeze-Pops.
The region of colder air is not a uniform, even circle around the poles in any case, but during the negative phase, it is very uneven because the oceans have a strong effect. Since the oceans are busy moving large amounts of heat from the equator to the north, the cold tends to get bunched up over the continents. In the North Atlantic, changes in the Arctic Oscillation interact with the North Atlantic oscillation and that affects weather in that region.
You’ve already heard that changes in the Arctic likely contributed to the path (and strength) of Hurricane Frankenstorm Sandy last year. Well changes in the Arctic have resulted in some very snowy winters in recent times, some killer cold snaps, and most recently, a series of large winter storms that don’t seem to have gotten the memo about it being Spring. The Weather Channel just recently started naming regular storms like hurricanes are named, in order to keep track of them. Winter Storm Xerxes just passed through my back yard, and Winter Storm Yogi is now forming up on the West Coast.
We’re gonna need a longer alphabet.
Information about Winter Storm Yogi from Weather Underground.
More on the Arctic Oscillation from Paul Douglas
Climate and Weather: Does your TV weather reporter get it?
You hear, again again, that climate and weather are not the same thing. This has led to assertions such as “you can’t attribute a single weather event to climate change.” But climate and weather are not distinctly different. Climatologists and meteorologists have made statements like this because people do confuse and conflate current conditions and weather forecasts on one hand with climate systems and climate change observations and modeling on the other. Saying “climate and weather are not the same thing” is a convenient segue into a discussion of how certain conclusions may be invalid or at least, underpowered. For example, we have seen that certain types of American voters change their opinion about global climate change depending on the current weather. Those who self identify as Independents “believe in” climate change if had been unusually hot over the previous 48 hours, but if it had been cooler than expected over that period of time they don’t accept the truth of climate change as readily. This is conflating and confusing weather and climate in respect to one of the most important differences between the two: time scale.
Weather and climate can be thought of as two sides of the same coin. That analogy is limited but useful. So, if one is going to walk around with weather in one’s pocket, there’s going to be climate in there too, just like if you are going to walk around with maple leaves in your pocket there’s going to be some loons in there at the same time. One can also think of weather as the short term and, possibly, geographically smaller face of climate, the latter being big in time and space. Thus, thinking of the two as “not the same thing” would be like thinking of the tail of a tiger as not the same thing as a tiger. That is somewhat true but if you yank on the tail, there will be a tiger there asking questions about that.
Over the last several months, we have done a pretty good job of putting aside the incorrect notion that a particular weather event can’t be linked to climate change. There are minimally two ways that the two are linked for a given weather event. One is that a weather event is what it is because of energy (heat) in the air and on sea and land (but mainly sea) surfaces and the distribution of water vapor in the atmosphere. Both of these things, heat and water, are different now than they were 100 years ago, or 30 years ago, because of climate change. Therefore, every single weather event, being functions of heat and water distribution and dynamics, is different than previously because of climate change. Some say that the extra energy raises the baseline for weather, but I don’t like that analogy because it is directional. Raising the baseline sounds like everything will then be more of something, more of the same thing (more hot, more wet, for example). But in fact, weather with climate change can be more wet or more dry (really, both, at the same time but in different places, or both in the same place but at different times) because of the reconfiguration of the water cycle due to climate change. Same with heat. Under climate change, we have increased extremes of both heat and cold (though on average conditions are warmer, but you need to average things out to see that). So the “raised baseline” explanation makes it harder for people to understand both floods and droughts as well as both heat waves and cold snaps, as being more severe as a result of climate change.
Rather than referring to a raised baseline, I’d rather refer specifically to a change in the configuration of heat and water. That is more accurate and people can understand that. To use a more appealing metaphor, one could say that when the various elements of the climate system, as a committee of forces and raw materials, sits down at the table to make the weather these days, that committee consists of individuals with much more polarized attitudes so the result is a bigger range of outcomes. Classically, we anthropomorphize the elements, Old Man Winter, the North Winds, giants bowling in the sky; Under climate change these characters are feeling their oats and demanding more, and the result is less compromise and more fluctuation between extreme outcomes.
The baseline metaphor does work well for certain specific areas of climate, though. For example, as the ice melts every year and reforms on the Arctic Sea, the baseline of ice reduces every year (thus the loss of “old ice”). Or, the sea level rises due to melting glaciers and thermal expansion every year, so the baseline for storm surges and coastal flooding, as well as the twice daily high tide line, goes up over time.
The second major way that climate and weather are linked (not unrelated to the first) is through configuration of major features of the sea and air. This is more complicated, more unknown, more recent, and more scary in some ways. If you follow the news about hurricanes, you’ll hear about a hurricane or tropical storm out in the Atlantic, and notice that the National Weather Service has drawn a line showing where that hurricane will go over the next week or so. That’s pretty amazing when you think about it, given that over time hurricanes go in many different directions along many different paths. But somehow they know where it is going to go and they are generally pretty close to correct these days. They also know how strong or weak the hurricane will get over time.
The way they do this is by understanding the effects of huge masses of air, and the distribution of sea surface temperatures. The Earth’s layer of air is like the surface of a fast moving stream. If you look at the surface of a stream you’ll see that parts of the stream are up high, like a hill, and others are down low. If you look more closely, you’ll see that most of the low parts are moving faster than the high parts, and if there are eddies (whirlpools) they are in the low spots. One could think of the air as acting like this, where the high spots are high pressure systems and the low spots are low pressure systems. In the atmosphere those high areas tend to determine where the low areas are going to form and where they will move, and how fast. A hurricane is just one of the lows, but more concentrated in energy than most (and with a number of other differences). The highs, typically less “visible” to us mere earthlings looking out our window (those are the clear mild days) are mapped at large scale and their configuration used to plot the future course of the big storms. (This is an oversimplification that ignores, fore example, the very important effect of jet streams, which actually require math to understand. I have noticed that any atmospheric system that requires calculus to describe causes severe weather. Just sayin’.)
Although the air covering our planet is very different from a stream surface, it has high and low areas and if you know where everything is on one day, all the highs and lows, you can be sure they are not going to be too different the next day. We also know the direction in which these features will usually move. In other words, the distribution of high and low regions in the atmosphere is measurable and predictable, to a very large degree.
With climate change, the basic configuration of lows and highs changes. We have seen a fundamental change in the way air is distributed in the far north, around Canada, Siberia, and farther north to the Arctic. These days, the air does stuff … climate stuff … in that region fairly often that it used to do only occasionally. A result is that the distribution of warm and cool air is different, thus the heat waves and cold snaps. Another result is the direction in which low pressure systems get steered during certain times of the year and in certain regions; thus, Superstorm Sandy hitting New York and New Jersey. Superstorm Sandy, a hurricane, was supposed to turn right. All the other storms turn right. If a storm hits the Northeastern US it hits it from the south before turning right, but usually a glancing blow or as a much diminished storm. Sandy got big and turned left instead of getting smaller and veering right. Climate change caused that weather event.
I mentioned sea surface temperatures as one of the changes that affects the overall configuration of weather qualitatively and not just quantitatively. Not only is the surface of the ocean generally warmer, but where the warm spots are has changed. Recently, the Gulf Stream has stalled. This means that warm water that normally runs up the US coast and disperses across the North Atlantic is hanging around in the Western Atlantic longer, and that area thus get warmer. For this reason, any of those big tropical storms and hurricanes that normally go north and get weak are going to go north and stay strong, or even strengthen. Then, more of them will turn left instead of right because of the new configuration of air masses. This means that all those people who have moved from New York to Florida over the last 50 year to get near hurricanes can move back to the Northeast and still have their hurricanes!
You can see a pattern here. Climate change alters both quantitative and qualitative aspects of climate. Quantitative changes in weather involve more extreme temperatures (both hot and cold) and more extreme water related conditions (floods and droughts). Climate change alters the qualitative aspects of climate in such a way that what happens where and when has shifted. Quantitaviely, more North American spring and early storms may have more tornados; Qualitatively, tornado alley now includes a big swath of Canada, and Dixie alley (the southeastern tornado region) will probably have more “off season” storms. Quantitatively, we may have more tropical storms form or transition to hurricanes, and those hurricanes may be stronger than before. Qualitatively, where they go seems to have changed; Historically, a very large percentage of Atlantic hurricanes go north, turn right, weaken, and make Iceland and Svalbard foggy and wet, but now some of those storms will stay strong and turn left. We have yet to see if this will qualitatively alter Nor’easters, to bring them ashore more often, but quantitatively storms like Nemo are clearly more common than they were decades ago. The Great Storm of 78 was a once in a lifetime storm that was not expected to happen again any time soon. Since then, that sort of storm has become commonplace in New England.
And this all brings up a problem. For some reason, possibly innocent reasons possibly nefarious ones, many TV weather reporters, many of whom are meteorologists, have been on the denialism side of global warming. Here in Minnesota, we once had three main news stations with weather. One of them had a meteorologist who occasionally downplayed climate change (in those days, it was always called global warming) and even got snarky about it. Another weather reporter, who was a meteorologist, seemed to be quit open to the idea that climate was changing. (I never watched the third station so I don’t know what was going on there.) Over time, the former became a more vehement climate change denier, and the latter a more outspoken climate hawk. The former always gave good weather reports. The latter always gave outstanding weather reports. The former is still at his station reporting weather but I think he stopped talking about climate change. The latter is Paul Douglas, who to all Minnesotans is a hero and icon of intelligent weather forecasting.
Then a thing happened that often happens in Minnesota. We are a donor state to the rest of the country. We produce great local politicians, like Hubert Humphrey and Water Mondale, but then thy go off to the White House or Congress and become nationally important. A Minnesotan took the luke warm trend of putting the wheels on your skates in a row and turned that into Rollerblades, which the world has embraced. Many years ago a quiet non-assuming Minnesotan with a cabin on the lake strapped barrel staves to his feet and got his friend to try to pull him around behind the motorboat on a rope. Today, waterskiing is everywhere.
Paul Douglas left his post as meteorologist at WCCO (CBS) a few years ago, and at that point I pretty much stopped watching local news. WCCO still had Don Shelby, and I still had to watch the news for various reasons sometimes, but without Paul giving the weather, really, what’s the point? I can get mediocre weather from the Internet. But Paul had plans, apparently. He founded a new network which you may or may not have heard of called Weather Nation, which is now on several cable channels. It’s like the Weather Channel but different. I don’t get the Weather Channel but I do get Weather Nation, and that’s what I watch. Sometimes, if I’m lucky, I tune in when Paul is doing one of his overviews, but usually it is someone else. He’s not the weather forecaster any more, he’s the owner. (And if you knew the details of how he got his start on TV that would be even more interesting!)
Paul raised a lot of interest in climate change when he published a “Message from a Republican Meteorologist on Climate Change” last year. Yes, there are some good Republicans. Well, there’s Paul, anyway. Do read the letter, and send it to all of your Republican friends and relatives!
Paul Douglas was one of a handful of meteorologists featured in a recent NPR report.
Last March, longtime Minnesota meteorologist Paul Douglas, founder of WeatherNationTV, posted an impassioned letter online urging his fellow Republicans to acknowledge that climate change is real.
“Other meteorologists actually emailed me and said, ‘Thanks for giving voice to something I’ve been thinking but was too afraid to say publicly,’ ” he says.
Douglas is part of a group pushing to tighten certification standards for meteorologists.
“If you’re going to talk about climate science on the air,” he says, you would “need to learn about the real science, and not get it off a talk show radio program or a website.”
(Here’s the audio of that report.)
What if. What if over the last few decades most of the TV meteorologists were Paul Douglas, or at least, like him. The general public would have been informed of climate change the best way possible, by understanding the nature of climate and how it is changing from the view of the local weather one experiences. That is possible and reasonable because climate and weather are not different things. They are two overlapping views of the way air and water on this planet work. If every TV meteorologists had been like Paul Douglas over the last 20 years, I’d venture to say we’d be 50 ppm of Carbon Dioxide lower than we are now and more on our way to a green economy. We’d have a chance to address this problem of climate change.
We can fix this whole thing with two simple devices: A time machine and a cloning machine. Somewhere in a small town in Minnesota, perhaps there is some innovative guy named Ollie Knutson working on that….