Watts Up With That?

More harbinger of the Northern Hemisphere winter to come?

A bulldozer cleans snow on the Sichuan-Tibet road in Nyingchi, southwest China’s Tibet Autonomous Region Oct. 30, 2008. (Xinhua Photo)

LHASA, Oct. 30 (Xinhua) — The death toll has risen to seven, and one person remains missing, as a result of the worst snowstorm on record in Tibet, local authorities said Thursday.

The seven people killed either frozen to death or were crushed by collapsing buildings. About 144,400 heads of livestock died in the storm, which also knocked out telecommunications and traffic in parts of Shannan prefecture.

In Lhunze County, 1,348 people stranded by damaged buildings or blocked roads had been rescued, the county government said. Rescue operation for the remaining 289 trapped was still underway.

The worst-hit county had 36 consecutive hours of snowfall from Sunday, with an average snow coverage of 1.5 meters. Four people died and one remained missing in the snowstorm.

The rescued people have been moved to other villages, sleeping in schools or government buildings.

A road linking Lhunze to Cuona County reopened on Thursday after 63 hours of snow clearing efforts of armed policemen and transportation staff.

Cuona had been isolated from the outside for three days due to the road blockage.

The Tibet regional civil affairs department has allocated relief materials such as clothes and tents to the affected areas.

h/t to Dr. Roger Pielke

Of course many of you that live in this weather already know this, but there is an early start to winter this year, not only in the USA, but also in London, where it snowed in October for the first time in over 70 years.

So far, no mention of this broadly distributed U.S. record event in the mainstream media. There are a few individual mentions or record lows in Florida. See this Google News search.

Here, from NOAA’s  National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), is a list of these new or tied records for October 29th, 2008.

I find the -25 below in Alaska interesting, since it bested the old record by 4 degrees.

Here are the 115 new or tied low temperature records: Read the rest of this entry »

Two Stories for you, one about the snow itself, and the other about climate law being debated and passed in the middle of the unusual snow.- Anthony

London has first October snow in over 70 years

From the Guardian

Cold snap causes flight cancellations while a motorway accident kills one driver and causes severe disruption

Parts of south-east England had more than an inch of snow last night while London experienced its first October snowfall in more than 70 years as winter conditions arrived early.

Snow settled on the ground in parts of the capital last night as temperatures dipped below zero. A Met Office spokeswoman said it was London’s first October snow since 1934.

For greater south-east of England it was the first October snow since 1974. High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire had 3cm (1.2 inches). One of the coldest temperatures recorded was -4.1C in Benson, Oxfordshire.

“It is unusual to have snow this early,” the Met spokeswoman said. “In October 2003 sleet and snow was recorded in Northern Ireland, Wales, south-west, north-west and north-east England and the Midlands, but it was mainly over higher ground.”

read the entire story here

How Parliament passed the Climate Bill (in spite of the weather)

By Andrew Orlowski The Register

Posted in Government, 29th October 2008 12:35 GMT

As many readers know, we’ve had an earlier than normal start to fall weather in the USA, and the cold just keeps on coming. Here is a summary of record low temperatures seen recently, courtesy of this website called IceAgeNow.

See a table of some October 2008 temps below:

Read the rest of this entry »