Of course we all know one winter in and of itself doesn’t prove much of anything. But if the earth were getting warmer, what we’d expect to see with time are less and less winters like this one in North Dakota. We’d expect to see the range of pesky critters like armadillos to work their way north. Doesn’t seem like that is happening.

As for the flooding potential of the red, I hope no one ever has to live through what happened to Grand Forks in 97. That was hell. But anyone who understands the region wouldn’t be as daft as a GW nutters to label it as a one of those catastrophic events that’s GW is going to cause.

It happened because of an unusually snowy winter. The winter had a high moisture content. It’s possible a lot of the flooding in GF could have been avoided had the national weather service not used an archaic, inaccurate way of predicting flood potential that didn’t take into account the snow’s moisture content. That would’ve released Fed funds to build up the dikes as an emergency. Then again, the local and state govt’s were too busy pleading for the money when they stood to loose a lot… but that’s another story.

Anyway, it was a bit of a shock since it wasn’t “predicted” (again, poor method for the prediction). But also because many overlook how insanely flat it is there. The Red River of the North not only flows north, a situation that leads to spring water flowing into lower capacity iced over riverway to the north, but it has one of the smalliest gradients of any river in the world. It is F L A T.

Not only doesn’t the water natually flow away very fast but since WWII the farmers up there have, to put it technically, gone ape shit with draining any bit of land the possibly can for farming, tiling to speed up the flow of water and digging huge ditches that quickly carry that water away from their fields and send it speeding at the Red and it’s tributaries.

That is, in the last few decades man kind has made HUGE changes that affect the situation. Now I don’t blame the farmers for doing it. It actually makes a lot of sense. It’s just that in the context of the frequency of flooding and the size of flooding up there, we need to have a big asterick in there indicating that when we’re comparing water levels in 1997 it’s really a different situation than 1956 (or whatver year it had the big flood that prompted the canucks to build a mega diversion around the east side of Winnipeg).

NEWTAP — Excellent, sir, Excellent!

It shall be henceforth known thereas.

Now, to get the little trench dug and operational before my as-yet unborn grandchildren grow old…

It only required 8 years to build the Erie canal 365 miles…

The believe they will find proof the Arctic ice cap is shrinking and is thinner:

That may be a stretch to say they can find proof since they have little in the way of baseline data to compare to.
To my knowledge no one has ever made this sort of over ice measurement before. Given the vagaries of the ice, no one will ever be able to exactly repeat it, so it will be an isolated data point for future reference, but difficult to compare to other ice thickness measurements.

It will take a lot of similar efforts to build any sort of meaningful data to compare to historic submarine sea ice data from the cold war and satellite based attempts to measure ice.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/03/080305105209.htm

Using this new technique, the thickness of Arctic sea ice was estimated from 1982 to 2003. Results showed that average ice thickness and total ice volume fluctuated together during the early study period, peaking in the late 1980s and then declining until the mid-1990s. Thereafter, ice thickness slightly increased but the total volume of sea ice did not increase.

Scientists propose that the volume stayed constant during the study’s latter years because while the ice was thickening in the high latitudes of the Arctic, the surrounding sea ice was melting. Sea ice, however, can only become so thick, and if Arctic sea ice continues to melt, the total volume of sea ice in the Arctic will decrease.

Larry

National Excess Water Transfer Aqueduct Program – NEWTAP

:-)

British explorers are visiting the Arctic to measure the area of ice and it’s thickness. The believe they will find proof the Arctic ice cap is shrinking and is thinner:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7917266.stm

We have an burgeoning need of another Civil War.

Basically right. East, West, Texas. All with limited interconnections. We also interconnect with Canada and Mexico. A decent write up is here:

http://www.energetics.com/gridworks/grid.html

with a more detailed PDF available at the bottom.

FWIW there is a rather fascinating thing in the Pacific DC Intertie that hooks LA into the PNW. 3100 MW on two surprisingly small wires at really high voltage… We need a few of these connecting blocks elsewhere in the grid…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie

Re weather perception. My father always reckons that when the US East cost gets extreme snow, we’re in for an icy blast about 4-6 weeks later across the Atlantic.

As i child i remember a friend of my father’s telling us that Native American lore says that in a year with 13 full moons the summer will be very poor (cold/wet) and that the year before and after will be similar. That was in response to a year with 13 moons and a run of poor summers. I can’t remember when though… It has come to mind as the last two summers have been terrible in the UK (if it would hold for the UK – not every where can have a bad summer) and I wondered if 2008 had 13 moons. Must check, out of curiosity.

This gives energy requirements and I get MGD but have trouble with the Acre Foot unit (getting my head round it i mean – as someone who is used to SI units).

1 acre foot = 1 233.48184 cubic meters

One of the big problems with green energy sources like windmills is their intermittent power output can actually cause instability in an electrical grid. It will probably take some engineering to work out the most cost effective solution to this problem. You need some way to briefly store and release excess power in sync with the needs of the grid. Pumped water /hydro is one way to do that.

One of the major challanges of AC power grids is that all the power plants on a given grid need to sync their AC cycle output to the grids. This is one of the reasons it can take hours to restart a grid after a blackout as each station needs to come online, stabilize power and frequency then slew its frequency to match up with the grid. The U.S. solves part of this problem by dividing the country into an eastern and western grid that are electrically isolated from each other (can run at different phase/frequency) by using huge AC- DC- AC isolators to shift power between the grids. (I think the Texas grid is also independent but do not know how they tie to the other national grids).

Regarding the heavy snows in the Dakotas and cold weather in the east, it is common for Colorado to be in a warm dry cycle while the north east is freezing cold or up to their eyeballs in white stuff. As mentioned above, the long term average circulations tend to set up stable patterns that redirect cold outbreaks to a specific area through out the winter.

Over my 50+ years of life I have come to the perception (not documented just an observation) that these patterns tend to precess to the west year to year. By that I mean that my expectation is that next year eastern sea board temps will be warmer and the cold zone will cover the Rockies and central plains and the warm dry zone covering our area this year will shift west into Utah-Nevada and possibly the Sierra’s.

It would be interesting to look at long term weather records over the U.S. and average winter temperature and precipitation statistics to see if this “perception” is real or just selective recall.

In the past I recall exactly the opposite of this years situation, where the Central U.S was freezing its buns off, and the eastern seaboard was unseasonably warm. Likewise it being very dry here while northern California, Oregon and Washington getting drenching spring rains. It might be another manifestation of the ocean oscillations or a general pattern that the seasonal loops in the jet stream slowly walk east to west. (I have no numeric data to back this up just a pattern my brain has picked out over the years).

Larry

Glad you have arctic birds!

On the left side of the continent in Los Angeles, we will have a gathering of birds of a different feather. The world-famous “California loons” next Friday, will be at UCLA. This Link

Only two things keep me from my runs: blinding blizzards and sheer icy surfaces. To the winters I say: bring it on, but only in season. I’m looking forward to running in shorts in a few months.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/feb/26/drought-us-climate-change