All-time Snow Records Tumbling Again for the Second Straight Year

5 04 2009

By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM, ICECAP

usa_record_events_040609
Map of US weather records for week ending 4/6/09 click image to enlarge or here for source. Map created by HAMWeather,

UPDATE: NOAA predicts the Red River Will Crest Again in Fargo-Moorhead in Late April here possibly again at records levels.

Just a week after the last major northern plains blizzard another significant snowfall occurred this weekend. Models did poorly with the location of the heaviest snow bands and generally overdid the magnitude. These models sometimes have difficult with the first 48 hours, but Susan Solomon and friends tell us you can depend on cruder models to predict the climate 100 years or even a thousand years in advance.

Several inches of snow fell in parts of Nebraska, South Dakota, Iowa, southern Minnesota into southern Wisconsin. This will include parts of the Red River Basin already in flood and with  deep snowcover (click here to enlarge). Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 231 Comments »

Categories : climate data, snow, weather

Quote of the Week #2

5 04 2009

From “Pragmatic”, on the Lindzen on negative feedback thread:

“What most alarmists don’t seem to fathom is that real people want balance in their decision/learning process. Balance arrives on the wings of debate.”

Art By Geoff Sharp, other artwork submissions will also be used on a rotating basis, thanks to all who submitted. – Anthony


Comments : 33 Comments »

Categories : Quote of the Week, fun_stuff

Bzzt! Welcome to the dark ages

5 04 2009

Guest post by Steven Goddard

The Effects of One Nuclear Bomb at High Altitude

From Wikipedia
Yesterday’s missile launch from nuclear power North Korea raised particular concern in the military, due to the possibility of EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) attack.  Almost every piece of technology in our lives is dependent on semiconductors, which contain circuitry that is extremely vulnerable to electromagnetic pulses.  From the Federation of American Scientists:

The pulse can easily span continent-sized areas, and this radiation can affect systems on land, sea, and air. The first recorded EMP incident accompanied a high-altitude nuclear test over the South Pacific and resulted in power system failures as far away as Hawaii. A large device detonated at 400-500 km over Kansas would affect all of CONUS. The signal from such an event extends to the visual horizon as seen from the burst point.


 During the Cold War, the US military was very concerned about the fact that US planes used solid state circuitry and Soviet planes used vacuum tubes.  It was known that nuclear war would likely cause American planes to drop out of the sky.  Since then, we all have become completely reliant on semiconductor technology which controls our transportation, power, satellites, information technology and communication systems.  Transistors have evolved over time to smaller and smaller geometries and lower voltages, which make them increasingly vulnerable to EMP.

http://unic.ece.cornell.edu/images/chip.jpg

What an integrated circuit looks like after being fried by overvoltage

Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 141 Comments »

Categories : Technology

The 1998 Super El Niño: possibly a “rogue wave”?

5 04 2009

In comments on WUWT, people often think freely and throw out all sorts of ideas. Like in any collection of people, some are bad, some are average, a few are good, and even fewer are noteworthy. However, one that was noteworthy recently was from a WUWT regular known as “hotrod” in the “NASA Deep Solar Minimum” thread.

He wrote:

The thing that has been nagging at me is, that the trace of a rogue wave in this link, looks a lot like the 1998 temperature spike. On thinking about it, if a [rogue] wave is possible in the ocean, is it not conceivable that the same sort of behavior could exist in an average temperature plot for a body like the earth, as it oscillates around an average temperature? This like the PDO and AMO are just different types of periodic motion.

He was referring to what has now become known as the Draupner Wave, named for the oil platform that recorded it on January 1st, 1995.

File:Drauper freak wave.png

The Draupner wave, a single giant wave measured on New Year's Day 1995, finally confirmed the existence of freak waves in the ocean, which had previously been considered near-mythical.

In the case of the Draupner Wave, it has an amplitude about 3x that of the average background wave amplitude. It was created when the amplitudes of some waves of dissimilar amplitude and period combined in sync to form a new wave peak for an instant. That instant passed and the sea went back to normal background amplitude.

In the case of the 1998 Super El Niño, there is a similar sort of event where the temperature peak is about 3x that of the background peaks. This plot of the RSS Global Temperature Anomaly below (done by Barry Wise) shows the 1998 super event in red:

Barry writes: Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 148 Comments »

Categories : ENSO, PDO, Science, earth, oceans

Global Warming and “The Early Spring”

5 04 2009
Guest post by Steven Goddard
http://www.shawnee.edu/gov/usa/news/graphics/SnowFlowers.jpg

Spring Bloom

Following up on the cold spring story from Friday, one of the favorite mantras of the global warming community has been that global warming brings earlier spring seasons.  If a bird shows up earlier than someone in Yorkshire expected, a news story often appears at The Guardian or BBC explaining that it is due to “man made global warming.”  A Google search of “global warming early spring” produces more than 300,000 hits.

So what happens when nature refuses to cooperate?  Below are some claims from the top ten, interspersed with recent observations from the cold spring season of 2009.


Today’s NCEP forecast for the US – cold across the entire country + Canada + Mexico

Man-made global warming has caused spring weather to appear an average of 10 days earlier than the start of spring 30 years ago Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 120 Comments »

Categories : climate_change, weather