Dickinson ND sees first June snowfall in 60 years

6 06 2009
Backyard Snow in Dickinson, ND - Photo by WUWT reader Daryl Ritchison

Backyard Snow in Dickinson, ND - Photo courtesy WUWT reader Daryl Ritchison

Updated with a photo, Daryl Ritchison writes:

If you want pictures of the Dickinson snow, here are a couple of  pictures sent from a viewer of mine.  They reported 1.5″ as these pictures were being taken. The one with the lilac blooming (at right in photo above) is interesting  because most years the lilac have finished blooming three weeks ago,  but the spring has been so cold in this area that most phenological events are running about 2-3 weeks behind schedule.

More here from the TV station web site: http://www.kxma.com/weather

From the “weather is not climate” department, this report from TV station KXMC in North Dakota:

Jun 6 2009 2:49PM
KXNewsTeam

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) Snow has fallen in Dickinson in June, the first time in nearly 60 years the city has seen snow past May.

National Weather Service meteorologist Janine Vining in Bismarck says there were unofficial reports of a couple of inches of snow in Dickinson on Saturday.

Vining says snow in North Dakota in June is uncommon, though it’s not unheard of. She says other parts of the state have seen June snow within the past 10 years.

Williston and Bismarck had received only rain as of mid-Saturday, but Vining said snow was possible in those cities later in the day.

But wait there’s more snowy June weather worldwide:

Comments : 198 Comments »

Categories : weather

Pielke Senior: Comment on Joe Romm’s weblog on El Nino and global warming

6 06 2009

Reposted from Dr. Roger Pielke Sr’s Climate Science

NOAA/NESDIS latest SST anomalies

current SST from NOAA/NESDIS

Climate Progress has a weblog by Joesph Romm titled “Breaking: NOAA puts out “El Niño Watch,” so record temperatures are coming and this will be the hottest decade on record“.

This is an interesting and very bold forecast of record temperatures by Joe Romm, and, if this does occurs, it would substantially support his claims on the dominance of human-caused global warming. Only time will tell, of course, if this warming will occur.

However, unfortunately, he still does not understand that i) the appropriate metric to monitor global warming involves heat in Joules, most which occurs in the oceans (e.g. see),  and ii) that the accumulation Joules in the upper ocean has not occurred since 2003 (e.g. see and see). Even Jim Hansen agrees that the ocean is the dominant reservoir for heat accumulation (e. g. see).

In Joe Romm’s weblog, there is the text

“As a side note:  Roger Pielke, Sr.’s “analysis” of how there supposedly hasn’t been measurable ocean warming from 2004 to 2008 is uber-lame.  In the middle of a strong 50-year warming trend, any clever (but cynical) analyst can connect an El Niño-driven warm year to a La Niña-driven cool year a few years later to make it look like warming has stopped.  In fact, the latest analysis shows “that ocean heat content has indeed been increasing in recent decades, just like the models said it should.”

This text shows a failure to understand the physics of global warming and cooling. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 144 Comments »

Categories : ENSO, forecasting, oceans

Another Look At Polar Amplification

6 06 2009

Posted by invitation, from Bob Tisdale’s website – original here. Photo/caption below added by Anthony.

Guest post by Bob Tisdale

Graphic added by Anthony

On two occasions I’ve attempted to leave a comment at Joe Romm’s Climate Progress. I discussed the first try back in July 2008 in my post Climate Progress Posts My Comment, Returns It To Awaiting-Moderation Limbo, Then Deletes It. Yesterday, I posted a comment on the Exclusive: New NSIDC director Serreze explains the “death spiral” of Arctic ice, brushes off the “breathtaking ignorance” of blogs like WattsUpWithThat thread at Climate Progress, but was thwarted again by the moderator.

Note: The original Climate Progress title included a misspelling “breathaking” that made the quoted “breathaking ignorance” quite comical.

In the recent Climate Progress post, Joe Romm wrote, “Humans are cranking up the Arctic heat by pouring steadily increasing amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which in turn cranks up warming in the Arctic, a very well documented phenomenon (see “What exactly is polar amplification and why does it matter?“). The linked Climate Progress explanation of Polar Amplification pertains primarily to positive feedbacks from albedo changes caused by the retreat of ice and snow, and to contradict Romm’s statement in his recent post, the term “Greenhouse gases” does not appear in Joe’s earlier explanation of Polar Amplification, nor does CO2, methane, GHG, etc.

The comment I tried to post yesterday at Climate Progress contained the quotes and illustrations from RealClimate that I used in my July 28, 2008 post on Polar Amplification and Arctic Warming. It also included an annotated RSS MSU TLT Time-Latitude Plot and Time-Series Graph from my post “RSS MSU TLT Time-Latitude Plots… …Show Climate Responses That Cannot Be Easily Illustrated With Time-Series Graphs Alone”.

There was nothing earth shattering in my comment, no reason for it to be deleted. Here take a look. It simply illustrated cause (El Nino events) and effect (poleward heat redistribution). Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 89 Comments »

Categories : Arctic, Science

An update on the NSIDC satellite sensor issue

6 06 2009

I missed this June 2nd NSIDC announcement while traveling this week, but here it is now, just a few days late. For those of you that have been inquiring about the status of the NSIDC sea ice plot, this should help answer some of those questions. The fact that they have done parallel data keeping from F17 for a year to gauge differences is the right way to do it. I wish NOAA would do the same thing for weather stations when they convert from Stevenson Screens to MMTS, or when they move a station, as it would help detect and minimize siting induced offsets that now make it into the temperature record.  – Anthony

NSIDC has transitioned from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) F13 satellite, to the DMSP F17 satellite. Switching to the new satellite will allow us to continue our consistent long-term record of sea ice extent.

map from space showing sea ice extent, continents

High-resolution image Figure 1. NSIDC now has more than a year of data from the Special Sensor Microwave Imager/Sounder (SSMIS) sensor on the DMSP F17 satellite, which has been intercalibrated with data from the F13 satellite. Note the close correspondence between the two data records. The average absolute daily difference was approximately 28,000 square kilometers (11,000 square miles).
Sea Ice Index data. —Credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center
Please note that our daily sea ice images, derived from microwave measurements, may show spurious pixels in areas where sea ice may not be present. These artifacts are generally caused by coastline effects, or less commonly by severe weather. Scientists use masks to minimize the number of “noise” pixels, based on long-term extent patterns. Noise is largely eliminated in the process of generating monthly averages, our standard measurement for analyzing interannual trends. Data derived from Sea Ice Index data set.

Continuing a long-term data series

The DMSP F13 satellite that has been central to our Arctic sea ice analysis for the past several years is nearing the end of its mission and is no longer a reliable resource for our sea ice products. As is standard data practice, we have transitioned to a newer sensor. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 27 Comments »

Categories : Arctic, Science, sea ice