With all the caterwauling over the record heat in Moscow over a few days due to a blocking high pressure zone, it would seem valuable to revisit a truly exceptional historical heatwave that occurred long before “global warming” became a buzzword.
From The Australian Bureau Of Meteorology, something the Aussies might remember and remind their MP’s of, given the recent downfall of labor to the climate policies they are pushing. It is still a stalemate, but it’s down to a few people.
From Wikipedia: The record for the longest heat wave in the world is generally accepted to have been set in Marble Bar in Australia, where from October 31, 1923 to April 7, 1924 the temperature broke the 37.8 °C (100.0 °F) benchmark, setting the heat wave record at 160 days.
CO2 was 305 ppm at the time. Imagine the press coverage if this happened now. From The Australian Bureau Of Meteorology:
The Marble Bar heatwave, 1923-24
source: http://www.bom.gov.au/lam/climate/levelthree/c20thc/temp1.htm
“Day by day maximum temperatures at Marble Bar over the period 31 October 1923 to 7 April 1924. At the peak of the heatwave – between late December and late February – many days approached or exceeded 45°C”.
The world record for the longest sequence of days above 100°Fahrenheit (or 37.8° on the Celsius scale) is held by Marble Bar in the inland Pilbara district of Western Australia. The temperature, measured under standard exposure conditions, reached or exceeded the century mark every day from 31 October 1923 to 7 April 1924, a total of 160 days.
Temperatures above 100°F are common in Marble Bar and indeed throughout a wide area of northwestern Australia. On average, Marble Bar experiences about 154 such days each year. The town is far enough inland that, during the summer months, the only mechanisms likely to prevent the air from reaching such a temperature involve a southward excursion of humid air associated with the monsoon trough, or heavy cloud, and/or rain, in the immediate area. This may sometimes be associated with a tropical cyclone or a monsoon low. In the record year of 1923-24 the monsoon trough stayed well north, and the season was notable for its lack of cyclone activity. (In fact, the entire Australian continent was untouched by tropical cyclones throughout the season, a rare event in the 20th Century). The rainfall recorded at Marble Bar during the record 160 days was just 79 mm, most of it in two heavy, short-lived storms that developed after the heat of the day. Only a further 12 mm of rain fell before the following December. Severe drought prevailed across the Western Australian tropics, and stock losses were heavy. With no rain to speak of, and minimal cloud, there was nothing to relieve day after day of extreme heat.
The highest temperature recorded during the record spell was 47.5°C on 18 January 1924. There have been higher temperatures at Marble Bar, with the highest recorded being 49.2°C, on 11 January 1905 and again on 3 January 1922. But temperatures in other Western Australian towns have been higher: in a remarkable late-season heat-wave in February 1998, Mardie recorded a maximum of 50.5°C (on the 19th) – the highest temperature in Western Australia, and the second highest ever recorded in Australia using standard instrumentation (Oodnadatta, in South Australia, recorded 50.7°C on 2 January 1960). Several other recordings above 49°C were reported in the northwest on the days preceding Mardie’s record, and at Nyang, the average maximum over the entire summer exceeded 43°C. As in 1923-24, very dry conditions accompanied the extreme heat.
h/t to Steven Goddard
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With some crafty modeling, those high readings can be adjusted downward.
Sames goes with floods. At that time the floods were not caused by CO2. They were caused by rain. Today they are caused by CO2.
That’s all well and good but we must remember that “modern climate history” began in 1979. Anything prior is irrelevant.
[don’t spam up multiple threads ~ ctm]
An inconvenient heatwave. Oh well, GISS can adjust it down so it won’t be so hot so that any 21st century occurence can be even hotter, no matter what the thermometer says.
Longest = worst? By who’s definition? Or are you making that up?
Moscow’s July temperature anomaly was ~3.6 standard deviations over the mean. How does the Marble Bar heat wave compare? How unexpected is it for somewhere that gets an average of 154 days above 100F to get 160 such days consecutively?
REPLY: You really ought to read the whole article before jumping to an erroneous conclusion and making an accusation that I “made it up”. By definition, a heat wave is duration based.
See my reply to Mark S below. – Anthony
“The record for the longest heat wave in the world is generally accepted to have been set in Marble Bar in Australia, where from October 31, 1923 to April 7, 1924 the temperature broke the 37.8 °C (100.0 °F) benchmark….”
Imagine if this record were equalled today in Marble Bar Australia. We would get the predictable “unprecedented”, “global warming”, “worse than we thought” ………[insert alarm mantra].
Almost every time we get a scare story and examine it closer [like the Russian heatwave] we find it’s not co2 or global warming but a natural event. I often have to point alarmists to the effect of UHI and that today we have many more instruments with greater sophistication looking at almost every square mile of the planet. 65 years ago we had fewer so local events could easily have been missed.
There was a great drought and presumably heatwave in the Buenos Aries region of Argentina from 1827 to 1829. More than a million cattle died.
Another heatwave occurred in France in 1540. According to Buisman’s recent findings, the year 1540 was an even more severe summer than 2003. All over Europe, the heatwave lasted, off and on, for seven months, with parched fields and dried up rivers, such as the Rhine. People in Paris, France could walk on the river bed of the Seine without getting their feet wet.
There are many other such heatwaves, if climatologists were interested in searching history.
if the temperature in death valley breaks 100 for a month straight during the summer is that really a heatwave? What about if NYC reached 95 for a month straight? Would that be newsworthy? My point is that i’m betting your point with this article is in fact pointless.
it’s worse than I initially thought. The average high temperature for this place is over 100 from november – march is well over 100.
This would be more informative if it were shown relative to other years.
Like this: my hometown record is 52 days 100 deg. or above in 1932.
2nd highest year was 42 days 100 deg. or above in 1988.
current year is 10 days 100 deg. or above.
Heat and drought have made Australia famous. A readable summary can be found here:
http://www.cultureandrecreation.gov.au/articles/weather/
Example: ————————
“There have been many serious droughts in Australia in the last 200 years. The 1895-1903 drought lasted eight years and caused the death of half of Australia’s sheep and forty per cent of its cattle. The 1963-68 drought caused a forty per cent reduction in wheat crops across Australia. In central Australia that same drought actually lasted eight years, from 1958 to 1967.
Generally speaking, for every ten years in Australia there are three years during which water supply is good, and three years during which water supply is bad.”
————————
There is no reason to think this hasn’t been the case for thousands of years. Here is another interesting take on weather in Australia, namely, El Niño/ La Niña – Detailed Australian Analyses.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/enlist/index.shtml
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/lnlist/
These pages describe a case by case analysis of El Niño/La Niña related weather events since 1900.
Leon Brozyna says:
August 21, 2010 at 2:30 pm
GISS has an app for that: It’s an Anomalymometer Homogenizer.
CTM, spamming wasn’t my intent. I did apologize, and you don’t have a edit/delete function for users, or I’d have deleted the first one myself.
My great grandfather was caught behind the great Blue Mountain blizzard over the Oregon Trail in 1878. It prevented him from continuing his trip to the Willamette Valley during that entire winter. When the snow cleared, he decided that Wallowa County, Oregon was about the prettiest place he had ever seen and, at the time, was considered to be the last place Indians were removed from, meaning that it was about as wild a place as you could find in the West. So he stayed and became the 6th richest man in the County within 15 years. No such blizzard has occurred since that time.
My grandparents drove through the dust bowl and managed to survive through the great depression. No heat wave or drought has ever been as worse or more worse than that one. They lived into the 1980’s, eking out a living on a small ranch here, the one that I now manage. Water has been plentiful and even more so these last 3 years. Oral histories are not that bad of a proxy. Wonder if Mann would consider studying those, given that his tree rings suck eggs.
rbateman says:
August 21, 2010 at 2:59 pm
==========================
LOL I had to read that three times to get it right……
Has anyone tried to figure out a tie-in to all these past heat waves, droughts, etc?
I just don’t know where to find it.
This was 1923-24 in the southern, then in 1930-40 you had the dust bowl decade in America, and almost the same thing in Russia, in the northern.
Moscow’s July temperature anomaly was ~3.6 standard deviations over the mean.
Your going to run with that in an attempt to scare us?
Assuming a normal distribution, you would see that 1 in every 4000 months (p=0.99984). So once every 350 years. But there are a lot of places on the earth which are also running the same “experiment”. I would expect to see a standard deviation of that nature every year.
In any case, the assumption that you can use standard deviation as a measure of extreme weather events is also very poor. The temperature from one day to the next is not an independent event. Once the temperature locks in hot, it will tend to run hot. Extreme events will tend to be much more likely than normal distribution would suggest.
All in all, your 3.6 standard deviations mean very little.
I’m suspicious. Was that 1920s heatwave recorded with thermometers? Thought so. I’m sure if we look hard enough we can find some treemometers to tell a different story, and with a 99% confidence too.
@richard telford
Historically, the Moscow heat wave was not extraordinary. Weather exactly like this summer happens there a few times a century going back as far as you can dig up records.
Of course, people in the 1800’s can’t be trusted with thermometers and scientists of the day commenting and writing about 40°C plus temperatures and thick smoke from burning forests and boggs must have been mistaken because it doesn’t show up in the modern officially adjusted temperature record.
Note DRY, what is the energy?
I and at least one other have mentioned, hyperventilating over temperatures is pointless! It means nothing in relation to the Earth energy budget!
Ocean temps on the other hand are more meaningful & they seem to be on the way down.
DaveE.
I guess I have to agree with Richard Telford on this one. The highest monthly average maximum temperature in Marble Bar is 108 deg F. The highest during the heat wave mentioned here was 117 deg F….not even an all time high which is 120.6 deg F.
In Moscow, the average high on the day the temp hit 100.8 deg F was just 72. The 100.8 was an all time high. The entire month of July averaged 15 deg F above normal in Moscow. Marble Bar was about half that in their heat wave.
How could you call this the worst heat wave ever, especially for a town that averages 154 days per year of temps over 100 deg F? This is a nonsense post and should never have appeared on WUWT.
REPLY: See my response to Mark S below. I’ll also point out this is from BoM, who thought it noteworthy enough to dedicate a whole page to it. Wikipedia has a page on it as well. – Anthony
A number of people have been looking at the maximum temperatures and saying they’re not that much out of the ordinary. Take a look at the minimums instead. It broke 100F on Oct 31 and didn’t get below it again until Apr 7. That’s a heat wave.
rbateman says:
August 21, 2010 at 2:59 pm
GISS product — homogenized and pasteurized. I’ve become lactose intolerant.
James & Telford
The “post” is from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.
Half of Russia has been below normal this summer. 160 days ago Moscow was experiencing bitter cold.
It is so terrible being told that the world is not coming to an end after all.
This is a nonsense post. Like saying that Death Valley had a heat wave or that it was hot in Vegas. If ‘abnormally high’ is included in your definition of heatwave than this is a non-event. I agree with C James that this never should have been posted on WUWT.
REPLY: Well, you are entitled to your opinion but I disagree. It was an event of distinction because of its duration. A heat wave is a prolonged period of excessively hot weather i.e. “heat waves” are defined by duration. The Moscow “heat wave” was defined by its duration also. It wouldn’t have been a heat wave if it lasted one or two days.
And as pointed out by Robert Swan above; “Take a look at the minimums instead. It broke 100F on Oct 31 and didn’t get below it again until Apr 7. That’s a heat wave.”
Too often we lose sight of the past and precedence of such events. Too often there is the conclusion that we experience “unprecedented heat waves”. If I’m guilty of reminding people (or educating them for the first time of such as event) so be it. But I’ll continue to post things that I think are interesting and relevant. If it were happening in WA today, it would get mondo press. – Anthony
Lighten up folks. Some days the scientific news is slow. A post that allows anyone to chime in with an opposing ‘worst’ or ‘best’ story about the weather ought not to raise Lyssa from her resting place.
Pamela mentions a blizzard in the Blues with none such since. But I’ve been on the nearby Interstate when each hill top was coated by a half inch of clear ice with none a few hundred feet lower. Now they call it “black ice” but that’s like blaming it on the devil when you crash. When you can see the road and the white and yellow lines through it, it is clear.
Have a drink and some popcorn. Relax. Cheers.