Snow is not as white as it looks. Mixed in with the reflective flakes are tiny, dark particles of pollution. University of Washington scientists recently published the first large-scale survey of impurities in North American snow to see whether they might absorb enough sunlight to speed melt rates and influence climate.
The results, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, show that North American snow away from cities is similar to Arctic snow in many places, with more pollution in the U.S. Great Plains. They also show that agricultural practices, not just smokestacks and tailpipes, may have a big impact on snow purity.
During their almost 10,000-mile trek across North American snowfields, the researchers were particularly interested in the Bakken oil fields of northwest North Dakota.
“With all this oil exploration, diesel trucks and new oil wells, people wondered: Is there a huge amount of air pollution making the snowpack darker?” said lead author Sarah Doherty, a research scientist at the UW’s Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean.
What they found was that these activities do appear to be adding extra soot to the snow, but perhaps just as important is the dirt. Disturbance from clearing oil pads, new housing sites and all the extra truck traffic on unpaved roads means dirtier snow. But even away from the oil fields, soil is disturbed by agriculture.
“Our work suggests that land use and farming practices might matter as much as diesel emissions in many parts of the Great Plains,” Doherty said.
Doherty was part of a team of UW atmospheric scientists who spent the winter of 2013 driving across northwestern U.S. states and some Canadian provinces to get a firsthand look at the continent’s snow.
The project involved collecting hundreds of snow samples from 67 sites away from any cities or major roads. The trip took the researchers from Seattle to North Dakota to Churchill, Manitoba. Every few days they melted and filtered the snow in their motel rooms, then back at their UW lab they shone light through a filter to see how much light was blocked, and did chemical analyses to determine what particles were responsible. (Read more about the group’s adventures on the road at http://www.bitly.com/snowsurveymethods)
Their main focus was black carbon, a very light-absorbing particle emitted by burning diesel, coal or wood. Many countries have regulated black carbon because of its effects on air quality and human health, but more recently climate scientists also have become interested because the tiny particles darken the snow and hasten melting. The cleanest samples they collected were from northern Canada, with overall levels of black carbon, or soot, similar to that of Arctic snowpack. The Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain states had levels slightly higher. The Great Plains readings were more variable and sometimes two to three or more times higher than in other parts of the country, typically 15 to 70 nanograms of soot per gram of snow.
Doherty previously worked with co-author Stephen Warren, a UW emeritus professor of atmospheric sciences, on a 2006-2010 survey he led of snow in the Arctic. Warren and Doherty also worked with Chinese collaborators in 2010 surveys of snow in northern China, all using the same techniques so the combined results can provide a first-ever global map of snow cleanliness.
Results from China showed rates of pollution tens to hundreds of times greater than in North America, with the highest rate in northeast China of 1,220 nanograms of soot per gram of snow, likely because of industrial activity and other emissions in the Beijing area. But dirt and desert dust also were prevalent in central North China snow.
“For a lot of the central U.S. and north China Great Plains the snow is not very deep. In the U.S., almost the whole area is agricultural fields and in China there is a lot of animal grazing,” Doherty said. “When the wind blows the dirt gets lofted, maybe just 10 feet off the ground, and gets mixed in with the snow.” North Dakota locals refer to the mixture as “snirt.”
The new paper documents how much light is blocked, and at which wavelengths, by filtered snow samples. Other co-authors and snow collectors were research professor Dean Hegg and graduate students Cheng Dang and Rudong Zhang, all in UW atmospheric sciences.
A companion paper by Dang and Hegg involved a chemical analysis of the North American samples to pinpoint exactly which compounds are contained in the snow.
“A lot of the focus in climate models has been on black carbon, because it’s a pollutant and it’s very dark,” Doherty said. “But the snow is darkened by other things as well, like organics, and also by dust and soil that can get in the snowpack.”
In fact, they found that in the Great Plains states up to half of light absorption is due to organic matter, or “brown carbon” from burning fossil fuels and from soil that mixes in with falling snow.
The deposits affect both global and local climates. Pollution on the Himalayan glaciers, for instance, is raising concerns that it will speed melt rates and harm water supplies. For U.S. farmers, changes in the snow’s reflectivity could affect when the spring melt will occur and when meltwater will drain out.
Whether the pollution the researchers found in North Dakota is enough to change snow melt timing will have to be answered by region-specific climate models, Doherty said.
“But first the models have to do a more accurate job of representing the amount of dirt that’s in the snowpack,” she added.
###
The work was funded by the Environmental Protection Agency and the China Scholarship Fund.
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Nonsense. black carbon and soot is a trace material. Plus it’s proven that humans can’t have any impact whatsoever on the climate and that includes snow.
hehe. sarc off
Dear Steve,
Seems, lately, you never miss an opportunity to mock anyone that considers the “consensus” opinion to be alarmist. As someone who respects your contributions to the climate issue, and that has watched your recent slide into cantankerousness, I am puzzled by this compulsion.
Do you make these snide asides at the alarmist sites, like Skeptical Science and RealClimate?
(Not that those sites would allow dissenting opinions.)
Best,
Lance Harting
IUPUI School of Science
Lancifer, speaking for my own crankytankerousness, no small amount of it stems from not being able to discuss this issue without several someones characterizing my personal opinions to be alarmist. I usually try to keep my snark strikes tactical and surgical, but sometimes I carpet bomb indiscriminately. I try to justify that as a strategic imperative, but the more honest truth is sometimes I do get genuinely hacked off and lose my temper.
Even if the source was human, it couldn’t have a significant effect on anything much. Just governments trying to bring in taxes to clean up the snow
Steven Mosher,
You may be right that these are flawed conclusions from a flawed study, just not for the reasons you list.
Is it happening to you a lot?
relax….
I prefer my alcohol a bit chillier than than, around 4ºC works for a decent beer. Although a room temp pint o’ bitter is okay if it’s cold outside and I’m at a pub.
Amen
Latitude, that plot is dishonestly scaled on the y-axis. The proper lowest value should be -459.67 °F. Please contact whoever produced it and have them correct their egregious error. Thanks.
🙂
Dust fluctuations are natural.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b8/Vostok_Petit_data.svg/1024px-Vostok_Petit_data.svg.png
sunshinehours1,
Ah yes, the old “if something has happened naturally in the past, it can only ever naturally” argument.
Gates,
That is a damn good argument, just ask Billy Ockham.
Unless you have evidence that “this time it’s different”, you are making your usual inane, pointless argument, nitpicking whatever you can.
No wonder you’ve lost the debate. Why not spend your energy job hunting, instead of making your endless, worthless comments? It could at least be productive.
dbstealey ….Brandon Gates has not “lost the debate”…..
..
It seems that you have by resorting to ad-hominem attacks…(i.e. “Why not spend your energy job hunting” )
Just interested in expanding my knowledge, that’s all.
So, how do I get a great job like that, where I can write blog comments instead of doing what I’m paid to do?
Of course, if you’re being paid to comment, that would explain it.
dbstealey,
This time the “dust” looks like the same stuff that collects on the inside of the exhaust pipe of an internal combustion engine. A 6th grader with a box of Q-tips, a bottle of xylene, some glass slides and a microscope could figure out the difference between 1 year old Arctic “dust” and 1 million year old Antarctic dust.
Fortunately the people out there collecting the research samples are a bit past the science fair level.
Now go on, tell us again how volcanoes are responsible for CO2 rise since 1850. Literature citations if you please.
Brandon:
“In 1992, it was thought that volcanic degassing released something like 100 million tons of CO2 each year. Around the turn of the millennium, this figure was getting closer to 200. The most recent estimate, released this February, comes from a team led by Mike Burton, of the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology – and it’s just shy of 600 million tons. It caps a staggering trend: A six-fold increase in just two decades. ”
http://www.livescience.com/40451-volcanic-co2-levels-are-staggering.html
I wonder if even 1% of the money thrown away on AGW funding was spent on actually finding out how much CO2 came out of volcanoes what we would find out.
sunshinehours1,
Mhmm hmmm, is that a six-fold increase in the estimate of output, or a six-fold increase in actual output?
The IPCC has already spent quite a bit of money to tell you that natural carbon fluxes are 35 times higher than anthropogenic ones. That isn’t good enough for you?
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/fig/figure-7-3-l.png
If you tally up the numbers, 212 GtC/year from natural sources. That’s 2.12 x 10^11 metric tons of carbon. The article you linked to is talking about 600 million short tons of CO2, which works out to 1.47 x 10^08 metric tons of carbon.
Which means that the sixfold increase in estimated volcano output brings the grand total up to 0.07% of the sum total of natural sources already identified by the IPCC. They don’t even break it out on the cartoon because that’s basically a rounding error compared to other natural fluxes.
Compare the shapes of the following curves now. Fossil fuel carbon emissions:
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/images/global_fossil_carbon_emissions_google_chart.jpg
Atmospheric CO2 composition:
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/ico2_annual.png
Notice a similarity?
Brandon: “Notice a similarity?”
Your CO2 graph is a actual measurements of CO2 graphed onto proxies for CO2 … correct?
We know that means very little. We also know temperature goes up and down in the ice cores and then CO2 reacts.
Yes I know the IPCC has squandered a lot of money lying to us.
“Scientists” would be fascinated by a 6 fold increase in volcanic CO2. Especially since there is a huge incentive to not look for natural sources of CO2. Imagine if they actually looked.
sunshinehours1,
Correct.
Why and how?
Those were the findings of Petit et al. (1999) per the plot you posted just above. I’ve got no quibble with that paper.
Quite right they would be. It would indicate something unusual was going on.
They already have looked, and according to the IPCC carbon cycle cartoon I posted previously, natural fluxes are 33 times GREATER than human emissions. How does that demonstrate non-incentive to identify natural sources of CO2? How big does the multiplier need to be for you to be satisfied?
As of today, no more impact on snow starting in 2020. Maybe some impact on something else.
http://www.nature.com/articles/nature14016.epdf?referrer_access_token=e64eZrGHlke1tR8YuUBCLdRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0MEzzy4wDRQte5fViQxiPJjJIfgcjxiQpfQtqwAkMQY0EytcYxwTGinosQQymtg-7AWlv9elwboasj0Yat-ztaq
Those guys wrote that the oil sands in Alberta would be economically un-viable by 2020. Fools.
Once I read that and their bowing before the IPCC projections, it was a waste of time article.
To joelobryan, you wrote:
“Those guys wrote that the oil sands in Alberta would be economically un-viable by 2020. Fools.
Once I read that and their bowing before the IPCC projections, it was a waste of time article.”
I have a different opinion. The article is not bowing before the IPCC projections. Quite the contrary. It says, without insulting anybody “here are the consequences of the IPCC projections”.
You don’t like that the oil sands in Alberta would be economically un-viable. Do you think the Canadian government does not know this? Look at the other affected countries.
So instead of arguing about the IPCC model, the global temperature averages, the anomalies, the pause, the dirty snow etc., the consequences are spelled out for each producing country. I think this will have more impact, at least I hope so.
I have often wondered why northern hemisphere snow extent has increased in the fall and winter since 1967, but declined in spring. The same trend applies to north America. Is this largely down to soot and dirt?
The NSIDC says:
Jimbo:
Let us assume that the NSIDC is talking about changes in snow cover (and thus changes in albedo) in the spring, as above when snow extent (and thus albedo) appears to have declined only in the spring.
Blame CO2!
In the NH summer, EVERYTHING is now growing 12% to 25% faster, longer, and taller and greener, but the reflectivity from that extra growth only slightly changes the total albedo of the NH. Fields are still green, forests still green, grassland still green.
In the NH fall, leaves are falling and branches exposed and fields are plowed under or harvested just like before CO2 strongly influenced growth, but there is no real change in albedo reflectivity between any time earlier and now.
In the NH winter, plants and grass are short, bushes and trees are bare, and the snow cover reflectivity is essentially unchanged.
But in the NH spring, things are growing greener faster and taller earlier than they were in years past. More snow and ice is hidden from the sun earlier than before, and so reflectivity goes down as plants grow faster earlier each spring. Warmer (even by 1/4 of one degree) has little effect that can be measured. But 25% MORE leaves earlier in the season by EVERY bush and tree?
I find you contribute less and less to these discussions every time you post. In fact, what you post can hardly be said to contribute to the discussion at all. Drive-by snark does not contribute anything, but it does reflect quite a bit on you, Mosh.
In the Colorado Rockies, the presence of red dust blown in spring dust dust storms from the Four Corners area mixing with spring snow storms over the Rockies is a significant accelerator of snow pack melt.
I’ve seen it vividly in Denver. When the snow is melting on roof tops, you see these red-tinged lines where the dust is accumulating as the melt water runs through the snow. Increases solar absorption, accelerates melt. Simple.
The glacial periods show elevated atmospheric dust, likely because a colder earth is a drier earth. Just one more negative feedback in the natural hydrologic cycle that helps regulate global temperatures.
Good info from NASA on this natural dust phenomenon is here:
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/ess20_research_painter_prt.htm
This red dust far exceeds in area and mass anything mankind could put up. And if it had been man-caused, the EPA and greenies would have shut it down long ago. It’s impact on accelerating the spring snow melt and impact downstream river flow into the summer is a significant concern in the Southwest dependent on the Colorado River water flows.
joelobryan, from your link is this image.
[This image shows the profile of the snow pit at Rabbit Ears Pass, in the Rocky Mountains of northern Colorado, in mid-April 2009. The three distinct dust layers represent the accumulation of nine dust events that had occurred by April 17. ]
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/362480main_PainterPres2_400.jpg
Hmmmnn.
So the “bands” in the snow are very distinct. They ALSO only cover a few days across the entire 12-17 FOOT HIGH record of snowfall – and thus albedo was ONLY AFFECTED for those few days.
The rest of the snow is VERY VERY “WHITE” …. Would 4 days of “dirty” snow really matter worldwide?
The red might be snow algae, see http://www.snow-algae.com/exploring-snow-algae/red-snow.html
Careful with that idea there Wry. That web page you link to is designed to generate sales for a commercial cosmetics. Any claims there should be read with the highest levels of skepticism.
Scientific American and Smithsonian on snow algae:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/2013/07/09/wonderful-things-dont-eat-the-pink-snow/
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-pink-snow-is-not-what-you-think-it-is-9651061/
James,
I realize there is indeed well documented snow algae, but linking to a commercial cosmetic sales site that uses it to sell anti-aging creams is pseudo-science.
But lets be clear. The snow algae doesn’t/won’t grow on pure water snow. It must acquire the iron, magnesium, phosphorus, sulphur, calcium, and organic nitrogen it needs from aeolian dust mixed in with the snow. Indeed, the algal spores themselves blow-in with the dust.
See that a lot on the western slope in Colorado too. Often a warm wind from the front of a low pressure system approaching from the west will blow red dust from the south, and make a layer before the snow starts. It has a significant effect on springtime melting.
The larger question is has this translated into a decrease in albedo for the globe? I do not think so.
“””””…..Doherty was part of a team of UW atmospheric scientists who spent the winter of 2013 driving across northwestern U.S. states and some Canadian provinces to get a firsthand look at the continent’s snow……””””
Well that was mighty white of her; going on a 10,000 mile junket to spread her auto exhaust soot over everyone else’s snow.
Snow doesn’t “reflect” it “scatters”. Most of the “light” enters the snow or ice, where much of it is trapped by TIR. It only takes a few hours for the sun to melt the surface and make it transparent.
What light does then escape from solid / liquid “snow” is scattered into a diffuse Lambertian back scatter.
It doesn’t take many hours for fresh snow to be turned into a surface with no more “albedo” contribution than ordinary grass or dirt.
Crevasses in glaciers look blue, because the blue rays are the only ones that can propagate in even the purest of waters for any great distance, and eventually find a facet they can emerge from.
And the soot which accelerates “melting” is merely aiding and abetting the optical trapping of a lot of radiant energy in the ice that non fresh snow quickly becomes.
>>> It doesn’t take many hours for fresh snow to be turned into a surface with no more “albedo” contribution than ordinary grass or dirt.
Around here it takes often months, until the Sun gets up some 30 degrees from the horizon.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=84499
Data confirming my thoughts in previous post.
The first sentence from that NASA link is this: “Sunlight is the primary driver of Earth’s climate and weather.” Whatever happened to CO2 as the primary driver of climate, because that is what the climate change extremists have been telling me for years?
Here’s some data that causes one to re-think how naturally-occurring dust can and does affect albedo:
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/362481main_PainterPres_400.jpg
and the accompanying Figure Legend:
Dust-laden snow surface in the central Colorado Rockies in mid-April 2009 is compared with a near 100 percent reflectance panel as a reference for determining the decrease in snow reflectivity due to dust. The measure of visible solar reflectivity, or “albedo,” of the dusty snow is 0.61 relative to clean snow albedo of 0.98. That means that clean snow reflects nearly all of the incident sunlight in the visible wavelengths, while dusty snow absorbs a huge amount — about half — of that sunlight. Credit: Thomas H. Painter, Snow Optics Laboratory, NASA
So clean snow “reflects” 98% of all the visible “light” that strikes it. Incidentally, “light” by definition IS visible.
Well a freshly evaporated silver front surface mirror, is the highest reflectance single layer specular surface reflector known, and the reflectance is 98% for that silver mirror.
On the other hand the reflectance of a specular water / ice surface, is 2% at normal incidence, and about 3% total for a Lambertian diffuse illuminance.
So that means that about 97-98% of the incident light on a water / ice surface, enters the material. If it rattles around inside by TIR, and then somehow finds its way back out the facet it came in on, well once again, only 97-98% will emerge, so in just this most degenerate of cases, the maximum reflectance or albedo that clean specular surface snow can have is 94-96 %, which is NOT 98%.
Now in this ideal case, we assumed that TIR trapped the light, until it re-emerged form the entrance facet, so those TIR reflections are lossless.
But what about a ray that enters the ice, and then escapes immediately at the first ice/air interface it encounters. Well that emerging ray back in air, is now only 94-96% of the original, and before it can get back out of the snow as part of that 98% reflectance, it must find another piece of ice to enter and TIR around, and then re-emerge, and that will cost it another 4-6% energy loss. Every single scattering encounter with a particle of ice, will cost the light about 5% on average of its incident value.
I’d like to see some peer reviewed measurements of the full hemispherical back scattered (“reflected”) return from a sample of brand new just got here this minute snow.
In the meantime, count me skeptical of ANY claim of 98% albedo from clean snow.
And I’m not even at the NASA Snow Optics Laboratory. But right now, I am working at a NASA Ames address at Moffett Filed in Sunnyvale CA; but NO, I am NOT working for NASA Ames
.
george e. smith –
OK, got some theory. Is there any way to just go out and measure this in the field smaller than a tractor trailer and that the sled dogs could haul?
Or must we invent the widget for the EPA?
George, I’d hazard a guess that clean, white small grained snow would probably have similar characteristics to a sintered PTFE or barium sulfate plate. (No snow here in Florida for me to check that… yet.) I think somebody assumed that 95% white (or whatever the target’s grey value) meant it was reflecting that much light and didn’t allow for its Lambertian qualities. You can make much scarier predictions that way.
According to the linked description of their methods, all of their research was carried out within a mile (1.6 km) of a road … did these folks ever think of sampling a bit further from our diesel-and-gasoline-driven highway system?
Sigh … another good idea fallen victim to selective sampling.
w.
Yup, an interesting idea but the study was not deep, wide or thorough enough to provide much insight.
Personally, I’m inclined to believe that particulate matter (produced by man or from natural sources) can measurably impact climate regionally if not globally. e.g. forest fires, volcano eruptions etc. And although there’s some controversy over the numbers, I am generally persuaded that particulate pollution does represent a health issue too. So I’m generally supportive of regulations and investment to reduce particulate pollution (and vehemently opposed to wasting money on CO2).
Just curious, what regulations do you think will have an influence on volcano eruptions?
Just watch the green eruptions later this year when they don’t get the global CO2 regulations they want. The air will be thick with it.
I should point out that I am in no way, in disagreement with the notion that any sort of dirt on / in snow will hasten its melting, and it can happen a lot faster than one might think.
The daytime surface melt / nighttime surface refreeze, quickly turns new snow with its fractal like micro surfaces, into significant sized optical windows, that transmit a lot of energy into the ice, wherein TIR trapping retains a lot of it. And as those now chunks of ice grow, they incorporate all kinds of absorptive pestilences into them, which ultimately absorb the solar radiant energy and convert it to heat (noun).
My objection is to the mythology that snow is this magic ultra high reflectance goop that is supposed to be a significant contribution to earth albedo. It is chicken feed.
Clouds are where the real earth albedo comes from. I’m talking total earth averaged solar spectrum reflectance. You know; the thing that goes along with Kevin Trenberth’s 342 W.m^-2 TSI.
Furthermore, wouldn’t the absorption depend on where the particulate matter was in the snow? A well mixed snow/particulates would certainly absorb less light then one where all of the particulate matter was on top, ergo the data they did collect is not that meaningful.
Snow melts or sublimates from the top down under solar heating. Once the darker layer containing particulate soot underneath is exposed in the Spring-Summer melt season, when sunlight is a a much greater factor, that particulate is now on the top all the way until the snow is melted to the dirt or rock layer. The dirty snow just keeps getting dirtier as the melt season progresses. Anyone who has watched the dirty snow piles accumulate in parking lots as the spring melt progresses sees that vividly.
See here:
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/362480main_PainterPres2_400.jpg
And then once any clean snow top layers are melted/sublimated down to the dirty layers, the dirt/soot stays on top, further accelerating solar absorption as the dirt piles up and decreases albedo.
As here:
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/362479main_PainterPres1_400.jpg
joelobryan
When dirty snow gets a new fresh snow cover, it may well continue melting under the bright white top. A flux of radiation inside the snowcover melts the snow around the dirt in there, sometimes it melts snow clearly from under (cool air + sunshine + thin cover on dark ground)
Rain and dry air are as important factors in a melting / sublimation process. It depends on latitude and other local factors.
Snow melting is a real science to study.
Hugh, not only is it a real science to study, just think of the number of different words the Inuit use to describe it.
You don’t think it might be because there’s no Starbucks miles from the roads?
If you’re going to go that far on the EPA and China’s dime, why not haul around some sleds and dogs and yurts and warm clothes. There must be something better or in addition to melting the samples in the motel, hauling water back to Seattle, and then shining a light through what has then been completely unmixed as Robert W Turner says.
Selective sampling and maybe give some more thought to that methods section.
If you read the article carefully it said they filtered the water and then shined a light through the filter. and measured the amount of light transmitted through filter. No need to haul jugs of water back to Seattle. 0.25µ filters are readily available in usable sizes at any industrial chemical supply outlet.
But if they did that, they wouldn’t have been able to retreat to their motel rooms every few days. Oh, the humanity!
http://www.washington.edu/news/files/2015/01/Lab_Forks_BySteve.jpg
A motel-room lab in Forks, North Dakota.
S. Warren / UW
You want to see dark snow in North Dakota just go back twenty years to the time farmers in North Dakota engaged in (Summer) Fallowing 1/3 of their land every year. Fallowing means that by mechanically tilling fields for an entire year no ground cover to grow thereby “Resting” the soil.
One result in the Winter whenever the winds blew were Ground Blizzards of snow and soil that blowing for miles before getting trapped in a Shelter Belt or Stubble field. We have photos from that era of our Shelter Belt filled literally to the top of the trees, surrounded by Fallow bare fields bare to the dirt starting within 20 ft of the trees.
Traditional Following was displaced by Minimum or No Till farming about 20 years ago, with this practice no crop is grown during the “Rest” or Fallow years, the stubble isn’t tilled under and new growth is controlled with Herbicides. Two of the side effects of No/Min Till is that snow is trapped in the remaining stubble where it falls and doesn’t blow or drift NOR DOES THE SOIL. Now the tree claims rarely fill with dirty snow because there is now very little soil and snow moving with the wind and I would speculate the the ground is much more reflective than it was during the era when Summer Fallow was a common, almost universal, practice.
Folks can do a search – use Image Tab – and the word combination below
eastern_washington dust devils
While on Interstate 90 just west of the town of Ritzville I have seen a dozen dust devils at one time. During 20 minutes there were about 100. This was not snow season. Still, the soil goes up. Where and when it comes down . . .
Can I get a grant?
~~~~~
Snow that melts quickly will infiltrate and some unknown amount will be held as soil moisture. Much cleaner snow may sublimate. Near spring, some farmers plow the snow into rows leaving much of the soil uncovered. The local heating causes the row of snow to melt and go into the soil. Such will be a very tiny fraction of total land. It is interesting to see what people do.
Willis, In much of the plains area of the US and Canada, it is quite difficult to get more that 600m (0.5 mi) from a road. The area was surveyed into one square mile sections using the PLSS in the US and DLS in Canada then sold or given away to homesteaders largely in quarter section (160 acre) units. So farm roads — often unpaved — ended up laid out on a one mile grid.
Try this. Go to Google maps and ask for Grand Forks, ND , back out to show about a hundred square miles — i.e. about 10 miles across horizontally. Then select Satellite view. This amazing 1 mile on a side grid (superimposed on a fainter half mile on a side quarter section grid) appears. and mostly there are roads between the sections although some segments are missing and one suspects many are very lightly used. The grid extends for hundreds of miles in all directions except where cities, rivers, or lakes interfere with it.
I grew up in one of the Colonies without the system. Here is a reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Land_Survey_System
Yup.
Good point about the selective sampling, but at least they got out on the road a bit. It beats creating a model indoors, and never double-checking to see what is going on outside.
Willis,
Did it ever occur to you that this isn’t their first rodeo and that they probably know more about it than you do?
Because I actually think before I run my trap, it occurs to me that heavy particulates might just have a limited travel distance which they’ve already reasonably characterized from prior work. Time and money being constraints, and Bell Jet Rangers costing megabux per hour to operate, I’m thinking they made some well-educated guesses about how best to spend their grant money to cover as much latitudinal distance at some meaningful resolution in the 67 sites they chose to survey. Also, because they’re interested in chemistry of the snow and not just what color it its, they may actually need samples from close to their sources to get concentrations good enough for their assays to work.
But I don’t really know, because I don’t do their job for a living, and wouldn’t dream of presuming to think that I could offer them much good advice on it either.
Brandon Gates January 9, 2015 at 1:24 am
Sure. But then I didn’t find any previous study of theirs doing the same thing, so I figured it might be their first rodeo of this particular kind. If you have evidence of them or anyone doing a similar study and restricting themselves to sample locations within a half mile of highways, I assume you’d have cited it … I found nothing similar.
Sure, it’s quite possible that they know more about it than I do. However, my experience in climate science is that as Richard Feynmann observed, “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts”. I fear I’ll take Feynmann’s word over yours. Me, I never assume that scientists or their studies are mistake-free, and I’m rarely disappointed in that assumption.
Ummm … er … well … I fear we are woefully short on evidence for that claim.
OF COURSE heavy particulates have a limited travel distance. If that’s the sum total of your insights at the end of your “actually thinking”, you’re in deep trouble. I started with that knowledge, and I thought
“How would the fact that
a) many of the particulates are generated on the highway, and
b) they have a limited travel distance
affect their results”
Then I thought, “They’re making a claim that ‘North American snow away from cities is similar to Arctic snow in many places'”, but they haven’t looked at the snow away from highways.”
So I pointed that out. And so far, you haven’t provided a scrap of evidence that this is not a legitimate objection to their survey methods, you’ve just provided handwaving and aggro accusations about my ignorance.
Here’s my question, Brandon. If you were designing a snow survey of North American snow, would you restrict yourself to areas within a half-mile of a road? Please show your work …
As to your observation about “Bell Jet Rangers costing megabux per hour to operate”, that’s dumber than a box of hammers. Get a damn snowmobile, put it on a trailer behind the pickup truck they used for the survey, and away you go. Helicopters??? This is a perfect example of why I believe in the ignorance of “experts”.
Well, at least that’s one thing we can agree on—I don’t think you could offer them much good advice either, so it appears you have an accurate view of your own abilities.
w.
You don’t really know, but thanks for demonstrating, so we may know, that you will run your trap and presume to think you could offer Mr. Eschenbach advice before actually thinking. You demonstrate that you’ll jump to the defense of these folks without so much as checking the rodeo lineups. You don’t seem to realize that this post will be remembered when you run your trap in the future.
Willis,
Look harder next time. Here’s the study at hand: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014JD022350/abstract
Searching for lead author Doherty brings up:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jgrd.50235/abstract
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1600-0889.2011.00577.x/abstract
Even though he’s not lead author, Dean A. Hegg has 55 articles to his name going back to the 1980s. Not the doing the “same thing” but similar things.
Well that’s a start at least.
Paul Courtney,
You don’t really know, but thanks for demonstrating, so we may know, that you will run your trap and presume to think you could offer Mr. Eschenbach advice before actually thinking.
Honest people admit when they don’t know something for sure. That makes it clear that what they are saying is their own opinion, i.e., what they think or feel, about a particular concept. You are busting my hump for something I see as an obvious ethically correct form of communication. My advice to you is to think about that the next time you run your trap.
I’d said:
Brandon Gates January 9, 2015 at 7:44 pm replies
Thanks, Brandon. I didn’t say that they had not done studies of snow … and guess what. You found that they’d done studies of snow.
What I said was, I didn’t find any previous study of theirs doing the same thing, a study which claims to cover a wide area but only sampled next to the roads … and as you agree, neither did you. I guess you’ll have to look harder next time.
So I’d say that the evidence so far is that this is their first rodeo of this particular kind.
But this is all just a red herring. Whether it’s their first or fiftieth rodeo is immaterial. What I said was that if you want to find out what the snow conditions are across a large area, the idea of only sampling within a half-mile of a road seems like a very curious method in any rodeo. And you haven’t brought up anything to challenge that, except for a hilarious claim that getting off the road would require a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter.
w.
Hey Brandon…
Check out this post from DB
..
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/06/on-the-futility-of-climate-models-simplistic-nonsense/#comment-1832556
Do you think Willis the fisherman would be interested in someone that is full of “carp?”
Deflecting as usual, socks. This isn’t about fishing. It isn’t even about carp. This is about one more alarmist climate myth being busted. No wonder the interest in changing the subject.
Seriously Mr Dbstealey…..when you tell someone they are full of “carp” in a public forum, don’t you think that we should ask a fisherman such as Willis what his opinion is of carp?
socks,
Are you really that thin-skinned? And can you not recognize irony as humor?
As for a ‘public forum’, no one is forcing you. Are they? Personally, I would rather not see your misinformation posted. Then I wouldn’t feel the need to correct it.
Mr Dbstealey…
…
Let’s wait until Willis provides us with his opinion of a person that is “full of carp.”
While you are on the subject of misinformation, can you please inform us of how global temperature (T) rises or falls the most at night ?
Willis,
What I said was, I didn’t find any previous study of theirs doing the same thing, a study which claims to cover a wide area but only sampled next to the roads …
Equivocation games, really? Up your game.
Socrates,
lol. Maybe, if only for bait. What kills me about that post is the parting shot:
Finally, anyone can play with the WoodForTrees site and create millions of charts, but most of them are worthless …
Edited for accuracy.
Socrates,
Is he on record saying that?
Willis: Have you ever been in ND or the Canadian provinces adjacent to ND in the winter? The area is very sparsely populated and most of the roads are county or township roads many of which are not paved. In the winter these roads are usually covered with compacted snow and ice. If the temperature is cold enough (near -17°C) driving on these roads is like driving on concrete. Furthermore there is not a great deal of traffic on these roads. Usually the local school bus or a family going to town once a week is about the most you will see for vehicular traffic. Families in this region have multiple snowmobiles for their everyday chores or recreation. IMO your snipe about sampling less than about 1 mile from a road is just that “snipe”.
greymouser, first off, yes, I’ve been in both North Dakota and the Canadian provinces in the winter. And?
Next, I’m not sure what your point is. My point was this: in areas such as you describe, the main source of human-made snow pollution is black carbon from diesel and gasoline engines on the roads. As a result, sampling near the roads will tend to overestimate the human impact on the snow. Far from being “snipe”, this seems to me to be a serious objection to any generalization of their results. And while you may disagree, your calling my objection “snipe” is just … well … sniping …
As to the idea that “a school bus or a family going to town once a week is about the most you will see for vehicular traffic”, that’s not my experience at all. People drive to work, both in ND and Canada, and they visit families, friends, and lovers, and they go out for a drink, and they go shopping and to the movies … and they use the roads to do so.
And being someone who prefers facts to anecdotes, here’s the number of miles driven on rural roads in North Dakota by month in 2010, from here et seq.
Around 350 million miles driven on rural arterial roads in North Dakota in summer, and 250 million miles driven in winter … sorry, greymouser, but 250 million miles driven per month in the depth of winter, that’s a whole lot more than “a school bus or a family going to town once a week” …
I also don’t understand your comment about how in the winter “driving on these roads is like driving on concrete”. Driving on roads is always like driving on concrete, or driving on asphalt, which is little different. What does that have to do with black carbon on the snow?
Anyhow, I truly don’t understand what your point is. Some clarification would helpful.
w.
Willis: re: the 250 million miles per month driven in ND as you cite below, Nowhere in that table of data is a breakdown of where in the state that mileage occurred. My guess is since that data was from 2010, it is likely to be heaviest west of the Missouri R. (the area known as the Williston Basin). But without a regional breakdown of travel patterns, that 250 million miles is just a figure. in most parts of the state you will find a N-S/E-W road every mile. So define for me what you consider “near” the roads.
Perhaps it would have been been better if we had the GPS coordinates for the sample sites. I noticed in the press statement that they sampled areas away from cities and major roads.
Willis,
We’re getting somewhere. Maybe the folks who did the actual field work weren’t so entirely clueless after all. Emphasis on field work. As in, their eyeballs registered the conditions of the surroundings in which they deliberately found themselves.
It’s even worse than that. Their selective sampling in N. America will tend to bias their findings on human impact on snow in S. America. Asia. Europe. Antarctica. Greenland. These guys need to be tossed into the brig for doing such schlocky work.
It goes without saying that the first idiot who loads these “data” into a model and assumes that road and traffic density are homogenous everywhere it snows should be summarily executed.
While I’m at it, someone really ought to tell these nitwits that driving vehicles isn’t the only human activity which might have some impact on snow and ice.
Good luck that!!!!! One of the many reasons the climate models fail, and will continue to do so. But that won’t stop the modelers from running them and then publishing their garbage output. As long as there is grant and funding money to be had for grantees, they will continue to put out what the grantors want to see.
Well does this mean the snow melts hours sooner, days sooner or weeks sooner? Here in NC the snow is rarely on the ground more than a couple of days, especially from mid-Feb on. Even if the snow is around long enough to interact with atmospheric particulates, does it really matter?
As you go north, obviously the snow will stay longer, but again when a warming event occurs the snow can go fairly quickly. And most of the time, sunny days are associated with cold temps, so we get some additional topical melting that refreezes at 4pm? Generally it takes a low pressure system pushing air up from the south or rain to melt the snow.
The only place where I could see this as a possible issue is with semi-permanent snow fields way up there, and according to the article, these are the “cleanest” areas anyway.
So, the snow turn to water faster, so what.
No wonder it’s so warm in South Dakota.
https://www.google.com/search?q=temperature+minot+nd&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
Minot is in ND
Where we lived.
I first noticed this as a boy in northern Alberta in the thirties lots coal used then. I wondred if the airplane traffic increase in the artic in the 1960s onward burning JP4 made a difference. I was there from 1955 to 1978 and could really see any.
“Could really see any,” or did you mean could NOT really see any?
Burned a lot of Lignite in the Dakotas at that time too, I used to retube those Coal fired boilers and you could smell them 5 miles down wind. Old timers used to tell me about the inversion layer that trapped Minot in smog whenever the wind blew over the Souris River valley rather than down it.
A little OT: thanks to AW for removing the “Solar activity at birth – Life expectancy” post. That was borderline astrology-esque junk science, IMO.
J.
me too, couldn’t even find my life expectancy. I think it is good to be at a place that will just say oops, let’s try something else. Not enough of that around anymore, but it is an excellent characteristic for a scientist to sit down and rethink.
joelobryan, the page is no more. Has it been removed or moved?
[Oops! That page can’t be found.]
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/08/solar-activity-at-birth-correlated-with-life-expectancy/
Original
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17951015
I thought that every rain drop/snow flake was formed with a speck of dirt at the centre.
How have they differentiated between those and specks of dirt from other sources, for example wind-blown or vehicle exhaust subsequently deposited on the snow surface?
Back in the late 60s during the Global Cooling scare, it was proposed to sprinkle soot on the Arctic snow fields to prevent the imminent ice-age. Seems like Chinese industry is doing just that 🙂
This is how we save ourselves when the planet starts to cool. Dot the great white north with little coal-electric plants designed to maximize soot production and just produce enough electricity to run the operation (unless there are nearby towns that could use more juice). Just run them in the winter (or switch to soot-free burning the rest of the year if they are being used for electricity supply).
Should be able to easily reduce albedo enough to offset significant cooling IF we have enough infrastructure up and running in time and use it in time. We need to be building this NOW.
The Dakotas are famous for their ‘snirt.’ The Coloradans make ‘snirt’ a term of mockery.
At least they got out from behind the computer screen and did some leg work for a change. Kudos for that. They could have sat there and done the famed “reanalysis” of data using a sophisticated climate model which seems to be the standard these days.
Most of the rural areas that I’ve lived in prefer to dust the roads with grit and ash and often locally common dirt.
Ash is a discard and less expensive than salt.
When the weather is cold, the grit makes for better traction up hills. Not a lot of help descending hills though, downshift and go slow.
Which leaves me wondering if road snow control practices were taken into account. Or even if the snow collected was far from local contamination sources. I’d expect easy walking points near the roads would be heavily road contaminated and biased.
How long and how often do these folks ‘collect yellow or dark snow’ after snowfalls?
Not forgetting that ‘paved roads’ in much of rural America are just graded soil/earth and tar oil sprayed to minimize rain washout and hopefully prevent ruts or washboard surfaces.
What is needed are definitive ‘control’ samples; ideally collected since the 1930s.
Where I live, people don’t think snow is naturally dirty enough so add things like salt hoping to make it go away faster. Where I grew up, people would add coal ash too. Finding that nature is catching on might be a good thing.
Uh, in Northern Wisconsin we’re taught early “Don’t eat yellow snow”.
Urea right !!
Anthony, if you put a disaclaimer, such as “Funded by the EPA” ahead of the article, we could have skipped to the pre-determined conclusion. 8D
Seriously though, it seems that the entire purpose of the “research” is to shut down US energy production. Isn’t it interesting that the “researchers were particularly interested in the Bakken oil fields of northwest North Dakota.” and “With all this oil exploration, diesel trucks and new oil wells, people wondered: Is there a huge amount of air pollution making the snowpack darker?” said lead author Sarah Doherty, a research scientist…”, er, paid government shill. People wondered? I think we know which people…
The comment from Willis sums it up. All their “research” is done near roads. What would be interesting is if they did this “study” at presetermined, published sites, for 30-50 years and present the data and any observable trend. That would be science. This one time sample demonstrates and proves nothing. Kinda like the ozone hole, from “look, there’s a hole”, to “we caused it.”
Eric
True. But soot is a clear public health hazard, and industry must continue to address this.
Define “soot” please. Small particulate matter regulated by EPA is not empirically connected to health or longevity. Enviros, like warmists, just make stuff up. Hope you are not repeating their theology.
True. But soot is a clear public health hazard, and industry must continue to address this.
Very true and so industry has, from the London Fog to today’s exceptional work by industry in North America and elsewhere since the days of “acid rain”. It is a simple fact.
Remember that if they did not do this by being more efficient and “cleaner”? There wouldn’t be customers to buy the products they manufacture.
See links to smog photos in saveenergy @ur momisugly 10:19 here:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/12/24/increase-in-uk-temperatures-largely-due-to-increase-in-sunshine-hours-caused-by-reduced-pollution/
o/t but brrr.
20 below 0 (F) last night with wind chill of approx -30 to -35.
high temp today was bouncing between 0 and 1.
my snow is usually pure white here, seldom see anything in it.
sometimes during the first storm of year, before ground fully frozen, if its windy during storm will see some dust mixed in.
Where is “here”?
Don’t know for dmacleo, but here in Northeast Kingdom of Vermont it got down to -22F – no wind thankfully because then we usually lose power.
That’s a pretty good temp – outside sensor, mercury register so not clearly the best (been thinking of upgrading but slight disposable income issue especially with electric costs = damned wind turbines weren’t whopping last night but still paying for them), and we can’t see another house from ours so no local (urban) heat sources. Plus I was up feeding the carbon burning wood stove – went with ash for last night – every couple of hours and would go look.
Central Maine
I think that the increase in human and warm-blooded animal populations has a far greater effect on “global warming” than the carbon in snow does. In 1850 there were about 1.2B humans on earth and now there are 6.7B. The difference (5.5B) accounts for an additional 550 GWatts of radiated heat (100W/human) that must be managed by the Earth’s atmospheric thermoregulation scheme. Throw in the larger animal population and there may be as much as a TeraWatt of extra energy to be dealt with.
“…additional 550 GWatts of radiated heat (100W/human)
Yikes, 550 GW/hrs!
If I did the math right, that’s over 31 Hiroshima bombs per hour.
What we eat and metabolize would have been metabolized by some other creature. Besides, your additional 5.5E11 Watts is miniscule compared to the background energy flows. Bio-productivity on Earth though has indeed cycled wildly up and down through geologic time. The Glacial periods are one of decreased biological activity to be sure, and then global average temperatures were only 8-10 K lower than today.
But be very careful of which way you point that arrow of causality.
Calculate these:
http://www.defenders.org/bison/basic-facts
If American snow is getting dustier and dirtier, surely you need to look east for the source – to China.
Here in the UK, we regularly get dust from the Sahara, so these airborne particulates can and do travel a very long way.
Ralph
Sorry – I meant “look west”.
Both are correct, just one is a bit farther than the other!
Sal, what an incredibly human-centric attitude. That’s as bad as any warmist!
There used to be herds of plains Bison that took days to thunder past. The sheer mass of wild animals on this planet exceeds humanity. There is probably more insect life than animal, again just by mass. Imagining that human population increase changes the animal balance indicates a lack of imagination.
CodeTech, what an incredibly mammalian-centric attitude 😉
We live on a planet overwhelmingly dominated by bacteria.
http://phys.org/news/2013-02-bacterial-world-impacting-previously-thought.html
Silliest statement of the millennium:
Obviously she never heard of The Great Oxygenation Event
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event
The point being made is the delta in human generated heat since 1850 not the absolute value. Aside from that, the point was being made, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that there are all manner of things that might affect climate and, that being said, there is only a very small difference in global temperature. I’m not sure whether the difference in temp is even really discernible due to varying accuracy in recording the data over time.
Now that’s a point I can agree with.
If hypothetical space aliens were to examine Earth (being highly advanced in all sorts of science, unlike our NASA-GISS boys), my guess is they would be gobsmacked at how temperature stable Earth’s climate is and has been over hundreds of millions of years.
Actually it is a reasonably well known fact (and echoed in most entomology textbooks) that simple ants outweigh humans on this blue orb.
I’m not really sure how much of a problem this is. For example, imagine the last glacial period. We saw ice that hung around for 100,000 years. All during that time the ice was collecting dirt from the wind, stuff that drifts down from meteor dust, and soot from natural fires, some of which were likely even coal fires started by lightning strikes. As these glaciers began to melt, the ice would melt leaving the dirt and soot behind. As these glaciers were melting in the summer they must have looked more like dirt than snow as the accumulation of 100,000 years of junk deposited by the atmosphere accumulated on the surface.
Is the modern load of junk any worse than what we might have seen during the last glaciation where there were huge areas that are now prairie which were desert at that time?