Northeast Siberia braces for extreme cold of -60C

Hi,
I’ve just ended to search thru Russian pages not knowing about the post. So… something real cool. 😉
All about Yakutsk (Yakutia).
Today: http://www.hmn.ru/index1.php?code=50&value=24959
3 days: http://www.hmn.ru/index1.php?code=4&value=24959
Archive: http://www.hmn.ru/index1.php?code=8&value=24959
Airport: http://avia.meteonovosti.ru/index.php?index=1&icao=UEEE&iso_cntr=RU
For future use:
Meteo Novosti: http://www.hmn.ru/index.php?check=1
RIA Novosti: http://www.rian.ru/forecast/?forecast_type=1
Russia’s Weather: http://meteo.infospace.ru/russia/html/index.htm
Original text in Russian: http://www.dni.ru/society/2008/12/15/155430.html
Please use Google translate: http://translate.google.com/translate_t
Regards

Having braved this kinda of cold before, absolutely been there. If we get our wishes, we can now look forward to power supplies by our gerbals and many dinners of weeds. Thank goodness its starting to freeze everywhere! Our food supply is now ensured.
We couldn’t have our crops grow better with longer growing seasons and increased CO2, especially if they are irrigated. No.
Is your freedom to breath now going to be determined in some back room in Europe?

Damn….. and I’ve just invested in a Siberian ice company ’cause the Arctic woz gunna run outta ice….. Knew I shouldna listened to that Gore fella.
…. Hmm. They reckon Ice is a good insulator ‘eh?…. Might have to go with cheap Siberian igloos instead… what with the collapse of the housing market an’ all. 😉

bah, vapor pressure, no it wouldn’t condense CO2 out. My bad.

After reading Lubos Motl’s blog on Steven Chu, the US’s next Secretary of Energy, I’m wondering how this guy ever won the Nobel Prize. Along with his boss, the next president of the US, the gods help us… the US is surrounded by idiots.
http://motls.blogspot.com/

J. Hansford quotes “They reckon Ice is a good insulator ‘eh?”. I can assure you that it is not. An igloo is built of snow; if it turns to ice, you freeze to death. I’ve lived in an igloo (actually two, had to build a new one when one started to glaze over) for a week and I do not wish to repeat the experience. I certainly do not want to have to display my snow-building skills to the younger generation but I’m afraid I may have to given Al Gore’s track record on predictions. A balmy -9C (16F) here on Vancouver Island tonight.

Well if it was my job to read the thermometer that day I would open another bottle of vodka and then write down the temperature from last month. Hmmm, why does that sound familiar?

The main Russian meteo address I sent at the beginning of this page (comments) are in English versions as well. So everyone will able to follow the current Yakutsk temps without translations:
http://www.hmn.ru/en/
Regards

The BBC reported that Moscow itself is having a very warm December
They have still not seen serious snow which is most unusual

We have snow on the ground and a cold front moving in which comes with its own weather service advisory… Yay! Im so glad its warming up. (sarc off)
In reality turns out that the Farmer’s Almanac for this area is right on so far. Wonder how the climate models are doing:P http://www.almanac.com/weatherforecast/us/13
The appointment announcements today were sort of a bummer. Only thing that makes me happy right now is the thought that somewhere in the world its warm and a little irony, most of the states who pledged their souls to Kyoto are experiencing record cold and cold related problems (ice pwr outages, record cold temps). Who says mother nature doesnt have a sence of humor, eh?

“Denver had a low of -19F last night, breaking the old record of -6F set in 1951.”
Yes…but it’s a dry cold.
JimB

jorgekafkazar (20:49:04) :
I’ll gladly give you a quitclaim deed to any part of the Earth’s surface where I can convert from °C to °F in my head.
Easy!!
Double C ……. Subtract 10%
Add 30 Add 2
So if C=16
2C = 32
10% =3.2
F = 32 – 3.2 or 32 – 3.
F=29.2 +30 = 59 +2 = 61
Works for me!!

record snow in austria and italy.. over 200m of fresh snow fell the last 4 days and its still falling
http://89.163.145.92/~skiforum/forum/showthread.php?t=25745&page=5
reports that there is 6 m of snow in slovenia!
Snow height:
625 cm
http://www.kanin.si/index.php?lng=en&cont=222&l=2
spain got over a meter last weekend..
south-west alpes italy ; CLOSED.. TO much Snow
http://www.monterosa-ski.com/index.php?option=com_readxmlmeteo10x&Itemid=153..
i have never seen this, its the the most snowfall in over 100 years

Am I imagining things or is there a lit incandescent bulb inside that Stevenson screen during daylight? That certainly would help the accuracy of the temp measurements.

Here’s the formulas:
C=5(F-32)/9 F=9*C/5+32
So 9 * -67.8 = -610.2/5 = -122.04 +32 = -90.04

Bill: Anthony has said before he reckons the one in the photo is a mockup for tourists. But you’d still think they’d want to leave it off – at those ambient temperatures the lamp is going to make it look a lot warmer than it really is.

So um, with the polar temps deciding to visit us in Siberia and the US, dropping temps to near historic or even historic lows…how is it the ice is melting according to the IJIS website? I know NANSEN just made a correction, what’s up with IJIS?

NOAA will show December averages as far above average anywhere they think they can get away with it, and many places where they clearly can’t get away with it. Afterwords the NASA team will adjust the data to show it was much warmer still. That’s my cynical prediction.
A little more warming of this type and the incresased CO2 will take care of itself as it begins to precipitate out of the atmosphere. Isn’t -68 a bit of a magic number? We can have dry ice at the poles like Mars, will that make them happy?

Here’s a report from the reliable, non partisan BBC, about the thickness of Arctic ice. It’s getting thinner! Oh bugger, what shall we do?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7692963.stm
I have to pay a TV licence fee of £139.50 per year for this garbage.
http://www.spiderbomb.com/tv/
The sooner the BBC is broken up, the happier I shall be.
Perry

Totally OT, but has anyone noticed this?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081215121601.htm
“Boundary between Earth’s upper atmosphere and space has moved to extraordinarily low altitudes, NASA instruments document”
I’m not sure what this means or how relevant it is to the theme of this blog, but I don’t know where else to ask.

Here in Port Angeles, WA the temp this morning is about 12 F. I don’t recall it being this cold since the late 70’s, although that is based on feeble human memory. It boggles my mind that the Arctic is churning out such a mass of frigid air in North America, Europe and Russia.
For a quick, albeit not exact, conversion of C to F, double the C and add 30.
I’ve been a lurker for a number of months and I just want to congratulate you Anthony, on a superb website. Keep up the good work!!

Some explanations for this record cold:
Op-Ed: Look to patterns to grasp glacier growth By DENNIS T. AVERY for the Journal Star Posted Dec 14, 2008 @ 12:01 AM

Alaska’s glaciers grew this year after shrinking for most of the last 200 years. The reason? Global temperatures dropped over the past 18 months.
The global mean annual temperature has been declining recently because the solar wind thrown out by the sun has retreated to its smallest extent in at least 50 years. This temperature downturn was not predicted by the global computer models, but had been predicted by the sunspot index since 2000.
The solar wind normally protects the Earth from 90 percent of the high-energy cosmic rays that flash constantly through the universe. Henrik Svensmark at the Danish Space Research Institute has demonstrated that when more cosmic rays hit the Earth, they create more of the low, wet clouds that deflect heat back into outer space. Thus the Earth’s recent cooling.
Unusually large amounts of Alaskan snow last winter were followed by unusually chilly temperatures this summer. “In general, the weather this summer was the worst I have seen in at least 20 years,” says Bruce Molnia of the U.S. Geological Survey. “It’s been a long time on most glaciers (since) they’ve actually had positive mass balance (added thickness).”
Overall, Molnia figures Alaska had lost 10,000-12,000 square kilometers of ice since 1800, the depth of the Little Ice Age. That’s enough ice to cover the state of Connecticut.

See full article
Could the following discovery have any bearing on this?
Scientists Discover Cloak of Plasma Around Earth

The warm plasma cloak starts on the night side of the planet and wraps around the dayside according to the researchers. As the cloak reaches the afternoon side of the planet, it gradually fades away. Due to that fact the cloak only surrounds about 3/4 of the planet.
The cloak is fed by the low-energy particles lifted into space over the Earth’s poles, carried behind the Earth on its magnetic tail, and then turned 180 degrees by a kink in the magnetic field. The particles are then boosted back towards the Earth into the region called the plasma sheet.

Denver weather report:
# Today: Snow showers this morning becoming more scattered later. Cold. High 28F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of snow 60%.
# Tonight: Partly cloudy skies. Low 13F. Winds SW at 5 to 10 mph.
Where did that -19 degrees come from?
Also, the snow in slovenia was 200 cm (about 6 feet) not 200 m (600feet), thats still a lot. Southern Austria (where I come from) has had a lot of snow
No sun spots.
The new ice age cometh.

Ah my bad , it is 2 trillion tonnes, the article has been moved out of the spotlight and is now under the “science” section

Anthony,
Has there been any explanation for the sudden change in ice coverage reported by ASMRE http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent.png. Following this chart the Acrtic is melting at a prodigious rate in just the last week. NSIDC ice extent does not seem to be reflecting a huge melt off http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png. AMSRE really needs to address this, the chart they are putting out is starting to look downright silly.
REPLY: I have been waiting to see if they will correct it, as I suspect an error. – Anthony

I wonder how many times the light has been left on in a Stevenson screen? Looks like a good place for some LED’s.
Noaa says that November was warmer than average for the U.S. The west was above “normal” while Florida, Georgia and So. Carolina had record cold.
If I measure my car’s radiator at 150 deg and my air-conditioner is putting out 50 deg air, does that mean the average temperature of my car is 100 deg?

SXUS71 KCAR 161430
RERBGR
RECORD EVENT REPORT…CORRECTED AWIPS ID
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE CARIBOU ME
435 PM EST MON DEC 15 2008
…RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE SET AT BANGOR ME…
A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 52 DEGREES WAS SET AT BANGOR ME TODAY.
THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 51 SET IN 1975.
What isn’t mentioned in these record event reports is the fact that the prior record was not representative. Most December daily temperatures records for Bangor fall into the mid to upper 50’s with a scattering of 60’s. This is just smoothing out the bell curve. Oh, this will be repeated again for today since we were in the 50’s after midnight.

The FOX NEWS article – 2 Trillion Tons of Ice Have Melted Since 2003 – has an interesting conclusion.
The amounts of methane in the region could dramatically increase global
warming if they get released, he said.
That, Semiletov said, “should alarm people”.
Should alarm people??
Well that sums the whole article up in a nutshell.
I’m terrified, what should I do.

Mercury freezes solid at -38.8 C. There is a thallium/mercury alloy that freezes at -61.1 C, but the range of a calibrated thermometer using this fluid only extends from -55 C up to about +5C. You would need to use a Pentane (-100C) or Toluene (-200C) thermometer, but these only extend up to +30C and have poor accuracy of 0.5 C.
Does anyone know what types of thermometers are used in Stevenson screens, either here in the US or in Siberia?
From wikipedia- “To avoid this (damage to the thermometer when the mercury freezes) some weather services require that all mercury thermometers be brought indoors when the temperature falls to -37 °C (-34.6 °F).”

This just came in today…
The year 2008 is on track to be one of the 10 warmest years on record for the globe, based on the combined average of worldwide land and ocean surface temperatures, according to a preliminary analysis by NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. For November alone, the month is fourth warmest all-time globally, for the combined land and ocean surface temperature. The early assessment is based on records dating back to 1880.

> Kevin (00:20:18) :
> I’ve done some rudimentary calculations, and it turns out that -60C falls under the
> category of ‘pretty damned cold’.
You obviously missed the latest NASA press release on the “New Revised Temperature Calibration Scale”. Quoting from the source:
“From this point forward all temperatures below -50 C will be officially described as tepid, -50 to -10 C will be warmish, -10 to +10 C will be balmy … “

More NASA alarmism: Two Trillion Tons of Land Ice lost since 2003

“The neat thing about sea level rise is that unlike an asteroid hit, a wealthy society can TAKE A STEP BACK AWAY FROM THE WATER–or follow the Netherlands model of high-tech dikes, etc. What is most galling about this is the Alarmists’ complete and utter lack of faith in humanity.”
We can’t move uphill one foot per century, but we can alter the Earth’s climate to make it colder so that sea levels don’t rise as they have been doing for the last 14,000 years! Such madness is not faithlessness, it is irrational Hubris with a capital H.
Many, many years ago when I first heard about GW, the concern was the drowning of art treasures in Venice. “Why not pack them out to higher ground?” I asked. From the response I got you’d have thought I shot the Pope. No, “we” must thermally adjust the entire planet downwards because “we” made it warmer in the first place.
As if!!!! Hello, Humanity. Warmer is Better. Fewer ice storms, arctic blasts, frozen pipes, frostbite, car wrecks on icy streets, power outages on the coldest day of the year, frozen homeless people, etc. If we can possibly make this planet warmer, we should do that, and sooner rather than later.

It’s one thing when it gets cold in Yakutia, when we get snow and ice in San Francisco, one notices. I live in sight of the Bay on a hill and had ice on my porch all morning yesterday and more and colder weather is coming thanks to the extreme cold in Siberia this year. This must be the work of the PDO!

“” jorgekafkazar (20:49:04) :
I’ll gladly give you a quitclaim deed to any part of the “”
Easier yet:
1/ Add 40
2/ Multiply by 9/5 (C->F), or by 5/9 (F->C).
3/ Subtract 40.
Based on the fact that -40 is same; C or F .
As for those Russkys in Siberia, they are pikers compared to their Vostok Comrades who get to deal with almost -90 C (-130 F)
Coldest official is I think -128.8F, and official highest is +136 F (in North Africa). they didn’t happen on the same day, but they very well could have.
Ordinary midsummer (northern) extreme range is over 250 F p-p.
And we are quibbling about hundredths of a degree over decades !
Fiddlesticks !

Mike D. your
Many, many years ago when I first heard about GW, the concern was the drowning of art treasures in Venice. “Why not pack them out to higher ground?” I asked.
Its not so much global warming that threatens Venice. Its built on a flood plain, in a marsh, just above sea level. They have also been draining the subsurface waters, which causes the soil to compact, which causes subsidence.
But, the worst flood threat comes from the dredging of the shipping channel, around 1900. This allows Adriatic storms to bypass the natural flood control, the marsh, and march straight into the city.
Any global warming, on the other hand, is predicted to actually REDUCE flooding, by increasing the presence of the stationary Adriatic high, which will keep storms away from Venice.

Find a place where the temperature is -40 deg. That will be both C and F.
Hence, a different calculation route is:
Step 1 Add 40
Step 2 Multiply by 5/9 for F to C or 9/5 for C to F
Step 3 Subtract 40.
Means you don’t have to remember whether to add or subtract the 32 before or after the multiply. As you would expect, this gives identical answers to the other routes
Alan

Reminds me of a comment someone posted about taking temperatures at a DEW Line station in the 1960’s. They don’t go out to take a reading! At least you don’t get dressed just to go out to the Stevenson Screen. You look at the window thermometer or take a guess.
I don’t even walk to my mail box on bad days in Virginia…

Mean while in Sweden we aint freezeing yet .
+4 C / + 39 F today.
Day by day temperature anomalies for December
http://www.smhi.se/cmp/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=11488&l=sv
Monthly mean temperature anomaly for December
http://www.smhi.se/cmp/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=11490&l=sv

About that “lake effect snowfall” near the Arctic Ocean, one theory about how glaciations start is that they are initiated by the Arctic Ocean staying ice-free along the Siberian coast in winter, which dumps so much snow on the Putorana plateau that it does not have time to melt in summer, thereby starting up an icecap. It would not take that much extra snow, since the Putorana is only free from snow about 4-6 weeks a year as it is.

~snip~
lol

2008 ONE OF HOTTEST EVER!!!
Analysis from David Whitehouse:
h/T Dirk Maxeiner
“One would have thought that any dispassionate and scientifically rigorous look at the general temperature standstill since 2001, and now a slight fall in the average annual global temperature record would provide pause for thought about what is really going on, and, whatever side of the fence you sit, perhaps a humble appreciation that we do not by any means know as much about the complexities of the climate as some say we do.
And so it happened. The headline in the Guardian said;
“2008 will be coolest year of the decade; Global average for 2008 should come in close to 14.3C, but cooler temperature is not evidence that global warming is slowing, say climate scientists” http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/05/climate-change-weather
If I may quote from the article;
“Prof Myles Allen at Oxford University who runs the climateprediction.net website, said he feared climate sceptics would overinterpret the figure. ‘You can bet your life there will be a lot of fuss about what a cold year it is. Actually no, its not been that cold a year, but the human memory is not very long, we are used to warm years,’ he said, ‘Even in the 80s [this year] would have felt like a warm year.’
And 2008 would have been a scorcher in Charles Dickens’s time – without human-induced warming there would have been a one in a hundred chance of getting a year this hot. ‘For Dickens this would have been an extremely warm year,’ he said. On the flip side, in the current climate there is a roughly one in 10chance of having a year this cool.”
Overinterpret? Is that a new way of saying don’t look at all the relevant data because it might be inconvenient?
As I pointed out, this is not telling the whole story, nor even putting it into a proper context. The important point evaded is not that 2008 would have been hot for Dickens but how hot is it with respect to the current warming spell. Nobody is arguing that the past decade is not warmer than previous ones and that the world¹s glaciers and ecosystems are not reacting to it. If 2008 is the coldest year since 2001 and the global average temperature didn’t change at all between 2001 2007 one should ask why! Talking about 2008 on its own and comparing it to Victorian times is misleading.
Then a few days later in the Guardian the environmental campaigner George Monbiot wrote, in response to the first article that “In the physical world global warming appears to be spilling over into runaway feedback.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/09/climate-change-science-environment
Really? What a load of nonsense. It’s statements like these that make me wonder if I am either living in the same physical world and if we need real world data at all?
It is said in that article that it’s all right because the Met Office predicted that 2008 would be cool because of the la Nina effect. What it didn’t say is that the previous year was predicted by the Met Office to be the warmest ever and it wasn¹t. la Ninas come along regularly and it’s no great scientific achievement to say that when one occurs the world will cool. A failed prediction of warming however is highly significant especially given the faith put in computer modelling.
Also this supposed explanation is not in itself adequate. If the predicted cooling by la Nina had not occurred then 2008 would probably have been the same temperature (given the uncertainties) as every year since 2001 and that in itself would require explanation.
Later on in the Monbiot article we have, as I predicted, the tired old cliché about “professional deniers employed by fossil fuel companies.” Where I wonder are their counterparts, the professional campaigners whose vested interests make them see a runaway warming world despite what the real world the data says?
I am broadly in favour of the global warming CO2 hypothesis but I know it is just that, a hypothesis – and that needs testing against real observations in the physical world. If it isn’t, then it’s not science.”

Well Pierre,
Just what would constitute real world testing that would convince you that the CO2 global warming hypothesis is something to be broadly in favor of ?
Would it influence your decision, if someone were to present data that showed a significant increase in atmospheric CO2 leading to a SUBSEQUENT significant increase in global surface temperature; or a significant decrease in atmospheric CO2 leading to a SUBSEQUENT significant decrease in global surface temperature ?
Because that sort of data might convince me in a real hurry.
The only problem, that I have, is that so far we have NO SUCH DATA; not ever; but we do have oodles of data showing the exact reverse situation.
So I am going to wait for data that so far at least the last 3/4 million years of data have failed to turn up ?
I don’t think so; but I’ll become a believer if and when such data does show up; well if I live that long of course. Meanwhile I have other more important things to do.

“” B Kerr (12:47:31) :
This is a fascinating question and I have been waiting for someone to explain how it is actually done.
paminator (08:58:13) :
>deletions<
Would someone please be kind enough to explain how low temperatures are measured, and how they were measured in the 1800’s without the use of modern electronics. “”
Well the short answer for the 1800s is “they weren’t”.
For most of that period, I would think that various types of “liquid” thermometers would be used, but maybe electrical resistance thermometers might have been in experimental stages.
If I ever knew when the Platinum Resistance Thermometer was devised, I certainly don’t remember now; but it would have been sometime after Ohm’s law was discovered (which doesn’t say anything like 99.99 % of electronics engineers say it says.)
In principle, today, you can use semiconductor junction thermometers (Bandgap devices) to measure as low a temperature as the semiconductor packaging can survive in.
The forward Voltage difference between two semiconductor diodes operating at a fixed current density ratio, is a function of the semiconductor Bandgap Voltage, and a linear function of the absolute temperature, and that Voltage goes to zero at absolute zero, so it can make a pretty good and very linear thermometer; in principle down to zero K.
HP once made (maybe Agilent Technologies still does) a quartz crystal thermometer. HP discovered a particular linear temperature coefficient of frequency quartz oscillator cut; I believe out of all the possible ways of cutting a single crystal of pure quartz, there is only one possible orientation, and mode of oscilation that provides a constant temperature coefficient of frequency; but I imagine that practically that only persists over a limited temperature range, before some secondary packaging phenomena introduce non linearities. But over its operating range it is a pretty nifty thermometer; but far too expensive to put up in a barn owl box in Siberia.
To get into the very cold technology era, you have to dig up stuff on Kammerling-Onnes; who has to be the all time low temperature guru; and I have to apologise to our Scandahoovian friends, that I don’t exactly remember his species. Something tells me his friendly handle was Heike or something like that, and maybe that is Finnish; but someone in Norway/Denmark/Swededn can straighten me out if I got that wrong. Certainly early thermometry was (and maybe still is) one of the problem areas of Physics.
Photometry takes the cake for the most screwed up part of physics; there being almost as many standard units of photometry as there are languages on planet earth; and most of them don’t make any more sense that the rod/stone/fortnight system, that now only the USA uses.

Well officially it was his low temperature studies that won him the 1913 Nobel Prize in Physics; but he did discover superconductivity in 1911.
I would think, that the Kammerlingh-Onnes (its modern name ) lab in Leyden, along with the Max Planck Institute in Germany, the Cavendish, and the Rutherford labortatories, would have been great places to got oschool in the early parts of this century.
Rutherford by the way was Kiwi, no matter what those Limeys say.

Thank you George E. Smith for taking the time to answer my question.
I still have concerns about past temperature records.
I read in an article where cold temperatures were estimated to be -83F.
Fine I’m happy with that I can understand the need to estimate. Months later the temperature was calibrated to -81.3F
The estimate is now accurate to one decimal place.
The same is true with early CET temperatures.
Temperatures in 1600’s are to the nearest degree C and then to the nearest half degree C.
Yet averages are given correct to two decimal places.
Mind you these temperatures would have been measured in degrees Fahrenheit then converted and rounded to C.

“Oymyakon is known as one of the candidates for the Northern Pole of Cold, because on January 26, 1926, a temperature of −71.2 ℃ (−96.2 ℉) was recorded there (however, this fact is arguable because the temperature was not directly measured but obtained by extrapolation). ”
-attributed to wikipedia (missed putting on the front end of the quotation marks)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oymyakon

Here in central MN we set an all-time record for a low pn evening/morning of Dec. 15-16 at a balmy -23F, overturning that of 1963 of -21.
In my memory this is early by 10 days for the coldest snap of the winter, so we can expect lower.

I received a letter in November from a man living more or less on the Equator in Kenya. He said “There was a funny snow cloud which fell near to Lake Ol’Bolosat and covered about 200 hectares, but no one died for the area is not settled by people.” This area is about 7000 feet above sea level, and my family lived there for fifty years, like my friend I had never heard of such a thing.
Susan Duke

Seems as though the cold air is rolling off the top of the world and landing in lower elevations. It’s been colder in Minnesota than Barrow, AK – very strange. Hence, no sea ice buildup and brutal winter conditions in upper North America and Siberia.