This is something you don’t see every day. We recently heard that Canada had a white Christmas EVERYWHERE, the first time in four decades. Here we see that the USA has an increased albedo (surface reflectivity) for about 1/2 of it’s land area. The increased albedo combined with low sun angle this time of year conspires to keep ice and snow unmelted.
Look for a long and extended winter weather pattern as we head towards the spring equinox, which can’t get here fast enough.
Here is a more colorful view of snow depth on Dec 25th from the National Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center:
Click for larger image
Jim G reports in comments:
On Dec 18th, the coverage was 59.4%
h/t to Ron de Haan and Fresh Bilge
They didn’t have Monsanto, and the other crazy gene-splicers in the thirties. I’ve often thought that if I was absolutely forced ,at the point of a gun, to place a bet on the next decade’s climate I’d try to find out what the seed companies are working on.
Dr. Latour is incredible. For those of you who don’t know, he works on models. However, his models work and control things. Those big, massive oil refineries and chemical plants are run by some of his models. Bottom line is this guy understands “DYNAMICS” and also the pitfalls of models. If his models are wrong, things blow up.
So if he has reviewed the modeling and found big problems, you can bet there are big problems. His example of convective heat transfer is a prime example. Global models are concerned about radiant heat transfer, but convective heat transfer is much more powerful.
Pamela Gray wrote:
My son is an executive team leader at a Target store in Portland, Oregon, and spent most of his days lately ferrying workers back and forth to their store locations. I don’t remember ever having to don chains to drive downtown. I don’t think this series of storms will be the last.
So true. My sister had to drive to work from downtown Portland. She now plans on buying chains…as soon as the stores have stock. Apparently, they’re sold out.
James D, Roger Carr, and others who read the Latour article:
he is a world-renowned expert in process control. I never met him, but know him by reputation and from working with others who worked for him at Setpoint in Houston.
I also worked in dozens of oil refineries and petrochemical plants around the world, as a chemical engineer, and dealt with many models of those processes. We had both the steady-state and dynamic process models, and the process controls used both along with optimizers.
The point I want to make is that Dr. Latour is absolutely correct when he maintains that it is impossible to control the Earth’s temperature by manipulating CO2 in the atmosphere. To control a system, there must be a proven, repeatable, dependable response between the controlled variable and the manipulated variable. As we now know from several good studies, there is no proven response of average Earth temperature (or climate) to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
We also know that whatever weak relationship exists, Dr. Latour has it as 0.6 degrees C in 33 years, it is not repeatable. We have data that shows CO2 rose while average temperature fell. And, vice-versa.
Further, in the world of process control, we try to manipulate the variable(s) that have the strongest effect on the controlled variable, not the weakest. In the case of climate, the strong variables include solar output, and water vapor in the atmosphere. Since both of these are difficult or impossible to control (absent a space-mounted solar shield), we are left with adjustments to reflectivity or albedo.
It appears that a part of Earth’s self-regulatory albedo mechanism is already kicking in this winter in the Northern Hemisphere, as evidenced by the abundant snow and the wide extent.
Stay tuned, sports fans. This article by Dr. Pierre Latour has stirred up many people. Hydrocarbon Processing has a huge following world-wide. It will be very interesting to watch as the AGW crowd attempts to discredit him. I predict they will start by saying he knows not whereof he speaks, because refinery control systems have time responses on the order of a few seconds up to a couple of hours, but planetary climate change has a time lag measured in hundreds of years.
The AGW crowd will also likely say that climate modeling is far more complex than anything Dr. Latour has dealt with, and on that one they would be wrong. There are few things on this planet more complex from a control standpoint than a refinery unit known as a Fluidized Catalytic Cracker, or FCC as we call it. The FCC has around one hundred measured variables, at least two dozen of which are independent. The variables are highly interactive, thus the need for the sophisticated control algorithms perfected by Dr. Latour.
Dr. Latour’s controls are used successfully on many hundreds of process units world-wide, operating 24/7, and have done so for decades.
Roger Sowell (23:35:20) Thanks for that important (and impressive) background on Dr. Latour.
I find his letter quite stirring and inspirational and will do all I can to spread it. Perhaps, Anthony. you would consider featuring it?
Anthony, good morning, sir! Wonderful blog, this!
A word of caution, regarding the suggestion to feature Dr. Latour’s comments on WUWT. And, to Roger Carr, I fully appreciate and concur with the spirit in which the suggestion was made, to disseminate more widely important information. I have done exactly that by publishing the link not only on this forum, but also on a few other blogs and sending the link to many in my email address book.
However, articles and letters-to-editor in Hydrocarbon Processing are copyrighted, so I would suggest contacting Mr. Les Kane, Editor, for written permission first. I received written permission from Mr. Kane to re-publish on my own website an article I wrote and had published in HP some years ago. He was quite gracious, requiring only that I include proper attribution to the original publication. I was glad to do it.
From above: Frank. Lansner (13:05:58) :
“If you look at daytoday UAH temps, it appears the UAH for dec seems to be headed to for a dip down to the level of 2007 DEC, slightly higher.”
—
Where are day-to-day UAH temperatures available at? I’ve only seen the end-of-month graphs. Sure, like the stock market, sunspots, or the weather, you can’t change or influence day-to-day temperatures, but it is interesting to watch….A train wreck coming.
“Pamela Gray (09:54:34) :
Dan, if you really want to make sense of the fact that it is raining in some places, snowing in others, freezing and dry in still other places, and sunny somewhere else, check out jet stream patterns here:”
Pamela
The point of my post was to indicate that, while I see a lot of anecdotal posting of cold events on WUWT as implied indications of global cooling, back here at the Fletcher PO and General Store, we are seeing consistent year to year anecdotal evidence to the contrary. I don’t see jet stream considerations being taking into account to explain the cold events, so why resort to non anecdotal evidence to explain the warm events? I consider myself skeptical of all arguments on climate change and would incorporate both groups of anecdotal evidence in my evaluation process if I was to use anecdotal evidence. Thanks for the links in any case.
I didn’t need chains up on Whidbey Island, my 4×4 F250 did just fine in the foot of snow we ended up with after a week. My wife’s small economy car, however, only just now has been able to get out after a week and a half.
Here in Copenhagen the temperatures appears to dive through the floor in the new year:
http://www.klimadebat.dk/forum/attachments/kopenhagenjan2009.gif
@Robert A Cook PE
The UAH day-to-day:
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps
Press “draw graph”.
Nov 2008 UAH: 0,26
DEC 2007 UAH: 0,11
difference 0,15K or around 0,3 F. So if not UAH in average is 0,3F higher than last year, we will see dive from nov 2008 to dec 2008.
The last 2 days difference where higher than +0,3F but else far from.
I know that there are different sorts of adjustments to be used when calculating precisely, so “you never know for sure” the monthly result.
I disagree. The snow was a result of cold are from the north. The cold air was NOT a result of snow. As soon as the cold air mass passed through, our temps went back to “normal” for December here in Western Washington. If albedo had anything to do with it we would have gotten colder and colder. As it was the initial cold blast was the worst, plunging us into the teens. After the snow fell, it went up near 30 and stayed there for a few days.
Jeff Alberts (15:11:32)
Possibly, but Western Washington alone is not the whole story.
Check this out for snow cover in North America.
http://www.natice.noaa.gov/pub/ims_gif/ARCHIVE/USA/2008/ims2008363_usa.gif
Warm day in New Hampshire today. Here at home a warm front brought temps from 35F to 56 at 1400 (2PM). A cold front came through a couple hours later. While the new air is dryer, it hasn’t cooled off much. We’ll be back to below normal by the time 2009 starts.
The warm day was much appreciated for clearing snow and ice of around our yurt, though when we got there it and most everything else was covered in heavy dew.
Dew points above freezing make for a remarkable amount of snowmelt. An old reference to “Snow eating fog” has it backward – the snow chills the air and as water vapor condenses on snow and in air, snow melt and fog happen.
Dan, you said,
” while I see a lot of anecdotal posting of cold events on WUWT as implied indications of global cooling…”
I don’t believe that Anthony is trying to imply anything of the sort. At the top of the page you can see what drives this blog:
“Commentary on puzzling things in life, nature, science, weather, climate change, technology, and recent news by Anthony Watts”
To ascribe any other motivations to Anthony is, I believe simply incorrect.
Dan Gibson (05:59:10) :
While last February was the snowiest on record for Burlington , the end of February saw about and inch of snow on the ground. That because of the prodigious rainfall that accompanied each snowfall.
Seems to me there was 2 rain events in Burlington last February. One on the 1st (.61″) and another on the 18th (.32″). And the snowcover at the end of the month was 10″, not the 1″ you so claim.
A good indicator of cold here is lack of snowfall. When it’s struggling to get out of the single digits F during the day and -20 or -30F at night for a week or two each January
Just go back and look a mere 4 years ago to January 2004. 10 days with highs in the single digits or below zero and 10 nights of low temperatures -10°F or less; the lowest being -20°F on 1/15. Snowfall that month was 14.9″ but came in only .47″ of liquid equivalent and the monthly temperature departure was -9.2°F.
You can’t expect near record cold all the time.
“It’s called global warming people. Since the glaciers are melting, there is more moisture and that turns into snow.”
Yes, yes, this is a new understanding of science. When the earth warms, due to mankind exhaling CO2, it causes a backlash of cold that freezes the planet. See who horrible this all is? It’s getting hot, melting the glaciers, then that causes the earth to freeze. People need to stop breathing out CO2 – or they should pay a tax for the privilege. Or we’re all gonna die! We’re gonna burn up and freeze to death, all at the same time!
[Um, snip ~ Evan]
Tc jr. (21:33:17) :
I track snowfall and snow depth for several locations around New England at http://wermenh.com/sdd/index.html . Unfortunately, I don’t have time to record data from Coop observer reports, though that may be getting to be something I could automate. I do go out of my way to track the “famous Mt. Mansfield snowstake” near Stowe, but my web pages only have monthly data.
I’ve concluded that snow depth is nearly as awful a way to gauge climate as are Atlantic Hurricanes. However, it is interesting. While Burlington had 1″ (or was that 10″) at the end of February, I had 34″ near Concord NH on the morning of Feb 29th. (The peak depth of the season was the next morning, 39″, far, far above average.) Over at the snow stake, they had 87″. I get that data from a site that Pierre should like, http://www.uvm.edu/skivt-l/?Page=.%2Fmansel.php3&dir=. Other than the latish start and earlyish end, their season had well above average snow depth.
I know, wasn’t trying to imply that it was. But I’ll wager the same cold air mass hit the rest of the now snow-covered places in much the same way. The cold had to come first, otherwise it wouldn’t have snowed.
As I’ve said before, it’s blatantly apparent to me that albedo is a follower and not a leader or driver.
Ric Werme (05:25:55) :
” And the snowcover at the end of the month was 10″, not the 1″ you so claim.”
You know, you are correct. I checked-the snow’s were down to 1 inch or so 2 weeks later. So much for anecdotal memory.