Minus 13 degrees – the coldest it’s been in April
From Weatherzone – Brett Dutschke,
Wednesday April 29, 2009 – 14:58 EST
A new Australian record was set early this morning, a temperature of minus 13 degrees, at Charlotte Pass on the Snowy Mountains.
This is the lowest temperature recorded anywhere in Australia in April and is 13 below the average. Nearby at Perisher it dipped to minus 11 degrees and at the top of Thredbo it dipped to minus 10.
Across the border, on the Victorian Alps April records were broken at Mt Hotham where it chilled to minus eight degrees and Mt Buller and Falls Creek where it got as low as minus seven.
A few other locations set April low temperature records also. In Tasmania Lake Leake was as cold as minus six, Sheffield and Dover both reached minus one and Flinders island got to zero. Hobart had its coldest April night in 46 years, recording a low of 1.7 degrees, seven below average.
While much of inland NSW and Victoria will be colder tomorrow morning than it was this morning under clearer skies, the Alps should be a little warmer due to a rise in humidity.
Note, all temperatures in the story above are in Centigrade. Photo and map added by Anthony.
Here are the all-time highs and lows for the continent of Australia (source Perth Weather Center)
HIGHEST RECORDED TEMPERATURE:
- Oodnadatta, South Australia 50.7 C (123.3 F) on the 2nd January, 1960
LOWEST RECORDED TEMPERATURE:
- Charlotte Pass, New South Wales -23.0 C (-9.4 F) on the 29th June, 1994
While this is certainly a significant new cold record this early in Australia’s fall going on winter, one must always remember that weather is not climate. – Anthony
(h/t to WUWT reader “Chuck”)
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“Not to let a good snark opportunity pass without a snark-attack:
Does that goodly portion of the continent float up there or is it supported from above or below?”
You can come and see for yourself if you like, but after those comments you should cover your face before you look skywards. There may be more than just the odd Gull or Pigeon to worry about.
As a resident of said continent, I agree that it does seem to be the closest place to heaven.
Anthony – first time poster here. I don’t really agree with your put down of Flanagan. The whole point of the argument against climate change is that it is bad science. I am a veterinary surgeon and it is drilled into us that we must practice evidence- based medicine. The evidence for climate change is of much poorer quality than the evidence required to launch a new drug for animals. However, even when posters are infuriating, we must be open to what they say as their evidence should be fairly evaluated and then disregarded or accepted. Clearly they must supply the proof of their evidence to be taken seriously. For me, the key is that climate change does not allow dissent and the sceptics must prove they are above such behaviour.
have to say – love the blog!
More cold weather stories from downunder…….
http://www.weatherzone.com.au/news/skiers-welcome-cold-snap/11803
It’s interesting that Mt Buller ski resort has never opened up this early in it’s 45 year history ?
As a keen skiier I’m glad we have global warming to make things colder 🙂
Also, Melbourne had it’s coldest April morning in 50 years.
http://www.theage.com.au/national/melbourne-records-coldest-april-morning-for-56-years-20090430-anoz.html
————-
Flanagan (05:25:37) : I clearly remember the hot records that were broken in Australia at several locations were not reported here at all, although they were all-time absolute maximum temperatures. Now, a record cold for April is the headline. Weather is not climate, we all agree on this. But where does this tendency to “forget” hot records come from?
– Mr Flanagan, you forget that the reporting of weather events showing only record hot temperatures is well and truely covered by the media. Anthony only tries to help balance the equation here.
Slightly OT but the UK Met Office have just issued their forecast for the summer over here.
The coming summer is ‘odds on for a barbecue summer’, according to long-range forecasts. Summer temperatures across the UK are likely to be warmer than average and rainfall near or below average for the three months of summer.
Chief Meteorologist at the Met Office, Ewen McCallum, said: “After two disappointingly-wet summers, the signs are much more promising this year. We can expect times when temperatures will be above 30 °C, something we hardly saw at all last year.”
Although the forecast is for a drier and warmer summer than average that does not mean that we will not get some heavy downpours at times. However, a repeat of the wet summers of 2007 and 2008 is unlikely.
The question really is, in light of their track record, should I be stocking up on firewood or sunblock?
matt (23:08:55) :
“Climate change = wild fluctuations in temperatures, rainfall, hours of sunshine and yes snowfall.”
Really? Is that all? I never knew!!
Sorry – but people post strange things around here sometimes…
Nickm (01:30:08) :
Welcome to the blog. Your assessment of Flanagan’s acceptance here is quite reasonable, however, as more evidence accumulates you’ll see he repeatedly makes the same claim despite evidnece to the contrary. His whining about not discussing record heat in Australia is about the most egerious claim. If WUWT were the dual of RealClimate, Flanagan would have been banned a long time ago. However, Anthony is much more tolerant and there’s likely near unaminous agreement that the few people he’s banned were here to disrupt instead of debate.
Personally, I think Flanagan has pretty much worn out his welcome, but his noise level is low enough so I occasionally reply as I did above to let new readers realize his arguments are largely false.
Matt:- Of course if you want to mislead in your discussions you’ll continue to use the term global warming.
Well you lot started it!!!
(Sorry, childish I know, but REALLY…….)
matt (23:08:55) :
Climate change = wild fluctuations in temperatures, rainfall, hours of sunshine and yes snowfall. GW is, as most of you will know, the incorrect term to use and is misleading. Of course if you want to mislead in your discussions you’ll continue to use the term global warming.
OK. If GW is incorrect and misleading, ask the MSM, Al Gore, Hansen, Man, Gavin, et. al. to stop using it.
I was taught, long ago, that “climate” is the prevailing pattern of weather in a geographically distinct area. As discussed above, the pattern is determined over a standardized 30 years. Also as discussed above, that fails to take into account longer term trends. Thus you also need to address data deniers, who claim there was no Little Ice Age, Medieval Warming Period, etc. (As glaciers recede and uncover the remains of villages, deniers of the evidence for NCC, such as Mann, Gavin, Gore, etc., remind me of Creationists denying dinosaur fossils as evidence of Evolution. Is that really the “scientific” company that you, and they, want to keep?)
But have it your way. Now you need to explain the difference between Natural Climate Variation (NCV) and Anthropogenic Climate Change (ACC? – which, I presume, replaces Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW)).
Please explain, quantitatively, the distinction between “wild fluctuations” and normal/natural “fluctuations” (although I believe the more accurate term would be “variation”). And present your theory of ACC in the form of some falsifiable hypotheses. If that’s the “new” theory, let’s address it in terms of mainstream, not “ACC,” science.
ROM
SO commentary of surpassing excellence. Much obliged.
” John F. Hultquist (21:39:10) : I just came in a few hours ago from loading a pickup with what I call trash wood ”
My grandpa called it “gopher wood” –you put some on the fire and ‘go fer’ some more because it burns so fast. Iron Wood trees were great,–heavy wood, burned slow and hot, the coals looked great. You could sit and watch them a long time. It could be 40 below outside but toasty in the house!
Burning wood, weeding the garden, eating eggs and butter, fresh foods from garden in fall, following the farmers almanac, … the good old days!
Graeme Rodaughan (16:59:51) : Isn’t weather the instantiation of climate?
Weather is what’s happening now with temperature, wind, precipitation, etc.
Climate is what’s happened over a very long history of a place in terms of the same properties.
The problem is: What is “a very long history”. The ’30 year average’ metric is clearly broken. There is at least one demonstrated weather cycle that runs about that long or longer (PDO, AMO, etc.) and there are solar cycles of much longer duration that seem to have a weather changing impact (there is a correlation of some degree.) On the longer end, there are 1470 year cycles of extreme cold:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/bond-event-zero/
Now if a change comes around on a regular basis, rather like the seasons, but is longer cycle that we normally notice in our short little lives, was there really a change of ‘climate’? Is not the Mediterranean Climate still present in the Mediterranean even though we had the LIA, MWP, Roman Optimum, etc.?
So some of us, like me for instance, tend to endorse Pamela’s point of view:
Your climate changes when you change your altitude, distance from the ocean, latitude, etc. i.e. Climate only changes over geologic time scales. Now I doubt that someone from 1800 And Froze To Death would really think that the climate was the same then as it is now (basically a practical climate based on what you can plant, grow, etc.) but I would assert that it is the same. Why? Because right now a volcano could pop off in Indonesia and we could have 2010 And Froze To Death. NOTHING has really changed, so how can I say the climate has changed? We would just be having a spectacular weather even for a few years.
So, IMHO, your question comes down to: “What is your time scale?”
short: weather —– middle: unclear —– very long: climate
we can clearly say that short starts at “now”. It’s the long end that is cloudy… But in my opinion, the notion of climate change in less than thousands of years is broken. In particular, is not the Sahara a desert climate and staying that way for many centuries and is not Antactica an arctic climate and staying that way for many centuries and Chile, California, Australia and the Mediterranean area all Mediterranean climate; and Northern Siberia a tundra climate; and Western Canada a temperate forrest climate; and the Amazon a Tropical Climate?
So my practical, grounded, measurable, and accessible to human experience definition of climate would be that it is reflected in the gross ecology that lives or can live in a place and that if the gross ecology has not changed, the climate has not changed (though the other direction is not true if people have eradicated the local ecology; for example via farming or a dam.) Why this definition? Because plants and animals have had millions of years to adapt to the normal ranges of an area. Cactus in the Mojave, for example, can survive both hot and cold, wet and dry. On rare occasions, the Mojave can be cold and wet… that is not an ‘unusual event’ on a geologic, climate, or biological time scale; even if it is on a human time scale.
Sidebar on Sahara: There is an interesting oscillation in the Sahara. On a geologic time scale it swaps from wet and lush to dry and dead. I don’t have a good answer to the question of “Is that climate change”. Clearly it is changing the ecology there. I would tend toward calling it “climate change”; yet it is a quasi periodic event, so isn’t it “normal’? (and thus not “change”?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara_pump_theory
So by my ecological based metric, I would have to call the Sahara a climate oscillator. It is not a stable single state, and the life there has not adapted to the full range of it’s states. Yet I can make the case that since those states last for tens of thousands of years, maybe that is a geologic time scale.
So my practical cutoff for the upper bound would be 10,000 years. At the 20k to 30k year range we have the Sahara oscillator to deal with. At less than 3,000 we have Bond Events. I think this pretty much bounds the range at about 5,000 to 20,000 years and so 10,000 looks to me like a reasonable point to plant the flag.
I think that the term “Climate” has become hopelessly ill-defined, to the point of being worthless.
I would agree, but think that the effort to reach a decent redefinition is worthy…
Graeme Rodaughan (17:06:33) :
Actually – could someone please provide a,
[1] Grounded,
[2] Measurable, and
[3] Accessible to human experience.
definition of the Distinction between Climate and Weather.
Hopefully I’ve done that…
matt (23:08:55) : Climate change = wild fluctuations in temperatures, rainfall, hours of sunshine and yes snowfall.
You mean like what’s normal in Texas?
Once had a 50 F or so plunge of temps from about 75 F to about 25 F and from sunny to snow in roughly 18 hours. I think I was in Dallas at the time (some convention 3 decades ago). Startling to a guy from California where San Diego is 70 F +/- 5 F more or less year round…
So Texas has Climate Change and California has weather (because nothing changes)? Strange definition…
GW is, as most of you will know, the incorrect term to use and is misleading.
Yes, we know it is. We keep hoping that the AGW advocates will learn that AGW is bunk and that it’s just the normal range of nature on the planet, but some folks are slow to catch on that people have little or nothing to do with the climate and that it isn’t warming and any changes are certainly not global. But we press on with presenting the data that shows that AGW is a broken concept.
Of course if you want to mislead in your discussions you’ll continue to use the term global warming.
Well, unfortunately, since the AGW crowd has made it the agenda, we kind of don’t really have any choice but to talk about their agenda with their term for it… It would be rather lumpy and very unclear to say:
“Hansen and Gore in advocating that the world is getting warm…er changing it’s changeable weath…er having variations of things that vary… Oh forget it…”
So, as long as the weather models are predicting that it is going to get warmer, and as long as the scare mongers are scaring with warmer fears of melting ice caps and sea level rise and tropical mosquito fears and as long as CO2 is accused of causing warming…. As long as that’s the agenda, the best and most clear way to refer to that agenda is to call it “Global Warming” and in particular “AGW” as a political movement based on the Global Warming Climate Change thesis.
Unless of course you want to say that the Climate Change we can expect is that we will all end up with a nice paradise climate, in which case I’m all for dropping the global warming term and calling it Paradise Change… 😉
Meanwhile, California’s Sierra Mountains are bracing for another snow storm this weekend…snow above 7000 foot level from Friday May 1st through Saturday morning, as far south as Fresno. This is to provide symmetry with last year on May 1 when we had an unpredicted cold snap that blasted through the orange groves, causing much damage.
But I guess two years in a row does not count, of course. Increased snow in California is just what was predicted by the Climate Change Crowd. Maybe after 10 or 20 years in a row?
What’s that? California is to have a hotter and drier climate, with less precipitation? We know this is true because the climate models tell us it is true.
Just ignore the white stuff on the ground, then. It will soon disappear, and you can tell yourself you imagined it.
Can I turn of my heater, too, and pretend it really is getting warmer?
And in case anyone didn’t see this …. an article about mice infesting an elderly folks home in Queensland ….
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8026865.stm
What caught my eye was the quote at the end :
“The state health department blamed the infestation on the cooler autumn climate which was forcing mice across the region to look for warm places to infiltrate.”
Not sure Gore does know what he’s talking about. I don’t listen to him.
Of course the debate is about whether or not current fluctuations are significant or not and if so, whether they are anthropogenic or just part of natural cycles. Probably a bit of both which is why we could debate the whys & wherefores forever.
The biggest problem we have is human population numbers increasing to a level where competition for resources among humans & between humans and other species is getting more and more intense. Wiping out fish stocks, large areas of the Amazon and polluting the little fresh water supplies we have really isn’t intelligent.
Just look around you. How can anybody possibly claim that we humans are not having an impact on this planet? And as for those making such a claim as being ‘arrogant’- what are you talking about?! Concerned? Yes.
You can argue the anthropogenic vs natural causes of climate change all day. The simple fact is that the climate is changing- the people who even deny that truly are are set of ostriches. The amount of unnatural substances we are putting into the air, the ground and the water is quite obviously significant.
A good balanced argument requires two sides, but I struggle to take these people who deny a human influence on our planets delicately balanced systems seriously. Some of them talk as if they are respected scientists dedicating their lives to climate research, rather than people enjoying all the benefits of milking the earth for all it’s worth with no thought for the future, as we are all doing. But of course, the IPCC and all those scientists world wide are clearly part of a huge cloak and dagger conspiracy theory- in the hope of gaining what exactly?
This is the first time I’ve ever put a comment on a debate page like this, the reason I have is because the sheer [snip] of so many who do makes me extremely angry and pushes me towards despair. Let’s just hope that there are enough people out there to help us positively change the way we exist on this planet, and that the majority of the [snip] spend their time on pages such as this one, out of harms way. And yes we do all realise that the earth’s climate fluctuates naturally over the years, but to palm off all the harm we’re doing to the only planet we know of with life on it, and just blithely say that the earth will go on anyway is a cop out of criminal proportions. Wake up.
Reply: Welcome to WUWT. Be respectful of other posters or post elsewhere. First warning. ~ charles the moderator
Well said Will.
Well, we can thru pollution, deforestation and so on make the planet uninhabitable for us, but to seriously believe that we can kill or save the planet is arrogant. And shows a human not geological timescale. There is not a global system as the true believers describe, just as true believers are wrong about creationism too. The Earth has many regional systems, it can get warmer some places and colder others. It may be generally warming now as it has been for 12k years but that is a good thing. Lets leave the hysteria behind. We must be resilient, that is always the key to survival. Fluid dynamic computer models of the Earth are nothing to make plans around or lament. There are profound biological, geological, and solar processes ongoing that no one understands. CO2 increases may be only correlated, and you may be ignoring another variable. The flora will love it. I am so tired of the group think tendency towards hysteria and dogmatism. Be resilient!
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/month/aus/archive/200904.summary.shtml