Temperatures dropped to a record low in Prince Edward Island overnight Tuesday, with reports of frost throughout the province.
An official record low of 3.8 C was set early Wednesday morning at Charlottetown airport.
The previous record for that date was 5.1 C, set in 2005.
Bob Robichaud, a meteorologist with Environment Canada, said that to his knowledge, frost has never been reported before in July in P.E.I.
“That 3.8 we got last night kind of sticks out as being lower than some of the other records for anytime in early July,” Robichaud told CBC News on Wednesday.
“So we’re looking at a significant event,” he said.
Environment Canada has issued a frost risk warning in low-lying areas of the province for Wednesday night. The temperature is expected to dip to 4 C.
The forecast for Thursday, however, calls for sunny skies and a temperature of 22 C for the province.
As per my last post, I noticed that Adam had used highest min temp while I used lowest min temp. Belay my last post.
@John W.
It ain’t that complicated. The Earth has always warmed and cooled.
What the scientist did, and scientist is the same as snake oil salesman nowadays, was to cherry pick a time when the Earth was turning warmer and play that up as a CO2 induced warming.
Same thing as the old days when those that knew the cycles of the Sun and eclipses could amaze the simple minded. And nowadays we have a majority of simple minded doing the voting.
@Pamela Gray
TJA, the lower temps were predicted when the PDO flipped to cold and we had La Nina conditions.
Now with the cooling PDO occuring at the same time as low Sun levels we will not know what is causing this cooling. It is so complicated and the science has not touched the surface.
Well, unless your Algore and the science is settled.
It’s Canada hey!… What do you expect?
Pamela Gray (07:05:48) :
TJA, the lower temps were predicted when the PDO flipped to cold and we had La Nina conditions. Anyone can clearly see that. And the mechanism is there. Land temps correlate highly to sea surface temps and oscillation conditions WAAAYYY more than to sun spots. If you try to find a match between the day’s sun spots and the sea surface temps you would be searching for a LOOOONNGG time. The occasional match is wriggle matching without mechanism.
Oh there is a mechanism for the sun warming the oceans Pamela. You see, the sun is a hulking great nuclear furnace and it chucks out radiation in all directions. Some of it hits the Earth. I agree that you can’t match a single days sunspot activity to global ocean temperatures, but you can see the solarsignal in the SST data if you smooth it using 1/3 of the solar cycle length.
Added to this ~11 year signal, the retained heat of insolation would seem to take a LOOOOONNGG time to work it’s way to the bottom of the thermocline and back up, such that the ocean can smooth out variations in the suns output on timescales of at 100 years. That’s why the wiggles don’t match on scales of a few decades, but in the long run, the solar effect is clear.
Frost warnings this week in parts of Newfoundland as well.
I too noticed that the HadCET data service link brings the response “The requested URL is unavailable at this time. The following error was reported: Failed to connect to server.” and that this has been the case since 30th June. Since this research centre is funded by government departments which, when last I checked were in turn funded from my not inconsiderable tax burden, still being levied in my 70th year, I consider my right to access to be the equal of any “university researcher” and resent this peremptory removal of data under the disingenuous guise of an internet error message.
It may well be that their reconstruction of a long series of records in order to accommodate their changes to locations of monitored sites, and their continuing interference with readings by the application of secretive algorithms, renders their latest figures subject to doubt, but I reserve my right to harbour those doubts and to fester them in my own peculiar way.
For those wishing to continue access to a CET dataset that at least attempts at continuity with early sites and readings may I suggest Philip Eden’s site at http://www.climate-uk.com/index.html
Dear Adam from Kansas
This NOAA temperature record site really is a nice toy. Coming from a small European country it amazes me that many times, on the very same day, some places in Texas show up with record low and others with record high temperatures. This shows 2 things:
1. Texas is a big state.
2. Regional temperature records do not have any significance for the whole wide world.
Pamela,
I am assuming then that you know the root cause of shifts in PDO and therefore can exclude solar activity.
Remember, you are asserting a negative here, that “solar variation does not affect climate”, so your proof better be pretty comprehensive. Otherwise, I have to say that one side predicted this past year or two, and the other side didn’t. Nothing more, nothing less. It’s early innings, I never said ballgame over. I just think that you are arguing about noise still, no matter how arcane your theories. Nobody really knows what the signal is, or this phenomenon would be explainable, which it clearly is not.
Shawn, please explain what you mean by “low Sun levels”. What measurement are you referring too? If it is TSI, total solar irradiance has not decreased to the same extent that SST’s have changed and there is no mechanized dampening or enhancing factor tied to TSI. TSI can therefore be eliminated has a source of variation. Regarding clouds, there is enough moisture in the air from warm ocean pools to explain cloud formation over land. The weak jet stream can also be explained by less than strong trade winds. All of these things that are currently varying around average are endogenous factors tied to Earth, not low Sun levels. There is no “low” Sun level that I know of. It is shining as much as it ever was for purposes of understanding our weather pattern variation here on Earth.
I should have said, “one side predicted it, and the other side is trying to explain it away.”
>Sean (00:20:25) :
>
>CET for the UK seems to be down, and the data is hidden behind >a ‘university researchers only’ firewall, but i found this site which offers a >representative point sample.
>http://www.stormtrack.co.uk/Pages/CET.aspx
>Above average, but the striking thing this year was there have been hardly >any days where the day’s average breaks the 95% historical range. Last >genuine CET deviation year to date I saw was about +0.79, including the >warm days at the start of this month.
>
Sean,
So…what is the URL for that data behind the firewall?
tallbloke, show me the statistical correlation you speak of (provide the link to the statistical graph and explain the thermal mechanism using a mathematical function). If this is true, you should be able to model and predict. Prove it.
Adam from Kansas (21:10:30) :
Basil, is that map very reliable you think? Some large regions have few dots and don’t give a full picture.
And what does GRB mean?
I think it is very reliable. The large regions that have few dots are areas in which surface stations are far and few between. I’d rather have the surface record depicted this way, than with GISS smoothing, which gives a false picture of having “a full picture.” As other posts in this thread have noted, not only are there large gaps in the surface record, but when we look at the length of the records, very few are truly long (like 100 years or longer).
On that, in addition to the link to a great image posted by ” E.M.Smith (20:48:09) : ” here’s a link showing the coverage, since 1880, of stations with at least 90% of the time period covered:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/gcag/GCAGdealtemX?mon2=1&monb2=1&mone2=12&bye2=1880&eye2=2005&proce=90&prob=0&submit=Create+Map¶m=Temperature&klu=2&mon1=0&eye1=0&bye1=0&graph=Dot&glob=AA&mon3=0&monb3=0&mone3=0&ye=0&begX=0&begY=0&endX=0&endY=0&puzo=0&dat=GHCNX&ts=6&nzi=99&sbeX=-180.0&sbeY=90.0&senX=180.0&senY=-90.0
GRB? Gamma Ray Burst?
To get a better perspective on current temps, you still have to look at the very long term data sets. This was started on my part to do a Fourier analysis on temps & sunspots, similar to Leif’s, to see if there was a correlation between the two.
Two of the oldest are the Central England Temperature from 1659-2008
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/cetml1659on.dat
or the Stockholm data STOCKH-GML 1755-2005
http://www.rimfrost.no
Rimfrost has a wealth of long term temp data from around the globe. Unfortunately all sets are complete, but enough to give an ides of what other parts of the world were doing.
P.S.
Should have said “Unfortunately NOT all sets are complete”. Sorry.
Solar activity can be excluded on its own merits by looking at measured “stuff” coming out of it and hitting Earth’s outer atmosphere, it’s middle atmosphere, and it’s lower atmosphere. That includes irradiance, cosmic rays, and magnetic disturbances. Of all these energy sources, TSI is BY FAR the larger energy source for heating or cooling. And its ups and downs do NOT coincide with temperature variations here on Earth. Yes there is a small signal but it is mathematically buried in the chaotic and oscillating noise (which by the way does not cancel out to zero). However, if you smooth enough, you can match just about anything to anything.
Lets not dumb down our discussion here. Using words like “low Sun levels” or vague statements like “It’s the Sun stupid” makes us less believable than the CO2 folks. It also behooves us to become educated on oceanic oscillations, how they were discovered, the prevailing theories on their causes, etc. It also behooves us to become educated on jet stream behavior, trade winds, and the Coriolis affect. These things are endogenous weather pattern variation drivers that far exceed the Sun’s ability to cause today to be cold and tomorrow warm. And here is the clincher. Pile enough weather temperature variation data caused by endogenous drivers into a number cruncher and you get … climate. Yes the Sun warms us, yes CO2, along with other trace gasses and water vapor, helps keep the planet warm. But these variables are week little members of a dynamic planet with its own very strong sources of weather pattern variation drivers. Learn about those first. Then I think we will have the basis for making room for discussions of the Sun and human sources of CO2, which should take about 5 extra minutes.
Remember, for every graph you give me on the Sun or CO2 versus climate, I can give you one that is far better. Oceans and trade winds versus climate. And I won’t have to smooth mine nearly as much as you will yours.
Regard from Indonesian Blogger… 🙂
Great Britain yesterday received 3 months of rain in a single day beating the record of the year 1865:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1198127/Flash-floods-power-cuts-record-rainfall-hits-UK.html
Yes, folks, it’s back in the news, and with good reason. Climate change is on the front burner in Washington, where the Senate is taking up the climate change bill the House passed recently. It’s also being debated at the G-8 summit in Italy.
Roger
I last accessed the Met office CET records around july 2nd to pick up the June 2009 CET so it has gone down since then. It has happened several times before which I why I keep a paper record of all the temperatures back to 1660. 🙂
Tonyb
Ron de Haan
I have noticed the date and can confirm that here in the South West I was driving my convertible with the roof down and we had not a drop of rain . The cricket started on time yesterday in Cardiff and they had a full day. By Great Britain they presumably mean a part of GB where all the media are located.
Tonyb
Pamela Gray (07:56:13) :
tallbloke, show me the statistical correlation you speak of (provide the link to the statistical graph and explain the thermal mechanism using a mathematical function). If this is true, you should be able to model and predict. Prove it.
It’s very much a work in progress, but these should hopefully give a bit of insight.
This first one smoothes the SST at 43 months to bring out the solar signal, which is not always ‘in phase’, particularly during the down and upturns of the pacific decadal oscillation (shown in the second graph)
http://s630.photobucket.com/albums/uu21/stroller-2009/?action=view¤t=ssa-sst-ssn.jpg
This second graph shows how the PDO affects the overarching cumulative solar input to the oceans.
http://s630.photobucket.com/albums/uu21/stroller-2009/?action=view¤t=sst-nino-ssa.jpg
A mathematical expression would involve terms such as the amount of insolation recieved at the sea surface in watts, the emissivity of water, the greenhouse feedback from water vapour plus minor trace gases such as co2, and the cumulative running total of TSI with an amplification factor to cover the feedback of cloud etc as quantified by Nir SHaviv in his paper ‘using the oceans as a calorimeter’
A number of years ago, NASA scientists did studies on the correlations between geomagnetic activity and climate variables such as precipitation and temperature. That seems to be out of fashion now, probably because the mechanism remains elusive. Nonetheless, the effect seems real enough according to the data they presented, and shouldn’t be dismissed simply because our current level of understanding doesn’t enable us to establish the chain of causation.
I appreciate that you won’t accept these ideas because they don’t meet the necessary criteria, but I believe there is something in it, even if we are not yet able to explain it.
Yesterday’s science is smartly presented, neatly cut and dried and blow waved. Tomorrows science is at the bottom of a muddy trench covered in grit and obscured by muddy waters of unknown density.
kwl!!!
J Bob anbd others
As CET seems to have mysteriously gone missing I suggest others here grab the data from my own link
http://cadenzapress.co.uk/download/mencken.xls
before I meet with an AARRGGHH!!!