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.
tallbloke: Don’t forget Wijffels et al (2008):
http://i44.tinypic.com/5uizit.png
From this post:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/07/ohc-trends-presented-by-levitus-et-al.html
tallbloke (15:45:18) :
That means the rise for Levitus et al is around 3×10^22 to just over 10×10^22, about 7.3×10^22
For 2003.5 I read 12E22 off the graph…
6th red dot from the right.
E.M.Smith “computer fantasies”
I commend your consistent promotion of this accurate term.
This comment is, in part, inspired by just having suffered through a paper full of “spaghetti”-based confidence intervals. A common (& telling) theme in such papers is phrases that begin with: “Surprisingly …” I interpret such instances as admissions of misconception – as opposed to openness to truth.
“While progress has been made in understanding some of the important processes contributing to drought conditions (3–7), the mechanisms by which a drought can be maintained over many years are not well established.”
“[…] severity, extent, and duration of the 1930s drought was unusual for the 20th century […]”
“Understanding the causes of the 1930s drought is particularly challenging in view of the scarcity of upper-air meteorological observations prior to about 1950.”
“An analysis of the other major central U.S. droughts of the 20th century (11) suggests that a cool tropical Pacific is common to all. Only the Dust Bowl drought, however, combined cool Pacific SSTs with a warm Atlantic Ocean.”
“[…] proxy climate records indicate that major droughts have occurred in the Great Plains approximately once or twice a century over the past 400 years (25). There is evidence for multidecadal droughts during the late 13th and 16th centuries that were of much greater severity and duration than those of the 20th century (25).”
http://www.seas.harvard.edu/climate/pdf/schubert_2004.pdf
I was staying in Tahoe last week near Truckee, on July 9th we got down to 28 degrees Fahrenheit (-2 Celsius), a record low for the date. It was interesting, but perhaps not too meaningful regarding any trends.
tallbloke (15:56:21) :
If you confirm my calcs are ok I think I’ll write it up and put it online for others to ponder.
calcs OK, but round them off to three significant digits. They are unneccesarily and [incorrectly] precise.
When you say ‘other assumptions’, which do you have in mind?
E.g. that the 700 m is the same for all basins, the effect of minor seas: North Sea [which is not 700 m deep], Gulf of Mexico, continental shelves, etc.
tallbloke (15:45:18) :
That means the rise for Levitus et al is around 3×10^22 to just over 10×10^22, about 7.3×10^22
For 2003.5 I read 12E22 off the graph…
6th red dot from the right.
Leif Svalgaard (22:26:30) :
tallbloke (15:56:21) :
If you confirm my calcs are ok I think I’ll write it up and put it online for others to ponder.
calcs OK, but round them off to three significant digits. They are unneccesarily and [incorrectly] precise.
When you say ‘other assumptions’, which do you have in mind?
E.g. that the 700 m is the same for all basins, the effect of minor seas: North Sea [which is not 700 m deep], Gulf of Mexico, continental shelves, etc.
Leif, many thanks for taking the time to confirm my calcs.
The 700 metres is Levitus’ assumption, not mine, see Bob Tisdale’s posts.
Also, the area I used is for open ocean, not including shallow seas, where ARGO buoys can’t do their bobbing up and down 2000m things. I need to read up on XBT.
Leif Svalgaard (22:28:51) :
tallbloke (15:45:18) :
That means the rise for Levitus et al is around 3×10^22 to just over 10×10^22, about 7.3×10^22
For 2003.5 I read 12E22 off the graph…
6th red dot from the right.
Yes, my study goes from the start of 1993 to the start of 2003, not 2003.5. Halfway from 2002.5 to 2003.5 is around the 10×10^22J I said after you spotted the mid year values.
The Chief analyst of the ARGO data, Josh Willis, said in an unguarded moment to an online magazine that since 2003, there had been a “slight cooling.” He made this statement in May 2008, after his 2007b paper in which he ‘corrected’ the ARGO data which had shown steep falls in OHC. It’s for this reason I have dome doubts about the Levitus reconstruction, post 2002.
Thanks again for your input, most helpful.
Bob Tisdale (16:43:36) :
tallbloke: Don’t forget Wijffels et al (2008):
http://i44.tinypic.com/5uizit.png
From this post:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/07/ohc-trends-presented-by-levitus-et-al.html
Thanks Bob, i’d missed that study completely. Their 1993-2003 rise is around 4.2×10^22J as best I can make out from the rather oddly divided vertical scale on your graph. That would bring the average rise for all the studies back down to 5.75×10^22 without adjusting Domingues for the 2003 spike. However, it also increases the ‘spread’ Leif mentioned that is very large in the late 1990’s.
At least the start and end points are in reasonable agreement, so my study has some validity I think, provided I make due mention of the broad spectrum.
You’ll remember I asked you why there was such a difference between Levitus 2000 and Levitus 2009, and you thought it might be due to ‘adjustments’ to the XBT data. Well I have found another answer for the ~250% downward ‘adjustment’. I’ll hang fire on that until I’ve worked out a way to write it up for maximum effect. I think it’s worthy of a post on the blog, but I’ll let Anthony be the judge of that.
I hope that at the end of the day, what I’ve discovered will renew your interest in OHC series, after your comment the other day that there is no OHC story, because there is no reliable OHC data. It’s actually crucial to the correct understanding of solar input to the Earth climate system.
Paul Vaughan (19:45:15) :
“An analysis of the other major central U.S. droughts of the 20th century (11) suggests that a cool tropical Pacific is common to all. Only the Dust Bowl drought, however, combined cool Pacific SSTs with a warm Atlantic Ocean.”
That’s very interesting, and may be indicative of the shape of things to come. Excess heat is coming out of both oceans at the moment, it will be very interesting to see the relative drops of temperature in both oceans following the currently developing ‘modoki’ el nino. It’s crucial to understand the modoki el nino is driven not by rising temperature like the ’98 el nino, but by lowered tropospheric temperature permitting greater ocean heat emission. Momentum built in the upwardly moving warm water will cause an overshoot and a spike in atmospheric warmth, before the consequently increased air temperatures slow down ocean heat emission again. Everything oscillates.
Is the Chandler wobble currently at high or low fequency? Sorry I haven’t had much time to pursue your line of research, I’ve been very busy with mine. I will make some time soon.
Bob Tisdale should get ready for a downward step change in the data. I predict the rapid emission of ocean heat will see us through this coming N. hemisphere winter ok, but the winter following will be severe.
tallbloke (23:34:54) “I hope that at the end of the day, what I’ve discovered will renew your interest in OHC series, after your comment the other day that there is no OHC story, because there is no reliable OHC data. It’s actually crucial to the correct understanding of solar input to the Earth climate system.”
& Re: Bob Tisdale (16:43:36)
These types of calculations aren’t up my alley, but I commend you guys for working on this.
tallbloke (23:55:40) “Is the Chandler wobble currently at high or low fequency? Sorry I haven’t had much time to pursue your line of research, I’ve been very busy with mine. I will make some time soon.”
I’d say carry on with what you are doing – you seem to be on a roll. There are enough dimensions to this climate problem to go around. I’ll share more as time passes…
Bob, I notice Wijffels et al (2008) show the same sort of magnitutude increase from 2003-2005 as Levitus, albeit from a lower baseline. I think that because it brings them back onto the longterm average extanding through the Ishii and Kimoto study, and back into agreement with Domingues too, it is probably more on the right course then Levitus et al which is definitely the outlier of the four.
I think in presenting my study, I’ll come at the problem from the other way round, and back calculate what the satellite altimetry saysthe ocean heat content should be , and then compare this figure with OHC studies past and present.
One of the reasons for doing that is that I’ve found another method using SST and the rate of temperature decline to the thermocline which corroborates the satellite altimetry figures, as well as having found a curious correlation which suggests a change in OHC calculation methodology driven by a need to fit reality to the model.
More on that soon.
Paul Vaughan (00:12:37) :
These types of calculations aren’t up my alley, but I commend you guys for working on this.
Heh, and likewise Paul, the types of calculations you do make my head swim. I’m just a mechanical engineer with a bit of extra knowledge in fluid dynamics learned at my father’s knee.
Let’s stick to what we’re good at and compliment each other by taking the trouble to think about each others work, and keep lobbing fresh ideas over the fence to each other to help inform the directions of our researches.
tallbloke: You wrote, “I hope that at the end of the day, what I’ve discovered will renew your interest in OHC series, after your comment the other day that there is no OHC story, because there is no reliable OHC data. It’s actually crucial to the correct understanding of solar input to the Earth climate system.”
But without cloud amount data that runs to present times, it would be difficult to determine what’s cause and effect.
tallbloke: You wrote, “It’s crucial to understand the modoki el nino is driven not by rising temperature like the ‘98 el nino, but by lowered tropospheric temperature permitting greater ocean heat emission.”
Please explain that.
NINO3.4 Region TLT anomalies follow the SST anomalies:
http://i29.tinypic.com/2a7bj2s.png
NINO3.4 OLR opposes SST anomalies due to the increase in cloud cover:
http://i25.tinypic.com/2035ed.png
Also, you might find the following link helpful. I just finished SST anomaly animations of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans from January 1996 to July 1, 2009, with the contour levels at 0.2 deg C to bring out the lower-intensity temperature anomalies. I’ll finish the “global” today and then upload and post them, probably tomorrow. Here’s a YouTube link to the Pacific:
Bob Tisdale (02:47:09) :
But without cloud amount data that runs to present times, it would be difficult to determine what’s cause and effect.
The non-seasonally adjusted sea level graph shows a lot of spikes occur in the second half of the year
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_noib_global_ORIG.jpg
Until I chart the data for the various oceans I can’t be sure whether this is caused by high insolation in the southern hemisphere springtime before summer mugginess clouds the tropics more, but warm humid conditions will tend to prevent heat escaping from the ocean easily too. Lots to work on and think about, but the overall picture is becoming clearer to me. The sun heats the oceans, the oceans heat the atmosphere. Downwelling radiation doesn’t penetrate the oceans to heat it but creates more evaporation at the surface and that slows down heat emission. Co2 is along for the ride, chipping in it’s tiny contribution to that slowing of heat emission.
I have calculated the rate at which the ocean accumulated heat between 1993 and 2003 in terms of the number of watts per square metre required to warm that much water. According to the 2009 Levitus ocean heat content assessment which is 250% lower than it was in 2000, the figure comes out at; guess what?
1.7W/m2
Now where have we seen that figure before? As I said, the downwelling back-radiation from the atmosphere doesn’t heat the ocean, but limits it’s ability to emit at the rate it would in vacuuo. If the ocean is restricted from emitting by an amount equal to 1.7Wm2 it will accumulate ~6×10^22J per decade, all other things being equal.This figure roughly matches the Levitus et al and other studies.
If what I believe is the correct figure for ocean heat content increase of around 14×10^22J is on the mark, and it not only agrees with the altimetry and the gradient of temperature from the surface to the thermocline for the observed rise in SST, but also James Annan’s calculation of the Levitus et al 2000 data which Levitus got wrong, then the ‘forcing’ is not 1.7W/m^2 but 4W/m2.
This is more than co2 could accomplish in the wildest dreams of overblown climate sensitivity theoreticians, so the there must have been extra energy going into the oceans 1993-2003 as well as any additional restriction on it getting out again.
As soon as it is recognized that the source of extra heat going in has to be solar in origin, the game is up, because the claimed sensitivity rests on the assumption that solar input is near enough constant.
But it isn’t. Using sunspot numbers as a proxy for TSI, and counting them on a running cumulative total of the difference above and below the average sunspot number we can see that the run of high amplitude-short minimum cycle in the late C20th must have been putting a lot of extra TSI into the oceans.
http://s630.photobucket.com/albums/uu21/stroller-2009/?action=view¤t=sst-nino-ssa.jpg
And now the sun has quietened down, we get the modoki el nino, which is the manifestation of that accumulated energy coming back out of the oceans now the troposphere has started to cool down.
Clouds are very important in the major weather and climate shaping events you study, but these overarching processes of ocean heat accumulation and dissipation during runs of high and low solar cycles are the bigger drivers which have been hidden from view by the assumption that the sun’s effect on the energy budget of Earth is constant, and the inability to isolate the signal in the SST data. The modoki el nino is the signal. It’s previously stored energy coming out of the ocean not because temperatures are increasing, but because they are falling due to a quieter sun, creating a bigger heat differential between ocean and atmosphere, sucking the heat out of the ocean.
Having said that, the 11 year solar effect is amplified by the amount calculated by Nir Shaviv, and he believes the major cause is the clouds, and cloud changes on longer timescales too, so we’re both right really.
I just want to get the key points out in the open, so they are on the table if I get hit by a bus later today. I would like it if people let me write it up and present it in more carefully considered words though.
Thanks for listening.
Bob Tisdale (03:40:50) :
tallbloke: You wrote, “It’s crucial to understand the modoki el nino is driven not by rising temperature like the ‘98 el nino, but by lowered tropospheric temperature permitting greater ocean heat emission.”
Please explain that.
NINO3.4 Region TLT anomalies follow the SST anomalies:
http://i29.tinypic.com/2a7bj2s.png
NINO3.4 OLR opposes SST anomalies due to the increase in cloud cover:
Hi Bob, how many interesting graphs do you have in your cupboard? 🙂
I hope the foregoing post covers some of your question, because my fingers are starting to bleed, but what I draw from the second graph is that while temps were rising, the sun was strong, oceans were accumulating extra heat and el ninos were driven by increasing temps exciting trade winds, clouds and the PWP, there were big restrictions on OLR at Nino time.
But at the back end of the graph, since solar cycle 23 started winding down, the minor el ninos this decade haven’t had such a restriction on OLR. I anticipate this one will be the same, because the heat is coming out of the oceans into drier cooler air, and it’s rising to form cumulus which vanish overnight as Willis Eschenbach explained. Less humidity, less restiction on OLR.
The momentum of that heavy warm water heading upwards will keep going as air temps rise for a few months before the newly warmed atmosphere slows the emission rate down again, thus giving us a pale shadow of a full blown el nino like the ones we got in the ’80’s and nineties.
The key thing is, we’ll see SST’s rise almost simultaneously worldwide (southern hemi first?), rather than with a lag like the spreading PWP el nino’s you’ve described so brilliantly. This is because the heat is coming out of the oceans everywhere at once, due to cooler tropospheric temps. There is no ‘teleconnection’ involved, there will be no heat teleported from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The warmth coming out of the Atlantic will be the warmth that has been below the surface of the Atlantic these last 20 years or more, raising the anomaly and the sea level.
Oops, lost Bob’s second graph and my closing italic tag
NINO3.4 OLR opposes SST anomalies due to the increase in cloud cover:
http://i25.tinypic.com/2035ed.png
I’m going for a walk in the cool damp July air. Normal pontification will be resumed when my typing fingers have recovered. :o)
Hmmm. I don’t like the way that SST animation hessssittttates. It doesn’t do that in .avi that GIF Movie Gear spits out. When I get the chance, I’m going to convert it to .wmv then upload it to YouTube again. Sorry.
Bob Tisdale (03:40:50) :
I’ll finish the “global” today and then upload and post them, probably tomorrow. Here’s a YouTube link to the Pacific:
Fascinating. The ‘jerky’ version is as you say, detracts a little from the ‘flow of the narrative’, but it still contains a vast amount of information to the trained eye. To an untrained eye like mine, several things come to mind, but I’ll wait for you to upload the others and especiallythe global animation and view them all.
Thanks for your hard work on this, it must be time consuming.
This is what I would describe as a rupture in the continuity of normalized wavelet harmonic cross-spectrum power between the absolute magnitude of the vector rate of change of terrestrial polar motion |Pr’| and the rate of change of the rate of change (i.e. 2nd derivative) of the distance of the sun from the solar system centre of mass r”:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/1930HarmonicPowerRupture.PNG
Loose resonance can be seen in a plot of the harmonic phase difference:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/1930sHarmonicPhaseDifference.PNG
Note that there is only one 180 degree (black) vertically-oriented trace, in the 1930s (…& note that during ~1910-1920 there was almost an instance of antiphase).
Introducing lunar nodal cycle (LNC) harmonics makes it clear that 1:2:3 resonance was broken in a unique interference pattern that has occurred only once in the entire polar motion record (1846+):
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/1931UniquePhaseHarmonics.png
It is very difficult to get any of my contacts to understand this stuff, but eventually someone of stature & influence will have the necessary patience & lack of prejudice.
Note for anyone pondering physical mechanisms that may have been overlooked in the past: The index r” is confounded with other indices of solar system dynamics.
Speculation: Earth’s shells (atmosphere, ocean, solid, molten parts) respond differentially to gravitational acceleration/shear. Although this may not always be important, it may sometimes be very important when peculiar harmonic phase alignments arise. Perhaps some terms in some equations have been assumed to be near-zero when they are not always near-zero. Or perhaps Earth is being treated as a point mass or as a homogeneous, symmetrical, uniformly-rotating body in (draft) calculations when it should be treated as heterogeneous (& additionally as a member of the Earth-Moon system).
I am only introducing a rough sketch here. I have other clean results. For example, this stuff is clearly related to LOD and local extreme monthly temperatures.
The balance of this investigation is going to take weeks-to-years – (perhaps a decade due to circumstances). The rate of progress could be severely limited by my access to funding beginning as early as this week. Research/Education money is being diverted to pay for the 2010 Olympics in my neck of the woods – and whatever climate research money there is here only goes to projects promising to prove global warming & its implications (supporting the existing carbon tax).
Funding research on the 1930s severe drought, which had severe economic, ecological, & social consequences, is not even on the radar of the funding bodies so far as I can tell (to date). I am left with the impression that our society has gone off the rails with its blinderred sense of priorities, but I choose to remain optimistic.
My strong background in ecology positions me to fully appreciate the importance of the hydrologic cycle, including the ecological impact of severe drought. Appreciable knowledge of statistics positions me to handle the harmonic cross-wavelet calculations. Engineering taught me to focus on extreme & unusual events rather than averages. Physical geography taught me to be relentlessly & acutely conscious of scale & heterogeneity. The results of this research are too clean to be dismissed. It is just a matter of time before the right combination of experts (from different fields since this is trans-disciplinary) polish this work. One patient & open-minded astrophysicist &/or geophysicist in a position of influence might be all I need as a collaborator to successfully see this work through to its fruition, for the benefit of all of society.
Earlier plots, for reference:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/ChandlerPeriodAgassizBC,CanadaPrecipitationTimePlot.PNG
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/ChandlerPeriod.PNG
“During the 1930s, the United States experienced one of the most devastating droughts of the past century. The drought affected almost two-thirds of the country and parts of Mexico and Canada and was infamous for the numerous dust storms that occurred in the southern Great Plains.”
“[…] severity, extent, and duration of the 1930s drought was unusual for the 20th century […]”
“While progress has been made in understanding some of the important processes contributing to drought conditions (3–7), the mechanisms by which a drought can be maintained over many years are not well established.”
“Understanding the causes of the 1930s drought is particularly challenging in view of the scarcity of upper-air meteorological observations prior to about 1950.”
Siegfried D. Schubert, Max J. Suarez, Philip J. Pegion, Randal D. Koster, & Julio T. Bacmeister (2004). On the Cause of the 1930s Dust Bowl. Science 303(5665), 1855-1859.
http://www.seas.harvard.edu/climate/pdf/schubert_2004.pdf
“[…] the development and maintenance of atmospheric ridges is the prime ingredient for drought conditions […]”
“[…] the longer the anomalous weather conditions persist, the more likely it is to have some stationary forcing acting as a flywheel (i.e., as a source for inertia) to maintain the anomalies […]”
“[…] the forcing required to sustain a drought over seasons or years would be expected to lie outside of the atmospheric domain […]”
“Because a large proportion of the variance of drought conditions over North America is unrelated to sea surface temperature perturbations, it is conceivable that when a severe drought occurs it is because numerous mechanisms are acting in tandem.”
http://downloads.climatescience.gov/sap/sap1-3/sap1-3-final-ch3.pdf
Switching to .wmv format eliminated the hesitations in that Pacific SST animation:
I’ll delete that earlier version in a few days.
Bob, great, much smoother. A couple of brief observations. I’m not knowledgeable about this, so take this and quite a few of the statements I made in my long replies to you concerning surface circulatory events with an ‘it seems to me that’ in front of them. I can appear overly definite in the way I write and I would like your feedback to my ideas.
1) The way warm anomalies ‘flow’ across cental america from the Carribean Gulf to the CalMex coasts indicates that clouds are the cause of a lot of the comings and goings of the more ephemeral sea surface anomalies.
2) Apart from the main equatorial alternation of el nino, la nina, the other multiyear features (with an annual oscillation due to axial tilt) are the areas east of Austalasia and Japan. These drift north and south over periods of months. Do you think this drift is connected with shifts in the jet streams at the boundaries of the Hadley cells?
3) The residual warmth sometimes clinging to the sides of south and north America following el nino. Are they affected by the changes in LOD and AAM Paul has been working on, causing water to pile up against continental masses?
I have lots more questions popping into my head, but I’ll leave it there for now.
Just to comment that this thread will fall off the bottom of the thread list soon. I’m getting a lot out of it and I’d hate to see it become a complete ghost town. How about we bookmark it or move the discussion to another site? I could set up a discussion forum, or you could host it? What do you think is best?