More from the “weather is not climate department”. Emphasis below mine. And it is having an effect not only on crops but tourism in the Northeast US. – Anthony
Statement as of 4:00 PM EDT on July 9, 2009
record event report … corrected
National Weather Service Gray ME
400 PM EDT Thursday Jul 09 2009
… More record cold weather for Portland Maine…
The temperature at the Portland jetport only reached 58 degrees
yesterday. This set a record for the coldest high temperature on
July 7th. The old record was 59 degrees set in 1961. To put this in
another perspective… the normal low temperature for July 7th is 58
degrees.
The low temperature on Wednesday was 55 degrees. This produced a
range of only 3 degrees between the high and low temperatures which
is a record for the smallest daily range in temperatures on July
7th. The old record was a 4 degree spread set in 1963 and 1995.
The 3 degree daily temperature range yesterday also tied the record
for the smallest daily temperature range for any day in July. The
record was established on July 16th, 1961 and occurred five more
times before this year.
The average temperature yesterday was 57 degrees… which tied 1961
as the coldest average temperature for July 7th.
The high of 58 yesterday tied July 6th of 1956 as the second coldest
high ever recorded at the Portland jetport in July. The coldest high
ever in July was 57 degrees on the 4th of July in 1992.
On the 1st and 2nd of this month Portland only reached 59 degrees
both days… setting records for the coldest high temperature each
day and also tying several other days for the fourth coldest high
ever recorded in July.
Portland has set a record cold high temperature four out of the
first eight days this month. Here is a list of the record cold high
temperatures so far this month…
Date high temp. 2009 old record high and year
July 1st 59 degrees 62 degrees in 1976
July 2nd 59 degrees 63 degrees in 1986
July 7th 60 degrees 64 degrees in 1956
July 8th 58 degrees 59 degrees in 1961
Here is a list of the coldest high temperatures ever recorded in the
month of July at the Portland jetport. Four of the ten coldest
highs occurred in the first eight days of this month…
Rank temperature date
1 57 degrees July 4, 1992
2 58 degrees July 6, 1956
58 degrees July 8, 2009 <===
4 59 degrees July 8, 1961
59 degrees July 16, 1961
59 degrees July 30, 1976
59 degrees July 3, 1987
59 degrees July 1, 2009 <===
59 degrees July 2, 2009 <===
10 60 degrees July 7, 2009 <===
11 61 degrees several dates
The normal high temperature for the month of July is 78.8 degrees.
Along with the cold weather portlanders have also had to deal with
soaking rain this month. There have been three days so far with
around an inch and a half of rain. Rainfall of 1.41 inches fell on
the 2nd, 1.57 inches fell on the 7th and 1.50 inches fell on the 8th.
The 1.41 inches on the 2nd set a record for daily precipitation for
the date… topping the old record of 1.32 inches set in 1983. The
1.57 inches on the 7th was also a record… breaking the old mark for
the date of 1.34 inches set in 1935. The 1.50 inches on the 8th was
far short of the record 3.66 inches that fell on July 8th, 1915.
Temperature records at the Portland jetport began on November 25,
1940 and precipitation records go back to 1871.
&&
Note… corrected date in second table and added normal high for July.
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I’m very impressed by your politeness, Anthony. If you don’t like dissenting ideas, state it from the start. Maybe “Wattsup with my own opinions” would be better.
REPLY: “Flanagan” There are plenty of dissenting ideas presented here, including yours, so your critcism as usual is myopic to your own world view.
I grow tired of your constant whining over the reporting of things that I see as relevant and interesting to the readers of this blog. Nearly every time I report on a record low or cold story you start this whining drivel. I’m tired of it.
I’m also not impressed with the need for an academic such as yourself, at a university in Belgium to have to hide behind anonymity. If you ideas and opinions are worth something, put your name to it. Intellectual cowards such as yourself do not impress me at all. – Anthony Watts
Folks up there are talking about “the year without summer”
Eighteen Hundred and Froze To Death
The Year There Was No Summer
Of the cold summers in the period 1811 to 1817, the year 1816 has gone down in the annals of New England history as “The Year There Was No Summer,” the “Poverty Year” and “Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death.” …..
http://www.islandnet.com/~see/weather/history/1816.htm
1816 – The Year Without Summer , By: Lee Foster, Meteorologist
As we all know living in New England means enduring long winters and savoring the short summers. However, in 1816, the summer season was shorter than normal and is commonly referred to as “The Year Without Summer”…..
http://www.erh.noaa.gov/car/Newsletter/htm_format_articles/climate_corner/yearwithoutsummer_lf.htm
Lucia’s Blackboard has an interesting article up on the HadSST Numbers. They are “through the roof.”
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2009/hadsst-highest-values-since-1998/
Looks like we could be in for a heck of an El Nino. And, a Very Hot Year.
Operate a ‘climate’ station south of Calgary Alberta. to-date, we are running .5 C below normal for the year. June started out cold, latest frost recorded was June 10th and we had snow in the early part of June also! HOWEVER, the last half of the month flip-flopped and was very hot and dry (crops are in trouble) June ended up being bang on normal for Temps. July is running below normal now too.
However, weather is not climate (unless its a hot spell!!) It will be interesting to see how this year plays out and if our sun continues to sleep.
GroupCaptainMandrake (10:24:15) :
“Guys, how come this website has not had a full article devoted to the ICESat results that were announced last week concerning record thinning of Arctic ice?”
[Sigh] Here you, go – have fun, and read the other articles there too.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=6547
“The global sea ice anomaly in June 2009 remained positive. Over the 1979-2009 period, there is zero trend in global sea ice anomaly, with a SH increasing trend offsetting a NH decreasing trend. June 2009 NH anomaly was not remarkable.”
PS
The Catlin Survey Team would have appreciated some of that thinning ice while they were up there…
Oh, how I wish those cooler temps could be spread around. We are having a record breaking heat wave here in central Texas with 23 days of 100+ temperatures already this summer.
Anthony: “Heat wave in Texas, not unusual. Happens every summer.
San Antonio 7/13/09 Forecast:
Today 103°F
Tues 103
Wed 104
Thur 101
Fri 102
These temperatures are not unprecedented, but are unusual and do not happen every summer. Even though last year was also a drought year, I don’t believe we had one day that hit triple digits.
While now confined to the indoors, I’m going to dig into the temperature dataset for some specifics.
“Experts blame climate change for the early arrival of intense cold which began in March.”
Of course. It was proved in “Day After Tomorrow” that Global warming does indeed cause intense cold, leading to an ice age. Didnt’ you know this movie is peer reviewed?
At least, that’s how it seems to me.
For those of you who get confused about weather versus climate, temp ranges and record lows/highs ARE related to climate. Climate zones very much depend on temperature ranges. Agriculture depends on knowledge of temp ranges. Climate zones are decided on based on day and night temp range. The average does very little to elucidate plant health. A case in point, the average of one climate zone may be exactly the average of another climate zone, yet the climate zones will have two different identification numbers. What makes the difference is the range of lows and the range of highs. Plants are very tolerant of averages. They are not so tolerant of extremes. For example, here in NE Oregon, the average daily temp is perfect for daytime growth. But the night time temps are preventing blossom development and seed set. Tomato plants will not blossom and set seed till night time temps rise above at least 50 degrees on a regular basis. So the day’s average does not have to change one bit, but the night time lows need to come up. If record nighttime low’s continue over several years, it will change the parameters of the climate zone and could even be given a different designation.
“Flanagan”
But what have you done? I think AGW is a fraud but I have done all sorts of things to lower my energy usage to save money more than anything.
Changed lights
95% eff furnace
28 mph highway van
New windows, double glass with argon
New washer and dryer energy star rated
and additional things
People like you want us to spend 500% more on energy as well as live in sod houses. The next war that you get yourself in, maybe we will just stay home this time.
More cold weather news from Saskatchewan: brrrr.
http://globalfreeze.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/regina-beats-92-year-old-record-low/
yes, I know! it’s weather not climate.
I am also watching the nsidc daily ice melt report with great interest:
I am not a climate scientist, I am an engineer – but I believe this makes me well qualified to interpret a graph – and it looks to me as though the ice melt is slowing since the 2007 record low. Certainly not ‘accelerating’.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
Kum Dollison (11:18:22) :
Lucia’s Blackboard has an interesting article up on the HadSST Numbers. They are “through the roof.”
The AGW consensus has begun to hedge bets, talking about perhaps a delay of 10 or 20 years in the warming with an intervening cool spell. Recent freezing of 250 children in Peru the other day (BBC news- reports this a “Climate Change” event – were not letting you guys get away with this “change” malarkey – you said unequivocally that higher CO2 was higher temperature. The Hadcentre has been through the roof for 20 years, but they will be heading for the basement like a lot of others like todays Real Climate:
“We hypothesize that the established pre-1998 trend is the true forced warming signal, and that the climate system effectively overshot this signal in response to the 1997/98 El Niño. This overshoot is in the process of radiatively dissipating, and the climate will return to its earlier defined, greenhouse gas-forced warming signal. If this hypothesis is correct, the era of consistent record-breaking global mean temperatures will not resume until roughly 2020.”
So Mr Dollison, don’t find yourself left all alone one day soon. I’m sure you don’t live in Canada or the northern half of the US or in Peru.
“”” Flanagan (08:42:37) :
Isn’t it strange that while the US is having a globally average temperature, all we can read here is about record colds? I mean, there must be record highs also in order ot have a globally zero anomaly for the US, so where are they? Florida, California? Why not mention them? “””
Well there you go Flanagan jumping to conclusions. You equate a “globally zero anomaly” with a globally normal TEMPERATURE RANGE.
First of all, just on the basis of properly sampled data; it is possible to have a zero average deviation (from some number) and have record lows, but no record highs; or you could have reocrd highs; without any record lows, and still have a zero average deviation.
Even on the basis of global anomalies (which aren’t global temperatures); one might expect that the 1998 big El Nino could exist without displacing the average; and yet have no record lows accompanying it.
But anyway; you are just pointing out the whole fallacy of these anomalies; The sampling regiman violates the Nyquist sampling theorem; so you can’t believe anything about those anomaly reports other than the specific data that they report; which isn’t anything to do with global temperatures.
Ray (09:18:19) :
Fraser, Colorado?
Just a note on Portland Maine.
My daughter and family live in Freeport, just north of Portland.
A lot of complaints about lack of sunshine and all the rain. Vegetable garden not doing well.
New York City, cold wet June, saved from being a record for both by a warm dry final week. Beautiful July with cool nights and warm days when it is usually oppressively hot. We had one 90 degree day (in April!) and have only gotten close a couple times since. Haven’t used the air conditioners yet.
I know data is not the plural of anecdote, but an anecdote is a datapoint. Enough weathers and you got yourself climate (with the alarmists conveniently vague on where the switchover is).
Flanagan (08:42:37) : Isn’t it strange that while the US is having a globally average temperature, all we can read here is about record colds? I mean, there must be record highs also in order ot have a globally zero anomaly for the US, so where are they? Florida, California? Why not mention them?
Well, no, there does not need to be such a compensating record high. The basic problem is that you are using a broken “rubber ruler” to measure the “average”. GIStemp so throughly cooks the record (as I posted under a prior thread) that you can’t at all say the ‘average warmth’ is anything other than a computer generated fantasy.
Basically, the news reports and “weather is not climate” posting here serve as a ‘sanity check’ on the insane computer dreams cooked up by folks like Hansen et. al. When your “computer toy” says it is burning up, and all around the planet folks are reporting cold, snow, freezing, death from cold, crop failures from cold, cold cold cold… it’s not the people who are wrong, it’s the computer toy.
And, BTW, YOU do NOT want to mention California. I’m suffering the coldest summer I can remember in the last 30 ish years of living here as we are under The Big Blue Blob of cold anomaly. Last night it was 50F on my patio when I went to bed. That is a common WINTER HIGH for this area. Common summer lows are more like 75 F and sometimes 85F.
There is also an unlikely but possible case where the typical warm area is slightly warmer, but there are more of them, while the record cold areas are smaller, but colder by a large margin. That would make an average higher with record cold spots. I do not think that is what is going on. The distribution of the cold reports around the planet are fairly uniform (though with some poleward excess and some equatorial deficit).
Occam’s Razor says it’s the crappy computer code with known demonstrable bugs and brokenness in it; no need to fabricate some conspiracy theory of folks all over the planet making up cold weather reports, nor any need to hunt for the hidden hot spots being kept from public view by the same conspirators.
Basically, the cold reports are the sound of truth pushing the broken computer fantasy aside. The people saying “The Computer Has No Clothes!”.
Gary Pearse,
I have not a clue what you are talking about. But, evidently, I’m not alone. You attributed this:
you said unequivocally that higher CO2 was higher temperature.
To me. I’ve never said any such thing. I’ve, from day one, thought Anthropogenic, CO2-induced, Catastrophic warming was the silliest sort of nonsense.
But, that doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that the Oceans are heating up quite rapidly. Son, weather is weather. If it’s hot, it’s hot. If it’s cold, it’s cold. I don’t care if the sun hung out a “Gone Fishing” sign; if the oceans are heating up, the oceans are heating up.
Sometimes you gotta call “time out” in the debate, and go look out the window (and, that’s all you want to do in N. Mississippi cause it’s been hotter’n hades here this year.
Can’t stand when the Google ad for “Help Stop Global Warming” comes up right after the article intro…
Every time I see it I write a note to the “We Can Solve the Non-Problem People” and tell them to do something productive with their life !
Unisys seems to be showing SST’s going down again now, while fairly warm for one month, the downtrend it seems to show this July may suggest that the recent high anomaly may only be that high for just the month of June. While the ENSO region isn’t budging much temp. wise the other ocean temps. seem to be dropping.
Unisys primarily uses bouys to chart the SST’s, so you have no possible bias from NOAA satallites and not much in the way of urban heat islands.
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.html
I noticed there was a noticable drop in SST’s since looking at this late last month, if it continues the recent peak will be a one month wonder and not like 1998.
While it has been cooler than normal for the most of the eastern half of the US, it has been baking in TX, and OK, especially TX. Nature trying to balance itself.
But we(our ancestors) have seen something similar before. This was just a quick read from history. I remembered seeing this, and it reminded me of the pattern we see now. Fitting for this post. Probably more instances, as well.
July 11
1888 – Heavy snow reached almost to the base of Mt. Washington, NH, and the peaks of the Green Mountains were whitened.
1888 – Colorado records its hottest temperature ever (118F) at Bennett CO.
Let me explain. The cause is a mystery mechanism. There, that was easy, wasn’t it?
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.ab03c6d3b3a7ecad80ca03e378097a4b.1a1&show_article=1
Ref. to Texas heat, check out the summer of 1980, 60+ days over 100 degrees in the DFW area, so it is possible to have hot dry weather. On the flip side during Dec. 1983 over 240 straight hours of subfreezing temps that caused major water main breaks. Old saying if you don’t like the weather wait it will change.
Nova Scotia here. WORST. SUMMER. EVER. The sun disappeared for 24 straight days, foggy, cold, miserable. It has been over 80 F exactly one freakish day in May, otherwise an absolute disaster. It simply cannot get over 20 C, had to use the heat several days in June and early July which is unheard of.
If you walked dow the street in Halifax with a “Stop Global Warming” T-shirt on, you would be assaulted.
This is sort of off-thread
I was at a gathering today at which a presentation was given by a number of people from DEFRA- that’s the UK Dept for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs otherwise part of the UK government AGW propaganda machine.
First have a look at this website and go the Climate Projections section for an example of hubris that cannot be matched. By the way, these projections are good becuase they are based upon “30 year trends as they are statistically solid”.
http://www.ukcip.org.uk/index.php
I also heard major league dissembling on the issue of certainties. They admit to there being uncertainty but solve this by using probabalistic based projections. The speaker either did not know or did not want to discuss the impact of the IPCC’s 75% minimum uncertainty about climate processes. He did say that our knowledge of climate processes had improved considerably in the past 7 years. Also the fact the the MSM media always present their output as fact – “we can’t control what appears in the media”.
Then we had the classic argument that we had to use modelling as we only had about 150 years of measurements – in fact I lost the plot here as I am sure he said that one of the problems with observations was non-stationarity.
Lastly a guy from the audience (from Reading University) said temps in the US were now at the upper end of projections- sheesh.
I am sorry this is incoherent. I should have taken better notes. I am still dumbfounded by the sheer arrogance and incompetence.
Cheers
Paul
Harold Ambler (09:45:36) :
Am spending a month in Rhode Island. Does anyone else at similar latitude or farther north perceive mild solar dimming as though from volcanic dust?
I have the translucent (with freckles!) skin of the redhead gene. I am fairly finely calibrated from decades of sunburns to know exactly when the activity in my skin is in the “danger zone”. I also have a half century of familiarity with exactly when that happens over the calendar year by time of day at this latitude.
Not only do things look a bit “dimmer” to the eye, but my skin does not complain until well after the “normal” hour… At this time of year, even a couple of minutes at high noon in the garden sans shirt ought to cause me That Tingling Sinking Feeling RUN GET A SHIRT!. Instead I just get “warm sun, worry in a few minutes”. I know, very unscientific. But the “Bite” has gone down in the sunshine. (I really do have it down to minutes. I’m normally good for 15 to 20 minutes MAX at high noon in summer to get a sunburn. I’m constantly aware of the sun angle, skin feel, and clock whenever I’m in the sun. If I don’t, it’s pain city… and my clock is running out long before the skin is reacting these days. Heck, I’ve even done some garden work lately without my mandatory wide brimmed hat on.
Can’t say what the cause is. We have had some increase in cumulus clouds, and there have been more overcast days, but it’s the clear sunny times, like now, that are a puzzlement. It looks like their is a faint milky haze “somewhere” up their (the expected stark dark blue sky is more of a periwinkle not quite milky faded blue jeans color). Don’t know how to turn that observation into a measurable quantity nor into a physical cause.