From the NOAA National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), State of the Climate, National Overview, October 2009:
Temperature Highlights – October
- The average October temperature of 50.8°F was 4.0°F below the 20th Century average and ranked as the 3rd coolest based on preliminary data.
- For the nation as a whole, it was the third coolest October on record. The month was marked by an active weather pattern that reinforced unseasonably cold air behind a series of cold fronts. Temperatures were below normal in eight of the nation’s nine climate regions, and of the nine, five were much below normal. Only the Southeast climate region had near normal temperatures for October.
- Statewide temperatures coincided with the regional values as all but six states had below normal temperatures. Oklahoma had its coolest October on record and ten other states had their top five coolest such months.
- Florida was the only state to have an above normal temperature average in October. It was the sixth consecutive month that the Florida’s temperature was above normal, resulting in the third warmest such period (May-October).
- The three-month period (August-October) was the coolest on record for three states: Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Five other states had top five cool periods: Missouri (2nd), Iowa (3rd) , Arkansas (5th) , Illinois (5th) and South Dakota (5th) . Every climate division in Kansas (nine) and Nebraska (eight) recorded a record cool such period.
- For the year-to-date (January – October) period, the contiguous U.S. temperature ranked 43rd warmest. No state had a top or bottom ten temperature value for this period.
Precipitation Highlights – October
- The U.S. recorded its wettest October in the 115-year period of record. The nationwide precipitation of 4.15 inches was nearly double the long-term average of 2.11 inches.
- Regionally, two of the nation’s nine climate regions (the East North Central and South) saw their wettest October. The Central region had its second wettest October, while the West North Central had its fourth wettest. This was the first month since December 2007 that no region had below normal precipitation.
- Three states (Iowa, Arkansas, and Louisiana) saw their record wettest October. Fourteen other states had precipitation readings ranking in their top five category. Only three states (Florida, Utah, and Arizona) saw below normal precipitation.
- Arkansas continued its remarkable run of wetness in 2009. The state has seen four months with top three precipitation ranks this year (May, 1st wettest; July, 3rd wettest; September, 2nd wettest; October, 1st wettest). As a result, the state’s year-to-date average is the wettest in 115 years of record keeping. This contrasted with persistent dryness in Arizona, which saw its second-driest year-to-date period.
- The three-month (August-October) rainfall was record-setting for many adjacent divisions within Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. It is noteworthy that this occurred despite only one tropical cyclone (Claudette, in August) making landfall in the region during this period.
- By the end of October, moderate-to-exceptional drought covered 12 percent of the contiguous United States, the second-smallest drought footprint of the decade, based on the U.S. Drought Monitor. Major drought episodes in California and South Texas improved significantly. Drought conditions emerged across much of Arizona.
- About 45 percent of the contiguous United States had moderately-to-extremely wet conditions at the end of October, according to the Palmer Index (a well-known index that measures both drought intensity and wet spell intensity). This is the largest such footprint since February 2005.
Other Items of Note
- According to the NOAA Midwest Regional Climate Center in Champaign, Illinois, more than half of the long-term stations in the Midwest had one of their five wettest Octobers on record, with one out of five observing its wettest. Combined with the cold, this delayed crop planting and stunted crop maturity. Corn development was as much as four weeks behind in places, and the soybean harvest was well behind schedule throughout the region.
- Two major snow storms hit the contiguous United States during October. The first struck the Upper Midwest October 9th through 13th, while the second blanketed the western Plains States October 27th through 30th. By month’s end, 13.6 percent of the nation was under snow cover, according to NOAA’s National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center.
- Unusually cold and wet conditions across the middle of the country led to several snowfall records. Cheyenne, Wyoming observed 28 inches of snow during October, making this the city’s snowiest October on record. North Platte, Nebraska recorded 30.3 inches of snowfall, making October 2009 the snowiest month of all months on record for the city. The previous record was 27.8 inches, in March 1912.
- October, like September, saw below-normal fire activity in all respects. A total of 3,207 fires burned about 158,000 acres in October, according to the National Interagency Coordination Center. Each of these values is below this decade’s average for October.
- Precipitation Highlights – October
- The U.S. recorded its
wettest October in the 115-year period of record. The nationwide precipitation of 4.15 inches was nearly double the long-term average of 2.11 inches.
Regionally, two of the nation’s nine climate regions (the
East North Central and
South) saw their wettest October. The
Central region had its second wettest October, while the
West North Central had its fourth wettest. This was the first month since December 2007 that no region had below normal precipitation.
- Three states (
Iowa,
Arkansas, and
Louisiana) saw their record wettest October.
Fourteen other states had precipitation readings ranking in their top five category. Only three states (Florida, Utah, and Arizona) saw below normal precipitation.
- Arkansas continued its remarkable run of wetness in 2009. The state has seen four months with top three precipitation ranks this year (May, 1st wettest; July, 3rd wettest; September, 2nd wettest; October, 1st wettest). As a result, the state’s
year-to-date average is the wettest in 115 years of record keeping. This contrasted with persistent dryness in
Arizona, which saw its second-driest year-to-date period.
- The three-month (August-October) rainfall was record-setting for many
adjacent divisions within Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. It is noteworthy that this occurred despite only one tropical cyclone (Claudette, in August) making landfall in the region during this period.
- By the end of October, moderate-to-exceptional drought covered 12 percent of the contiguous United States, the second-smallest drought footprint of the decade, based on the U.S. Drought Monitor. Major drought episodes in California and South Texas improved significantly. Drought conditions emerged across much of Arizona.
- About 45 percent of the contiguous United States had moderately-to-extremely wet conditions at the end of October, according to the Palmer Index (a well-known index that measures both drought intensity and wet spell intensity). This is the largest such footprint since February 2005.
- Other Items of Note
- According to the NOAA Midwest Regional Climate Center in Champaign, Illinois, more than half of the long-term stations in the Midwest had one of their five wettest Octobers on record, with one out of five observing its wettest. Combined with the cold, this delayed crop planting and stunted crop maturity. Corn development was as much as four weeks behind in places, and the soybean harvest was well behind schedule throughout the region.
- Two major snow storms hit the contiguous United States during October. The first struck the Upper Midwest October 9th through 13th, while the second blanketed the western Plains States October 27th through 30th. By month’s end, 13.6 percent of the nation was under snow cover, according to NOAA’s National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center.
- Unusually cold and wet conditions across the middle of the country led to several snowfall records. Cheyenne, Wyoming observed 28 inches of snow during October, making this the city’s snowiest October on record. North Platte, Nebraska recorded 30.3 inches of snowfall, making October 2009 the snowiest month of all months on record for the city. The previous record was 27.8 inches, in March 1912.
- October, like September, saw below-normal fire activity in all respects. A total of 3,207 fires burned about 158,000 acres in October, according to the National Interagency Coordination Center. Each of these values is below this decade’s average for October.
C’mon guys, this is just weather. November is warmer than October. I have been in the US for 5 days and it is still 70 in Ohio!!!!!!! Was lower in October.
REPLY: Cmon Peter, this is a report by that US National Climatic Data Center, complain to them if you don’t like it, Otherwise bugger off – Anthony
I knew it was cold… Even said so and so did my tomatoes!
So not global climate change but local weather change.
REPLY: So not impressed with your opinion. If this were the hottest month on record, evar, the media would be howling about it and connecting it to “climate change”. This is a report from the National Climatic Data Center, they thought it important enough to write, I think it’s important enough to share. – Anthony
Absolutely it’s important enough to share. I have been hearing from virtually everyone I know online that their October was cold (I don’t know anyone in Florida). We set cold temperature records here in Calgary, and the wind this year has been constant. I’ve only had a few flying days for my R/C planes.
With the constant drumbeat of “warming being worse than we expected”, it’s certainly a surprise to many that we had a far below average cold month, right? In fact, we’re told to expect to never see cold again, basically.
Those charts are taking quite a dive. I wonder why?
“The three-month (August-October) rainfall was record-setting for many adjacent divisions within Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. It is noteworthy that this occurred despite only one tropical cyclone (Claudette, in August) making landfall in the region during this period.”
I seem to recall this same weather patter over GA back in 1979, and everyone here knows that hurricane season is what brings our rainfall in the second half of the year. How curious- exactly thirty years?
The increased precipitation must MUST be due to global warming.
We must…..MUST do something now.
To keep the sky from falling, we need to immediately cut all power to the USA.
Perhaps we can save the planet from itself….given that our species has been around sooooo long…..100,000 years (the early part still swinging from trees)…as compared to the brief, fleeting, and ephemeral FOUR POINT SIX BILLION YEAR saga of Earth’s climate.
We must act now. Stop breathing. CO2 is a poison.
Register with Al…..he knows the way.
But he has to get there in his private jet just like the rest of us.
Except we don’t have private jets.
COAL DUST IS………..CO2…….IS NOT!!
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
I’m have to repeat my pet peeve about graphics like this. No color in the chart represents “normal”. The colors should have been chosen with a neutral tone (grey or white) for a band centered on 0, with the warm and cool colors to either side.
Compare this graphic to most of the graphics displayed in the recent post (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/07/october-2009-3rd-coldest-for-us-in-115-years-what-about-the-upcoming-winter/) from Joseph D’Aleo.
Sorry for venting, but sometimes I get the impression that I’m the only person who ever read Tufte’s classic book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and understood any of it. This book should be mandatory reading for anyone responsible for creating this kind of display graphic. (See http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi for Tufte’s official site.)
Now back to actual, meaningful commentary….
Ist climate when you compare with with the longer term October values.
Funny Peter NZ, would have had the same result of a colder than normal October in NZ (Coldet in 64 years),yet we are going into summer
Clarification from another thread:
Coal dust IS pollution. CO2, however, emphatically is NOT.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
savethesharks (23:32:21) :
Coal dust IS pollution. CO2, however, emphatically is NOT.
Damn it Chris, you keep getting that emphasis wrong 😉
DaveE.
Sure – you are having colder starts to winter and we are having a warmer start to summer down in the southern hemi.
It’s called climate change – as it does.
I wonder what’s causing all that rain cloud?
“local weather change”
Not really. Weather across the continental US is representative of about 1/4 of the Earth (a large portion of the Western half of the Northern hemisphere). It shows a pattern of polar air coming down across North America during that month. I wonder how October was in Canadian statistics. I don’t even know where to find such information but it would be interesting to add that to the CONUS data and get a larger picture.
Now if this were coldest October in Chicago or Fargo or Miami, yeah, then I would dismiss it as local variation due to a more localized weather pattern (say a lack of downslope winds someplace that normally gets more of them). The “average” temperature can change quite a bit in some locations just because the wind happens to blow mostly from, say, the East rather than West one month or vice versa in other locations.
A general pattern over a large continental land mass is not “local” weather in the sense I generally use the term. It is even wider than what I would consider “regional”. It appears to be “continental” in scope and that generally tends to point out larger changes in dominant weather features that impact weather in more than a local scope.
Let’s see now . . . what does “normal” really mean? The human body has a genuine “normal” temperature. Using “under the tongue” thermometers, it is 98.6 degrees F. A variation of only a single F degree means that there is something abnormal going on. In other words, the person with that body temperature is ill . . . with something, and it is not good at all, with only a single F degree of variation (or was that an “anomoly”) from the normal temperature of the human body. Now THAT is what I was led to think a “normal” temperature meant. And I would guess that is what the majority of Americans think “normal’ means too, giving that a person’s body temperature is taken each and every time anyone goes to a doctor. Then again, there is that pesky word called “average”. Darned arithmetic!
Was the US “ill” circa 1925? Or circa 1963? About 1925 I wasn’t here yet, but I don’t remember the US being ill circa 1963 . . . surely I would have remembered something such as that. I can’t remember massive crop failure that year, from crops burning in the heat. Nor do I remember tens of thousands of people dying from heat stroke or heat exhaustion that year. Or even one or several years earlier or later. Surely the media would have had at least something to say about that sort of thing. At least the news media then, that is.
And where, oh where was the high temperature of the year 1998? Let’s see again. What nation has the most temperature measuring stations per square mile. and over a large area indeed? Oh, that can’t count for anything. We know that the width of treerings on a single tree somewhere counts for more regarding temperature of planet Earth. And it sure looks as if the US is really out of step regarding temperature compared with . . . the rest of the planet . . . or was it the hemisphere? . . . Hard to keep in mind, isn’t it? Oh well, that is only the national temperature of the lower 48 . . . I think.
I do have to say that I am really surprised that NOAA would actually publish that temperature chart. But wait, perhaps it is just that they mixed up the labels . . . put the word “temperature” on the precipitation chart, and the word “precipitation” on the temperature chart. Now that would explain it, and would certainly further the interests of the warmmongers and better fit their dire warnings, now wouldn’t it?
Looking at all these charts is tiring, and confusing to say the least. One thing I do remember well from the college chemistry and physics courses I took . . . and that is: If you don’t use the correct terms for the values, you will confuse yourself . . . and get the wrong answer. It seems as if there was something about the great importance of estimating “margin of error” or something like that . . . regarding actual design of structures and such. Plus so much and minus minus so much.
Thanks Anthony, for keeping us so well informed, and for attempting to make it so that we can know what is actually happening in the present, at least, regarding temperature. Old codgers such as I would find it interesting to know.
Of course, that is only October. But I do wish that those folks would use the word “average” when they mean average. And realize that “normal” does have a meaning for the average American.
How is the fall harvest going where you are this year? This is the October of “froze my butt and got washed away” for the most part. Not so bad here in Phoenix, though. No AC needed, and haven’t even turned on my heat yet this fall. Low utility bills for me as of now.
Weather is just a snapshot of the climate at a moment in time. As the Earth’s climate/weather system is chaotic, trends do not convey meaning making predictions about the future uncertain.
Until all our climate systems are fully understood, as well as the interactions between the different processes, medium-term weather and long-term climate forecasts will remain in the province of astrology.
This is the reason the ‘big lie’ about CAGW has survived as long as it has, and why politicians could use this as a weapon to subdue the freedom of the Western World. Like the climate, the scientific tide is turning on the AGW hypothesis. As more and more of Joe Public move into the sceptic’s camp, politicians across the globe are waking up to the fact that the game is up.
Considering yesterday’s thread about warming from land use change I wonder how cold the US would have been without man-made warming…
Is there a relationship between Northern and Southern hemispheres here somewhere?
October in Australia was cool. November is, however, turning into a scorcher. All the averages are looking like being records. We have a high pressure system parked over the Tasman sea that doesn’t look like going anywhere soon. Adelaide, for example, is going for its fourth day of 39C+ and week of 35C+.
Is the North heading for a record breaking winter?
As well as the graphics issue pointed out by Ross Berteig, is there some psychology in using ‘hottest’ rather than ‘warmest’ for promoting AGW and ‘coolest’ rather than ‘coldest’ when the thermometer does not agree with the AGW story?
I might add that I was reared on a farm in NW Iowa from the time I was 3 until after the summer I was 13. (I was a WWII child) Then to school and lived in town for high school. October and the first half of November was harvest time . . . and for the most part, the annual pay months. And it was the frost which was on the punkin back then, not snow. Or for that matter, rain either.
Anthony,
You got me wrong. I was just joking, playing with semantics as well as premeditating the usual cliches of weather is not climate.
REPLY: Well then, use /sarc as in “saracasm off” at the end to denote such punnery and we won’t make that mistake. Thanks for the clarification. – Anthony
Just watched a national broadcast current events programme here in Oz. There’s been a five day heatwave in Adelaide. Is it weather? No- it is “in accordance with the climate change forecasts of the IPCC.” A national scientific figure was on the radio this morning claiming that “events which the IPCC forecast to happen in 100 years time, we’re seeing NOW.” Can someone help me tear my hair out?
To put irony in one’s writing may be not my strongest point as a non-native English speaker. And the humour/irony was a bit stale, I must admit. My apologies
REPLY: No worries, lessons learned all around. – Anthony
@ stevec
Doesn’t stop some good old fashioned scaremongering going on here though: ice sheets thinning, sea level raises worse than IPCC predicted, blah, blah, blah. It would be funny if it wasn’t so serious.
http://www.3news.co.nz/World/Story/tabid/417/articleID/129447/cat/61/Default.aspx
PS, I think some of the first posts were sarcasm?
Could it be due to an increase in lap-dancing having replaced traditional rain-dancing ? Serious note,I collected weather data at a site in Wexford [ Ireland ] for 5 years . I was very kindly given some 20 years of data from a Gov. site just 5 miles away and I was getting 15% +/- more rain each year. I was on the lee side of a hill so I guess its all down to where you place your bucket.
“bugger off” made me laugh, thank you.
Please excuse the OT, but (news),
on BBC Radio 4 ~an hour ago was Dr. Ian Plimer. Now there’s a turnup for the books! Only gave him a short interview, though.
Thanks for posting this publication, I haven’t visited the NCDC web site for a long time. The increase in precipitation is remarkable.
These are interesting times.
According to AccuWeather, a new cold wave and snow is underway for this weekend:
http://www.accuweather.com/news-story.asp?partner=rss&article=6
Sorry OT (long) – BBC Radio 4’s “Today” programme (their top slot morning, serious news affair) just had Ian Plimer on… I nearly crashed the car.
So, I’ve sent the following email to the programme – you never know it may do some good:
“Dear Sir/Madam,
Re: Ian Plimer’s appearance on the Today programme (12 Nov 2009).
Firstly, how refreshing for a BBC broadcast to feature a sceptic in the field of climate change.
Now that the Today programme has “started the debate” (to paraphrase from the piece) it would be rather excellent for you to carry this on.
Might I recommend an interview with Steve McIntyre – a prominent statistician (and IPCC reviewer) who has, amongst other things, debunked the myth of the “hockey-stick” more than once. He has recently appeared on Finnish TV and his voice should be heard in as wide a context as possible – he really does understand the maths behind the claims of ‘doom-n-gloom’ and more often than not finds it badly wanting.
His struggles in obtaining the data used as the basis for “proving” that we live in unprecedented times should have been the subject of a broadcast by a major media organisation. He has frequently been stonewalled, denied access and generally obstructed for years in his attempts to get access to data that should be (by definition) open to anyone who wishes to examine it. Oddly, when he finally obtains the data it is found to be badly flawed and used in questionable statistical techniques. Keep in mind that this data is the foundation upon which we may well all be taxed under new “carbon” regimes. If a similar level of [a] obstruction and [b] bad methods had been found in any other field the main-stream-media would have been all over the story; not so for climate change – you must ask yourselves if this reflects the true spirit of investigative, hard-hitting journalism?
This quote from leading CRU climate scientist Dr Phil Jones (2004) says it all really: “I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.” – Newton et al would be spinning in their graves at this point.
I think if your researchers are brave enough to dig a little deeper and wider in their search for information on climate change they will find that the “consensus” doesn’t exist and that the science is far from settled.
May I recommend two sites: http://www.climateaudit.org (Steve McIntyre’s site) and http://www.wattsupwiththat.com (run by Anthony Watts). The former is somewhat heavy on the technical details; the latter is more accessible and contains many links and guest postings by prominent scientists that challenge the current consensus view.
As a final note do you really, really, think that if we were all doomed (“50 days to save the planet” to paraphrase Mr Brown) that there would be a generally accepted view that Copenhagen-09 isn’t going to do much for emissions targets?
Best regards
Mark Fawcett”
Cheers
Mark.
“Departure from the 1971 – 2000 Normal”
Come 2011 will it be Departure from the 1981 – 2010 Normal? As the naughties (2000’s) will be seen as “Will be the Warmest on Record”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/10/countdown-to-an-unprecedented-warm-decade-2-months-to-go/
What difference would this make to the map
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/asos-oct2009-nocities.gif
Also I note the warmer areas are coastal.
UAH, Second coldest USA October.
2002 -1.48
2009 -1.45
None of the others came close.
janama (00:12:40) : Sure – you are having colder starts to winter and we are having a warmer start to summer down in the southern hemi.
It’s called climate change – as it does.
Not where I am. The whole of NZ is cooler than normal.
http://www.metservice.co.nz/public/weatherToday/temperatures.html
Shaun (01:08:45) : “Just watched a national broadcast current events programme here in Oz. There’s been a five day heatwave in Adelaide. Is it weather? No- it is “in accordance with the climate change forecasts of the IPCC.” A national scientific figure was on the radio this morning claiming that “events which the IPCC forecast to happen in 100 years time, we’re seeing NOW.” “
The IPCC was one hundred years out in their predictions? Sheesh, just who can you trust these days…
Chris Schoneveld (01:10:29) : “To put irony in one’s writing may be not my strongest point…
The irony was there, Chris. Would not take the response as meaning anything more than unlucky timing on your part.
Once upon a time, Weather was the pieces that made up Climate.
These days, however, Weather is not to be confused with Climate, which has
become politically correct, modelized and turned into a weapon of mass delusion.
Fortunately for us, we have Meteorologists who defend the Weather.
And one of these days, the Meteorologists will free the Climate from the clutches of the politically correct modelers who beat us all day long with forecasts of Faster than Previously Imagined through Doomsday.
A battle was won here, the Weather having turned in favor of the Meteorologists, who have the PC Imaginaries on the run.
Just curious. Could someone give us a snapshot of the UK’s autumn? How has it been?
After a cooler-than-normal October, the Midwest seems to be experiencing a fairly normal November.
I really dislike the way these maps are coloured. There is no colour for “normal”… it’s either over, or under. So I imagine in the great scope of things, if a region has exactly 0 degrees deviation from “normal” temperature, it’s coloured “pink” which visually puts it on the “warm” side.
Minnesota. Unbelievably miserable October which is usually my favorite month. Unusually pleasant November so far. Come Dec 12 compare the headlines to the crickets today.
It would be interesting to hear what large scale patterns caused both Western Europe and North America to have such a cold, wet October. However, it does appear that El Nino is strengthening. This might give North America a nice, mild Winter for 2009/2010. However, it could portend for a very stormy Winter for the West Coast.
Ice expands upward. As the ice melts it creates energy by releasing it’s salt. The salt ions create kinetic energy in the ocean waters; which causes the warm vapors to rise. Which also creates expansion in the atmosphere and this rising heat has caused the atmosphere lining to bust open.
Just like the old fashioned jiffy pop popcorn, which had the aluminum foil, and upon pressure would rise until it tore open from the internal combustion of condensed heat.
It is the same thing with melting ice causing salt ions to create ocean kenetic energy. Heat rises.
So the oceans need to be diluted from the salt content, which would reduce the ion energy of the salts, which are causing global warming.
Meanwhile, over in Beijing, the heaviest snow in 54 years…
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=ad0dn1Nzvk8g&pos=9
Well, it’s “warm” on the East coast of Aus, Sydney, certainy not unusual, but humid, 85%+.
Predictions are for 42c next Monday. We’ll see. Seems like a “usual” spring/summer change going on, but a cool flow is, predcited, coming the week after.
Salt destroys ice. Salt prevents water from freezing.
When the human body has too much salt, it swells, and pressure increases.
Salt is heavier than water, ice is lighter than water. So salt could be removed from the sea, since it is heavier than water. Just filter out the salt from the water and create salt mountains. Then as the sea waters decrease in temp., the water will freeze from below the sea floor, causing the icebergs with expand upward again.
Use the salt mountains as resource heat.
Re: JP (05:08:51) :
It would be interesting to hear what large scale patterns caused both Western Europe and North America to have such a cold, wet October.
Excuse me – October was in Europe only a bit cool in the very far north of Scandinavia and a limited part of Russia. It was normal to mild over all of Western Europe and flabbergastingly warm/record ‘hot’ over central and Southeastern Europe.
My last comment contains a bad mistake based on the faulty record of Zell am See. In fact October was mild, but not exceptionally so, over all of central and Southeastern Europe.
The cold spell in the Alps middle of the month didn’t compensate for the rest (including e.g. the German absolute October heat record on the 7th).
JP (05:08:51) :
It would be interesting to hear what large scale patterns caused both Western Europe and North America to have such a cold, wet October. However, it does appear that El Nino is strengthening. This might give North America a nice, mild Winter for 2009/2010. However, it could portend for a very stormy Winter for the West Coast.
A “nice mild winter” is just what many of the Northern states, (with their dependence on a snow economy) do not need at this point in the recession.
Yaakoba (05:13:05)
Ice already expels most of its salt when it freezes, so surface ice is usually unsalty. The water beaneath it is denser, and unfrozen so has its salt worth, so sinks whilst, warmer water, or less salty water rises/circulates to replace it. As more ice forms, more salt is expelled.
Its all good,, as you can melt frozen sea water for drinking purposes
crosspatch (00:21:20) :
A nice website to bookmark to keep track of the “larger picture” is here:
http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/climate/synop.html
Use the pull-down menu to select “Temperature Anomaly.” The data is updated weekly. Since you asked about Canada, here is what it looked like for the second week of October:
http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/climate/synop/td20091014_e.png
Nearer the end of the month, Canada looking a bit warmer (anomaly-wise) than CONUS:
http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/climate/synop/td20091028_e.png
November has been warmer all over most of North America:
http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/climate/synop/td20091111_e.png
Seriously, this is a great website for keeping track of climate/weather from a global perspective. And the anomalies are standard climatology, i.e. relative to 1971-2000, not the older baseline of GISS.
We’ve had a very wet cold and windy autumn/ so far. Its normally a fairly settled period. An interesting fact though: In London on 10th Nov, water vapour was very high, temperature very low -the following night water vapour lower and temperature higher (negative feedback?) we’ve had some unusual cold/warm anomalies so far but reckon on a mild winter of ElNino. It could be cold though. There’s no way of telling
Shaun (01:08:45) :
Just watched a national broadcast current events programme here in Oz. There’s been a five day heatwave in Adelaide. Is it weather? No- it is “in accordance with the climate change forecasts of the IPCC.” A national scientific figure was on the radio this morning claiming that “events which the IPCC forecast to happen in 100 years time, we’re seeing NOW.” Can someone help me tear my hair out?
By now it really doesn’t come as a surprise that only in Climate Science can proof that you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about also prove that your credibility has been enhanced. And they’re not even on “meth”.
I prefer warm to cold. I looked at the significance of global temperature trends from GISS HadCRUT, UAH and RSS recently and found no significant warming for 15 years.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/11/12/no-warming-for-fifteen-years/
Tamino and RC use the argument that the downward trend doesn’t exist but it applies both ways. I just used their approach and found it’s been a long time since we’ve seen what they call ‘real’ warming.
Peter in New Zealand (23:01:19) :
C’mon guys, this is just weather. November is warmer than October. I have been in the US for 5 days and it is still 70 in Ohio!!!!!!! Was lower in October.
REPLY: Cmon Peter, this is a report by that US National Climatic Data Center, complain to them if you don’t like it, Otherwise bugger off – Anthony
Ouch! Peter you were a BAD boy. (/sarc)
The reader should note however that Peter’s comment is left as is, and in a prominent position within the blog. Anyone who has lately been at RC or CP will appreciate the contrast.
It is, however, remarkable that NCDC is reporting this. Shame that the media aside from Drudge is silent though.
Oh, and Anthony, my mum believed that “bugger off” was swearing (my grandparents were from Britain). Be careful that the new government blog regulators don’t censure you for bad language.
Maybe churches should ring out a warming on global cooling. But the Copenhagen publicity campaign rolls on:
Church bells to ring out warning on climate change
meant “warning”. Time for coffee.
“Could someone give us a snapshot of the UK’s autumn? How has it been?”
http://www.climate-uk.com/page3.html
Check this site out.
Thanks for sharing these important findings about October Anthony.
From the report:
“Florida was the only state to have an above normal temperature average in October. It was the sixth consecutive month that the Florida’s temperature was above normal, resulting in the third warmest such period (May-October).”
Glad they were able to fit that tidbit in 😉
Doug in Seattle 06: 54: 44:
“Bugger off” is considered pretty mild swearing in the UK nowadays – much less offensive than something else which ends in “off”. I’m surprised to see an American write it, though (although this is not the first time AW has used it), because I didn’t think it was used in the US. Well, you learn something every day, if you’re not careful!
Midwest Mark (04:47:00) :
Just curious. Could someone give us a snapshot of the UK’s autumn? How has it been?
After a cooler-than-normal October, the Midwest seems to be experiencing a fairly normal November.
So far It looks average so it probably won’t change much.
http://i599.photobucket.com/albums/tt74/MartinGAtkins/Sep-Oct.png
November at the start was nice.Here NE Oregon, but awoke to an icy,snowy day.
not unusual,but a bit early,not one single bird at the still full feeders.Do they know something? 1969 and 71/72 were Nino years and quite cold and nasty here.
I fear warm water and cold air are not a good combination…
pwl (07:42:04) :
Thanks for sharing these important findings about October Anthony.
Stay tuned. Next month we feature November.
RR Kampen (06:19:09) : Excuse me – October was .. flabbergastingly warm/record ‘hot’ over central and Southeastern Europe.
What precisely “flabbergasted” you RR Kampen? Can we have the temperatures that made your jaw drop open and leave you gasping in amazement?
RR Kampen (06:22:21) : ..The cold spell in the Alps middle of the month didn’t compensate for the rest (including e.g. the German absolute October heat record on the 7th).
Can we have a few links to back your Oracle at Delphi like statements? I Googled October weather in Germany and could only come up with this: “All-time October low recorded in Bavaria” http://www.thelocal.de/society/20091020-22693.html
You seem to be unable to grasp the simple fact that warm weather is desirable, cold weather harmful, specially in the higher latitudes of the world. The little ice age wiped out the Vikings in Greenland and reduced the population of Iceland by 35%. It has also been implicated as a factor in the Bubonic Plague which killed off 35-50% of Europe. http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS105562+09-Oct-2009+PRN20091009
The second concept you should try and grasp is climate varies naturally and trying to control it by reducing pitiful amounts of CO2 by shutting down power generation and industry is akin to the Chinese astrologers beating their drums during a solar eclipse to make the dragon disgorge the sun.
Akin because it is equally ridiculous, futile and irrelevant but far more harmful and hence stupid.
Notice the warming around the urban corridors.
” Basil (06:35:16) : ”
Thanks for that, I have bookmarked it. One thing I noticed … compare the anomaly in Canada with the anomaly in Eurasia. You can see what looks like a phase difference. When the cold air spills down into Canada, it appears that warmer air is pulled up across central Russia. When the anomaly goes warm in Canada, it appears to go cold in Russia. All if this is sort of what I would expect to see. If cold air spills down out of the polar region, warmer air must be coming from somewhere to replace it.
And one thing people should be aware of about averages: The temperature is rarely “average”. An average is just that, an average over time. Temperature is usually warmer or cooler than “average”. An average is not a mean or a mode. It is quite possible to never have a month that matches the “average” temperature. You will also find that periods of unusually cold weather are often closely followed by periods of unusually warm and vice versa. Unusually wet weather by periods of unusually dry, etc.
In Central MN, the anti-traditional rollercoaster continues. Fighting the trend since June, November is mild and dry.
“”” DaveF (08:06:41) :
Doug in Seattle 06: 54: 44:
“Bugger off” is considered pretty mild swearing in the UK nowadays – much less offensive than something else which ends in “off”. I’m surprised to see an American write it, though (although this is not the first time AW has used it), because I didn’t think it was used in the US. Well, you learn something every day, if you’re not careful! “””
Well Doug, I believe that Anthony was simply several chess moves ahead of you on this one.
“bugger off”; being akin to “scram” or “shoo” for Kiwi, Aussies, and Limeys alike; and Anthony was simply adressing Peter in terms he would well understand; my guess is to make him feel at home here.
I revert to “g’day Mate” when talking to fellow Kiwi folk or Aussies; but don’t usually use that with my American friends. I tend to be bilingual in idiom; having grown up on a pretty good mixed diet of Hollywood, and J. Arthur Rank.
Even after all these years, I have a hard time telling the two apart; and you may notice that I inadvertently spray a good deal of British spelling around in my posts, with a lot of esses, where WE use zees here in America; I do admit to having lost the zeds some time ago.
So no harm Mate; Anthony was just warming up for Peter’s benefit.
JP (05:08:51) : “It would be interesting to hear what large scale patterns caused both Western Europe and North America to have such a cold, wet October. However, it does appear that El Nino is strengthening…”
Here’s a clue:
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm
Arctic ice extent, after a fairly decent recovery relative to 2007, has edged closer to the 2007 trace (or vice versa!). It appears that 2009 will pass under “the knot” where all recent years converge (Arctic ice is geographically constrained). It would appear that heat is being smeared from the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere up into the Arctic.
Delayed Arctic freeze-up will result in higher-than- normal heat loss there as we enter the darkest northern months. I’d expect either record Arctic ice formation rates this winter or a hideously cold NH.
Seemingly in accord with the record colds experienced by the Southern Hemisphere in June/July. Hmmmm. Global trend towards a cooling off the 20 year warm?
Patrick Davis (05:52:01) :
Well, it’s “warm” on the East coast of Aus, Sydney, certainy not unusual, but humid, 85%+.
Predictions are for 42c next Monday. We’ll see. Seems like a “usual” spring/summer change going on, but a cool flow is, predcited, coming the week after.
Hey Pat have you loooked over the border to South Aus? we are having a record breaking november heatwavew..basically very hot January/ Feb weather here
This should be studied in depth. I think it gives insights, in a small scale way, what the onset of ice advance might look like. Imagine if this happened not only for a month, but month after month, for several decades.
Quote of the week for me.
DaveE.
“bugger off” would still be rude to a kiwi or aussie, even if mildly so. Depends on the context. If used by a mate at a pub it could be like an expression “oh come off it” or “you’re joking”. Not to be confused with “oh bugger” or just bugger, which is a mild expletive here, something like “oh damn”, commonly used, though perhaps not quite Queen’s etiquette.
George E. Smith (09:35:39) :
I’d be careful with J. Arthur Rank! I know what you mean but a J. Arthur is rhyming slang for a word sounding like rank. 😉
DaveE.
4 billion (10:04:51) : ..Hey Pat have you loooked over the border to South Aus? we are having a record breaking november heatwavew..basically very hot January/ Feb weather here
Yep it is blistering hot there. But 4 billion thats just the weather. The climate says the past months temperatures have been normal to cool. Past 12 months normal mostly.
Tell me when the temperature reaches 4 billion.
Well, I live in Ohio, and I don’t remember a day where it hit 70. It has been in the mid/upper 60s, but I don’t remember a 70. Still, given June, July, August, September, and October here in Ohio, November was bound to be warm. I am already stocking up on the salt. Colder, wetter. If that happens again in December, we will get a ton of snow. Only if it is warmer than last winter, though. Last winter we had ice storms. The ice was so bad that walking was nearly impossible across sidewalks that had not been salted. I literally sat on a cardboard box and pushed once, slid for about 5-10 yards and a first down.
Still, got quite a few warm days on tap here, so I wouldn’t be surprised at all if November ends up high across the country.
Richard (10:06:52) :
“bugger off” would still be rude to a kiwi or aussie,
When I was young. My mum, who was born in 1926, used to use the phrase (and then apologise because children were present (including me)).
I think nowadays in the UK the kids (that includes anyone under 30 BTW), do not really use it and have hardly ever heard it being used. In times gone by, ‘bugger off’ had a very mild (leave me alone) usage. Now it would have the PC police after you big time and you would be hounded as anti-gay.
jorgekafkazar (09:50:19) :
Your comments about the Arctic Sea Ice is part of concern.Heat loss.Cold air,
and the Polar jet makes me very nervous about the coming winter.El Nino
is not going to be as big a factor this year…
Isn’t this what we could expect?
Cosmic radiation is at record levels, so we have more clouds than normal.
More clouds reflect incoming radiation more, so the air gets cooler.
Meanwhile, the oceans are still warm, so more evaporation and more clouds mean more rain.
The sunspots are still not there, the magnetic field is declining, so we can expect more of the same for a few more years.
RR Kampen: what you say about Scandinavia isn’t quite right: The northernmost part of Norway was AFAIK slightly above normal because of above normal SST in the arctic. Southeast Norway (Oslo) was well below normal, and drier than normal. I.e. A wonderful October with lots of sunshine, golden trees and cold nights with hoarfrost in the morning.
It seems most of the US has experienced temperature variation recently that just happens to line up with calendar dates. So we have very warm or very cold months. So far November is following the trend and will be warm. Does that mean December will be cold?
It’s kind of like a hockey game in slow motion where one side heads down the ice to the cheers of their fans and then the other side gets the puck, heads the other way and the cheers come from their fans.
SteveSadlov (10:06:00) : :”This should be studied in depth. I think it gives insights, in a small scale way, what the onset of ice advance might look like. Imagine if this happened not only for a month, but month after month, for several decades.”
Probably won’t happen that way. Negative feedbacks usually act to swing the temperature pendulum back the other way. An overall trend may exist, but it will not be visible over the short run. The ocean has to cool for any persistent anomaly to become established. The ocean is 1160 times as big a heat-sink as the atmosphere.
No problem with the map colors, folks. If we think of “normal” as a precise temperature, rather than a range, then the line dividing the pink areas and the light blue areas (ranges), represents the “normal” points. Hope this is some help for those who miss the non-existent “white” areas.
Mark Fawcett (02:16:06) :
Sorry OT (long) – BBC Radio 4’s “Today” programme (their top slot morning, serious news affair) just had Ian Plimer on… I nearly crashed the car.
Mark — brilliant letter. We all ought to be regularly contacting news media and politicians with this kind of input. It may feel like a “pebble in the ocean,” but we must make any effort we can to counter the insanity that otherwise will consume us — and, make no mistake, such insanity CAN consume our civilization — it has happened before and will probably happen again, but we can’t just roll over and let it happen. We cannot assume “The Enlightenment” is a permanent feature of Western Civilization. It is only permanent if we make it so by denying those who prefer the world be driven by myth and unscientific belief. Luddites, Malthusians, and Communists will always be with us; however, they must be marginalized because their ideas do not work or add to human happiness; quite the contrary.
More details on Scandinavian weather: Even the North Sea city of Kristiansand on the south tip of Norway had an October 1.7°C below normal: http://www.yr.no/place/Norway/Vest-Agder/Kristiansand/Kristiansand/statistics.html
Hammerfest, close to the North Cape, was a mere 0.1°C above normal:
http://www.yr.no/place/Norway/Finnmark/Hammerfest/Hammerfest/statistics.html
And the southernmost part of Scandinavia, Denmark, had a very cold October too, 1.2°C below the 1961-1990 normal, and 4.3°C below the record warm October 2006:
http://www.dmi.dk/dmi/vejret_i_danmark_-_oktober_2009
I don’t know where RR Kampen got his information from, but it contradicts official Norwegian and Danish statistics.
“”” DaveE (10:16:35) :
George E. Smith (09:35:39) :
I’d be careful with J. Arthur Rank! I know what you mean but a J. Arthur is rhyming slang for a word sounding like rank. 😉
DaveE. “””
Well Dave I must be living under a haystack; because I don’t have even the faintest glimmer of an idea of what the blazes you are referring to.
Suffice it to say that J Arthur Rank, was and maybe still is the largest British movie film producer; but then that was 50 years ago so who knows now.
If the name happens to have some other connotation to other people for evidently some reason you don’t even feel you want to disclose; then that is THEIR problem to deal with; not mine.
One thing I am not ever going to do is try to rearrange the whole English language; or even the American translation of it; to suit some mental blockage that happens in other people’s minds.
If it is in the OED or even in Websters; I am going to use it to mean exactly what those authorities say it means; and I won’t be changing any time soon to suit any person’s or groups hijacking of the language to corrupt its meaning.
I won’t be using any artificially created neuter or euphemistic words to tip toe around somebody else’s self imposed sensitivity to the language; as I say; those problems are in their heads; not mine; so they will have to deal with them.
When a person is under guard in hospital recovering from gunshot wounds inflicted on him; while he was in the act of brandishing a pair of special laser sighted killer guns, and taking down some 50 people with them; fourteen of them fatally; I am not going to describe him as an alleged anything. Alleged is what computer climate models generate; what a hundred or so eye witnesses observe, and what a hospital bed contains, is NOT (to me) an alleged anything; he’s at least a terrorist and if the CIC of those many victims is too damn dumb to see that; he should resign and let somebody competent do the job; even the dummy who is waiting in the wings should that ever be necessary.
If special interest groups of any ilk, want to take over portions of the language as if they are their property; and then bastardize the meaning of those words to suit their own ends; well then WE will have communication problems; because I’m not joining the parade.
when I click on those two “picture” above, I just get links to a blank page; well on my browser anyway, so I have no idea what is in those two pictures.
November has been warm here so far, but a sizable cooldown is expected next week.
Also, for those who spend all their time tracking the weather, Intellicast has a new high tech toy to watch things like temps, SST’s, and cloud cover (to see if Svensmark’s theory is working or not), this should allow for better weather guesses for hobbyists, enthusiasts, and scientists alike.
http://www.intellicast.com/Local/Map.aspx?weather=tempcon
Living in Kansas I can’t resist:
It was worse than I thought!
Richard (10:35:10) :
Yep it is blistering hot there. But 4 billion thats just the weather. The climate says the past months temperatures have been normal to cool. Past 12 months normal mostly.
Tell me when the temperature reaches 4 billion.
Agree its a weather pattern but we in the lower parts of Australia are seeing more of it. We only have been here 200 years so its hard to know, but some of the records we are breaking now happened around the start of last century at a time of lower sunspot activity. Maybe if its not about TSI and more about other solar impacts the pressure cells over our part of the world are following a different pattern that sets up these unusual weather events. The current high pressure cells are not like we usually get.
This is probably the normal El Nino cycle hey, USA is cool so Australia will be warm this summer?
Harold Ambler (07:45:16) : From the report:
“Florida was the only state to have an above normal temperature average in October. It was the sixth consecutive month that the Florida’s temperature was above normal, resulting in the third warmest such period (May-October).”
Let’s see….. we had very little effects from tropical storms and no hurricanes so the period lacked the cooling effect of those. We had a consistant wind pattern from the west that kept a lot of tropical air away limiting afternoon thunderstorms. That same wind pattern also blocked several fronts coming down from the Midwest that usually bring some atmospheric destabilization, rain and slightly cooler temps. I wonder if this is consistant with a year when an El Nino is developing?
“No problem with the map colors, folks. If we think of “normal” as a precise temperature,”
If normal was a “precise” number, there would be no need to take an average, everyone would know precisely what the normal temperature for their area for every day of the year. We could program that precise temperature, that normal temperature, into our laptops and with the clock and gps available on the computer, we would know precisely what the precise normal temperature is for every moment…
NSF Press Release 09-222 November 12, 2009
Record Highs Far Outpace Record Lows Across U.S.
Spurred by a warming climate, daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade across the continental United States, new research shows.
The ratio of record highs to lows is likely to increase dramatically in coming decades if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to climb.
Blimey, what manner of new fangled meaningless statistic is this?
Speaking of the ‘normal’ map… I believe that + or – two degrees from the average is a pretty good description of the warm phase of the PDO, of course normal would be a little lower for the cool phase.
So the light blue and the pink in the map above are probably a pretty good indicator of October normals for the last thirty years
As is ice in hot water will melt and the water will cool — Earth is warming and icecaps are melting, but the lower latitudes are cooling because of the icebergs and hence less hurricanes to form in the cooler waters. Eventually global warming will cause global cooling because of the conveyor belt of water will have stopped significantly. When the conveyor belt becomes stagnate the earth will start to freeze as water is one of the major driving forces of earths climate. Also, all of the planets in the solar system are heating up indicating humans are not the cause of the global warming.
This is the kind of “extreme weather” we’re likely to see more often in a warming world, lol,
Link to Ian Plimer interview audio:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00np17v
Starts around 2:52:00.
Mark Fawcett (02:16:06) : fantastic letter, mate. Very well written.
Grant in Melbourne, Australia
L (11:34:35) :
I’d rather think of normal as something akin to within +/- 1 standard deviation of average, and average to be a precise temperature. Exactly how to determine the average is can be a subject of major dispute over sample size, time period and statistics.
If the average high temperature for some date is 25°, then almost certainly I’d expect that some year when the temperature is 26° or 24° it would still be considered normal weather instead of abnormally warm or cool.
jon doe (16:23:12) :
So far, everyone who has made that claim hasn’t been able to back it up with a good source of data or papers supporting that claim. (Mars may be an exception,
but it’s only one planet.)
References would be very welcome!
Ric Werme (17: 25:49) I posted a study done of Neptune over 30 years that showed warming. Leif Svalgaard dismissed it saying that it represented only 2 months “Neptune Time”. I do not believe that his dismissal changed the fact that Neptune has been warming for 30 years (albeit earth time). Found this “antique” during a google search. Lockwood and Hammel study. http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/2007/05/global_warming_on_neptune.html
It may be a heat wave in several areas of Aussie right now, but it isn’t crossing the ditch to New Zealand. Two frosts this week here on the Manawatu plains just to top up a record breaking year for frosts in the past three decades.
As a Kiwi I think that Anthony’s use of “bugger off,” was quite appropriate in the circumstances, i.e. the recipient would have understood perfectly the intent of the message.
Goodonyamate!
Only just caught up after a busy week.
Hot in Sth Australia, delightfully cool here in Nth coastal Queensland, due to strong SE trades, heavy cloud, and heavy rain. Many official reports of from 2 to 8 degrees C below normal. Just had 185 mm of beautiful rain to end a long dry spell.
“Bugger” used to be considered a mild swear word here, definitely not for polite conversation, so the “bugger” ad for Toyota a couple of years ago caused much hand wringing for us teachers- every kid was trying it out at school. “Buggered” means worn out, finished, tired, no good any more, upter. Euphemism for the f word (check the dictionary meaning).
What about record cloudiness. Texas shattered the old record in October.
My friend lives in Minneapolis and I did notice the cold weather in October, but it does seem to show a nice warm November up to now, even more so than the UK! It will be interesting to see the November graphic for comparison on WUWT.
Andy
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/get-file.php?report=national&image=timeseries01&byear=2009&bmonth=10&year=2009&month=10&ext=gif&id=110-00
looks like a hockey stick to me!!!!!!
only this one scares the poop out of me.
With the Georgia Tech land use study in mind couldn’t October 2009 really have been the coldest October ever on record?
Did Pyramid Lake in Nevada turn pink?
😉
All that red in Florida reminds me of that land use study from Florida State :
That evidence leads Winsberg and FSU meteorologists to blame the hot spots on local land-use changes that accentuate the urban “heat-island” effect — the pools of heat that large, dense concentrations of people produce in their local climates. Cutting down trees, draining wetlands and pouring concrete all make a place hotter, as anyone who’s walked across an asphalt parking lot on a summer day knows, Winsberg says.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/02/10/floridatrend-its-hot-but-dont-blame-global-warming/
Richard (02:52:47) :
janama (00:12:40) : Sure – you are having colder starts to winter and we are having a warmer start to summer down in the southern hemi.
It’s called climate change – as it does.
Not where I am. The whole of NZ is cooler than normal.
What I think is going on here is just the “Lava Lamp Effect”. We have a decade or three of heating the oceans, now, suddenly, the poles have gone cold with the various quiet sun and PDO flip. Lots of heat radiating out to space.
Now you have extra heat at the equator and extra cold at the poles. The blobs of hot air (and water?) headed for the poles and cold blobs headed for the equator are each more extreme than “a while ago”. And depending which side of the interface between the blobs you are on, it’s rather warm, or OMG Get the Jacket and Light The Furnace!
IMHO, as time passes and the cold phase continues, this will eventually slow down into a generally colder world. I’d guess about 10 to 15 years from now. (There is a lot of heat to move and air is not all that good at it…).
Per Florida: We didn’t have any hurricanes to speak of. They are the pipelines taking Gulf hot water heat to space. No hurricanes, water stays warm, Florida stays warm… (Until the blobs flow…)
Sidebar: TWC forcasting “Winter Storm Warning” with snow for Denver and related mountain areas… It’s THE BLOB from Cananda! 9-)
Per “Bugger”: if it’s been on TV in commercials, it’s lost it’s “punch”.
And I’m with George on the more obscure innuendo. If it’s in the OED, I’m using it. I’ll not be niggardly in my use of all the words available to me and in their proper meaning. If somebody has a problem from the fantasies in their head, those fantasies are not coming into my head. I’m just not into the PC thing and do not let it have entry to my brain. (It is very important to keep a tidy mind and I don’t have enough room in mine to keep track of every persons sensitivities. Heck, I can’t even keep all their names straight.)
FWIW English has a perfectly natural non-gender pronoun already. “They”. As in: ‘My cousin is coming to town and they like beer’. No need to invent any neo-tripe… You get a little confusion of number (Is “they” plural or singular?) that you pick up from context or just accept as being vague in both number and gender.
You just can’t let the lowest common denominator set the usage rules for the language. If you do, then the most insane and imbalanced in the society are given power over the rest; since they are the folks who will have the most “issues” based on nothing… Rather similar to the way AGW as a belief disorder is about to cause the rest of us no end of economic grief. When it comes to broken belief systems, of all kinds: Just Say No. Do it for the children and the Planet 😉
For example, I don’t like the name “blood sausage”. Do you all get to come up with some euphemism acceptable to me, or do I just “get over it”? I vote for ‘get over it’… (though I won’t eat it… strangely, I love liverwurst even though it is made from ‘a blood organ’… It’s a long story involving growing up in farm country).
Back on weather: Is there any metric for differential surface temperatures between sides of the jet stream (and whatever the SH equivalent might be?).
One of my gripes about an “average temp for the USA or N.America” is that it blends the two sides of the heat engine. I want to know how much heat differential is driving that engine not what the average is between the fire and the ice… One tells me how much power that heat engine can wield, the other tells me nothing.
About planets warming up: search for Triton, it has also been shown to be warming. However, I haven’t seen any news on Mars or Triton warming for a couple of years.
Is no one going to comment on the Arctic Ice levels
– lower than 2007!
Quote:
George E. Smith (09:35:39) :
I’d be careful with J. Arthur Rank! I know what you mean but a J. Arthur is rhyming slang for a word sounding like rank. 😉
Well Dave I must be living under a haystack; because I don’t have even the faintest glimmer of an idea of what the blazes you are referring to.
Endquote.
I don’t thınk Cockney rhymıng slang ıs bıg ın the USA. It ıs (was) the tradıtıonal East End London language. Trouble ıs, the language of East London ıs no longer Cockney, ıts Bengalı.
Example:
Trouble and strıfe – wıfe
Bees and honey – money
Oxford scholar – dollar
Barnet faır – haır
So you could say:
”My trouble has got some Oxford bees to get her barnett done.”
And I thınk the noun of ‘Arthur’ ıs ‘Merchant’
.
Phil M: The relatively low sea ice is mainly due to high SST in the Barents Sea, I think. The Barents Sea has been in a “warm mode” for a few years now. The Barents sea temperature is correlated to the AMO:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/08/new-paper-barents-sea-temperature-correlated-to-the-amo-as-much-as-4°c/
– and the AMO is high but may have peaked in 2005, according to Bob Tisdale (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/10/countdown-to-an-unprecedented-warm-decade-2-months-to-go/)
Jet stream moving into a familiar pattern this weekend:
Here comes the cold.
http://www.accuweather.com/news-story.asp?partner=rss&traveler=0&article=7
About October weather in Germany:
http://www.dwd.de/bvbw/appmanager/bvbw/dwdwwwDesktop?_nfpb=true&_pageLabel=dwdwww_menu2_presse&T98029gsbDocumentPath=Content%2FPresse%2FPressemitteilungen%2F2009%2F20090929__DeutschlandwetterimOktoberr2009__news.html
Executive summary: Very varying, but all in all 0.7 below normal. New October heat record, 30.9 degrees in Freiburg. The old record, also from Freiburg, was 0.1 degrees lower and from October 1985.
I have to add, as someone who has stayed in Freiburg several times, that extremely warm weather at unusual times in Freiburg is hardly sensational. Due to the proximity to the Alps, and thus the “Föhn” wind, the weather in Freiburg can turn from winter to summer and back again in a few hours.
(I think they use 1961-1990 for the “normal” temperature, which, I think was all in all a pretty cold period in Germany, colder than e.g. 1910-1940, at least for some stations)
In the 1960’s in New Hampshire a “bugger” (noun) was any person, but usually a child. Telling someone to “bugger off” meant they should scram or get lost. To “bugger up” a job meant you had botched the job.
When I went to school in Scotland in 1970 I learned I should not use the word bugger, because a “Bugger” (noun) meant someone guilty of sodomy, and to “bugger” (verb) meant to sodomize. I actually got in trouble for using the word, back then, and weeded it out of my vocabulary.
I give NCDC credit for not sugar coating this report. They could have easily pulled a NSIDC.
Gene Nemetz (23:00:18) : I live in Florida and believe me, we have been having an endless summer up until now.
That’s not global warming related at all. These things just happen from time to time.
Yes, a few years ago there was an official decision by the New Zealand media watchdog that the word “bugger” is OK to use. So definitely appropriate to use it to reply to a NZer.
On the temperature gradient map, the colors are all either “warm” or “cool”. Considering the uncertainty of the measurements, I would draw such a map with a white band in the middle, representing -1 to +1 degrees, i.e. “average” temperature. That NOAA does not do so indicates a lean to alarmism, I think.
We all know that if it happens in the US, that’s all that matters, right? I mean, we ARE the world, aren’t we? Get real, folks, and show the worldwide temperatures, not just US. This means nothing!
Kerry: The worldwide temperatures are right here on the right side of the page 🙂 (in Anthony’s weather widget)
Kerry (11:26:22) : ..Get real, folks, and show the worldwide temperatures, not just US. This means nothing!
Well how about this: “In China, heavy snowfall has led to the deaths of 38 people in road accidents and collapsed buildings, state-run media have reported.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8358162.stm
In Australia its blistering hot other places cool. Thats weather. No need to rush to the conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 done it.
Regarding arctic sea ice, while the area appears to be among the lowest in history (i.e., since satellite days), the DMI polar temperature, while much higher than usual, is still minus 20°C. Do we know if the water is warmer than usual this year?
IanM
timetochooseagain (10:01:52) :
I’m not saying it’s been mild there. I am saying temperature readings are off. Regardless of what summer is like there land use is still affecting temp readings. I think there would be less red in the map making readings closer to average if UHI was subtracted out.
PS you guys in South Australia moaning about the heat – I’ve solved the cause of it. No its not those microscopic amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere – its actually hot water from the Indian ocean arriving and piling up on your shores.
Watch it here. http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/ml/ocean/sst/anom_anim.html
The waters arrive around the 5th of November and suddenly you move into a heat wave.
Looks like there might be an update to the US temperature for October.
The State of the Climate National Overview indicates that “the average October temperature of 50.8°F” is based on preliminary data.
The monthly state temperatures file on the NCDC FTP site shows October for the lower 48 at 51.30, a half a degree difference. Notice the 11th column of the last line of the relevant file at
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cirs/drd964x.tmpst.txt
1100022009 31.20 37.50 43.80 51.90 62.60 69.50 73.50 72.70 67.10 51.30 -99.90 -99.90
51.3 degree vs. 50.8 degrees. The ftp file appears to be dated November 10, the day after the State of the Climate National Overview was created. Perhaps the difference reflects more up to date data.
The half-a-degree difference only affects the ranking slightly. According to the FTP site, October 2009 at 51.30 is in 4th place, behind October 1917 at 51.0.
Oddly, the Climate Summary page for the Contiguous US at
(http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/na.html cont) indicates that it uses the above named file on the FTP site to generate reports upon request. However, creating a report for October still shows the 50.8 degrees for 2009.
More evidence you’re confusing local weather with global climate: the most recent NOAA data shows that GLOBALLY, October 2009 was the 6th warmest on record. and year-to-date, it’s the 5th warmest year on record–and the El Nino is just starting to kick in. Can you spot the global cooling?
http://akwag.blogspot.com/2009/11/cold-october-can-you-spot-global.html
LOL at all those huge red dots in NW Canada
The closest station I can find is Whitehorse A
http://climate.weatheroffice.gc.ca/climate_normals/results_e.html?Province=YT%20%20&StationName=&SearchType=&LocateBy=Province&Proximity=25&ProximityFrom=City&StationNumber=&IDType=MSC&CityName=&ParkName=&LatitudeDegrees=&LatitudeMinutes=&LongitudeDegrees=&LongitudeMinutes=&NormalsClass=A&SelNormals=&StnId=1617&&autofwd=0
It show an October mean of 0.51 degrees that is .09 degrees cooler than the 1971-2000 value of 0.6 degrees
http://climate.weatheroffice.gc.ca/climate_normals/results_e.html?Province=YT%20%20&StationName=&SearchType=&LocateBy=Province&Proximity=25&ProximityFrom=City&StationNumber=&IDType=MSC&CityName=&ParkName=&LatitudeDegrees=&LatitudeMinutes=&LongitudeDegrees=&LongitudeMinutes=&NormalsClass=A&SelNormals=&StnId=1617&&autofwd=0
Amazing how many people are still swallowing the manmade global warming thing. I thought there were going to be monster hurricanes in the new climate.
This hurrican season was one of the quietest I have seen in my lifetime.