From the “weather is not climate” department. 815 new snowfall records, 304 low temperature, and 403 lowest max temperature records were set this week.
Here’s a summary:
| Record Events for Sun Dec 6, 2009 through Sat Dec 12, 2009 | |
| Total Records: | 2601 |
| Rainfall: | 992 |
| Snowfall: | 815 |
| High Temperatures: | 36 |
| Low Temperatures: | 304 |
| Lowest Max Temperatures: | 403 |
| Highest Min Temperatures: | 51 |
Data from NOAA via the HW map generator
UPDATE: Puzzled by the single odd record high temperature in West Texas of 80F in Sheffield, TX on Dec 9th, I called the NWS office in Midland/Odessa, TX to ask about it today (Monday). The meteorologist on duty was very helpful. While he first throught it may by a typo, perhaps a 3 that got turned into an 8 on a report, a review of the synoptic conditions that day revealed some very strong southerly winds ahead of the Arctic cold front that day. At a pass in the Pecos, winds were clocked at 112mph. Thus it appears that this station go a brief benefit of some very strong warming southerly wind.
I’ve seen this effect happen before. In fact it can result in a record or near record high temperature being achieved on the same day as a record or near record low temperature if the front is moving fast enough and has a strong temperature gradient.
The record high there does not appear to be in error. – Anthony
warmers better start praying for sunspots 😉
Simple. Those are the effects of strong winds from the north which are in turn an indirect effect of previous warming. You are going to see all kinds of extremes. (Kidding this time.)
They may have missed some records. I thought the lack of rainfall records broken was strange, what with all the slippery stuff falling this last week.
http://www.mydesert.com/article/20091208/NEWS09/912080319/Record-rainfall-could-be-followed-by-second-storm-Thursday
“According to the National Weather Service, 1.12 inches of rain was recorded at the Palm Springs International Airport as of 8 p.m., surpassing the previous 1992 record of 0.90 inches on the same day.”
http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/news/breaking_news/story/942599.html
“The record came at midnight Saturday after more than 2 inches fell during the day.
The recent rains have pushed the city’s total to 73.63 inches since Jan. 1, according to the National Weather Service office in Peachtree City, Ga. That breaks the previous mark of 73.22 inches set in 1964.”
http://www.delmarvanow.com/article/20091210/NEWS01/912100349
“More than 2 inches of rain fell on an already saturated Eastern Shore of Virginia…
December’s 4.28 inches already exceed the 69-year average of 3.42 inches for the month.”
http://sandiego.about.com/b/2009/12/08/record-rainfall-snow-blankets-county.htm
“In fact, it set a record as 1.38 inches of rain fell at Lindbergh Field, topping the previous record for a Dec. 7 of 1.15 inches, set in 1992, the NWS reported.”
It’s what kind of weather in what kind of years that matters, Leon.
And it matters when it happens.
Shifting winter into fall and late spring is a telling statistic.
Tells me what kind of a year it is.
Come of folks… you can’t believe this weather rubbish. The raw data need to be homogenised and have some value added before they can be taken seriously…
Anyone live near Sheffield, Texas where the lone red dot in Texas is? I’m wondering where that temperature station is located.
A bit nippy here in Seattle too… I see some red dots down in FL. Time for a trip to the keys…
“Young described the icebergs as uncommon, but said they could become more frequent if sea temperatures rise through global warming.”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091211/wl_afp/australiaantarcticaiceberg
Something tells me that this is just a local NH hemisphere event. All those snow records? Not at all indicative of a lack of warming. The warming is there. It is in the pipeline. The pipeline is just a little frozen at the moment.
The independent newspaper has the truth about sunspot activity (not)…
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/sunspots-do-not-cause-climate-change-say-scientists-1839867.html
NA is not the only place experiencing a bit of a chill, Sydney, Australia today is ~8c below average. But this is only weather of course.
Environment Canada recorded a frigid -46.1 C, or -58.4 C with wind chill, at the Edmonton International Airport
How much colder does it have to get before the CO2 starts to fall out of the air like snow?
REPLY: It is not possible on Earth, due to the low partial pressure of CO2 becuase of its low concentration. This has been proven by experiment right here on WUWT.
Am I mistaken in the thought that if CO2 was as strong a greenhouse gas as they claim it is, that it would be in winter time, when the H2O in the air is lowest should be where we would be seeing the most record high temperatures?
This should help everyone. Snow anomoly for all of the northern hemisphere.
The amount of blue (extra snow), is unusual and has been so most of this fall.
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_daily.php?ui_year=2009&ui_day=347&ui_set=2
I know WUWT tracks Arctic ice anomoly. But this is fun too, especially when the Arctic is a bit low on ice still.
These kinds of extended sub-zero cold fronts may have been part of the oscillating ice damns in Canada that when broken, brought huge torrents of water down into the lower 48, flooding most of Washington, Montana, Idaho, and Oregon.
A side note, the rivers in Wallowa County are beginning to freeze so badly that they are rising above flood stage. One house near the river is stuck in a glassy ice yard that extends from the foundation to the fence. I have never seen that before.
Could we see a breakdown of these records by how years old the previous record was. If the globe has warmed yet 50+ year cold records are being broken then the climate has not warmed more than natural variability.
The first sign of any significant warming (ie. greater than natural variability) would be NO cold records at all.
Here is another sign of global warming…
The temperature at the Edmonton International Airport dipped to -46.1 C at its lowest point, smashing the -36.1 C record set in 2008.
http://www.metronews.ca/edmonton/local/article/396638–deep-freeze-shatters-temperature-records
All these recent articles showing an indication of cooling to come explains the “Circle of Commitment” (Circle the Wagons?) politics going on at Copenhagen.
They are trying to lock at least part of the world into their “New World Order” before the cooling becomes undeniable, even to the acolytes of their new religion.
(I once had a Politics Professor who said the simplest way to tell if a person was a Fascist was to ask about their view of the world. “If he wanted to construct a “New World Order” he was one, if he was happy with the current world order he was still sane.”)
There’s something wrong with NOAA’s “records”. Every time I look I find a problem. Looking at the current Ham weather map, it shows a record high min temp at Raystown Lake on 9 December of 43 degrees. That is probably wrong. Nearby stations are reporting 9 December lows of around 30F. The high temperature for 9 December in nearby Altoona was 44 so it looks like they might have got the min/max reversed or something.
NOAAs records are way screwed up.
Oh, and the above temperatures for Raystown Lake and Altoona are in Pennsylvania. That orange dot in south/central PA.
WMO:
Extreme storms and flooding
In January, 1.3 million square kilometres (km2)
in 15 provinces in southern China were covered
by snow. Persistent low temperature and
icing affected the daily lives of millions of
people who suffered not only from damage
to agriculture, but also from disruptions
in transpor t, energy supply and power
transmission.
In Canada, several all-time snowfall records
were set during winter, reaching more than
550 centimetres (cm) in many locations,
including Quebec City. In Toronto, it was the
third snowiest winter on record for the past
70 years. At the end of January, Prince Edward
Island was struck by one of the worst ice
storms in decades.
Sandy (22:47:27) :
mouse over the dots on map at link
http://mapcenter.hamweather.com/records/7day/us.html?c=maxtemp,mintemp,lowmax,highmin,snow
well here in chistchurch n.z i still have my heatpump on 2times a week and they say its summer . Today lighting and heavy hail in places air temp now 8.8c.
My 2009 – 2010 winter outlook, and why, link to all maps at bottom of comment.
One of the problems with the current models is the reference time frame is very narrow for initial conditions, and changes with in the past three days, a lot of times, will introduce presistance of inertia, to the medial flows, for several days, consistent with the actual flows, as the Lunar declinational atmospheric tides, make their runs across the equator from one poleward culmination to another.
Then as the tide turns and we have the severe weather bursts at declinational culmination, they get confused, or surprised, as the initial inertial effects reverse for about four days before the sweep to the other pole, that brings back the smooth flows, the models understand.
So that when the Lunar declination went to Maximum North on December 3rd, turbulence and shear introduced into the atmosphere, from the turning tide, (the models do not know about), surprised them with the usual couple of tornadoes. Now (12-13-09) that we are ~20 degrees South Lunar declination, the models have a full buffer, of five days of linear inertial movement, from the Moon’s trip South across the equator (12-09-09) and is slowing it’s movement.
Coming up on the Southern extent culmination, producing a secondary tidal bulge in the Northern Hemisphere, bringing us to the mid point of a 27.32 day declinational cycle (one of the four routine patterns that cycle on an 109.3 day period). This particular one (#1) that started back on Dec 3rd, has incursions of polar air masses that come down from Western Canada, through Montana and the Dakotas, to make up the Northern part of the atmospheric tidal bulge.
So I would expect to see a large invasion of cold dry air sweep almost all the way to the Gulf coast again, then the produced frontal boundary with the interesting weather, that includes change state intense precipitation. Freezing rain, where the warm over runs cold, and snow where the cold undercuts the more sluggish warm air, still moving North East by inertia alone, severe weather to form in that trailing edge of the warm moist mass, that gets over taken from behind by the polar air mass that tries to follow the tidal bulge back to the equator, which for the next 4 of 5 days powers up the cyclonic patterns generated by carolis forces, and finishes out as the Moon approaches the equator again.
Expect the same type of interaction again for a primary bulge production by the passage back North, culminating on 12-30-09, pumping in a solid polar air mass very consistent with the pattern we had on 12-03-09, (the North “lunar declination culmination”)[LDC], then (#2) the next Rossby wave / jet stream regime pattern, comes back into play with much more zonal flow, and air masses invading from the Pacific, (of the two sub types of) phase with lesser amounts of Gulf moisture entrainment in this one, more in the other #4.
The (#3) third 27.32 day pattern with polar air masses invading in from the Minnesota / Great Lakes area and sweeping out through the Eastern sea board, and mostly zonal flow out west, from 01-27-10 till 02-23-10, comes next.
The fourth 27.32 day cycle, that looks very similar to #2 but with much more moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, usually has more hail and tornadoes associated with it than Pattern #4, and typically flows up Eastern side of tornado alley. Will be in effect from 02-23-10 through 03-22-10, and should produce the first big surge of severe tornado production, from about March 20th 2010, until about March 26 or later as the Next polar air mass cycle is coming out of western Canada, and should make for steep temperature gradients, and ion content differences.
Richard Holle
Link to site with the daily maps for the next 4 years.
http://www.aerology.com/national.aspx
It’s one of the paradoxical effects of Global Warming that, as the climate keeps getting warmer and warmer, the weather keeps getting colder and colder.
Heard a guy on the CBC saying the science of CO2 and climate change are long known (and settled), first in 1952 when President Johnston commissioned a large study on it. Didn’t mention it was thought to be driving cooling for most of that time, and got a complete pass from the interviewer of course.
That said the guy was a self described green advocate and scientist (not sure how he keeps those separate) and yet he said that the ‘catastrophe scenarios’ are basically very overstated. Also if he had one dollar to make the world a better place, he’d spend zero on climate change.
It seems to me there is a bit of a retreat from hysteria in both the ‘science’ and media. I think the worry is (besides the imminent failure in Denmark) that this may turn to a ‘cold fusion’ situation. Aka zero ‘climate change’ funding for 30 years plus. Seeing as there isn’t a lot of work in the public sector for people that bad at math and ethics (esp since the financial industry collapse) maybe they are looking for a soft landing.