UPDATE: The East coast snowstorm seen from space
The Mid-Atlantic states were completely white on Sunday, December 20, 2009, in the wake of a record-breaking snow storm. The storm deposited between 12 and 30 inches of snow in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. on December 19, according to the National Weather Service. For many locations, the snowfall totals broke records for the most snow to fall in a single December day.
The storm shut down the federal government in Washington DC, stranded travelers, left hundreds of thousands without power and sharply cut holiday sales the weekend before Christmas.
From the “weather is not climate” department here’s interesting news from the National Operational Hyrdologic Remote Sensing Center. While certainly not unprecedented or unusual, it is interesting, especially when comparing years past:
Indeed, it looks like a white Christmas for much of the USA. Here’s the data:
December 21, 2009
| Area Covered By Snow: | 51.7% |
| Area Covered Last Month: | 8.0% |
| Snow Depth | |
|---|---|
| Average: | 3.8 in |
| Minimum: | 0.0 in |
| Maximum: | 887.0 in |
| Std. Dev.: | 6.4 in |
| Snow Water Equivalent | |
| Average: | 0.7 in |
| Minimum: | 0.0 in |
| Maximum: | 435.0 in |
| Std. Dev.: | 1.4 in |
Their weather summary indicates more snow on the way:
One to 3 feet of snow fell in the western Plains yesterday, while up to 1/2 inch of freezing rain fell in the central Plains. The precipitation was in response to a potent upper low in the Southern Plains and an associated surface low, which caused upslope flow conditions. The heaviest snowfall amounts were observed in the Colorado Front Range and in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of New Mexico. Strong surface winds in these areas caused much blowing and drifting snow.
Most of the snowpack across the West and western Plains is cool, with cold conditions at the lower elevations of the Great Basin. In the central Plains, where rain and snow fell yesterday, the snowpack there is warm, but snowmelt occurred along the southeastern edge of the central U.S. snowpack. Very warm conditions exist on the windward side of the Cascades where warm onshore flow occurred yesterday; slow snowmelt occurred there. Strong surface winds caused high blowing snow sublimation in the Western Plains from southeastern Wyoming and the Nebraska panhandle southward to northeastern New Mexico.
The upper low, currently over the Central Plains, will move slowly northeastward during the next three days, passing through the Great Lakes region by Sunday. A surface low will accompany the system. Little additional deepening of the system is expected since it appears that dry air is wrapping around the system. But on the cold side of the low, about 1/2 foot of snowfall is expected today in northeastern Colorado through southwestern Minnesota today. Heavier amounts are expected in orographically-favored areas of the Western Plains and northern Front Range. Snowfall is expected in the eastern part of the Upper Midwest and south of western Lake Superior. Up to 1/2 foot of snowfall is possible in this band with higher amounts snowfall likely in northwestern Wisconsin and the Michigan Upper Peninsula.
A deep surface low just off the central British Columbia coast has a cold front extending southward through the Northwest. Onshore flow behind the cold front and midlevel dynamics associated with the front will bring up to a foot of snowfall to the Cascades, Intermountains, Northern Rockies, and northern Sierra Nevada today and from northwestern Wyoming through southern Utah tomorrow. Another front will bring 4 to 8 inches of snow to the Cascades on Saturday.
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Joe Romm has trouble making a distinction between warm and cold, and also conflates rain and snow into “precipitation”, as if they are both equivalent.
REF: http://climateprogress.org/2009/12/20/global-warming-copenhagen-snow-storm-blizzard-extreme-weather/
In any event, for Joe Romm, all weather is somehow indicative of man made global warming that will kill us all.
Not to mention – –
That I live in the High Plains of Wyoming – –
And it has been quite pleasant and warm.
When I saw the statement about three feet of snow –
I did a double-take. We get our news/weather feeds from Denver –
And there has been nary a word about a blizzard – even any snow.
So I checked the link which is in the text about the Western Plains.
It showed Burlington, Colorado as the center of snow activity.
I checked Burlington’s NOAA weather history the past 48 hours.
No snow – – warm. Then saw that the map was from 2006.
Not to mention that the initial snow cover map shows the High Plains as dry.
Anyone can make an error.
Even moi – as Miss Piggy was wont to say.
Thanks to those who mea culpaed.
Perry: If that thing had been driving eurostar, I am sure it would not have got stuck
Here is a clip of where the warmest’s are right now:
And now for some horrifying fallout from Copenhagen, courtesy of Andrew Bolt. Well worth the look.
gtrip (17:30:46) :
Here is a clip of where the warmest’s are right now:
I actually should have said: This is Joe Romm right now.
But they are one in the same, aren’t they?
Chuck L (14:22:43) :
“Joe Romm has a posting blaming the big weekend snowstorm on global warming. I know that global cooling is a far more serious matter than global warming but I am praying for a “little ice age” to shut up all of these AGW alarmists, especially Romm and his ilk.”
You can’t confuse these people with the facts, they’ve already prepared a theory to explain how global warming will trigger another ice age and made a movie on the premise.
We need to understand and accept that this is the modern equivalent of the Darwin vs Lysenko battle that occured in the Soviet Union in the mid 20th century. The LyAGWists are using the same tactics used by Lysenko: character assasination, professional exile, corruption of peer review, falsification of data, defunding, labelling opponents as mentally deranged, etc.
This is definitely a Global Antropogenic Climate Anomaly.
BTW, the idea of setting up a huge CO2-Cap’n’trade scam (Europe already has it and as Fox correctly pointed out, it doesn’t bring down emissions but generates windfall profits for heavy emitters, profits for VAT-Scammers and people who run the Carbon credit exchanges – oh, Fox missed the VAT scam, that would be about 5 bn euros damage) – well the benefit of that idea is: As CO2 has only a very slight influence on the total radiative forcing – about 4 W*m-2 for each doubling of the CO2 content according to the IPCC – they could run this scheme forever without interfering much with the ongoing natural variability. In other words, generate profits forever without ever solving or causing a problem with the climate – whether or not there was one in the first place. We might never know. I admire these people for their cunning.
John Egan (17:18:18) :
“Anyone can make an error.
Even moi – as Miss Piggy was wont to say.
Thanks to those who mea culpaed.”
What threw me in addition to referencing the map was “with an 06 following
It’s 2006” language, which I mistook as an error in understanding the timestamps on the maps. The “06” is the time of day.
“Mike B. (15:27:40) :
The links associated with “snow fell” and later “snowfall” are clearly from 2006, not 2009.”
And others…
Get off your thing and go check, just a couple of clicks. Select 2006 there and actually look. It’s very different.
Ok?
Hottest year in 1000 YEARS HAHAHAHAHHAHA
@ur momisugly Graeme From Melbourne (17:15:50) :
Yee-ouch, I see what you mean about Joe Romm.
Reference link.
“[JR: It ain’t cold. It’s the hottest friggin’ decade on record, probably in thousands of years.”
O-kay. Sure.
“For the record, for those among the duped who aren’t so inanely illogical, we’ve only warmed in the last several decades a bit over 1°F, which isn’t enough to turn December into July, but is enough to increase the incidence of extreme weather events, especially extreme precipitation events — and that includes extreme precipitation during the wintertime.
If we listen to your ilk, however, we’re going to warm 10°F over much of the United States this century, and your children will certainly figure out just how misled you have been.]”
So, for several decades we’ve had just over a degree F of warming, and If We Don’t Act NOW we will see more than 10 degrees F in 90 years? And during those decades we’ve been basically doing nothing but pumping out more CO2, for only that amount of rise? And the “hottest friggin’ decade on record, probably in thousands of years” involves just a fraction of “a bit over 1°F” warming from when those several decades started? Thus at the start of those several decades we were very very close to having the hottest decade in probably thousands of years right then?
climateprogress.org, meet logicretreat.org.
The result of any Global warming agreement will be to stop 3rd world countries developing. Maybe the British/American Governments believe it’s a long term method of keeping us on top? Of course it’s mistaken and the more development in the World,the better for all but with the nonsense economics currently holding sway it wouldn’t surprise me if it was the basic motivation behind it all.
Yesterday rotten sea ice. Today rotten snow.
Bill Murry captures the essence of the warmers – (from about 4:40 to 6:05)
Pretty good for January, oh wait……
If albedo were that large a factor in global climate, I would think events like these would cause some sort of tipping point. The fact that they don’t tells me climate sensitivity to anything except orbital changes (which directly affects energy received from the sun) is very low.
Hmm, I think this was originally to be an article comparing 2006 to 2009, but something was left out and mis-linked.
Monday, Dec 21; Colorado Springs; Fair, dry, 60 degrees F.
No snow here, but that is exactly what Climate Change theory would have predicted.
(Actually, snow predicted within 24 hours, but that is exactly what AGW theory would have predicted also.) [grin]
jmt (14:19:21) :
Why is there virtually no coverage of the dozens of people that have frozen to death in eastern Europe?
Do you have links please?
Huge NH albedo, just as the sun angle is starting its annual increase.
More than 80 dead in European winter weather.
Wonder how many “global warming” killed in the past year.
Dios mio, the aerology guy is here again!
Michael (15:49:18) :
The body count will be high on both sides.
People are dying because of optimists/deniers? Who are those?
AGW predicts more snow? I really don’t think it predicts earlier snow.