I don’t know if this is a record or not for Christmas coverage, but it is certainly reminiscent of the winter of 1977-78 where we had similar bouts of cold and snow. About 99% of Canada has snow cover also, with some parts of the Pacific Coast excepted, and it appears that all of Canada’s Lakes are frozen as indicated by the “yellow ice” in the photo. Here is the latest (Updated for 12/25/09) from NOAA:
From the National Operational Hyrdologic Remote Sensing Center here is the satellite snow depth map and the hard data on coverage:
December 25, 2009
| Area Covered By Snow: | 63.0% |
| Area Covered Last Month: | 10.4% |
| Snow Depth | |
|---|---|
| Average: | 5.0 in |
| Minimum: | 0.0 in |
| Maximum: | 889.2 in |
| Std. Dev.: | 7.0 in |
| Snow Water Equivalent | |
| Average: | 0.9 in |
| Minimum: | 0.0 in |
| Maximum: | 437.5 in |
| Std. Dev.: | 1.5 in |
Caleb (21:36:55) :
That is a beautiful, inspired and inspirational piece of writing. I have saved a copy on my desk top. I hadn’t heard of the concept of “Strange Attractors” before. Very interesting. I also live in New Hampshire, more in the middle part, in the small town of Pittsfield. We try to get a walk in every day, even in winter, enjoying the scenery, fresh air, and yes the clouds with their seemingly endless variations.
Pouring rain forecast in northern Vermont for Dec 27
Purakanui (00:08:45) : Watch this:
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sst_anom.html
Glenn (17:23:40) :
Speaking of forecasts and El Ninos,
“Expected El Niño impacts during December 2009-February 2010 include…Below-average snowfall and above-average temperatures are most likely across the northern tier of states (excluding New England), while below-average temperatures are favored for the southeastern states.”
So in Vermont-a warm November and early December forced ski areas to push back their openings by weeks due to an inability to make snow. The last 3 storms (with the exception of a squall just before Christmas) produced mixed ppt. Tomorrow heavy rain is forecast and it will ruin the critical holiday ski week. It is the same pattern that we have seen over the past decade or so in my opinion. A look at the World Climate Widget confirms the warm Nov temps. I see no evidence of a return to the old winters of yore.
Caleb (21:36:55)
That’s some really good stuff, you got any left?
Unfortunately, Toronto area is not following the weather pattern of the rest of the US. It rained yesterday on Christmas day…no snow this year compared to more than 2-feet last year, it is currently 35 F and cloudy right now, but no snow. Weird, but typical of Toronto. We usually get heavy snow in January and February.
Time lapse satellite visible image from 8:02 AM to 10:15 AM Friday, December 25th 2009 showing the snow and some light clouds moving over the snow-covered area; if the clouds had been heavier, a moving-image/time lapse series like this allows the cloud deck to be differentiated against the ground snow-cover:
Vis_Abi_2009-12-25_0802-1015_AMCST_00.gif
Courtesy of the services of: rap.ucar.edu and giftedmotion (GIF editor) and tinypic.com.
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The OtherDan (08:36:59) :
On the plus side (at least here in New Hampshire) there has been no hand wringing over the impending demise of the ski industry. What are your “old winters or yore”? Several recent years have had well above average snow depths at the Mt Mansfield snow stake, see for good years in the last 10, see my http://wermenh.com/sdd/index.html for summaries around New England for the last 12 years, see my http://wermenh.com/wx/winter_0708.html for a season that exceeded pretty much all of the local “years of yore” over the last century or so.
I’ll grant you that Killington not being open for Thanksgiving is remarkable, but I remember one Christmas around 1970 where we left a couple days after Christmas during a rain storm.
It won’t rain all week, and it won’t be a warm rain, so ski areas won’t be as badly impacted as they might, and it will be cold enough for snow making. Don’t expect consistency in New England weather!
Hi Chris –
Oops; not quite a ‘record heavy snow’ although it was 80 years since snow had last been seen on Christmas. We’ve had much, much heavier snows on a number of occasions though, just not this time. I speak this a +30 year resident.
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[Moderators N.B. – my last post is in the spam bucket, please rescue.]
Here’s a link to a chart of “Snow Depth Days” at the Mt. Mansfield (Stowe Vermont) snow stake – http://www.uvm.edu/~empact/data/gendateplot.php3?table=SummitStation&title=Mount+Mansfield+Summit+Station&xskip=7&xparam=Date&yparam=Depth&width=800&height=600&smooth=0&csv=0&totals=1
Very different “years of yore” if you are thinking of the 1950s vs. the 1960s.
Ken Roberts (09:02:14) :
The stuff is called Christmas Spirit, and there’s plenty to go around, although I’ll confess a jigger of rum in my eggnog did loosen my tongue a bit.
Bruce Cobb (06:17:07) :
In 1982 when I visited Santa Cruz some fellows at the University were very excited about the concept of “Strange Attractors.” There was a flurry of excitement about it, and a show on “Nova” a few years later, but I don’t think it ever attracted much funding. Like Bill Gray’s ideas concerning thermohaline circulation, it didn’t get much aid, with Hansen’s “Climate Science” wolfing all the available dollars.
The OtherDan (08:36:59) :
New England has fairly wide swings in winter temperatures. I remember a Christmas in the 1960’s where I was running around outside barefoot, in a mist of rain, playing with a toy helicopter I got as a gift (which soon wound up in a tree.) Then I lived to see my own boys running barefoot on green grass back around 1999 or 2000 on Christmas. However both winters brought heavy snow later on.
What will be interesting to see is what happens when the AMO reverts to a cold cycle.
The Duluth/Cloquet area up to Two Harbors area here in N MN has gotten 2ft of snow from this storm. These totals are from areas away from the Lake in the higher terrain. It stayed a little cooler, and the orographic lift from the East winds off the Lake really helped. If there wasn’t so much warm air being brought in, we could have gotten much more(there was a bit of rain that mixed in). It would have rivaled the Halloween Storm of 1991 for single storm snow, which is around 38-39″. That was a storm.
It was the “Perfect Storm” out in the Atlantic that helped to create our weather here because it retrograded back to the West. That slowed the weather pattern down across the C US, which was unexpected. Today’s models would have done a better job picking that scenario up, as compared to back then.
Everything is freezing up now as temps are below freezing. Should be able to walk on top of the snow in a couple days.
mhw (12:26:32) : track down that station that has almost 900″ of snow and about 430″ water inch equivalent
For your amusement:
Over Christmas dinner the discussion turned to the ice skating rink where a family member works. They had put up a temperature and rain – snow station for the local radio station (to be able to give reports ‘from the rink’). This is an outdoor artificially frozen machine / rink… and runs even if the air temp is 50F. (It’s a “California Thing”…)
OK, seems locals where making ‘snow balls’ from the results of hockey stops on the ice and tossing them at each other… AND at that ‘strange thing’ next to the rink. Still waiting to hear if the radio reported 50F and Snowing at the Rink … 😉
The family member informed the kids of the need to not throw snowballs at the machinery, and they did stop. But it does bring up an unexpected “issue” with the siting of all those thermometers and rain gages in back yards and near public roadways. ‘The Snowball Effect’ ? 😉
ShrNfr (17:09:45) : Can I send any bills for damages to Al Gore?
Given that the EPA has announced CO2 as causal and that THEY are now in control of the weather and climate: I think the appropriate billing is EPA as the party ‘responsible for CO2’ and Al Gore as principle consultant gets a ‘partial responsibility’ bill (so if EPA does not pay up, he gets to pay all of it).
Unfortunately, there weren’t ‘early’ supporters for any sort of formal underlying theory like French mathematician Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier whose theories have a clear mathematical basis and see much use today.
Maybe the category ‘strange attractors’ is the bin meant to collect all that we cannot yet easily describe mathematically, although we intuitively grasp the goings-on with a chaotic system and can intuit certain outcomes.
Much of what Fourier’s theories are applied to involve cyclic, predictable functions, and not the ‘meanderings of a stream’ as chaotic system are more akin to; there are sets of laws (or rules) a ‘meandering stream’ will always observe, however, as in the water flowing down hill, the flow rates through given-size openings and flow-rates through given size channels. Where the actual ‘meander’ occurs, however, is a little more non-deterministic.
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ShrNfr (20:28:07) : When you trade millions of dollars on commodities, you are merciless with the quality of forecasts. Getting left with a wad of fuel oil in storage (which costs you money) after a warm winter does really lousy things to your P&L.
I think that’s why we see Joe Bastardi a lot on the financial channels, especially for the more difficult and ‘big deal’ reports.
BTW, “Fast Money” traders (a CNBC show) were calling out Natural Gas as probably headed even further up. They also we’re pointing out the ever increasing price and quantity of coal being mined. KOL is the Coal ETF ticker (but I’d probably go for one of the real coal companies. BTU is Peabody coal, one of the largest, but Console was the one they mentioned as a good play. UNG is the Nat.Gas ETF, but I’m more fond of the “oil and gas trusts” with gas (like PWE, which I own) and CHK Chesapeake (on a short spike up at the moment).
The “money guys” are betting on cold, gas, and coal.
So am I.
Caleb (21:36:55) : A healthy democracy, where people truly behave as if “all men are created equal,” is a sort of “Strange Attractor” which appears over and over in the history of mankind’s chaotic behavior. It has no respect for those who may think they have the money and power.
And Adam Smith, in “The Wealth of Nations” described another similar one with the phrase “Invisible Hand”. It is that Invisible Hand that makes capitalism work well, and that makes The Socialism Shiny Thing always an “also ran”. It is forever “spitting into the wind” of the storm of capitalism…
If ever there was an area of knowledge that needs further exploration, it is that one. Strange Attractors and all…
Commenting the recent snowing records, someone here posted the link to http://climateprogress.org/2009/12/25/australia-weather-bureau-pacific-ocean-surface-temperatures-el-nino-science/
I went there (it was about a now disturbingly strong El Nino apparently, but still it’s remarkable how the inhabited places seem to refuse to comply), and saw a biased comment by “From Peru” about Liguria (Italy) where I live. He was reporting a “HEATWAVE” in southern Europe (lots and lots of shouting all caps there), with floods in my region due to “melting snow” (which is ridiculous).
The effect was that of countering the general impression of cooling in the average reader with some report of bizarre, hot weather from a distant place no one could bother to verify. Luckily I was there to correct this, since, for once, it was about something I witnessed. Here’s what I posted there:
“I’ll answer anecdotal evidence with anecdotal evidence, since my region has been mentioned.
I’m from Genoa, Liguria, Italy. This December reminds me of the 70s when I was a child, while it’s definitely not like the warmer 90s.
-We’re on the warm Riviera, where the influence of the Mediterranean Sea causes the mildest (but very rainy) climate of northern Italy (French Riviera is next to us). A bunch of years ago we got used to see little to no snow for the entire season; the last few years have reversed the trend. This December we got three distinct occurrences of snow, plus freezing temperatures and an occurrence of rain turning into a thick ice layer that, according to 80 year olds, is unprecedented in their lifetime.
-While I heard that in Sicily they went to the beach on Christmas, they are as far south and as warm as Europe can get, alongside Greece.
-In my region floods are not that exceptional, and I don’t see a pattern in them (the worst one here was in 1970, before the supposedly man-made warming.) Sure, some parts of the Riviera saw no snow at all, but that’s absolutely the rule for them.
-Floods in Liguria have NOTHING to do with snow melting, get your facts straight!
-Granted, on Christmas Eve the temperature went up sharply due to southern winds, and on Christmas Day it peaked around 19 °C, which is really odd. But today (26) it’s again at 9 °C, which is really par for the course here; on the contrary, before that we had many unusually cold days. So, to say that here in Liguria you can find signs of global warming is really nitpicking. Some 10 days ago, one morning, I found that no water was coming out of the faucet; I can’t recall the last episode of water freezing in the tubes, but it’s at least dating to the mid 90s.
-In conclusion, subjectively, the present weather in Liguria and in Northern Italy is typical of a just slightly colder year, if put on a context of a _non-warming planet_. To make world news as a proof of global warming is frankly ridiculous.
-So, with a big chunk of the northern hemisphere blanketed with snow, and people who write from Australia lamenting a weak beginning of summer, you say there’s an unusually strong El Nino? Wow, I wonder HOW COLD it’s gonna be with La Nina, then!”
___________________
Their reaction was of treating me like a naive know-nothing.
Especially Leif (calling me Alexandra, neophyte) started condescendingly lecturing me about how the weather is not climate etc. Basically, anything related to the topic I failed to mention in my post was reason enough to believe I had no clue and I needed a lesson on the subject.
I fail to see how my correcting false statements about a heatwave and melting snow causing floods is implying that I don’t know that significant changes in temperature cause major weather events, including storms. It’s really a nasty framing bias that put me in bad light, while diverting the attention from the subject (a place where it’s been cold described as an example of warming).
I posted a reply, but they deleted it. I tried to reply again, but my messages were blocked.
Alessandro (10:34:31) :
Sorry to hear you were treated rudely. I’ve experienced the same thing at certain sites. You need to have a thick skin, and simply reply calmly. Of course, if they delete your replies, they are in essence saying “We don’t want to hear.” There is nothing you can do about that.
Looking over your comment, I only saw one sentence that might have annoyed them. It was when you said, “To make world news as a proof of global warming is frankly ridiculous.” That may have been like a red flag to a bull, because none of us likes being called ridiculous, even if we are.
It’s best to just report the news. You did a good job to counter “From Peru.” Just leave it at that. If there are thinking people at that site, they will take what you stated, and process the information. They will discern for themselves whether “From Peru” is ridiculous. In fact, a discerning person often notices when a mob “piles on” one lone person’s comment, and the more the mob ridicules the lone person the more the mob looks ridiculous. So just state the truth, and then don’t worry.
One thing I like about this site is that we get so many “on-the-scene” reports from all over the world. The fact the MSM fails to report cold events, and goes wild about warm events, is increasingly obvious to everyone, and is starting to look silly.
Somehow I’ve always felt uneasy with triumphant reports of episodes of cold weather, because I keep thinking that they may not be representative of anything. Just episodes.
What I described as ridiculous was the concept that, when reports from most inhabited places were all about cold temperatures and snow records, the place where I live was singled out to represent the proof of warming, even if overall it’s been unusually cold.
They shouldn’t counter hundreds of “episodes” with a single, biased, episode, and get away with it. That their retort comes in the form of lecturing me about I don’t get it because it’s the Big Picture that counts, not the single weather events… that’s irritating.
Caleb: “If there are thinking people at that site, they will take what you stated, and process the information”… I don’t think so. You are underestimating the power of framing.
Alessandro (10:34:31) :
“Granted, on Christmas Eve the temperature went up sharply due to southern winds, and on Christmas Day it peaked around 19 °C, which is really odd. But today (26) it’s again at 9 °C, which is really par for the course here; on the contrary, before that we had many unusually cold days.”
Do you vouch for the temperature on Christmas to be that hot?
I’m asking because another poster from New Zealand said that the temperature at a certain location there was 32C on Christmas, double the normal. I did some research and it looks really suspicious. The airport station happens to be one that is used for “zone” temps by HadCrut. Other stations in NZ did not report such a quick and extreme rise and fall of temp in such a short time.
Alessandro (21:38:17) :
“You are underestimating the power of framing.”
You could be right. I have often had too much faith in people. However faith in Truth is another matter. I think you underestimate the power of Truth. It may take a long time, but even the blind will see the light, eventually.
“Do you vouch for the temperature on Christmas to be that hot?”
Yep. I didn’t measure it myself but it was a friend of mine (I don’t have a thermometer, can you believe it?)
On the other hand, I must stress that the temperature reported on my AccuWeather Firefox widget appears typically higher, probably due to the station being at Genoa airport. It’s normal for me to see some centimeters of snow falling outside and the reported temperature being well over the 0 °C threshold (plus often the rain symbol is prevalent over the snow one).
We have got really a complicated microclimate patchwork. I’m 5Km from the sea, the airport is built in the sea port, so it’s the last place where it snows. It would be interesting to know where were the weather stations here before 1962, when the airport became operational.
c stillings (17:57:36) : posted the 25th
I notice the satellite Daily Arctic Sea Ice Map shows only the Northern Shore of Hudson Bay covered with ice. While NOAAH’s map shows it 100% covered with ice. WUWT?
Somebody went back and removed Dec 25 with open water on Hudson Bay and on the 26th,2009 it shows Hudson Bay completely covered with ice.
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=12&fd=26&fy=2008&sm=12&sd=26&sy=2009
US area covered by snow increased 1.6% from the 27th to the 28th.
Not out of the woods yet.