It has often been said that “Weather is not climate”, but ultimately it provides the only meaningful way to verify climate models. Did the climate models predict the cold, snowy weather which has been seen across much of the US?
According to NOAA, October was the third coldest on record in the US, with almost every state showing temperatures from one to ten degrees below normal. Some Parts of Colorado received record snowfall during October, starting the first week of the month.
Image from HPRCC – University of Nebraska at Lincoln
With a few days left, it appears that December is headed for a repeat, with temperatures ranging from one to fifteen degrees below normal. (Note that the color scale is different from October, now the greens show more negative departure, even South Texas is at -6F)
Image from HPRCC – University of Nebraska at Lincoln
Temperatures for the rest of the month are forecast by NCEP to be below normal for almost the entire country, so it is unlikely that the map will change much before New Years Day.
So let’s compare the complete Autumn temperatures vs. the forecasts from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center. In August, CPC forecast that most of the US would have above normal temperatures from October through December, and perhaps more importantly did did not predict that any areas would have below normal temperatures.
As you can see below, their prediction was largely reversed from what has happened. Most of the country has seen below normal temperatures during the same period.
Image from HPRCC – University of Nebraska at Lincoln
So my question is – if the climate models can’t reliably predict the next three months, what basis do they have to claim their ability to forecast 100 years out? It is well known in the weather modeling community that beyond about three days, the models tend to break down due to chaos.
We have all heard lots of predictions of warmer winters, less snow, animal populations moving north, drought, dying ski resorts, etc. But did anyone in the climate modeling community forecast the cold, snowy start to winter which has occurred. If not, it would appear that their models are not mature enough to base policy decisions on.
On the other side of the pond, The Met Office forecast 2010 to be the warmest year ever, as they last did in 2007. On cue, the weather turned bitter cold immediately after the forecast and it appears that the unusally cold weather will continue at least through mid-January. As in 2007, the Met office 2010 forecast is not getting off to a good start:
http://wxmaps.org/pix/temp4.html
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“it would appear that their models are not mature enough to base policy decisions on.”
Understatement of the decade.
Here in SW BC, it has been cold but very dry; for quite long stretches. It is normally? wet most of the time. This “dry spell” goes back about 14 months. Last year was somewhat colder, with a bit more precip in the form of snow. This year is a tad warmer, but very dry with little precip of any kind. My records go back about 32 years, (16 of good quality records) and precip for these past 12-14 months have been well below “normal”.
Looks like we will be getting some snow in a day or two however.
“it would appear that the modelers are not mature enough to base policy decisions on.”
There. I “fixed” it for you. LOL!
There predictions are based on what is typical of El Nino conditions (I recognize the map). They do not take into consideration the AO, which they should.
Hide the decline!!!
Type two quick and I end up with to many errors related too, it, it’s, there, their, and they’re. And I call myself a teacher.
For the remainder of the Winter watch the AO. The ENSO numbers earlier in the autumn pointed towards a “mild” winter for the NH in general and NAmerica in particular. However, a negative AO has allowed colder than normal air masses to drive equatorward beginnign in ealry Autumn. It looked like El Nino would have a final say as rather mild weather dominated both NAmerica and Europ ealry on. Yet, for the last 5 weeks colder than normal air masses have begun the settle in for the duration (Joe Bastardi hit it right, again).
If El Nino begins to weaken significantly, things could get interesting. If La Nina builds again in late 2010 (like it should witha negative PDO), and a negative AO remains, 2011 could turn out be very very cold compared to the late 90s early 2000s.
Don’t the CO2-forced climate models also predict that the warming will be greater the closer you get to the poles? It seems not only is it colder than normal, the anomaly is colder as you go farther north.
There has been clear cooling since 2005. No argument there. So that is climate.
http://lh4.ggpht.com/_4ruQ7t4zrFA/Sy0GNXuxT1I/AAAAAAAADqY/90Z472zMWPg/uah-temperatures-1995-2009.JPG
I can say that ‘computer predictions are not climate’. Especially since they are always wrong. I’ll stick with the data in the real world showing a cooling earth.
JonesII (18:46:55) :
Hide the decline!!!
————————-
It’s a travesty!
I know i shouldn’t say this about the brutally cold weather you’re experiencing at the moment, but i will say it all the same…..Let Er Rip .. And by the way temperature is now sitting on a balmy 23 c in Sydney.
Pamela Gray (18:48:01) :
And I call myself a teacher.
Only when someone calls you “teacher” have you earned the right to call yourself “teacher”, teacher: )
I have decided that NOAA and the Met Office need a new motto:
“Not even God can sink the ship of CAGW.”
Pamela Gray (18:48:01) : Type two quick and I end up with to many errors…
To many errors add >i>too many errors and the bats will leave the belfry too, miss Pamela…
“Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.”
-Lazarus Long in Time Enough For Love
Robert A. Heinlein
Whereas I only mess up my html tags…
gtrip (19:05:56) :
Only when someone calls you “teacher” have you earned the right to call yourself “teacher”, teacher: )
This is to be remembered when you think of all of those who have called Al Gore a great teacher on environmental issues.
Al Gore impersonation:
“The entire state of Florida is experiencing temperatures this December that are significantly above normal.”
October was cold, December is cold…
Anyone else notice how November was so blazingly hot it made for the warmest last quarter of the year in decades? Why that may have been the hottest last quarter since records began!
“If it’s cold, it’s weather; if it’s warm, it’s climate.” Certain sources have indeed correctly predicted –“forecast” is a vexed term– an excessively cold Continental U.S. Autumn 2009 (October – December vs. solstice dates), but these are uniformly cyclical projections rather than modelers’ inherently simplistic linear extrapolations.
No-one acquainted with Lorenz’s Chaos Theory, whereby sensitive dependence on initial conditions (the “butterfly effect”) entails non-random but indeterminate fluctuations focusing on “strange attractors”, would ever presume to “model” complex systems, defined as those with three or more mutually interacting variables. Climate Cultists’ foolish assertions to the contrary display not mere naivete but willful blindness to mathematical reality, a deluded self-importance concomitant with radically skewed Arguments from Authority by Stipulation: AGW is true because we Ascended Masters say it is.
Blacklisting, deceit, massive Luddite fraud has typified GIGO effusions by Briffa, Hansen, Jones, Mann et al. since 1988 if not before. Given this putrescent provenance, we predict that no-one even marginally complicit in Hockey Team excretions will ever publish anything again.
the first person/entity to predict the weather reliabily, even in the 24-48 hour period…….. never mind, too many variables.
could have made lots of money.
Here in the foothills west of Denver, I am a snow spotter for the NWS. 77 inches of snow so far this season at my location. This is the snowiest start to the snow year since I have been recording data in this spot (last 13 years). As interesting though is the snow has been focused east of the continental divide. We have actually had more snow at my spotter location than at Vail (71 “), Keystone (49″) or Breckenridge (73”)
See link:
http://www.snow.com/mountainconditions/snowandweatherreports.aspx#/keystone
This is a very unusual pattern as the west slope is usually significantly wetter than the east. If time permits, I am going to look into past analogs & implications on what may be the drivers.
Interesting how the most northern tip of the lower 48 shows above average warming. What a weird wacky thing climate is!
CRU climate scientist:
“It’s a travesty that we cannot account for this unexpected cooling. Quick, we need to use Mike’s Nature trick to hide the decline. Oh wait! The tree ring data is going in the opposite direction of the actual temperatures. Homogenize, homogenize!
And please, tell Connolly to erase any reference to this cold weather in Wikipedia as soon as they appear. The last thing we need is let the public know we’re entering another little ice age.”
INGSOC (18:42:27) “Here in SW BC, it has been cold but very dry; for quite long stretches. […] This “dry spell” goes back about 14 months.”
You must’ve been away in November! And how about the 3 week interval exactly 1 year ago?
QBO & ENSO flipped signs and things changed ~mid-2009. You may have noticed that the mountain ranges of western N. America seem to have had warm (west) & cool (east) pools of air (relatively speaking, on average) since about June. This isn’t a pattern that has been common (for such extended periods of time) in recent memory. The recent cool is partly fog / temperature inversion related — the temp goes up (noticeably in just a few steps (walking)) as soon as you emerge from the fog / lower elevation ponded-cool-air going uphill at night, beginning just after dusk. Check today’s Strait of Georgia winds for a revelation (conditions conducive to snowy-peak cold-air-drainage dusk-to-mid-morning). In winter, ENSO/PDO/ALPI/NPI & “arctic outflow” (AO/NAO/NAM) play a big role in temp / precip relations on the coast. The temp / precip relations of the rest of the year literally flip upside-down with the winter dynamic. I don’t buy into a notion of winter “normal” – there are distinct states and the “averages” (“normals”) mask this.
I saw ice while kayaking in salt water today. (Without giving the answer away) I’d be curious to see if anyone here knows how this happens with such high temperatures (near-zero C). Last year when I reported ice in a coastal inlet, many questioned my honesty. It seems people have a hard time imagining how it happens.