Earlier I wrote about the Arctic Oscillation Index going strongly negative in December and what new cold to expect in January. From NASA’s Earth observatory, we have a high resolution temperature anomaly map that provides visualization of the effects. This image was taken while the Copenhagen Climate Conference was in progress.
A wave of frigid air spilled down over Europe and Russia from the Arctic in mid-December, creating a deadly cold snap. According to BBC.com, at least 90 people had died in Europe, including 79 people, mostly homeless, in Poland. In places, the bitter cold was accompanied by heavy snow, which halted rail and air traffic for several days during the week of Christmas.
This image shows the impact of the cold snap on land surface temperatures across the region from December 11–18, 2009, compared to the 2000–2008 average. The measurements were made by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. Places where temperatures were up to 20 degrees Celsius below average are blue, locations where temperatures were average are cream-colored, and places where temperatures were above average are red. Light gray patches show where clouds were so persistent during the week that MODIS could not make measurements of the land surface temperature. The biggest anomalies were in northern Russia, but a swath of below-average temperatures stretched across the countries around the Baltic Sea as well.
See also:
- Daily, 8-day, and monthly land surface temperature anomaly maps
- Animation of monthly global land surface temperature anomalies
h/t to WUWT reader “JT”
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It will be interesting to see how the NASA imagery compares with the anomaly maps of GISS and HadCRUT for December when they are made available. More images are available at links below.
….
This image shows the impact of the cold snap on land surface temperatures across the region from December 11–18, 2009, compared to the 2000–2008 average.
I think we need to play fair here.
1. The MODIS image only covers one week not a complete month.
2. The anomaly base period is 2000-2008 while GISS and HadCRUT use 1951-80 and 1961-90 respectively.
Here, for example, is the GISS map for Mar 2009 relative to 2000-2008 (anomaly=-0.16)
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2009&month_last=11&sat=4&sst=0&type=anoms&mean_gen=03&year1=2009&year2=2009&base1=2000&base2=2008&radius=1200&pol=reg
Commonsense said: “Now in Europe the heat is on again”.
When I went to the first NOAA link, I got a little exclamation mark at bottom left of my (IE) browser plus the message “Error on page.”
Clearly Microsoft know something!
Since Cyrosphere Today’s compare is back up, thought it would be appropriate to check on the Sea Ice and Snow Cover:
http://www.robertb.darkhorizons.org/New%20Image.GIF
Compared to last year.
commonsense (18:04:01) :
I bet you won’t go up to the Arctic this winter for your winter holidays and swim in the “VERY WARM” tropical waters. Maybe try going next summer when those hungry polar bears are looking for something to eat in among the steamy seas.
If you think its warm today then please read about the time when
crocodiles roamed the Arctic and breadfruit trees grew in Greenland!
We’re all doomed to runaway melting of ice, it’s worse than we thought. :o)
Bill, I spit my coffee all over my computer. Frozen that hard are they? Gotta warm them puppies up if you expect to shoot out of a cannon.
You can clearly see the city of Moskou. And you can see other urban area’s. You can see that the Rurh area with multiple city’s next to each other are still white.
Rather off topic, but Richard Heg’s reference above also had this in the sidebar:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2007/0603-can_carbon_dioxide_be_a_good_thing.htm
It discusses the benefit of carbon dioxide, which is another interesting aspect of this whole discussion, and raises questions about the validity of (or perhaps confirms) the article entitled “No Rise of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Fraction in Past 160 Years, New Research Finds”
Commonsense has His day and he’s… right!
I didn’t see so much prejudice evinced by “Anti-AGW commenters” with their remarks here as far as I started to read WUWT.
One Commenter sensibly explained the present Europe’s weather – the South is warmer, and the North is colder. The border lies on NW to SE line. Here in Poland too, as in Germany, the upper part of my country is gripped by cold (mild cold), with the south being showered with rain day after day. But that doesn’t prove neither WARMING nor COOLING.
Here in Cracow just as in Berlin we have 5-10 cm snow and mild rain! This hour I can see snowing, the next one I will watch windows covered with rain drops. But generally **warm** touched the southern parts of Europe amnd that is the FACT the Commonsense pointed out. Whether some of you like it or not.
But what is of my concern is the vocabulary used by most of Americans or so called Westerners. As some of you know I read WUWT not only for the scientific news about climate but to get known with western culture.
Tell me Mr Watts why the dramatic title – “… deadly…” (cold in Europe and Russia).
Minus 10 centigrade is not a severe cold. Far from that. This part of northern hemisphere witnessed such temperatures many times in my life (I’m 53 years old). -30, -35 deg C is Siberian cold and it happened in Poland too.
I always wondered why Siberian or Russian people “laughed at you”, citizens over the Pond, when seeing you wearing fur hats with only 0 to -5 deg C outdoors!
Most of the “dead” are dead to their own free will! Alcoholics, “freedom lovers” aka homeless (but due their “style of life”), stupid drivers, or forgotten kinsmen. The deaths from cold were, are and will be occuring year after year. It seems to me that it is your Western culture with skewed views on humanity as a whole and with false and hypocritical attitude to a Man especially which suggest your minds such idiotic titles. In this context of Climate and Weather matters, course.
Not for the first time reading WUWT blog I felt like reading RealClimate scaremongers’ website.
Best regards and Happy New Year to all!
For those interested in wagering on more “mainstream” (i.e., global) projections of temperature, the well-known Dublin-based event-prediction website http://www.intrade.com takes bets on whether 2010 will be the hottest year on record. Ditto for 2011. It also takes bets on whether any or all of the years 2010-2014 will be one of the five warmest years on record. (The GISS temperature database is used to settle bets.)
The odds on that site (arrived at via a bid/ask market among participants) have a good track record of being right about elections and other events. Currently the odds on 2010 being one of the five warmest years on record are 75 to 25, and the odds of it being THE warmest are 33 to 67. You can visit the site to see how the odds are shaping up for the years ahead. (However, bets for future years have only recently been posted, so volume is low at the moment.) Click on:
Markets –>
Climate & Weather –>
Global Temperature –>
Will Global Average Temperatures for 2010-2011 be THE warmest on record? (Click on the + sign) –>
OR
Will Global Average Temperatures for 2009-2014 be AMONG FIVE warmest on record?
(If you want to bet (after you’ve registered, etc.), click: )
Trade (in the 2010.GLOBALTEMP.WARMEST box) →
(enter your Quantity and Price in the Bid/Asked box on the left) →
Click Buy (if you think 2010 will be the warmest on record), OR
Sell (if you don’t)
Quote: “It will be interesting to see how the NASA imagery compares with the anomaly maps of GISS and HadCRUT for December when they are made available.”
For an agency not-so-fondly referred to by some as “Never A Straight Answer”, NASA imagery and other media cannot always be trusted. Fortunately, the truth usually leaks out from conduits in NASA or through persons working with NASA, but not in the manner that you might expect.
Graham,
“Here in the UK, Scotland and the North of England have barely risen above zero for 19 successive days.”
I live in the midlands, and the temperature has not climbed above 3C. Yet in the anomaly map in commonsense’s link, the whole of the British Isles is shown orange, representing an anomaly of about +5C. Since the average for this time of year is 4C, the map is representing 9C, which is utter nonsense.
Clearly, there is something very, very wrong with that map.
BillD (03:42:19),
Correct about the increased use of fertilizer, etc. But increased CO2 does have a significant effect on plant growth. Here are some pics of plants of the same age grown at various CO2 levels: click
LOL!
Berlin Germany webcam:
http://www.wetter24.de/de/home/wetter/webcam.html
(You got about another 45 mins. before it gets dark)
Took me a sec to realise I was looking at icicles.
The anomaly map in commonsense’s link is way off…. 15 days of snow on the ground here in Aberdeenshire with 8cm of global warming last night with more due this evening and New Years Day…bring it on!
New Year celebrations cancelled in Inverness due to snow and ice:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/highlands_and_islands/8435578.stm
BillD (03:42:19) :
“You must be joking to suggest that CO2 is the main factor affecting farm yields since the 1940s. (And you don’t see other changes?) Massive increases in fertilizer might make a difference. New hybrids that are planted much more densely and grow taller as well. If farmers went back to the the 1940s seeds and farming practises, they would get 1940s yields.”
My lawn disagrees with you in regards to that last statement. Thirty years ago, I mowed every 10 to 14 days from May through September to keep my lawn height below 5 inches. Now I have to mow every 7 to 11 days for the same, and I’m at the same address as thirty years ago. I do not fertilize with any commercial products such as Weed and Feed (never have, since I’m a perpetual cat parent, and they like to nibble on the grass), except for dumping cow manure on the occasional bare spot. The same with re-seeding, just the bare and thin spots, never the entire lawn. I’ve also noticed substantially fewer problems with bare spots and thin areas, compared to thirty years ago. I do hope that CO2 % levels off, as I really do not want to have to mow the lawn twice a week in the future.
Primary data, I love it!
commonsense
There is a BIG WARM ANOMALY ( between +3ºC and +9ºC) IN THE ARCTIC …
… despite the NEGATIVE Artic Oscillation values.
Also warm anomalies in Europe. The only notable cool ones are in Siberia-Scandinavia. This air masses will move away as the day pass, but …
I BET THE ARCTIC WILL STAY VERY WARM ALMOST ALL WEEKS UNTIL NEXT SUMMER.
And where exactly is all this energy keeping the Arctic “very warm” coming from?
How are things in Australia this summer?
Przemysław Pawełczyk (05:49:33) :
“Tell me Mr Watts why the dramatic title – “… deadly…” (cold in Europe and Russia).”
I live in the UK, where the weather is milder than Poland and Russia. The old in particular here who do not have enough cash to heat their homes quickly succumb to hypothermia and pneumonia and other chest infections which lead to death.
Those countries that continually live in a cold climate appear much better able to survive the cold, so I assume it comes down to what you are used to.
Just look at the chaos on British roads and rail caused by an inch or two of snow to see what I mean.
Przemysław Pawełczyk (05:49:33) :
Most of the “dead” are dead to their own free will!
Do you ever read what you type before hitting “submit”?
“Przemysław Pawełczyk (05:49:33) :
[..]
Most of the “dead” are dead to their own free will! Alcoholics, “freedom lovers” aka homeless (but due their “style of life”), stupid drivers, or forgotten kinsmen. The deaths from cold were, are and will be occuring year after year. It seems to me that it is your Western culture with skewed views on humanity as a whole and with false and hypocritical attitude to a Man especially which suggest your minds such idiotic titles. In this context of Climate and Weather matters, course.[…]”
I gotta defend the Brits and Americans here while saying at the same time that you’re partially right, Przemysław.
But it is a fact that cold kills more people than warmth, and while you’re right about people sleeping rough dying and making the headlines in their local newspaper, there are much more cold-related deaths simply because more pneumonia cases happen, mostly killing the elderly. These are “silent” deaths nobody reports about. It’s so common that we are actually used to it in EVERY northern country.
Also the danger of bad harvests does exist and will, in my opinion, force wheat prices up severely. We will probably not be able to increase the production of biofuel, maybe we will have to reduce it again.
Some people here talk about famine and doom and gloom scenarios by comparing to the LIA. This is just silly, folks. Back then people didn’t have fossil fuels or nuclear power or large scale hydropower. We have all of these and OF COURSE we will use all that when necessary and forget about that little CO2 thingy that allegedly had something to do with the warming.
Our chancellor Frau Merkel just did her talk to the nation. As usual she warned of hard times ahead, bla bla bla, finishing with a warning that we also need to continue our CO2 reduction.
That was the LAST part of the talk. In other words, the least important. The entire CO2 mania is about to drop off the attention horizon sooner rather than later is my impression.
Przemyslaw, thanks, for your observation. I heartily agree. I grew up in Winnipeg in the 1950’s, and the cold we are experiencing now is still mild relative to then. Both sides of every argument tend to exaggeration in America, regretably. However don’t blame Anthony. He tends to be quite balanced, but he allows free reign to the less experienced and less equilibrated, and I suspect a lot of these folk don’t have much of any place else to vent. I also get irritated by the politicization of these discussions by numerous contributors, but that is also the temper of America at present. Murray
“Roger Knights (06:14:37) :
[…]
The odds on that site (arrived at via a bid/ask market among participants) have a good track record of being right about elections and other events. Currently the odds on 2010 being one of the five warmest years on record are 75 to 25, and the odds of it being THE warmest are 33 to 67. ”
Very interesting, like the Delphi principle as explained in “The Showckwave Rider” by John Brunner.
I find these odds realistic. My reasoning is: Temperatures were flat over 10 years and start to go down now due to beginning of solar minimum. So we are still near the maximum of the curve. It’s like a sine wave added to a long term warming trend starting in 1850. So even tough i expect 3 cool decades, i go along with what the odds say.
Maybe a bookie is a better (and cheaper) predictor than the GCM’s.
Smokey, to add to your point, for a while in my career, my job was to design & build control systems for “growth chambers”. These chambers were for speeding early growth of plants. You had to control not only temperature and humidity, but added CO2 to speed things along. It was interesting to see what a difference CO2 made on plant growth.
DirkH says:
We have a much larger population than we did then, and a great many of them depend on the energy we get from fossil fuels.
At the margins, there is an opportunity for a great many deaths if cold weather affects crops and the supply of fuels and the distribution of electricity.