Cold event setups in atmospheric circulation patterns are aligning. Two days ago I brought to your attention that there was a strong downspike in the Arctic Oscillation Index and that the North Atlantic Oscillation Index was also negative. See The Arctic Oscillation Index goes strongly negative
Yesterday, Senior AccuWeather meteorologist Joe Bastardi let loose with this stunning prediction on the AccuWeather premium web site via Brett Anderson’s Global warming blog:
What is facing the major population centers of the northern hemisphere is unlike anything that we have seen since the global warming debate got to the absurd level it is now, which essentially has been there is no doubt about all this. For cold of a variety not seen in over 25 years in a large scale is about to engulf the major energy consuming areas of the northern Hemisphere. The first 15 days of the opening of the New Year will be the coldest, population weighted, north of 30 north world wide in over 25 years in my opinion.
The Climate Prediction Center discussion for their forecast also concurs with both of the above:
THE AO INDEX WHICH RECENTLY HAS BEEN VERY STRONGLY NEGATIVE IS FORECAST TO INCREASE SLIGHTLY IN VALUE BUT REMAIN STRONGLY NEGATIVE THROUGH DAY 14. TODAYS BLEND CHART INDICATES BELOW NORMAL HEIGHTS ACROSS ROUGHLY THE SOUTHEASTERN TWO-THIRDS OF THE CONUS, AND ABOVE NORMAL HEIGHTS OVER THE NORTHWESTERN THIRD OF THE CONUS, CONSISTENT WITH A STRONGLY NEGATIVE AO.
Here are two of the CPC forecast maps for the days covered by Bastardi’s forecast. It is fairly typical to see an above average temperature in the west when we get a cold deep jet stream in the east:
I was going to include some Met Office forecasts here but after trying to find something useful at their web site and failing to find anything, I gave up looking.
If you live in these areas: bundle up, stock up. Get ready.
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wmsc
“a coal fired power station.”
Classic!
Tonyb
JonesII
ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/005/y2787e/y2787e08.pdf
Interesting document you quoted there, I have to study it in the detail. Initial impression is frequent quote of 55 year period.
I’ve just completed a graph with a similar 53.6 year sequence for CET summer/winter deviation.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-SW.gif
An immediate repeatable pattern is recognised in each block:
– 1 pre 1740 deviation is converging
– 2 diverging deviation (opposite)
– 3 converging deviation
– 4 equal deviation
– 5 diverging deviation (opposite)
– 6 equal deviation
formula from:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SSNAnomaly1.gif
This is could be one of the ‘known unknowns’, at least for time being.
JonesII (08:52:08) :
Which big costs? Also, we’re already fairly irrigated with expensive bottle water here.
Over here even the real-time data is wrong. My kitchen window thermometer (bad location with significant warm bias, maybe 1-2C too warm) now shows -19.5C and at the same time http://yr.no for my location says it is -10C. So I think they are 10C too warm right now. Like always when it is this cold, there is no wind at all.
yr.no is a cooperation between Met.no (our equivalent of UK Met Office) and NRK (our equivalent of the BBC).
vukcevic (08:58:04) : It seems that though that oscillation (LOD) it is near reality it also would oscillate within another one, or be modulated by your sun’s magnetic polar field strength oscillation.
@Deadman (08:39:39) :
“I thank you for the link to a droll article. Are you suggesting thereby that it would not be cost-effective to transport water from flooded areas to drought-effected ones even though floods at times cause damages costing many millions of dollars and much heartache? Bear in mind that, here in Tasmania at least, some of those pipelines I suggest, would be little longer than some of those we already have as part of hydro-electric schemes.”
Quite the contrary. In fact, our ideas coincide. see link to my article:
http://energyguysmusings.blogspot.com/2009/02/wind-water-farms-and-power-generation.html
I heard that the Met Office over in England has a new chief: http://tinyurl.com/yax88pm
Is this true?
Where’s Canada?
REPLY:Being a US government service, NOAA does not cover Canada
Deadman (09:02:12) :
This is really funny, I’ve just found the following in the web:
ALGOR MORTIS = “The cold of death”☺
The Gore effect decoded!
M.A.DeLuca (07:52:18) :
===
“Steve in SC (05:30:22) :
OT just a little bit here.
Is everybody at AccuWeather named Joe?
I mean you have Joe Bastardi, Joe Sobel, Joe Mergo, Joe Zona and several others that I can’t think of right now.
===
I used to work at a plant in Grover’s Mill, NJ where a lot of the people had the first name ‘John’. They were pretty weird, too. I’d be suspicious if I were you.”
I went for a beer once in a pub at home. There were 6 other guys in there at the time and they were all called Jimmy.
@ur momisugly TonyB (05:23:30) :
A casino with attached Lido/Ice rink?
Good thing we’ve got Global Warming going for us, or else it would be MOST EXTREMELY COLD!!!! (Ahem…) Dear Friends, the Great Plan is to return us to the status of SERFS. Your politicians will not save you. Your churchmen (churchpersons?) will not save you. Take a good look in the mirror, because that’s from where your help will come. Bless you all!
Carsten Arnholm, Norway (09:02:19) :
“My kitchen window thermometer (bad location with significant warm bias, maybe 1-2C too warm) now shows -19.5C and at the same time http://yr.no for my location says it is -10C. So I think they are 10C too warm right now. Like always when it is this cold, there is no wind at all.”
That’s inversion. Forecasts fail to model temperatures in any detail in rugged terrain when inversion sets in. Temperatures can easily be 20C off. Living a bit uphill I have fairly balmy conditions outside with a temperature of -7C right now, but a station a few km away near a lake currently reports -20C. Here there also is a slight breeze, but I bet it’s dead calm at that lake.
*******
wws (06:23:33) :
Regarding rainfall in Sydney – I just looked up the stats which say that Sydney gets 1217 mm ( 48 in.) yearly. Looks like 2009 was lower than average, with about 37 in (968 mm) falling. So they didn’t count on that.
Still, in any objective sense, that’s a huge amount of water and most of it must be getting wasted. With 40 in. of yearly rain almost anywhere in Texas every river and creek is full and every lake is overflowing, and there are a lot of lakes, almost all man made. Anything west of Dallas would have massive flooding with that much rain, only Houston and areas close to the coast get more rain than that. And Phoenix, Az, survives quite well on only 10 in. of rain a year, never gets more.
So for any modern city to get 40 in of rain and wail about a drought – somebody’s treating their resources like they were still hunter gatherers. Time to do a little bit of strategic planning and construction there, just a thought.
*********
It depends on temp & the resulting evaporation rate. While 40″ avg here in w MD keeps the soil plenty moist, the same amount in say, south Florida would lead to drought. Boreal forests grow amid soggy marshes in N Canada w/only 5-10″ precip, while 30″ in central Texas can support only grasslands (other than on floodplains).
“Deadman (08:39:39) :
[…]
Are you suggesting thereby that it would not be cost-effective to transport water from flooded areas to drought-effected ones even though floods at times cause damages costing many millions of dollars and much heartache? Bear in mind that, here in Tasmania at least, some of those pipelines I suggest, would be little longer than some of those we already have as part of hydro-electric schemes.”
Nah, can’t work. Didn’t work for the Romans either. Look at what they did. A few hundred years after starting to build aquaeducts they were so heavily indebted that they had to sell their entire empire to the Germans. IIRC 😉
Don’t worry, Al Gore will soon to announce that the United States under his direction and scientific acumen has quilted a giant blanket to cover the hemisphere just in case errors to his extensive calculations are temporarily “Challenged” by actual climate activity.
TonyB (05:23:30)
My entry:
The BBC (Bye Bye Credibility) Hotsprings and Spa.
Doug Arthur (09:20:36) :
It’s that big block of ice just north of the USA
Deadman,
Wish I had a permalink you your reply. That is pretty good. Al Gore has the best name since Mike Dukakis of kakistocracy 🙂
Carsten Arnholm: About yr.no: The observations from today are here: http://www.yr.no/observasjonar/
The extreme local variations during weather like this just reminds us what an absolutely impossible concept “world mean surface temperature” is (Sea and upper troposphere temperatures are different, though). The closest observation to where I live is Asker, but it was probably 8-10 C warmer today.
For the Aussies, there is this piece from The Register:
SGI inks deal for Tasmanian cluster
‘Cluster-what‘ is up to you
Supercomputer maker Silicon Graphics has inked a deal to build the Tasmanian Partnership for Advanced Computing – which has the rap name TPAC – at the University of Tasmania on the eponymous Australian island state. The gig: creating a new x64-Linux cluster for climate research.
The TPAC facility is a partnership between the University of Tasmania, CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, the Australian Antarctic Division, Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre, Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre, and the Australian Maritime College. […tech stuff…]
…
By the way, TPAC is run by Nathan Bindoff, a professor of physical oceanography at UTAS, who was one of the handful of scientists who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice president Al Gore for their collective efforts to get the world to deal with climate change.
Read the article. Turns out if they had just waited a bit they could have saved some money (and to us ordinary peons that’s a whole freaking lot of money). Is someone trying to get in whatever they can before the gig is up?
I’m not feeling smug about this, nor am I gloating – but I knew this cold was coming.
How did I know, not being a meteorologist, nor working at the MetOffice?
Simple: the rowan berries, the rosehips and the berries on the cotoneaster hedge had gone by October – very fast indeed.
‘Old wives’ tales’ have it that this is a sign of a very cold winter, the birds eating as much as they possibly can before it sets in.
As has been mentioned here before: good observation of events in the natural environment, and a memory going back for some decades, together with a willingness to listen to old people who have seen it all before will beat those who rely on computer models before anything else.
Still – could’ve done without this cold weather!
And how about the fact that our winter was 2 months late in coming where I live in Bulgaria and it didnt arrive untll late December? Last time I checked, Bulgaria is in the northern hemisphere. And surprise surprise but for the last 3 days we have had record HIGH temperatures here. This has been yet ANOTHER very mild and warm winter so far. The 3 or 4th in a row. A few extra cold days? I will believe them when I experience them.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/dailypolitics/andrewneil/2009/12/its_going_to_be_a_cold_2010.html#P90364206
😀
This deserves to be repeated; a result of the “Law of Unintended Consequences” vis-à-vis AGW-driven long range forecasts which others base material, substantive decisions on (like PLANNING for winter events!).
We have press reports here in the US about NE (northeastern) states who have already exhausted (busted) their ‘snow’ (street clearing) budgets on account of the storm that moved through around Christmas!
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