England Buried In Snow – image from The Times
According to the Rutgers University Global Snow Lab, last month had the second greatest December Northern Hemisphere snow cover since records were started in 1966. Snow extent was measured at 45.86 million sq. km, topped only by 1985 at 45.99 million sq. km. North America set a record December extent at 15.98 million sq. km, and the US also set a December record at 4.16 million sq. km.
Source: December Snow Cover from Rutgers University
Source: December Snow Anomalies from Rutgers University
This is not an isolated event for 2009, as can be seen in the graph below. Seventeen of the last twenty-one Decembers have had above normal snow cover.
Source: December Snow Cover Anomalies from Rutgers University
Nor is it an isolated trend for the month of December. January, 2008 was the second snowiest January on record, and six out of the last eight Januaries have had above normal snow.
Source: January Snow Cover Anomalies from Rutgers University
October, 2009 was the snowiest October on record in the US, and sixth snowiest in the Northern Hemisphere. Twelve of the last fifteen Octobers have had above normal snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere, similar to the pattern of the 1970s.
Source: October Snow Cover Anomalies from Rutgers University
A favorite mantra of the global warming community is that reduced snow cover will reduce the albedo of the earth and provide positive feedback to global warming – causing additional warming. Clearly that is not happening, at least not during the October through January time period.
2010 is also getting off to a fast start. Most of Europe and North America is covered with snow, as is much of Asia.
Daily Snow Cover from Rutgers University
Reader Poll :
Sponsored IT training links:
Guaranteed CISA exam preparation with 642-262 online training! Also get free download link for next 650-393 exam.
photon without a Higgs (07:36:31) :
“… Her viewpoint may not be selling well.”
Let’s hope it isn’t.
typo: springtime instead of autumn
Anthony, I tried to leave this at “Tips and Notes” but the comment box was not available.
David Stockwell has a post this morning which I am sure you will find interesting: http://landshape.org/enm/ramstorf-reamed/#more-3447
He is refering to this article in the Australian: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/sea-level-theory-cuts-no-ice/story-e6frg6so-1225817853987
Mann O Mann (23:25:38) :
People are skating on the canals in Amsterdam.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8451006.stm
Fairly rare.
An “Elfstedentocht” (skating along the 11 cities in the Friesland province of the Netherlands) would certainly affect public opinion over here. the last one was in 1996. Alas there is way too much snow on the ice at the moment hampering the ice growth. The Elfstedentocht also has a nice correlation with the solar cycle, especially in recent years:
http://www.dearend.nl/WeatherLink/nieuws/2004/elfstedentocht_zonnevlekken/elfstedentocht.html
Nothing unordinary for 1998/99 el nino… 2nd warmest. If warmer weather causes snow, as the talking heads oft point out, the data doesn’t quite show it.
Has anyone been paying attention to the GFS 10 day model?
Jan 19-20-21 and beyond are looking pretty hairy for the Southern California and the US Southwest. The potential exists for Arctic air to get entrained at all levels and then taken over the Pacific and then into Southern California. The plots show flow aligned from the surface all the way up to 300 mb with large amounts of moisture. The plots are showing surface gales of 100 mph over the Pacific just off the California coast with onshore vectors around 70 mph from Big Sur all the way down to much of Baja. Day 10 shows a very, very strong upper disturbance still out in the Pacific as cold air is being drawn in from Siberia.
Very unusual to say the least.
Some people are making this site a chat room.Maybe there should be a limit on the number of entries on a given topic for some folks.Maybe some of us should not be allowed to post.
[We don’t censor comments like the alarmist blogs do. But feel free to comment all you like. Most readers enjoy seeing other points of view. ~dbs,mod.]
According to NASA data,
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=42260
the freeze is regional, does not indicate global cooling.
Greenland and the Arctic are warmer than usual. The cold and snow has moved from the Arctic to lower latitudes. The Arctic and Greenland will be more vulnerable during the summer for melting and getting the sea level to rise.
I would not be so fast to debunk that the climate is changing.
Now available at: http://bigjournalism.com/pcourrielche/2010/01/10/peer-to-peer-review-part-ii-how-climategate-marks-the-maturing-of-a-new-science-movement/
Peer-to-Peer Review (Part II): How ‘Climategate’ Marks the Maturing of a New Science Movement
Looks like all schools in Uk will get involved in this…http://www.lowcarbonday.com/ one of their links is to a web page “rebutting” skeptic arguments.. some of the comments are breathtaking in their comments 56 struck me! and no mention of climategate except to say some of the comments in the emails were unfortunate.. and then blather on and on about peer review! It would be nice if there were a succinct page like this givihng the skeptic viewpoint in neat catchy phrases. Without knowledge of the argument what child will not believe all this?
yonason (04:38:20) : re: TAMPA BAY WEATHER ALERT
I am in Venice (70 miles south) about 1 mile inland from the Gulf. This morning the temp was at 26F. This is the lowest I have personally experienced in the 19+ years I have lived here. All banana tree leaves are dead (I hope the plants will recover as they did last year), my coconut palm may not make it, won’t know til a week or so, even the periwinkles all died again. Frost on everything that wasn’t covered. Only cold hardy plants survived.
Will someone please try to convince me why we need to cool the planet.
Magnus A (07:16:58) : It will take time for those green jobs to appear. These indeed will be created to remove those windmills after they prove to be a total fiasco.
NOAA reports that December 2009 for the contiguous US was the 14th coolest December in the last 115 years.
http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/na.html
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/in-depth/ask/julia-slingo.pdf
a link to the current UK Met Office {propaganda} website where Prof Julia Slingo “answers” those important AGW questions. Not.
Since we all know that the AO is negative, I looked at the AAO and it is also negative. (http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/teleconnections.shtml).
Anybody done in studies on how AO and AAO interact with each other?
This whole, hot-cold, warming business creates a picture of a future world where The-Keeper-of-the-Pan stands gravely before a huge pot, alternately feeding huge logs to the fire below and dumping great chunks of ice into the pot from above.
And there he stands — forever.
We are! Environment Canada has listed this as “* unusual”
Everyone who lives in Southern Alberta knows that Chinooks are not in any way “unusual”. They’re freaking awesome! Some of my earliest childhood memories involve Chinooks. When it goes from -30C to +10 in 2 hours, how can that possibly be anything other than awesome?
When I were a lad, 1940s to mid 1950s, on a cloud covered sky in winter, if the temp was below about 25F, the oldtimers would say, “too cold to snow,” and they were always right (with good, unknown to them, chemistry and thermodynamic reasons). In the last couple of weeks, I noted that snow was falling at temps below 10F. Unusual to say the least in my 74 years.
crosspatch@23.23.56
‘The whole notion of AGW being used to manage government spending relies on the ability to “manage” public opinion and with the Internet, there is no longer any guarantee that the traditional information outlets will be able to manage that opinion’
That is why it is imperative we have to keep meddling government hands off the internet – no matter what the excuse to do so is: i.e porn, terrorism, our own protection, etc.
The climate is changing and always will be.
What is important to note is that the climate is not behaving in the way that the climate models predicted.
OT kind of… Dec offically coldest month in 115 years
The average temperature in December 2009 was 30.2 F. This was -3.2 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average, the 14th coolest December in 115 years. The temperature trend for the period of record (1895 to present) is 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit per decade.
2.88 inches of precipitation fell in December. This was 0.65 inches more than the 1901-2000 average, the 11th wettest such month on record. The precipitation trend for the period of record (1895 to present) is 0.02 inches per decade.
http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/na.html
mistyped the OT headline and hit enter to quick, sorry, havent had my first cup of coffee yet.
The Times restaurant columnist explains why this all makes sense:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/giles_coren/article6981487.ece
Anthony I was trying to post to your hints and tips but couldn’t work out how. Anyway, I was directed to look at Dominic Lawson’s piece in the Times which describes how the UK Met Office calculates average temperature for the winter by taking the highest 15 readings for November (which is not in the winter but in the autumn, according to their web site). So this winter in the UK is already going to be classified as the warmest on record.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/dominic_lawson/article6982310.ece
Can this POSSIBLY be true???
Totally OT, and if mentioned above, Moderator can snip with my blessings. But I can’t believe what this paragraph says. From http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/dominic_lawson/article6982310.ece
“A period of humility and even silence would be particularly welcome from the Met Office, our leading institutional advocate of the perils of man-made global warming, which had promised a “barbecue summer” in 2009 and one of the “warmest winters on record”. In fact, the Met still asserts we are in the midst of an unusually warm winter — as one of its staffers sniffily protested in an internet posting to a newspaper last week: “This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”
Can the last three sentences possibly be true, or is the columnist merely being sarcastic?