More from the “weather is not climate department”.
Flurries hit southeast Australia as towns record their first-ever summer snowfalls
CANBERRA, Australia – Australia is following its second-hottest year on record with extraordinary snow flurries in its southeastern alpine region, where some towns have recorded their first-ever summer snowfalls.
Australia’s temperatures during the summer months of December through February can be uncomfortably hot even on its highest peak, Mount Kosciuszko, which stands a modest 7,310 feet (2,228 metres) above sea level.
Snow fell to 3,000 feet (900 metres) above sea level Monday in parts of New South Wales and Victoria states, Bureau of Meteorology senior forecaster Jane Golding said.
“Any time of year, it’s unusual to have snow down that far,” she said.
…
The town of Bombala in New South Wales, east of Kosciuszko, recorded its first summer snow since the bureau began keeping records there in 1965, Golding said.
The town of Cooma, also in New South Wales but north of Kosciuszko, recorded its first summer snow since records were first kept in 1973.
Cooma resident Krystal Pernitsch said the wind chill factor made Monday’s high temperature of 59 degrees (15 degrees Celsius) feel like 48 degrees (9 Celsius).
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Oliver K. Manuel (13:43:39) : “I even voted for Al Gore for President in 2000 and was puzzled by his quiet withdrawal after winning the majority vote.”
Whoa! If his bitter, prolonged, and expensive court battles constituted a “quiet withdrawal”, I’d hate to see him actually fighting for the Presidency! 🙂
Ray (07:30:25) :
Like the iguanas in Florida, do they have koala falling down trees when it’s cold?
We call them Drop Bears, but its not a cold weather thing. just something international tourists need to look out for.
Back when I did my meteorology course with the Australian BoM one of the lecturers told us that, for unknown reasons, you get some years or a period of a few years where the patterns in the troposphere are more meridional or more zonal. In the zonal years the patterns result in more west – east flows and you get fewer extremes and in meridional years you get more north south flows and hence more weather extremes.
Seems to me that is what is happening in Australia and maybe the SH for the last few years. In the early 70s when I was an operational forecaster in Western Australia the flows seemed to be zonal and the weather was boring.
I’m in Perth at present and after a few cooler days last week the last couple of days were over 42 deg C. This has been seen before.
wenson (15:28:17) : “Co2 is a Green house gas. It causes a positive feed back. water vapor is more potent green house gas. Why does not water vapor generate more positive feed back?
If water vapor does generate more positive feed back, but no one mention it. why?
If water vapor does generate more positive feed back, then warrying Co2 is meaningless. Co2 only a very small part of the question.”
The fundamental radiative formulas show that the forcing is proportional to the logarithm of the increase in CO² or H²O. Each successive positive feedback yields less and less return. The formulas are theoretical; whether they accurately describe the Earth’s climate system is questionable. A scientist once ‘proved’ that heavier-than-air craft can’t fly. There’s a big difference between theory and reality.
To learn more about this, wensonid, see:
http://climateaudit.org/2008/01/07/more-on-the-logarithmic-formula/
http://www.john-daly.com/bull-121.htm
http://www.geology.iastate.edu/gccourse/alumni/forcing/text.html
When is it going to snow in our neck of the woods?
I would think that corn production is up due to demand for ethanol, not due to climate as a driver of crop yields.
Where/when does the “Precautionary Principle” come into play?
It goes both ways, doesn’t it?
I have to agree with Gary Hladik (16:23:02):
Oliver K. Manuel (13:43:39) : “I even voted for Al Gore for President in 2000 and was puzzled by his quiet withdrawal after winning the majority vote.”
Gore promptly recanted his original November 8th
‘quiet withdrawal,’ as this timeline shows: click
It says something about Gore’s character that he was ready to throw in the towel at the first hint of a setback.
Ray (07:30:25) :
Like the iguanas in Florida, do they have koala falling down trees when it’s cold?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
No Ray … they do that anyway, and their proper name is “drop bears.” They land on people’s heads and eat their brains… or something like that:
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Drop_Bear
A slight correction: it didn’t actually snow in Cooma, although it was sleety, and the maximum was 14-15 degrees Celsius, which is amazingly low for this time of year (by contrast, the forecast for tomorrow is 36 degrees Celsius, which is what you’d expect for mid-summer).
It did snow at Jindabyne (about 60 kilometres south of Cooma): large snowflakes falling heavily for over half-an-hour. While Jindabyne is at the base of the Snowy Mountains before the climb up to Perisher and Thredbo, it doesn’t snow very often in Jindabyne itself, and in most years, there is no snow there even in winter (a bit like Copenhagen!).
While there have been some hot days this summer (it is summer after all), it has been on average quite cool. In Sydney today, and for the past few days, its been cool enough to wear a jacket. At this time of year it should be baking hot and starting to get humid.
It is also interesting that we are supposed to be having an El Nino, and yet its also been moderately wet in Sydney, and I think, the east coast in general.
Between the rain and cool weather, its really cramping on my beach time, and I was promised a long, hot glorious summer!
SteveK
You need to supply a valid email address to comment here. This is board policy. I have redacted many of your comments until this is resolved.
charles the moderator
Funny that there was no coverage in the mainstream media!
Apart from a couple heat waves (a result of northerly winds) summer seems mild so far this summer.
No, I live above 850hPa, and there are definitely clouds above me. Now we do radiate pretty effectively to space at night, and we also do so during the day as well, I’ll wager, but 850 hPA is not the upper end of convection.
HB: Thank God if we don’t see more bushfires this year. My family was burnt out of our home near Kinglake and I wouldn’t want anyone to go through that nightmare.
By the way, if you get a chance to see it, read Inferno: The Day Victoria Burned. We survived the fires, but had no idea how badly we were let down by governments, emergency services and green ratbags (well, we knew about the greens because they have dominated our council for years!!!!). I couldn’t put the book down and now as we rebuild I am very, very angry.
Quote: Smokey (17:03:01) :
“Gore promptly recanted his original November 8th ‘quiet withdrawal,’ as this timeline shows: click
It says something about Gore’s character that he was ready to throw in the towel at the first hint of a setback.”
Thanks, Smokey, for the timeline link. It appeared to be a pitched battle, up to this ending:
Dec. 12: The Florida House of Representatives votes to appoint electors for Bush. The U.S. Supreme Court overturns the Florida Supreme Court, ruling 5-4 that there may be no further counting of Florida’s disputed presidential votes.
Dec. 13: Gore concedes; Bush, as president-elect, calls for reconciliation.
I hope that my hypothesis is wrong. If Al Gore and George Bush were play acting – each being but puppets in a show – then WUWT and other AGW skeptics face a far more formidable foe than NAS, the UN’s IPCC, and Al Gore.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
These examples of unusual weather in Australia/Tasmania, as well as our unusual winter in the U.S. result from meridional flow–they say little or nothing about global trends. Right at this moment in the U.S. we have gone back to zonal flow for a time, but I’d bet the meridional flow will return soon. We have been doing this since august it appears. One month meridional followed by a month zonal–cold, warm, cold, warm…
I think people are missing the point of the item. Not just snow in the Australian mountains during the height of summer down under (Jan/Feb) but down to record low levels in the modern (recorded era). If this happenned in the earlier part of the 20th century then I wouldn’t be surprised either.
I live in the Lower North Island of New Zealand and have been recording snowfalls as seen from a distance out on the plains to the two main mountain ranges that divide the North Island here for the past 30 years. The Tararua Ranges (Ave MSL 5,000 ft/1500m) and the Ruahine Ranges further north(Ave MSL 5,500ft/1700m) can be snow free as seen from the plains for several months of the year. I have never seen snow on them in February. In the period 1980-2009 I have only seen snow on the Tararuas in January in 1997 and 1998 (both El nino years).
The earliest snowfall for a new cold season has been on March 4th in 1983 and 2006. I’m talking about snow that you can see from 30 miles away, not the stuff that you have to be amongst to notice.
Despite all of the usual high temperatures in all of the usual places in Australia, I am not at all surprised to see low level snowfalls for Australia, it could have just as easily been here. Typically though that same depression that brought a southerly flow to the S.E. corner of Oz will now bring sub-tropical humidity and rain to much of N.Z. over the weekend. Although there maybe a southerly kick-back, similar to what Oz received, as the depression passes through.
For my neck of the woods this has been the 5th coolest summer to date in the past 55 years going by maximum temperatures alone. Yesterday we cracked 25 degrees C for the first time this hot season, the 5th latest date for such an event. The top 7 are; 1992-3 Mar 2nd, 1982-3 Feb 16, 1963-4 Feb 7th, 1976-7 Feb 2nd, 2009-10 Jan 18th, 1991-2 Jan 13th, 2006-07 Jan 12th. All of these are El Nino Years, and the first three as well as 1991-2 are also affected by large tropical volcanic eruptions as well. To me the fact that two summers from the end of this current decade feature without the influence of vulcanism is quite significant.
IMHO what all of this shows is that far from being a runaway greenhouse as the warmistas would have us believe, we are seeing a continuance of the natural variability with El Nino/La Nina (as well as other local oceanic/climate phenomena) having a strong impact on our varying weather/climate.
On the other hand if we start to see a trend of continuing cool summers and harsher winters in most places worldwide then we should be really worried. This would break the trend of variability seen in the ACTUAL data for the past 50 or so years. We can only keep observing, recording.
Go to the bottom (just about) of the right-hand sidebar and click on “Tips and Notes to WUWT”
Anthony and WUWT readers,
Can we please cease with the “weather is not climate” department? Even if thousands of people came to this blog and described the “weather” in their back yard, it wouldn’t even come close to describing global conditions. Every “weather is not climate” post I could find – every single one – tried to point out unusually cold temperatures at some location in the world. And yet . . . .
http://nsstc.uah.edu/atmos/news/2009_full.jpg
Anyone who cares passionately about science (as you all appear too) should encourage Anthony to discontinue the “weather is not climate department”, and its ilk, immediately. Anyone who has, presumably, studied science, and in particular someone that presumes to have a scientific understanding of climate and the global warming issue, should be embarrassed post such rubbish. It contributes nothing.
(for those of you ready to point out the cartographic distortion in the figure, go ahead and check: the global anomaly was +0.259 C)
It is worth mentioning that five or six years ago various Australian climate scientists were claiming we would never see any snow at any level in this country within a few years. The last two snow seasons have been rather good, and now this.
It was 38 degrees Celsius here on the Gold Coast SE Queensland yesterday. I had already given myself the day off before it got hot so I was very happy. Back to normal today, 30 Celsius and breezy.
Koala’s still literally high in the tree’s.
SteveK (14:45:55) :
‘..greenhouse gases, which comprise less than 1 percent of the atmosphere, are responsible for the Earth being 21 degrees Celsius higher (the difference between a frozen planet and one where life exists) than it would otherwise be. Small amount — yes. Insignificant — no.’
I thought greenhouse gases made up 7 to 10 percent of the atmosphere, of which, CO2 makes up about 3 percent of the greenhouse gases.
Tell us. How is that 2.5 amplification number been working for you in the last 10 years?
Phil M (18:41:48) :
I agree with you that all this discussion of weather does not equate to global conditions (see my post above at 17:43:29). But letting people talk about what is going on in their neck of the woods is fun–even if biased towards reporting of cooler than normal. And every now and then I learn something interesting. I think we can live with “weather is not climate” and just keep it in perspective.
Snore. We had hail on Christmas Day in 2009 in VIC. But it doesn’t make me think it has not been hotter than hell lately. Its all just projections, another projected trait of climate change being increasing instability and climate extremes across the globe. Which could mean alternating freeze and boil for us in AU. Though I sort of hope not, changing into the long underwear from the swimming togs is such a bother.
Phil M (18:41:48) :
No, I would not have Anthony cease the “Weather is not Climate Dept.”.
Why? Because Weather is an Instance of Climate, and Climate is both regional and moving to one state or another, chiefly a higher or lower state.
Weather and Climate are currently moving towards a lower state, one with less energy but erratic in dispersion.
When there is a hot place somewhere on the Globe, whether it is record-breaking or not, it is cited as “proof” of Global Warming. There are fewer of these places with each passing year.
The majority of Weather and Regional Climate states are now cooder.
The “Weather is not Climate Dept.” is for all those people out there who have just been whacked with a cold month and then being told thier area was the warmest in X # of years.
Why would anyone want Anthony to take away the only relief valve in existence from these insane GISS/MET anomalies?
And furthermore, the Weather does NOT belong to GISS, NOAA, MET, IPCC or NCDC. These Johnny-come-latelys take a back seat to Man’s love of discussing the Weather, lately of which these Agencies have been misrepresenting in a very bad way.
REPLY: Plus, I’m doing exactly what I did on TV for 25 years – point out interesting and record setting weather events when they happen. Show me a TV meteorologist or weathercaster that doesn’t do this regularly, and I’ll show you someone who is likely unemployed. BTW you’ll find warm stories here too, such as the recent “warmest January day in UAH sat data”. Should I stop doing that too? – Anthony
Damn it! How does global warming do that?