Major snowstorm headed for eastern US

OT but…
Detectives question climate change scientist over email leaks
University of East Anglia scientist Paul Dennis denies leaking material, but links to climate change sceptics in US drew him to attention of the investigators
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/04/climate-change-email-hacking-leaks

“Forecasters all over are watching this storm with concern.” What forecaster doesn’t like a nice big storm? I thought they lived for his stuff. As a D.C. resident, I know I’m stoked.

A scientist at the University of East Anglia has been questioned by detectives ­investigating how controversial emails were leaked from the campus’s climate research unit.
Norfolk police have interviewed and taken a formal statement from Paul Dennis, 54, another climate researcher who heads an adjacent laboratory.
The leaked emails from the head of the unit, Professor Phil Jones, surfaced just before the Copenhagen conference in December and caused a furore because they suggested that data which did not support theories of global warming was being deliberately withheld. Dennis denies leaking the material. But it is understood that his links with climate change sceptic bloggers in North America drew him to the attention of the investigating team, and have exposed rifts within the university’s environmental science faculty.
Can’t be true. They say it was hacked.

Unuasaly large number of trolls hailing this report.
I prefer wait and see.

And they just got a foot of snow in some places last weekend. They got a lot of snow in that region in 1996 but that was the first week of January. A “doozy” is right. BUT … the storm tracking 50 miles east or west can make a huge difference in snow totals. It can mean the difference between a dumping and a dusting or the difference between a dumping and a deluge of rain.

I was thinking “must be brutally cold there”, but the forecast is only for a low of 32F. Oh well.

“Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past” headline was posted in the Independent newspaper in the UK on March 20, 2000.
However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers.
According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said. (end)
Please, for the CHILDREN.
For those on the East Coast subjected to the storm, please save samples of the snow in jars and then put in them in the Freezer.
And, many years from now, your thankful descendants with great reverence will remove the jars, gather round them, and marvel at real SNOW.

Meanwhile, in Washington State from east of the normally snowy Cascades:
Headline: “Kittitas County irrigators are asking: Where’s the snow?”
http://kvnews.com/articles/2010/02/04/news/doc4b69ea7583efd597666919.txt
Oh, the snow is in Washington, D.C. So Mother Nature confused the two Washingtons. Funny business, this weather.

OT A forthrightly well stated:
The end is not near by S. Fred Singer
February 04, 2010
http://www.hindustantimes.com/The-end-is-not-near/H1-Article1-505317.aspx

Hey, take is easy on us folks in the Baltimore-Washington area. This has already been billed by the Washington Post as a “historic” storm. (They went on to say it’s just like the one that hit us the week before Christmas.) Anyway, it seems we get these 2 footers about every 6 or 7 years, (except when we get hit more than once) and it was not many years ago the governement shut down for almost a week. Do you think anyone will notice that the DC is shut down?

C’mon y’all! Weather is NOT CLIMATE!

Quick! Schedule some global warming hearings!

Where have all the severe droughts gone?
http://www.drought.unl.edu/dm/monitor.html
Climate change is sure scary.

We’ve had almost no snow in Toronto this year. It’s been cold from time to time, but little snow, though there’s snow about 60 miles north.

Only two previous Winters have recorded two double-digit snow events in the same season. Looks as if we’re well on our way to the third such season. After this event, we can probably begin looking at this Winter’s place in the record books in DC.
And the overall pattern is favorable for more snow events over the next week or two.

Yes. It’s called a Northeaster because the wind comes from the NE. Typically it is associates with a low pressure that is just offshore.

RobP,
You are right, one of our big ones was the President’s Day storm. I have been in this area for 30 years now and I think this is my 5th or 6th major storm like this. I think the reason they don’t plan for these is its not unusual to have several years where we get less than 10″ of snow all year and then the heaven’s open up. It’s hard to plan for the variability. One note about “historic” weather events in the area. In the mid 90’s we had a huge Nor’easter that was followed a week later by 3-4″ of warm rain. The Potomac had a “500 year flood” and a small town called Point of Rocks, MD was inundated. The state allocated a lot of money to rebuild the town the following summer but in September the Potomac had its second “500 year flood” of the year. They took the money that had not net been spent, added some more to it and moved the town further away from the river.

“Doesn’t a Nor’easter come from the North East?”
Wind direction….
“I am sitting in the central NC area just south of Jordan lake. ”
I went to NCSU, lived in Durham until 2002. We had some huge snows there in 2000 and 2001. 18″ on one of them. Set a single day record. The city basically shut completely down…

3 Feb: Skeptics turn up the heat
By Li Jing (China Daily)
Chinese scientists say severe weather conditions and the scandal surrounding a famed study has opened the debate on alternative causes of climate change. Li Jing reports ..
Chinese experts, however, have cast doubt on the link between CO2 concentration levels and the global temperature rise over the past 150 years, which has been the basis of arguments over carbon emissions reduction plans in recent years.
Ge Quansheng, vice-director of geographic sciences and natural resources research for the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said he believes the IPCC may have exaggerated the impact of human activities because of the incomplete collection of climate data.
“The IPCC report offered no definite scientific basis for the sensitivity of climate change to atmospheric CO2 concentration, although a warming trend was witnessed in the latter half of the 20th century,” Ge wrote in a report published on Jan 15.
Many questions were not answered in the IPCC’s fourth assessment report, he wrote, such as how much does the natural cycle contribute to the global warming? And are man-made aerosols countering or worsening the temperature rise?
Norden E. Huang, director of the research center for adaptive data analysis at the National Central University in Taiwan, agreed that the IPCC was wrong to maintain the theory that CO2 levels are the controlling force in climate change, and said the world’s oceans play a much larger role in global warming. ..
Studies on air bubbles found in Antarctic ice core samples have enabled scientists to chart variations in the planet’s temperature and greenhouse gases over the past 800,000 years, he explained.
“Looking at the available ice core data, there is an almost perfect correlation between the temperature and CO2,” he said. “But the change in temperature has always preceded any increase in the atmospheric concentration of CO2, so it is too arbitrary to conclude that most of the historical global warming was caused by changes in the levels of CO2.”
The rate of warming also remains a contentious problem, said Huang, who has provided a different interpretation for the same data used for the 2007 IPCC report.
In 1998, as chief scientist for oceanography at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in the United States, Huang developed an adaptive method of analyzing non-linear and non-stationary systems inspired by ocean waves. “The world is non-linear, so any data analysis method with pre-defined base functions will never produce reasonable results for ‘trends’ such as climate change or the stock market,” he said.
The method received eight patents in US and was honored by NASA as one of the most important applied mathematics inventions in recent history. Using his method, and by separating possible natural climate cycles from the recorded changes in temperature, Huang said he found the rate of global warming is only half the alarming rate predicted in the IPCC report.
“My conclusion is that oceans play a dominant and controlling role in climate change over 10- to 100-year periods. This has not been paid necessary attention by the IPCC,” he said.
Global temperatures during the past millennium can be broken down into four cycles – 194 years, 116 years, 62 years and 21 years – and these show why the Earth has become warmer in recent decades, according to Qian Weihong, a professor of atmospheric science at Peking University and a renowned climate change skeptic.
The accelerated warming rate over the last 20 years is due to the combination of the four cycles, he said. Based on this belief, global temperatures could begin to fall from 2010 until 2030, when the natural climate cycles move into a downward curve.
Other scientists are also studying the impact of black carbon aerosols on the atmosphere. Aerosols are tiny articles suspended in the air that occur naturally from volcanoes, forests, sea spray and vegetation, and during dust storms and grassland fires. However, human activities also generate aerosols, including black carbon, which is the soot released when fuels like diesel, wood and coal are burned.
Most aerosols reflect sunlight back into space, thereby reducing the amount of solar radiation that reaches the Earth’s surface and having a direct cooling effect.
Recent studies, however, have found that black carbon aerosols could be major contributors to global warming. Once in the atmosphere, black carbon absorbs sunlight and emits heat, but after falling to the ground it darkens snow and ice, which reduces their ability to reflect sunlight and accelerates melting.
Research published last December by NASA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences suggested black carbon aerosols have contributed significantly to the melting of the Tibetan glaciers, which explained why temperatures at the Tibetan plateau – known as the “third pole” by Chinese – have risen twice as fast as the rest of the world over the last 30 years.
Liu Hongbin, a senior researcher for the National Climate Center in Beijing, welcomed the debate on the causes of climate change. “It is meaningful for us to better understand the issue and take actions to adapt to change,” he said.
No one should embrace the IPCC’s conclusions as “the truth”, he said. “Science itself is not the truth but it offers the best approach to finally close in on the truth. The conclusions were all made based on the knowledge scientists had acquired by a certain point of time. They are far from perfect.”
The number of Chinese contributors to the IPCC’s reports has increased steadily from nine on the first assessment to 28 on the fourth, but the participation of climate scientists from China is still very limited, said Liu.
“The 28 Chinese scientists made up less than 2 percent of all contributors to the fourth assessment report,” he said.
One of the reasons is that climate data collected in China is not well received internationally. “The exposure of several plagiarism cases in the recent years has given Chinese scientists a bad reputation overseas. But it’s unfair for the vast majority who work really hard,” said Liu.
Most international scientists are concerned about the continuity of China’s weather data. Most of the country’s weather stations were only built after 1950, while most climate data collected before then was incomplete. But Liu insisted: “All available data from these weather stations is well verified and authentic. We are constantly improving data collection on climate change.”
Liu is now helping to recommend Chinese contributors for the IPCC’s fifth assessment, which is due before 2014 and is expected to take into account more of the possible natural causes of global warming.
Researchers will again be separated into three teams, with one group expected to address the physical science related to climate change, as well as look at aerosols, changes in sea levels and the carbon cycle. The final report will also have specific chapters that discuss the overlapping and interrelating factors of global warming, added Liu. “The aim is to get a more comprehensive and deep understanding of the issues surrounding climate change,” he said.
Huang in Taiwan also warned of the danger of global warming becoming a diplomatic issue.
“Climate change used to be a scientific problem. It was very much politicized at last year’s United Nations conference in Copenhagen,” he said. “Politicians sell certainty but we scientists live off doubt.”
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2010-02/03/content_9418037.htm

Weather.com’s snow total maps never seem to match the warnings, it always confuses me. Like Morris county, NJ for example says 8-12 inches…yet with that snow total map it says 1-3 to 3-6 line…so yea….

I am interested in the offered explanation of the term “Nor’easter” as being due to the direction of the wind. I was under the impression that it took its name from its movement up the north-east coast of the USA.
We are very aware of nor’easters in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia because one that comes up the coast is likely to hit both our provinces, though it can veer westward and just dump on Maine, or it can be blown east into the Atlantic and miss us all. But we will be watching this one carefully!
The good thing about living here is that snow is a feature of every winter, and the province is well equipped with trucks that plow off the snow while spreading salt and/or sand, so we are inconvenienced only temporarily.
An irony is that Americans complain about the cold air and bad weather going down from Canada, but we in the Maritimes generally get our worst storms from the USA!
More trivia. An old saying here is:
When the wind
Is from the east
Weather’s not fit
For man or beast.
(Storm winds come from the east or northeast.)
I really appreciate WUWT because it is like a large family of like-minded people scattered around the world. We learn so much more than just about AGW from reading postings here.
IanM

Pandemonium is it? I was wondering they call what’s going on in Washington.
And now word the Indian Gov’t sets up it’s own Climate Change panel, because the IPCC can’t be trusted – who knew?

Sigh.. Yet another big storm passes us by.
Greetings from the forests of far northern Wisconsin where snowmobiling is life and a pretty good chunk of our economy. This year we have been really suffering as the AO put us under a force field of high pressure that pushes every big storm, like this one, south.
I keep looking at the 16 day GFS and there is just no hope of a ‘real’ storm north of Green Bay. We can’t even get a respectable Alberta Clipper. The AO models say it will ease a little soon, but so far nothing shows up in the forecast models as far as the high pressure backing off.
Q-1.. Will this hellish high pressure ever go away, or is it time to drop the plow off of the truck and store the snowmobiles? We can get snow as late as June, but by March 15th the sun gets so hot it melts 3-6″ a day and ends the snowmobiling season. Time is short.
Q2- Opinions.. how much of the hellish high is an AO phenomenon, how much can be attributed to ENSO or PDO ?

Roger Knights (20:39:01) :
Mark Walker (19:50:57) :
Once Brazil sets up its own climate panel, to whom will the US and the UK be sending all the money, and how will the IPCC be able to say that the sea is rising is India says their coastlines are fine, or that the rain forests are doomed if Brazil says they are fine, or the glaciers are melting if China says they are fine. What then if Russia joins in and says that, surprising as it is it is actually really cold.
It is not inconceivable that Russia, China, India, Brazil and South Africa could form the global warming equivalent of the Warsaw pact. They are all upset with the IPCC over misinformation (to put it lightly) in AR4.
That would be a real cold war, skeptics could be the communists (except they would keep their own money) and the warmist would be the capitalists (except that they would give away all their money).

There also seems to be another storm winding up at about the Nebraska/Kansas border.

It’s just weather get over it!
You notice that these heavy snows are farther south? thankyou there not here! Michigan!
ya ya ya it’s not evidence.

One snowstorm means nothing in the climate debate…but what does mean something is, temps at 14.000 feet globally are going up up up. Right now we’re seeing temps not normally seen until mid-April at this level of the atmosphere. Go to this site and click on 14,000 feet and see the data for yourself:
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
Of course I’m sure some of the cool-aid drinkers will insist that some NASA technician has fiddled with the data– maybe even Jim Hansen himself! 2010 continues on track to be the warmest year on record…

“R. Gates (07:02:22) :
One snowstorm means nothing in the climate debate…but what does mean something is, temps at 14.000 feet globally are going up up up. Right now we’re seeing temps not normally seen until mid-April at this level of the atmosphere. Go to this site and click on 14,000 feet and see the data for yourself:
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
Of course I’m sure some of the cool-aid drinkers will insist that some NASA technician has fiddled with the data– maybe even Jim Hansen himself! 2010 continues on track to be the warmest year on record…”
R. gates, maybe it didn’t occur to you but the ocean warms the atmosphere not the other way round so the El Nino warms the lower atmosphere, is that a surprise? You’ve cherrypicked the only height where 2010’s signal comes out on top. Nice link, BTW, good Java visualization.
Of course I’m sure some of the cool-aid drinkers will insist that some NASA technician has fiddled with the data– maybe even Jim Hansen himself! 2010 continues on track to be the warmest year on record…

Zeke the Sneak (07:53:50) :Why should it be?, don’t wanna think it’s because of coal’s color.

JR ‘ But, good truck, lots of winter driving experience and good skiing in VT. All that equals FUN!”
This has been one of he worst ski years in VT since I sarted skiing again 20 years ago. Areas opened weeks later than usual due to warm temps and therfore no snow making. We have gotten one storm that dumped (supposedly 33 inches in Burlington but Stowe only got 6inches). The next storm was a rainy downpour.
March is usually a reliable snow month, but last year it just rained. No snow forecast from this noreaster in VT. Sunny day today and Sunday

That Punxutawney Phil must have had one heck of a shadow on Tuesday. Looks like he was right about more winter.

To clarify, a Nor’easter typically moves N or NE, carried by upper steering winds. The surface winds flow CCW, so areas north of the storm experience NE winds.
Just going from memory, multi-feet snows have occurred here in the mid-Atlantic states more often recently (since the late 1970s) than some decades before. Jan 1996 was perhaps the record snow event since the late 1800’s in western Md — up to 36″ in low elevations, 50″+ in mountains.
So there has been a moderate increase in yearly snowfall avgs from the late 1970’s to present. However, it only matches the snowfall avgs in the late 1800’s to ~1920, then snowfall avgs dropped off a bit for decades. Of course, there were occasional big snows like 1961.

R. Gates (10:00:06)
Facts about CO2:
CO2 it is not black, but trasparent and invisible
CO2 is the gas you exhale. You exhale about 900 grams a day of CO2
CO2 that you exhale is what plants breath to give you back O2 (oxygen) for you to breath. Then it is neither a pollutant nor a poison, it even rejuvenates!!!:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1485258/carbon_dioxide_therapy_carboxy_therapy_pg2_pg2.html?cat=69
CO2 is heavier than air, it doesn´t fly up, up and away CO2 is a trace gas in the atmosphere, it is the 0.038 per cent of it, or 3.8 parts per ten thousand.
The atmosphere, the air you know, does not have the capacity to “hold” enough heat, it only “saves” 0.001297 joules per cubic centimeter, while water , the sea you know, has 3227 times that capacity (4.186 joules).
Would you warm your feet with a bottle filled with air or filled with hot water?
The so called “Greenhouse effect” does not exist, see:
http://www.giurfa.com/gh_experiments.pdf
But if you have been cheated to the core and still believe in it, think the following:
Svante Arrhenius, the guy of the greenhouse effect, said he thought CO2 acted as the “window panes” of a green-house, but as its concentration in atmosphere it is just 3.8 per ten thousand, you would have a greenhouse with 3.8 window panes and 9996.2 empty holes

I’m glad it’s only dumping rain here. We’ve had a couple of inches of rain which iirc would translate to a foot of snow. Thankfully the temperature has been hovering at 34F. 🙂

Leon Brozyna (23:14:02) :
The bad news:
— all those self-important political and bureaucratic slugs will get to take a three-day weekend without a second thought (or maybe even a first thought).
That’s the good news out of this storm. The only thing that would be better would be if a mini “Day After Tomorrow” scenario developed which left the entire D.C. beltway encased in permanent glaciation. As a wise man once pointed out,
“No man’s life, liberty or fortune is safe while our legislature is in session.” — Benjamin Franklin
If the deadheads could be prevented from gathering to inflict more of their wonderful plans to fix the catastrophes they created by their previous efforts to remedy the catastrophes they created by their efforts to solve the problems they created by their previous efforts to…etc., the native resilience of the American people and economy might actually be able to pull us out of our present predicament. Unfortunately, their profligate schemes to exploit the greed of the populace to ensure they stay in power may have pushed us past a “tipping point”. Social Security has “unexpectedly” gone broke “much faster than predicted”, The National Debt has zoomed to a point where it can’t ever be paid off
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/it-is-now-mathematically-impossible-to-pay-off-the-u-s-national-debt
It’s been a nice run but it may be time to gather round and sing “So Long and Thanks for All the Fish”

Dave Wendt (12:27:00) :
This is your armageddon:
The National Debt has zoomed to a point where it can’t ever be paid off
Unless a Carbon Currency (Cap&Trade) is adopted.☺

rhys jaggar[02:59:51
You said
“The 1980s had quite a few ’snow fests’ in SE UK, whilst the 1990s were broadly like the 1970s. As were the 2000s. Until Dec 2009.
I went back and checked the actual snowfall record since 2000 and found Dr Viner was wrong for 8 of the last 10 winters between 2000 and 2010. [Only 2002 and 2008 had no snow] according to this UK source http://www.richardjwild.co.uk/blog/category/uk-snow-news/

Well I am in the north of Scotland happily waiting to see what comes our way from across the Atlantic. Can’t wait, they got it all so wrong …. The grit supplies are at an all time low, they have followed the government’s minium amount needed to get through our non existent airbrushed out, so called winters. So now they have plundered their next year budget. All on the strength of recommendations that there would not be a hard winter from the met men.
There is a great line sung with fearsome tone ‘and sent him homeward – to think again!’

I’m pretty sure we did have some snow here in East Anglia in 2008! I’ve worn my sheepskin snow boots every winter for the last few

SouthAmericanGirlsArePerfection (07:54:47) :
Which country exactly?

thank you

email is http://www.jnelson@gmail.com