From the “weather is not climate department”, it seems that the biggest snowstorm of all time is targeting the nation’s capitol. Here’s the current radar image:
via NOAA/NWS
SPECIAL WEATHER STATEMENT NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE BALTIMORE MD/WASHINGTON DC 1234 PM EST FRI FEB 5 2010 DCZ001-MDZ004>007-009>011-013-014-016>018-VAZ042-050>057-501-502- 060145- DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA-FREDERICK MD-CARROLL-NORTHERN BALTIMORE- 1234 PM EST FRI FEB 5 2010 ...RECORD SNOWFALL FORECAST IN THE BALTIMORE-WASHINGTON DC REGION... ...EXTREMELY DANGEROUS WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS DEVELOPING TONIGHT... GUSTY NORTHEAST WINDS 20 TO 30 MPH WITH VISIBILITIES FREQUENTLY FALLING BELOW ONE-QUARTER MILE DUE TO HEAVY SNOW WILL DEVELOP TONIGHT TO PRODUCE NEAR-BLIZZARD AND EXTREMELY HAZARDOUS WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS TONIGHT THROUGH SATURDAY MORNING. TRAVEL IS HIGHLY DISCOURAGED TONIGHT AND WILL BE VERY DANGEROUS. LOOKING BACK AT THE BIGGEST STORM OF RECORD FOR WASHINGTON DC... THE JANUARY 1922 KNICKERBOCKER STORM...28.0 INCHES OF SNOW WAS PRODUCED FROM 3.02 INCHES OF LIQUID WATER. CURRENT FORECASTS FOR THIS EVENT HAVE TOTAL LIQUID FALLING FROM THIS STORM APPROACHING 3 INCHES...WHICH ACCORDINGLY WOULD CREATE A SNOWFALL THAT WILL RIVAL THE KNICKERBOCKER STORM TOTAL. GENERALLY ACROSS THE REGION...20 TO 30 INCHES OF SNOW WILL FALL BY SATURDAY EVENING. BALTIMORES RECORD OF 26.8 INCHES FROM THE PRESIDENTS DAY FEBRUARY 2003 STORM WILL ALSO BE THREATENED.
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Reporting from Baltimore.
Global warming has struck. It appears to have arrived in the form of a harbinger of an ice age. The predictions are true. Looks like 16″ + and still falling.
My super bowl party is a Bust….
28″ in Ashton, MD and still snowing.
Good luck to all in this “inconvienent” storm
Roger
As of 9 am EST they’re reporting anywhere from 17 inches just south of DC to 20 inches at Baltimore. One report at Elkridge Md was 30 inches. Something like 150,000 without power. There have been reports of thundersnow and someone sent a TV station a picture of a lightning flash.
I’m stuck in Delaware. They’ve closed the roads to all but emergency vehicles here. We’ve had high winds and a very wet snow. Forecast is for continued snow thoughout the day (6-12 inches additional) in DC.
Note to James Hansen.
We can’t make it to the coal mine today to protest mining. Keep shaking your fist at the bulldozers. They may reach their tipping point.
Also the forrest fire risk is low. Keep close to a road going out just in case.
Better post while the power is still on. Prb’ly 28″ or so here in western MD & still snowing. Wet stuff that clings onto everything, but still hardly a breath of wind. A serious flood will result here in my bottomland when this melts.
That is flakes of frozen water, it must be flakes of ash
Could this snowstorm in D.C. be “The Gore effect”?
Re: BarryW (Feb 6 06:09),
That’s what Global warming does. Highways closed, trains and planes not running and everybody getting HOT under the collar.
All this cold and snow coincident with ****gate seems like too much of a coincidence. This storm is for Mann, Chu, Holdren and Obama.
“Whoever undertakes to set himself up as judge in the field of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods.”
– Albert Einstein
“The gods too are fond of a joke.”
– Aristotle
Power outages.
http://chicago.straightdope.com/sdc20091224.php
So wind turbines start up at 8MPH, stop over 30+ and get shudt down during ice and snow events. Will we learn from this teaching moment?
You need one of these:
i-shovel
Should be interesting in that there are not that many stations in NZ. Asking for the details of how exactly all stations were “homogenised” could turn up something more than “well it’s in the peer reviewed literature” (it’s in a Library somewhere)
Just a shame that “Washington” has currently moved away from CO2 scamming. You could have had the UK version where politicians are busy passing “Global Warming” legislation as the snow fills the streets outside the castle for the first time in decades.
Can just see Obama at the podium after the C&T bill debate suggesting that attendees start a new overnight session on Weevil preservation because the Coast Guard can’t get in until daylight.
Miracle Gas® – is there nothing it can’t do?
If we get another 4.6 inches in the DC area, it will beat the 100 year record. If we get another 12.3 inches, we beat the all-time record.
1898-99 – 54.0″
1995-96 – 46.0″
1921-22 – 44.5″
1891-92 – 41.7″
1904-05 – 41.0″
So far this season: 41.7″
We still have a good 7 hours of snowfall left, so we should be number two when all is said and done. Also, having two top ten snowfall amounts within the same year is unprecedented. It has never happened before in the DC area.
Some areas may break that 238 year old unofficial record. We will have to wait and see.
Western PA here. 19-22 and still coming down.
Okay, here’s a bit a trivia for all you who can’t quite figure out how AGW can mean bigger snowfalls, and bigger rainfalls, and more evaporation…
What’s one of the driest regions on earth? Yep, Antarctica. Also of course the coldest.
More heating=More evaporation=more extreme rain & snow event (all as predicted by every AGW model
Is the “epic” snow on the east coast a sign of global warming? One storm does not mean anything. Should we get these “epic” storms repeatedly over a period of years…then you can start to draw some conclusions…
A rare blizzard warning is in effect for the Washington-Baltimore area.
The storm – dubbed “snowpocalypse” and “snowmageddon” by the local media – is expected to stretch from Indiana to Pennsylvania and into parts of New York and North Carolina.
Parts of Maryland and West Virginia are already buried under more than 20in (51 cm) of snow.
And forecasters say that snowfall rates are likely to increase – up to 2in (5cm) an hour – early in the day.
It comes less than two months after a December storm dumped more than 16in (41cm) of snow in Washington.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8501246.stm
21 inches and counting in Baltimore.
R Gates
I would agree with you, if I hadn’t heard the:
More heating=worse droughts=more deserts mantra ad nauseam
You can’t both eat your cake and have it you know.
R. Gates: The same AGW models also predict droughts. It seems the modelers have their bases covered no matter what happens or where.
R. Gates (08:24:38):
“Okay, here’s a bit a trivia for all you who can’t quite figure out how AGW can mean bigger snowfalls, and bigger rainfalls, and more evaporation…”
Who said that? The fact is that the alarmist contingent claims that droughts and deserts will result from global warming. Maybe you need to start educating your own clueless crowd.
And that explanation of ‘bigger snowfalls’ applies equally well to glacier growth, because the primary factor in glaciers advancing is increased precipitation at higher elevations.
So much for the latest alarming glacier conjecture. Is there any scary AGW-caused scenario that has actually happened? I mean, besides the three-headed frogs…
Could this unusual blizzard in DC and all the unseasonable rain in Florida be associated with high frequency radiation causing the Haitian earthquake?
R. Gates (08:24:38) :
“Epic” rainstorms might get you different conclutions than “epic” snowstorms.
Anyway, I thought warming was suppose to cause dreadful droughts. Changing your mind?
If patterns do move in cycles, another Dust Bowl is over due. If one reoccurs, will you change back to suggesting warming causes droughts?
And if you had been paying attention on this blog for the last year or so, you would know that we are already well aware of the relationship with temperature and humidity, that is one of the reasons we know the AGW folks are selling a bill of goods.
One of their favorite AGW pitches is that increased temperatures will lead to drought and starvation. We are well aware that the dry times are the cold times globally which is why there are dust signatures in the ice cores from the ice age periods.
Major snow storms take not only humidity but cold. It takes a lot of energy to freeze all that water to ice crystals. That happens at high altitude where the heat of fusion is easily radiated away to space.
Go back and look at the snow storms which occurred in the late 1970’s when the temperature record clearly shows a cooling trend. You will see major storms that nearly shut down the eastern sea board areas. It is the pattern of cold and snow that important. A seasonal shift to higher snow depths and more persistent snow is consistent with cooling. The dryness you point to in the Antarctic is due to the very cold temps far below the freezing point, dropping the dew point to levels where the atmosphere can carry very little water vapor. At near freezing temperatures the atmosphere can still carry and hold quite a bit of water, and as shown this year moving the snow line south from from its traditional snow zone by 10’s or 100’s of miles clearly shows a regional climatic change (at least for this winter season).
This is just one bit of data in a long series of data points. In and of itself it does not prove a thing (either your position or the skeptic position), it is the accumulation of such events that will prove which trend is correct.
Your willingness to take it as absolute and unconditional proof of global warming is a statement of faith, not acceptance of it as simply a single piece of data necessary to build a picture.
A skeptic accepts it for what it is, an example of natural variability. It is not unusual and also its humor value to wake people up to how naturally variable weather is.
One single storm does not prove anything, but a continuing pattern of storms — well over time that can show a trend. Normally moderating influences on temperature make this sort of snow fall quite rare in that area of the country.
When you see repeated snow events where they are very rare, then you begin to develop a pattern that shows subtle changes have occurred in regional climate patterns. The snow line is a very sensitive marker that can be used to indicate regional and seasonal temperature changes. Like first frost and last frost it is the sort of record that goes back generations (far longer in most regions than quality thermometer measurements). It is also the sort of climate record that is immune to post collection homogenization and adjustments.
Most of us are simply enjoying the comedy relief posed by AGW proponents trying to ignore a pattern of seasonal shifts that have appeared in the historical records time after time. They are trying to tell everyone that these storms and shifts are unprecedented. They are not, if you have any sense of history at all.
http://www.nycsubway.org/articles/1888-blizzard.html
Larry
@Tenuc, and Gail Combs,
I also have serious doubts about Hadley’s machinations, but I wonder just how far they go in tampering with data. My guess is they don’t tamper much with the data they recently published (from which that tinypic graph was made). Those are just monthly temperature averages for a few hundred cities across the globe. Plus, those are fairly easy to verify or disprove. Not very smart to fiddle with the raw data.
I suspect the real manipulation occurs when they begin calculating anomalies, infilling for missing data, filling grids with inappropriate values, then adjusting the results for publication.
Still, it is quite interesting that the CRU data show quite a few cities in a pronounced cooling trend. Is CO2 fickle? Does it play favorites? Does it heat up only selected cities / rural areas, but not others? Or, is developing anomalies and grid-filling just another way to “hide the decline?”
Cities with cooling trends per CRU data include Eureka, Los Angeles, San Diego (all in California), Washington DC, and Marquette, Michigan.
AccuWeather forecaster Jim Cosik goes ballistic on DC weather – so ballistic they have to mute the screaming:
And here’s a weather cam at Kogan Plaza – George Washington University:
http://my.gwu.edu/mod/camera/liveview.cfm?ID=1