Guest post by Steven Goddard
Photo above from: NY Daily News: Record Snowfall in New York
Now that we have reached the end of the meteorological winter (December-February,) Rutgers University Global Snow Lab numbers (1967-2010) show that the just completed decade (2001-2010) had the snowiest Northern Hemisphere winters on record. The just completed winter was also the second snowiest on record, exceeded only by 1978. Average winter snow extent during the past decade was greater than 45,500,000 km2, beating out the 1960s by about 70,000 km2, and beating out the 1990s by nearly 1,000,000 km2. The bar chart below shows average winter snow extent for each decade going back to the late 1960s.
Here are a few interesting facts.
- Average winter snow extent has increased since the 1990s, by nearly the area of Texas and California combined.
- Three of the four snowiest winters in the Rutgers record occurred during the last decade – the top four winters are (in order) 1978, 2010, 2008, 2003
- The third week of February, 2010 had the second highest weekly extent (52,170,000 m2) out of the 2,229 week record
The bar graph below shows winter data for each year in the Rutgers database, color coded by decade. The yellow line shows the mean winter snow extent through the period. Note that the past decade only had two winters below 45 million km2. The 1990s had seven winters below the 45 million km2, the 1980s had five winters below 45 million km2, and the 1970s had four winters below 45 million km2. This indicates that the past decade not only had the most snowfall, but it also had the most consistently high snowfall, year over year.
It appears that AGW claims of the demise of snowfall have been exaggerated. And so far things are not looking very good for the climate model predictions of declining snowfall in the 21st century.
Many regions of the Northern Hemisphere have seen record snowfall this winter, including Washington D.C, Moscow, China, and Korea. Dr. Hansen’s office at Columbia University has seen record snowfall, and Al Gore has ineptly described the record snow :
“Just as it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm,”
A decade long record across the entire Northern Hemisphere is not appropriately described as a “snowstorm.”
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Leif Svalgaard (09:47:29) :
Yes you do, it is Estimated from current Research. That does not make it a Fact.
You are so pedantic with other posters on here, why did you not clarify your remark instead of stating it as Fact, which it can’t possibly be.
Fact as far as we know.
kadaka (09:56:38) :
I did not get the wrong end of the stick, I was asking Lief to be more precise and now he has. But still won’t change what he quoted as a fact and not a CALCULATION.
Leif, you talk about others using short data sequences for Trends, just how many Years of Results have you got to “Calculate” 100 Million Years in to the Future?
NickB. (07:11:33)
Do you mean did I catch a dead fish and disected it to see the cause of death myself?
Or did you mean that the salinity changes in the area declining coincided with the fish disappearing to never return when there was no oil spills or other natural causes off the coast of British Columbia, Canada.
If I was at home, I would give you the report on the salinity changes in the area along with the news story of the salmon becoming extinct.
Steve,
Why do you want to change what I post? I said Denver, not Wolf Creek pass, or any of the other sites around the state. Denver’s snowiest month on average (over the past century at least) has been March…and it is also the warmest month of the traditional (Dec-March) winter.
Finally, you keep shying away from the fact that a global cooling (ala the last glacial period) would be more dry, not Snowier. The last Glacial Period was more like Antarctica is, with very little precip.
For it to be snowier, you have to have more evaporation from the oceans, which means more heat, not more cool. No amount of twisting will change these basic laws of atmospheric physics– warm=wet, cool=dry, and has for millions of years on earth.
A C Osborn (11:21:01) :
Fact as far as we know.
Many ‘facts’ are ‘as far as know’. But when you know it, it is a fact. Example: The Earth is round. No amount of future research will change that.
A C Osborn (11:23:33) :
But still won’t change what he quoted as a fact and not a CALCULATION.
Calculations can be facts [and it this case are]. If you know the material and construction of a bridge, you can calculate at which load it will break, and it will.
A C Osborn (11:29:27) :
Just how many Years of Results have you got to “Calculate” 100 Million Years in to the Future?
About 12 billion years.
@ur momisugly A C Osborn (11:23:33) :
Ah, gotcha, my apologies. I studied his wording and thought that was the problem, didn’t seem to clearly indicate either direction.
Of course we know it is not a completely linear trend. At some point the Sun fired up, as it ages it will fuse heavier elements with reactions yielding less heat, it’ll run out of fuel and cool down. But for right now, in this little slice of time, I guess a linear approximation is close enough for government work (as the expression goes).
R. Gates (11:42:44) :
No Ice Age is ever alike due to the constant changes involved.
Evolution if you will. The rotation is slowing the planet, the planet is moving away from the sun more, volcanic activity, atmospheric activity, oceanic activity, meteorologic activity, any planetary shifts.
The shifts are gradual as to starve plant and animal life. Hence, very small fossil record of land animals.
But where did all the precipitation come from to form the massive glaciers that inhabited most of the conteninents?
Here’s one example of record warmth for February 2010 and what it can do:
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/sju/?n=record100301
Now where do you think all that moisture that evaporated from the oceans around Puerto Rico went to? Answer: Mostly to Europe in the form of the severe rain and snow storms they saw in February:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35496312/ns/world_news-europe/
If you look at the satellite maps during this time period, you can almost see the direct bee-line trail of clouds and storms that the moisture from around Puerto Rico made right toward Europe. Combine the record warmth with the extremely negative AO index…and bingo! Big Snows. Basic atmospheric physics…
Warm=wet, Cold=Dry, And Wet + Cold = SNOW!
Joe,
Your question is an excellent one, and really gets to the reasoning behind the AGW prediction that the interior of Greenland will see growth in snowpack while the edges deteriorate, with the net overall loss of ice for Greenland. Remember, warm=wet and cold=dry, but wet+cold=Snow. So, it takes heat to evaporate the moisture from the oceans, and it generally stays warmer near the oceans, but once this moist air travels over the interior of a continent and finds cooler air, bingo, you get more snow! This is precisely what the latest very accurate mapping of Greenland ice has found. See:
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003400/a003476/index.html
So, in a cooling world, we see the slow growth of glaciers and ice moving from the interior of continents out toward the seas, and in a warming world, we see the slow shrinkage of ice, moving from the seas toward the interior of continents.
Leif Svalgaard (11:45:24) :
Many ‘facts’ are ‘as far as know’. But when you know it, it is a fact. Example: The Earth is round. No amount of future research will change that
It depends of the observer, if its blink of his/her eye would be a thousand years, that observer would say perhaps it is an spiral or rather a more complicated geometrical form. So your opinions are not facts but only relative to your aprehension of reality.
R Gates,
So what you are saying is that you expected to see less snow at lower elevations of Greenland because of warming, and also expected to see more snow in Florida because of warming.
While we in the northern fifties were snowed in, Southern Spain suffered the wettest winter in the past 100 years.
Interesting remark by José Antonio Maldonado, president of the Asociación Meteorológica Española (the Spanish Meteorological society), and I quote: “en el último siglo no se ha registrado un temporal de lluvias tan intenso y prolongado como el actual que, en su opinión, contradice las estimaciones sobre el cambio climático en España.”. Translated: “A rainy season as intense and long-lasting as the current one has not been registered in the last century, and in his [Maldonado’s] opinion this contradicts the predictions for Spain resulting from climate change”.
linky: http://actualidad.orange.es/sociedad/maldonado_dice_que_este_temporal_es_unico_en_el_siglo_y_contrario_al_cambio_climatico_386208.html
Of course y’all can know how the deceivers and the deceived would respond…
But remember: the settled climate change science predicted a much drier Spain. Quid non.
PS: I won’t be translating the president’s name, the poor lad 🙂
Leif Svalgaard (11:45:24) :
Calculations can be facts [and it this case are]. If you know the material and construction of a bridge, you can calculate at which load it will break, and it will.
It’s simplistic statements like that which can cause major problems. I could trust such a calculation for a simple beam of a homogeneous material, provided it is known the material used had no flaws. However it is still good practice to spec the load under what the calculated amount is “just in case.” And for a bridge, given all the many components that are involved, a healthy margin is best.
But even for a simple bridge that is a mere slab of concrete, your statement falls apart. For such a slab it would be rare that rebar is not used in the concrete for reinforcement, virtually unthinkable to not use it. Well, steel rebar is spec’d to minimum yield strength. Since said calculation would use that minimum value, and rebar (predominantly recycled steel) varies quite a bit batch-to-batch and all that used in a project would very likely not be right at that minimum value, it is more likely than not the bridge will hold at above that calculated maximum load. Far more likely, I would wager.
Steve Goddard said:
“R Gates,
So what you are saying is that you expected to see less snow at lower elevations of Greenland because of warming, and also expected to see more snow in Florida because of warming.”
? ? Steve, Your comment makes no logical sense, and I insinuated no such thing, nor does any climate model indicate such. But of course it seems rather than talking basic climate and atmospheric physics, you’d like to poke fun at the notion that warmth can bring snow, when that is exactly the case, and any Climate 101 class explains this quite well. The moisture that fell on Florida, Washington, NY, Germany, and all the other places affected by the negative AO this winter was evaporated from warm oceans and carried to the point that it collided with cold air brought down from the arctic.
January and February have seen record or near record global tropospheric temps, and that combined with El Nino and the negative AO this winter has given us the big snows and storms we’ve seen. Also, I suspect that the very low GCR count, brought about by the waning solar minimum helped to encourage greater cloud cover, though this is more speculative.
R. Gates (09:54:53) :
Steve,
Good work…as the last 10 years were also the warmest, and we know with more heat we get more evaporation, and thus, in the winter, more snow. Thanks for providing proof that AGW is correct.
The coldest place on earth (Antarctica) is also one of the driest in terms of precipitation, and the last glacial period was cold and DRY. So it sure makes sense that a WARMER decade would also be a SNOWIER decade. The coldest months of winter in N. Hemisphere are not typcially the snowiest…as in Denver, CO instance, it’s the late winter Month of March that is warmer and snowier.
Warm=Wet
Cold=Dry
R Gates, you are confused about oceanic evaporation, but don’t feel bad, it is common.
In each hemisphere, the evaporation is the greatest during that hemisphere’s winter season, when the wind blowing across the ocean is cold, and more importantly, dry. Global humidity rises and falls on an annual cycle, peaking during the SH winter. This is because the SH has more ocean surface than the NH , and the SH is windier. It is cold winter temps that drive evaporation, not hot summer temps (or averages).
You can learn about oceanic evaporation here:
http://oaflux.whoi.edu/
This paper is a good place to start:
http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1520-0442/20/21/pdf/i1520-0442-20-21-5376.pdf
In addition, the glacial episodes are most definitely NOT dry periods. It would be very difficult for continental glaciers to form up to 2 miles thick without copious quantities of winter precipitation in the form of snow.
Certainly, precipitation patterns are different during a glacial episode. For example, the western US was much wetter during the last glacial than it is today: http://esp.cr.usgs.gov/info/mojave/paleoenviron.html but there is no evidence that total global precipitation was any less than we see today.
In fact, because during a glacial period the average position of the polar jet streams are shifted equator-ward, which would result in more cold, dry wind blowing across the ocean, it is likely that total global precipitation was greater then than today, it just occurred in different places.
JonesII (12:30:08) :
“The Earth is round. No amount of future research will change that”
It depends of the observer, if its blink of his/her eye would be a thousand years
This guy would be right up your alley:
kadaka (13:21:30) :
“Calculations can be facts [and it this case are]”
It’s simplistic statements
The analogy is valid, because in the case of the Sun we do know the internal constitution and properties with some precision. It is as we had x-rayed [or gamma-rayed for the steel] every beam and ensured [or mapped it so we can take it into account] that we have a detailed knowledge of every component and material of the bridge. In a sense, the Sun is simpler because it is so hot [and therefore a gas]. We can verify our calculation of the internal constitution of the Sun the same way people peek into the Earth prospecting for oil: analysis of seismic waves. We find that the calculated properties match the actually observed ones very closely. So calculations are good and the analogy with a bridge [of which we know every detail] is good as well.
“R. Gates (13:36:37) :
[…]
Also, I suspect that the very low GCR count, brought about by the waning solar minimum helped to encourage greater cloud cover, though this is more speculative.”
Ah, you’re not a simple warmist the, you’re a Svensmark warmist. Now that’s a first.
Joe (11:37:55)
What I’m getting at here is that for all I (we?) know this could be another polar bear drowning incident (caused by a storm – not arctic sea ice retraction). It could be (real) pollution, it could be a natural phenomenon… could it be a freak change in salinity (I guess), could it be a change in salinity caused by global warming yes (not the top of my list but sure, anything’s possible).
All I’m getting at here is that there is a track record for knee-jerk reactions to make specious attributions of both precedented and unprecedented phenomenon to global warming. I’d be interested to see a reliable analysis of the incident in question, but for now it seems like fish die-offs (if that’s even a proper term) are not uncommon, and the same goes for trying to pin them on global warming: http://home.att.net/~thehessians/fishkill.html
Joseph (13:48:54)
To paraphrase your somewhat paternalistic approach “Joseph, you are confused about oceanic evaporation, but don’t feel bad, it is common.”
Your citations say that evaporation is greater in the winter. However, this is because the information used is not actual observations. As your cited site says,
OK, so we’re not dealing with real observations. We’re off into the ethereal region of “parameterizations” (which means guesses that fit our theories) and climate models. Note that they say that the “observed quantities” are inter alia “produced from [models]”. Obervations produced from models?? These guys are so far out into their modelled universe that they think that models produce observations … if that doesn’t ring huge alarm bells for you, you’ve never looked at the guts of a climate model.
The main problem with this approach is that it ignores thunderstorms. These are too small to be seen in models, and don’t show up in satellite retrievals of bulk air qualities.
But underneath the thunderstorms, unseen by the satellites and invisible to the models, storm winds drive the evaporation through the roof. The warm moist air rises in the core of the storm, the moisture is stripped out, and the now warm dry air continues to rise.
At the top of the thunderstorm, this now cold dry air leaves the thunderstorm and begins to descend in the area around the thunderstorm. As a result, because of greatly increased evaporation driven by thunderstorm formation, the bulk air (the air in between the storms, the air that is measured by the satellites and simulated by the models) becomes drier. And since the air over the ocean is drier, this is interpreted by your cited sources as there being less evaporation.
This is a small part of the huge and unrecognized problem with using averages. Nature is not smooth, it has sharp boundaries. What goes on under a thunderstorm is hugely different from what is happening in the bulk air surrounding it … but a satellite or modelled average ignores this small but vitally important area entirely. This gives a very distorted picture of the underlying reality.
Leif Svalgaard (14:02:19) :
(…) So calculations are good and the analogy with a bridge [of which we know every detail] is good as well.
No, it’s not. You are saying if you know everything about anything going into the bridge then the analogy holds, you can make that precise calculation. Sorry, real world doesn’t work that way. The rebar is joined together with welding and other methods, introducing variance. Over time the steel components corrode, fasteners loosen, the concrete itself ages, that calculated maximum load is no longer valid.
Heck, even the weather works against you. It rains, the concrete soaks up water, that calculated maximum is no longer valid. Unless you declare that value was an absolute number, then fiddle around and try to figure the added weight of the water so you can do fancy subtraction for the calculated maximum load on the bridge “at that moment.”
And we haven’t even gotten to the differences in maximum loading at a particular point over the span of the bridge due to certain elements, like perhaps more where a support cable is attached and less between attachment points.
Too much possible variance, too many other factors involved. You can’t get a precise definitive answer. A competent structural engineer will give you a number good for official documents that will hopefully avoid all lawsuits, with a healthy margin of understatement “just in case.”
Now, are you saying the calculations for the Sun, out here in the real world, are of similar nature?
R Gates,
If you look at areas of the US which had unusual snowfall this winter, you can see that most have also had cold temperatures.
http://www.hprcc.unl.edu/maps/current/index.php?action=update_daterange&daterange=Last3m
Same for Europe.
Link didn’t work properly:
http://www.hprcc.unl.edu/products/maps/acis/Last3mTDeptUS.png
Joseph,
Thanks for those links, I shall study them, though I think we are talking about two different things…rate versus total moisture in the air. Mssive amount of moisture in the air only come from warm water releasing that moisture. One bit from one of your links given above says:
“…The nearly 50-yr time series shows that the decadal change of the global oceanic evaporation(Evp) is marked by a distinct transition from a downward trend to an upward trend around 1977–78. Sincethe transition, the global oceanic Evp has been up about 11 cm yr1 (10%), from a low at 103 cm yr1 in1977 to a peak at 114 cm yr1 in 2003. The increase in Evp was most dramatic during the 1990s.”
For the period in question, those were also warmer years in the troposhere, and follow the temperature trendlines. Seems even your link, (at least at first glance) would confirm the general statement that warmer=wetter.
I think for everyone’s general information, a good 101 course on evaporation, humidity, global rainfall amounts, etc can be found at:
http://www.uwsp.edu/geo/faculty/lemke/geog101/lecture_outlines/07_hydrologic_cycle_intro.html
The warmest and wettest place on earth is near the equator, and not at the poles. Warmer=Wetter.
kadaka (15:26:33) :
No, it’s not. You are saying if you know everything about anything going into the bridge then the analogy holds, you can make that precise calculation. Sorry, real world doesn’t work that way.
Yes it does if you make the calculation for the moment where you have just measured all the properties in great detail. The calculation is then only valid for that precise moment, but that is all that is claimed. We do not extrapolate the result of a stale calculation indefinitely into the future while the bridge rusts.
Now, are you saying the calculations for the Sun, out here in the real world, are of similar nature?
The calculations for the Sun show that the state of the Sun changes with time [the bridge is rusting], but we calculate the changes and update the calculation all along, so there is never any extrapolation. Our knowledge is so detailed that we can start with a ball of hydrogen [with 24% Helium and ~1% heavier stuff] and the mass of the Sun and calculate what luminosity it should have 4.6 billion years later and compare that with what we actually measure of the real Sun today and they agree very well, so we have confidence that they also agreed 100 million years in the past as well as in the future.