From the “weather is not climate” department, more chilling news from the southern hemisphere.
Guest post By Alexandre Aguiar
MetSul Weather Center via ICECAP
A brutal and historical cold snap has so far caused 80 deaths in South America, according to international news agencies. Temperatures have been much below normal for over a week in vast areas of the continent. In Chile, the Aysen region was affected early last week by the worst snowstorm in 30 years. The snow accumulation reached 5 feet in Balmaceda and the Army was called to rescue people trapped by the snow.
In Argentina, the snow in the region of Mendoza, famous for its winery, was described by local
meteorologists as the heaviest in a decade. The temperature in the morning of July 16th was the lowest in the city of Buenos Aires since 1991: -1.5C. The cold snap caused a record demand for energy and Argentina had to import electricity from Brazil. Many industries in Argentina were shut down due to gas shortage.
It snowed in nearly all the provinces of Argentina, an extremely rare event. It snowed even in the western part of the province of Buenos Aires and Southern Santa Fe, in cities at sea level.
The most famous beach of Argentina, Mar del Plata, was whitened by the snow in the morning of July 15th, a scene only seen in recent memory in 1991, 2004 and 2007. See below:
The snow was heavy even in Northern Argentina. In Santiago Del Estero, according to media reports, some areas experienced snow for the first time in living memory. In the province of Tucuman, some town saw snow for the first time since 1921 (Gaceta de Tucuman newspaper).
In Uruguay, there were widespread reports of sleet and even snow mixed with rain in towns in the Southern and Eastern part of the country, even in the capital Montevideo. At leas two deaths have been blamed in Uruguay on the low temperatures. Hospitals were packed with patients with respiratory illness.
In Paraguay, at least nine people died due to the cold weather in only 3 days. Cattle were very affected and one thousand animals died of hypothermia. In Bolivia, dozes of people died in consequence of the very low temperatures. In some areas of the nation the cold period was described as the worst in 15 years. It even snowed in the Chaco of Bolivia, one of warmest areas of South America, where the local population never saw snow before. Classes were suspended in Bolivia for three days to prevent more cold related deaths (El Nacional newspaper from Bolivia).
Southern Brazil was also very affected by the cold air eruption from the Southern Pole. Last week the temperature dropped to -7.8C in the city of Urupema, Santa Catarina. In Rio Grande do Sul, in the hills of the state, temperature felt to -4.9C in the city of Cambara. In the state of Paran�, the low was -6C. Only the nights were freezing, but the afternoons were very cold. In some days, temperature failed to reach 5C in many towns, the first time in a decade. Flurries observed in towns of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina and Parana and sleet was also reported in Western Santa Catarina.
The most striking scenes came from the top of Morro da Igreja, a 1800 meters elevation in the state of Santa Catarina. The area recorded snow and freezing rain. As anyone can imagine, freezing rain is extremely rare in Southern Brazil. The event was witnessed and photographed by weather observers from MetSul Marcelo Albieri and Caio Souza.
On July 14th, in the afternoon hours, temperatures in the hills of Rio Grande do Sul state in Southern Brazil were lower than in Marambio, the main polar base of Argentina in Antarctica. In Central Brazil, in the tropics, the long streak of cold days was considered extremely rare. It was so cold that thousand of animals died in this region of Brazil known for its cattle, just South of the Amazon basin.
Maybe the most notable fact took place in North South America. The cold reached Amazon and temperatures felt to as low as 7C in towns in the Amazon Forest in the states of Acre and Rondonia. Temperature even felt in Roraima, where the state capital Boa Vista record 20C (normal lows are 25C) and the wind were blowing from the South.
Boa Vista is located at 2 degrees North of latitude, so the influence of the Antarctic cold blast crossed the Equator line and reached towns in the Northern Hemisphere. It would be the same of a cold snap from the Arctic crossing the entire North America continent, the Caribbean and reaching North Brazil in cities at 2 degrees South of latitude as Santarem, a bizarre situation.
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Hmmm…let’s see…if I apply the GISS reference station interpolation method to the global temperature anomalies, I can put a GIANT RED DOT over southern Chile and Argentina on my anomaly map, because our algorithms say they are really burning up down there but they don’t really know it! And besides, it’s the hottest year, and no one interferes with NASA/NOAAs hottest year!!
j.pickens says:
July 20, 2010 at 7:45 pm
Someone mentioned how long it has been since a Polar Air Mass crossed the equator. In another thread.
It was bound to happen, I believe, as the Antarctic Sea Ice grew to record levels.
Now, for anyone who needs a reminder: The hopscotch of winters from one hemisphere to the next over the past couple of years. Is this a portent of our coming Northern Winter?
Ray says:
July 20, 2010 at 9:06 pm
Weather is not climate…. a half truth about as dismissive as they come.
Weather is not only part of climate, it’s an instance of climate. Climate has a range in which each instance of weather occurs/operates.
“It’s just weather” is equally dismissive and disingenious.
Mankind has talked of weather for 10’s of thousands of years. There are those who wish to silence the common man’s ability to talk about the weather. How’s the weather? is as basic a human communication as one can find, transcending language, cultures, religion, race, social status….you name it.
Meanwhile, hundreds died in a Russian heat wave this last few days and people reading this blog wouldn’t even know about it. What’s up with that?
REPLY: But it has tons of coverage in the media, so plenty of people know about it. Let’s do the math:
Google Russia heat wave and you get 698 results.
Google Argentina cold snap and you get 34 results.
And you are complaining that I covered (from a person on the scene, meteorologist no less) the cold snap but nobody here knows about the heat wave? Puhleeze.
I get this sort of whining every time I run a cold weather story. Old news. – Anthony
I stopped trusting “global” temperature a long time ago when I found out Mr. Hansen was in charge of “statistical” modeling of temperature data. The second you put someone who is biased in control of something scientific, you have at the least observer bias, and at the worst fraud.
And for one, I am still un-sure of how interpolation of temperature data helps us understand our current temperature at all. I would assume the most pressing needs for humanity are based where we actually work, live and harvest crops, not in the arctic which has no bearing on our lives.
Now do not mis-construe what I am saying, I am not saying Greenland does not matter, because frankly people do live there. And we already measure the temperature there….As I was saying, the point is that we should be more concerned about the “climate” at important locations where we already measure the temperature…
And if sea levels will rise, we can figure that out by the steady increase of the sea, and prepare ourselves, changing climates will happen regardless of CO2…. the question is will we be prepared or will we be running around yelling like a bunch of chicken littles….
“It was so cold that thousand of animals died in this region of Brazil known for its cattle, just South of the Amazon basin.”
Somebody should take Jones et. al. and rub their nose in this, to show them what a REAL death spiral looks like!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_2009_Central_Plains_and_Midwest_ice_storm
65 initial fatalities, many more were later injured or even killed during the repairs and cleanup afterward.
http://www.realclearwx.com/020109.htm
There was basically no mention of it anywhere!
The articles are wrong to say IF the cold could reach the Caribbean. I was in Cuba during January and they had their lowest ever temperature measured in Havana of 3.2C and had their first ever frost outside the city. All the Hotels had turned off the A/C and the guests every night we were eating with our coats still on to stay warm. On returning home a group of freinds who went to Mexico said the temperatures did not get out of the teens in the Yukatan peninsula.
@Amino Acids in Meteorites
Don has a tendency to be wrong on most everything he does research-wise.
He does have a nice textbook though.
[snip – mocking people’s deaths, shame on you]
Zeke the Sneak says: July 20, 2010 at 7:31 pm
“Mortes de bovinas devem passar 2 mil”
This is truly devastating.
Not to diminish the significance of two thousand head of cattle dying, but if you don’t know Latin-based languages, you might be left with a feeling that the quote and caption from above was really saying that 2 million cattle died…
Having said that, I personally was shocked to see the dead cattle shown in the pictures. Was the ranch where those cattle died grossly incompetent or horribly unfortunate?
The issues with Mongolian livestock this past winter should be warning enough that too much cold can be just as punishing as too much heat and that we all need to find ways to safeguard our food and industries. Now. And, chasing more inefficient energy-use plans (i.e. carbon emission reductions) is just a waste of our precious time and resources.
I hope our policy makers are reading and paying attention to the events taking place all around the world, not just those in their own back yard…
message understood.
Alex Baker says:
July 20, 2010 at 10:39 pm
The issues with Mongolian livestock this past winter should be warning enough
It should be warning enough. Thanks for the reminder of Mongonlia. More winter hopscotch ‘top this’ that the MSM is ignoring, at our peril. The records being set do not point to warmest ever. They point the other way.
Our current crop of political leaders have too many heads planted firmly in the sands of the Anthropogenic Climate Change Desert.
Benjamin P. says:
July 20, 2010 at 10:26 pm
@Amino Acids in Meteorites
Don has a tendency to be wrong on most everything he does research-wise.
You’re going to have to provide proof of that otherwise you are libeling him.
I haven’t seen him be wrong.
Now provide proof for what you said.
Benjamin P. says:
July 20, 2010 at 10:26 pm
Don
You call him ‘Don’. You know him?
Geoff Sharp says:
July 20, 2010 at 8:53 pm
Australia’s BOM today declares we are in La Nina conditions.
The cool waters have been there pretty persistently:
http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/GLBhycom1-12/navo/equpacsst_nowcast_anim30d.gif
Is there a new moderator? It seems like there are more messages being erased.
[no, just a large influx of trolls lately with comments that violate policy ~mod]
See those dead animals? What killed them? Weather or climate?
What, if anything, are the various “agencies” doing about improving and expanding the coverage of temperature networks (actual thermometers etc.) to ensure accuracy and precision in the raw data?
Which is more unprecedented? Russia recorded it’s highest temperature ever in some areas, correct? Were the equilavent low temperature records set in the southern hemisphere during this cold snap?
Jim D says:
July 20, 2010 at 9:36 pm
Meanwhile, hundreds died in a Russian heat wave this last few days and people reading this blog wouldn’t even know about it. What’s up with that?
People dying in heat waves happens every year. That is not the unusual thing to make a point of. It is not something that just started happening since Al Gore made his movie or James Hansen testified in Washington in 1988. Was it heat covering an entire Hemisphere and passing the equator into another? Was it record heat as is supposed to be happening in global warming? Or is it just one more heat wave that happens every summer?
Obviously global warming isn’t happening with the Southern Hemisphere being this cold. Winters have been harsh for four years in a row now there. And for three in a row in the Northern, with a fourth on the way. This cold was not part of the plan in global warming.
Global warming is not happening.
But people making hysterical assumptions from any and every opportunity in weather is happening. And the readers of this blog, for the most part, would know about that.
I sent you a set of facts as to the number of people living in South America: 365 million and about their death rate 1 in 100, which amounts to 3.65 Million deaths per year.
And you accuse me of “mocking people’s deaths”.
What I mocked was the idea that you or anyone else could attribute 80 of the 3.65 Million to the cold weather.
[numbers aren’t a problem, it was the way you phrased it. mock on, but unless you have something that shows the cold was not a factor as the person in SA who wrote this report shows, you’ll have to accept some mockery yourself ~mod]
There is nothing surprising in the middle-of-July heat in Russia. I remember summers in Western Siberia in 1960s that were smothering hot (add clouds of mosquitoes to the picture).
Relatively large amount of deaths in Russian summer is mostly due to immoderate vodka consumption under the Sun, and lack of air conditioning in most places outside the downtown offices in largest cities.
Add somewhat improved media reporting (in Soviet times they wouldn’t tell you, how many died), and there you have it: the whole Universe is warming.
Meanwhile, hundreds died in a Russian heat wave this last few days
The news I had reported was that most of the deaths were blamed on people drinking too much in their enjoyment of the good weather and going swimming while drunk. That is, they weren’t dying of actual heat.
The line is right – they died IN a heatwave, not because of it.
One of the peculiar things about average is that they make a mockery of extremes. And, they are never explanatory. My daughter is returning from Moscow this week and the heat there really is unprecedented, but then the cold this winter was very nearly so. The Muscovites actually had more snow than they were used to and it lasted longer. People die in Moscow every year from cold. During the summer around 2,000 drown, mostly males and over 90% are drunk at the time of death. But – Russians do not expect to die of heat, cold yes, alcohol yes, smoking yes, mafia yes, but heat? Russian buildings don’t even have air conditioning. Like, Brazilian cattle farmers are likely to expect heat to be a problem for their herds, possibly drought, but cold? In fact when they settle down and average the numbers out for this year, the “extremes” of heat and cold will vanish. They are statistical outliers until they happen often enough to become part of what we expect from weather where we live; that is, part of the climate.