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.
PDF here.
Sponsored IT training links:
We offer 100 % pass results for JN0-532 exam! Check out our latest 1Y0-456 dumps and NS0-153 sample tests to practice and pass real.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
May I also remind people about Fire & Ice [pdf graphical version]
110 years of global warming (and cooling) fears!!! WUWT???
I got more similar stuff if any Warmists want it. Calm down, the world is not about to roast!!!
Recent Southern Hemisphere temperature animations;
http://www.pa.op.dlr.de/arctic/index.html
the ozone one is interesting too, re. S. America.
It’s worse than we thought, on the freezing side but. It is even worse than this report described it: 50 children have died of the cold in Peru these last days, and this has been occuring since the winter of two years ago.
Please Al Gore, can you ask the UN to issue a Fatwa on this freeze and tell the world to stop burning HC fuels and reduce our carbon foorprints? You see, Mr. Gore, I have developed this graph, it is peer reviewed by my dog and the drunk next door, which shows this perfect correlation between increasing CO2 levels and dipping temperatures. And can I have a million dollars grant for more reasearch and a Nobel prize nomination please? I have just saved the planet from global freezing.
I agree. It’s just like the Arctic this past winter helped Florida to have ready frozen oranges, dead iguanas, corals and manatees.
Millions of live cattle died in Mongolia in the winter. Makes a shortage of meat for Mongolian BBQ. I notice the warmist sites delete a post if it refers to cold events.
Global warming is heating up the North Pole since there is much less ice to keep it cool nowadays. The hot air is rising and sucking up all of the cold air from the South Pole to replace it. That in turn is pulling down air from the stratosphere over Antarctica. As this air sinks, it will heat up and melt the glaciers there. Gian icebergs will cause sea levels to rise and all the penguins will die. Then the polar bears will have nothing to eat and will starve to death. I know this is true because they said so on TV.
1,200 drownings in Russia in June. That is scalding waters? No the temps may be near records and still under 100 degrees.
100s in Russia because of a heatwave???? How about the 25,000 exess weather deaths in tiny UK??????????? How many people die in Russia each year due to cold? Get a grip on reality. Cold always kills more people than hot!!!
UK cold weather deaths
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=574
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/08/shocker-heat-wave-story-from-associated-press-no-mention-of-global-warming/
Stephan says:
July 20, 2010 at 8:12 pm
“Its quite common for these cold snaps to occur here. I remember 1974 …
Doesn’t sound very common to me…
One little comment. When life expectancy was 35 years, we had few die from heat and some die from dehydration. With
expectancy bringing us millions over 80 years old, their tolerance for heat is very low.
Their cardio strength is just not there.
Warmists ignore multible variables and factors that may skew the data.
Clarification:
How about the 25,000 exess cold weather deaths in tiny UK???????????
Just The Facts says:
July 20, 2010 at 7:52 pm
Re: Do we have a reader who has some atmospheric expertise and can comment/provide further reference material?
Sorry cannot help, but your post certainly helped me. Thanks
Henry chance says:
July 21, 2010 at 5:02 am
1,200 drownings in Russia in June. That is scalding waters? No the temps may be near records and still under 100 degrees.
____________________________________________________________
First they drowned their sorrows in Vodka, then drowned themselves in the rivers.
Bet the green warriors will jump at the idea of reducing the global human population to one billion (their ideal number) through vodka consumption. They wil lbe asking our govs to subsidise the production of vodka to save the planet.
Re: Just The Facts
& further to May 1989
I belong to a discussion group where this stuff has been thrown around:
Ball, T. (2009). Outbreaks of cold polar air. [Mobile Polar Highs (MPH)]. http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FoS_MobilePolarHighs.pdf
Leroux, Marcel. Mobile Polar Highs (MPH) & Anticyclonic Agglutinations (AA) Map. http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2008/8/14/64552/3547
related notes: http://www.mitosyfraudes.org/Calen6/Leroux-2.html
I haven’t had time to give the preceding much thought, but at first glance it all appears consistent with the following:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/SAOT_SO_SEP_MSI_IVI2.png
http://earthquakes.usgs.gov/research/data/plate15.pdf
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Ocean_currents_1943_%28borderless%293.png
Also, Bob Tisdale draws attention to the following:
http://oceanmotion.org/html/resources/oscar.htm
http://www.oscar.noaa.gov/datadisplay/
Certainly we can’t ignore turbulence & backeddies when constructing spatiotemporal summaries [without risk of introducing (false) phase-relation reversals].
A very big story indeed, a giant media organisation with offices around the world would want to send their reporters to the area to find out the stories, wouldnt they? Er….uhm…nope!
It aint a story unless its a heatwave, it just confuses the thick herd minded proles you see, cant have the great unwashed getting mixed signals especially now when the media are doing their copy’N’paste extravaganza from GP/FOE/WWF about record heat.
How desperate,mean minded and flawed do you have to be to hide information from the public in order to pimp a narrative? Im thinking petty but that just aint gonna cover it.
Perhaps the BBC are crushing the story for ‘legal reasons’ as they did with the climategate leaks.
This could make interesting cocktail party conversation, except I don’t enjoy being shouted at.
Just to put the weather thing in perspective for people talking about record heat waves:
The record high in my part of OH today was 105F, set in 1934. Our high today will be 20F less than that. What does that mean if record heat is an indicator of GW? Also, what does last year’s 2nd coldest month of July on record mean? I am sure there will be well reasoned answers to these questions, so I will check back later.
If memory serves, there are record cold winters taking place right now in:
Australia/New Zeland (cold enough to kill native plants and livestock)
South Africa (unknown)
South America (cold enough to kill native plants and livestock)
Antarctica (no one noticed)
So this isn’t some localized “cold air mass,” it’s the entire friggin’ southern hemisphere.
further:
That animation http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/intraseasonal/z200anim.shtml (pointed out by ‘Just The Facts’) appears to be a classic example of this http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2008/8/14/64552/3547 generalization – [see the AA map]. Note the ‘football’ being kicked around the Southern Ocean eastwards. (Also note that the [southeast] Pacific ‘handles’ its pass quickly.)
Anyone studying current ocean currents in the SE Pacific may note the southerly anomaly [relative to the usual generalizations one finds on long-term summary-maps of ocean currents (some of which show the opposite rotation for that cell — see the links I provided above from Bob Tisdale’s site)].
The Russian literature emphasizes the role of the terrestrial hydrologic cycle.
“So this isn’t some localized “cold air mass,” it’s the entire friggin’ southern hemisphere.”
Pretty much like the freezing ice and snow of 2009/2010 NH winter wasn’t localised. But then, we’re told it’s just weather not climate…
After penguins dying from the cold in South Africa a few weeks ago, now it is their South American cousins? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-10707906
UK Sceptic says: “Pretty much like the freezing ice and snow of 2009/2010 NH winter wasn’t localised. […]”
I’ll remind those from east of the west coast mountains of North America (for umpteenth time) that it was d*mned HOT on the other side of the mountains (NE Pacific or NW N.America, depending on how you want to look at it) during that period.
It was a spatial oscillation [& one with a very steep gradient].
I readily acknowledge the cold experienced elsewhere at that time, but for the sake of those interested in pursuing truth, the pattern empirically observed takes precedence over what may be perceived by some as ‘politically convenient’.
The Warmist Stream Media always points out the casualties from the deadly heat events, but never gives mention to the far more serious threats from the deadly cold events. People in S. America were not warned about the events in Mongolia and Florida.
And, in turn, the people in Mongolia and Florida were not warned about the previous winter in Alaska & the Yukon, where many clung to life by burning thier furniture and outbuildings.
Likewise, I am sure the WSM will not pass the message of the current events in S. America on to the N. Hemisphere.
In military stragetgy, this is known as a feint. All that is necessary is to hold the attention in the wrong place for the real threat to take maximum effect.
Paul Vaughn:
That European Tribune story is interesting considered with the ‘unprecedented’ collapse of the thermosphere. That happened during the down slope of the solar cycle. I wonder if perhaps the sun’s effect on the density of the thermosphere can cause an increase in pressure in the troposphere, which traps heat at the surface? I wouldn’t know how to find the pressure information shown in the link you provided, but it is an interesting thought. There is a downward trend in the thermosphere density since the 70s.
http://science.nasa.gov/media/medialibrary/2010/07/15/graphs.jpg
“So this isn’t some localized “cold air mass,” it’s the entire friggin’ southern hemisphere.”
Like last winter in the North saw record cold that was across almost the entire northern hemisphere? Except for the little bit on the East coast of Canada when the winter Olympics was starting, hence massive headlines about global warming in the media at the time.