Of course, it will only be a matter of time before some pundit blames this storm on “global warming”. Readers feel free to post links to such stories in the comments.
click images to enlarge. Loop the radar image here
The record nature of this storm is the low barometric pressure (< 960 mb), on par with a major hurricane (if this storm were centered in the tropics and not in Minnesota). However, this system is not typical Arctic blizzard, but a more subtropical/tropically oriented monster. Nevertheless, Southern Canada will be covered in snow.
RUC Analyzed Sea-Level Pressure and WRF Simulated Radar Reflectivity Forecast
AccuWeather News Forecast FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Violent Storms Spawning Tornadoes Across Midwest
State College, PA — October 26, 2010 — AccuWeather.com reports a rip-roaring squall line (or line of severe thunderstorms) got under way in the heart of the Midwest Monday night and has already spawned tornadoes and caused widespread damage from Missouri and Kentucky to Illinois and Wisconsin.
Indianapolis is getting hit by these thunderstorms right now.
This dangerous line of thunderstorms will continue racing eastward across the Midwest today, expanding the damage swath all the way through Ohio. Destructive winds and tornadoes will remain the primary threats.
Several tornadoes have already been sighted in northeastern Illinois, southeastern Wisconsin and southwestern Kentucky. Damage to homes has been reported with one of the twisters near Peotone, Ill. Another reportedly uprooted and downed trees onto homes near Racine, Wis.
Before sunrise Tuesday, the thunderstorms were lined up from Paducah, Ky., to just west of Chicago, Ill. The main line blasted through Chicago between 7 and 8 a.m. CDT.
The line will continue roaring eastward at about 60 mph throughout the day. If you are able to safely take photos or video of the damage from these thunderstorms, be sure to post them on our AccuWeather.com Facebook page.
Other cities in the path of these vicious thunderstorms include Louisville, Ky., Toledo, Columbus, Cleveland and Cincinnati, Ohio as well as Detroit. It’s in this general area where the worst of the severe weather can be expected.
Severe thunderstorms will also affect areas farther south through Tennessee and northern parts of Mississippi and Alabama, including Nashville. However, damage is not expected to be quite as widespread as in areas farther north across the Lower Midwest.
People in the path of these thunderstorms need to stay alert to their local weather conditions and head to the lowest level of a sturdy building immediately if a severe thunderstorm or tornado warning is issued.
These thunderstorms will be knocking trees and power lines down, potentially onto roadways, buildings and vehicles. Often times when this happens, lives are tragically lost.
Again, some of the thunderstorms could also spawn more tornadoes. Any tornado that touches down in a populated area today could be devastating.
Even though the nasty thunderstorms will exit the Midwest tonight, howling winds will pick up behind them through Wednesday with gusts up to 70 mph threatening to cause more wind damage.
Story by Heather Buchman, Meteorologist for AccuWeather.com
960 millibars??
Phah! In the UK, the lowest recorded was 925 millibars:
“The lowest pressure yet recorded over the UK was 925.6mb at Ochtertyre, near Stirling (Scotland) in 1884.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/weather/article3508196.ece
.
Incidentally, the reason that this is a large depression and not a tight hurricane, is Coriolis force. Coriolis is larger in the high latitudes than near the equator (due to the ‘increased’ spin-rate of the Earth) and this keeps the low pressure system from getting ‘compressed’ or ‘compacted’, with tighter, stronger winds.
“you can’t fix stupid. But you sure as hell can vote it out of office” -Pamela Gray
Very well said. I added this to my ongoing list of quotable quotes. So the question for Pamela is: did you quote someone or did you beat him to it? (I’m betting the latter)
Maybe progress is being made. I’ve tried looking through a bunch of news links, but so far except for the Examiner article linked above, I haven’t found any MSM articles tying this storm to
global warmingclimate changeglobal climate disruption.I’m not sure he’s the winner but he was hinting at “climate change” even as the storm was forming. Paul Douglas “leading climastrologist (my own term)” of the Minneapolis Star Tribune is more than suggesting it’s climate change. Noting there are jsut too many coincendeces adding up and even posting a CO2 graph in his weather blog to make his point. http://www.startribune.com/blogs/105795173.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUgOy9cP3DieyckcUsI?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUgOy9cP3DieyckcUsI
Ralph says:
October 27, 2010 at 6:13 am
960 millibars??
Phah! In the UK, the lowest recorded was 925 millibars:
“The lowest pressure yet recorded over the UK was 925.6mb at Ochtertyre, near Stirling (Scotland) in 1884.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/weather/article3508196.ece
Incidentally, the reason that this is a large depression and not a tight hurricane, is Coriolis force.
==============================
International Falls, MN recorded 955 mb so somewhat lower than 962.
The UK has a very large ocean to its west and southwest with Gulf Stream energy available, and so extratropical cyclones could be expected to deepen to fantastic levels.
THIS cyclone was smack in the middle of one of the largest continents on Earth, and so its intensity, extremely tight isobars, and very large size, were all remarkable and impressive.
Also…I take issue with your use of the words “depression” and “hurricane” here. Those are tropical of origin, have warm cores, and they deepen over warm water only.
This was a winter cyclone that bombed out over land.
Very, very impressive storm on all counts.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
“Pamela Gray says:
October 26, 2010 at 7:37 pm
It is poetic justice that the I-5 corridor folks have to suffer under cold weather (meant to say climactic disruption) and then send those La Nina systems to the midwest where conservative folks get hammered. The icing on the cake is when, with a straight face, these green freaks try to shove global warming, climate change, catastrophic climate change, climate disruption, whatever, down our collective throats. It simply proves to us, you can’t fix stupid. But you sure as hell can vote it out of office.”
**********
Very well & succinctly said — so I thought it deserved yet another appearance. This and the “sun dog” I saw on the way to work this morning has made my day! Thank you, rkh
A short update. The Mackinac Bridge closed for some period of time as winds were at 72 mph in the Straits.
Down here on the southern steppe we had the joy of 70 mph winds and gusting dust on Tuesday, thanks to the storm, followed by frosts and possibly a hard freeze tonight. Lost a few trees and at least one portable outhouse (unoccupied at the time, one hopes).
Eric (skeptic) says:
October 26, 2010 at 12:20 pm
I don’t think the storm itself is radiating heat since those are cold cloud tops. A more important factor is the subsidence around the storm which radiates heat more effectively to space.
I think you are mixing metrics – temperature is not the same as heat.
The storm is radiating heat as the water vapor changes state to liquid then ice. The heat is still radiated even though the ice is (by definition) cold – i.e. at low temperature.
Is this why my sinuses are going nuts right now?
On cue the alarmists have blamed this on fossil fuel usage.
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2010/10/27/chiclone-of-denial/
REPLY: Yup, saw that yesterday. Predictable. -A
Comment left by Timothy Lang on the cited blog Yesterday 12:06 PM:
I am an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University. I fully endorse the basic conclusions of the IPCC, and thus I am by no stretch of the imagination a climate change skeptic. But I want to urge extreme caution when attributing a single event, no matter how extraordinary, to climate change. There is no real way to scientifically establish such a claim. Indeed, since climate can be thought of as the statistics of weather, single weather events should not be the focus. Sometimes, outliers are just outliers. Also, see http://blog.ametsoc.org/news/the-bomb/ and http://blog.ametsoc.org/columnists/but-not-the-bomb/ for more discussion by scientists of this storm in context with other “bombs”.
tty says:
October 26, 2010 at 2:07 pm
Will Crump says:
“what is the energy source that drives the extreme low pressure of this particular storm”
It is usually known as “the sun”.
tty:
Thank you for your insightful comment, but you neglected to include rotational energy from the spinning earth.
Since these storms do not form every day that the sun shines and can form at night as well as in daylight, I was looking for a more technical explanation for how this particlar type of storm can form, like the explanation below.
In winter, the southern shift of the polar jet stream can cause mid-latitude cyclonic storms to be better developed and to move with greater speed. For a storm to intensify, there must be an upper-level counterpart, such as a trough of low pressure, that lies to the west of the surface low. At the same time, the polar jet stream must form into waves and swing slightly south of the developing storm. When these conditions exist, zones of converging and diverging air, along with rising and sinking air, provide energy conversions for the storm’s growth. These conditions allow some surface lows to intensify into huge mid-latitude cyclones in winter.
While it is not possible to directly link a single storm to warming in the arctic, it does appear that a warming arctic may contribute conditions that make it more likely that such a storm can develop.
See the article “Warming Arctic pushing jet stream farther south” at:
http://summitcountyvoice.com/2010/10/24/warming-arctic-pushing-jet-stream-farther-south/
Well the mega storm is now caused by human climate change according to this article: http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/meanwhile-back-planet-earth-we-had-bi.
“I imagine future Mars colonists will tell the story to their children when they say, “But why didn’t someone do something?”
That’s Minnesota meteorologist Paul Douglas in an exclusive interview with Brad Johnson about the “weather bomb” that just hit and the global warming deniers that populate his state:
My dad was the biggest Republican that ever walked the earth. He always said: “Actions have consequences.” To pretend that a 38% increase in greenhouse gases isn’t going to have any impact, that we can have our cake and eat it too, and smear it all over our face, and maybe have our grandchildren deal with the hangover, I think it is immoral.
Meteorologist Jeff Masters puts this massive superstorm into context:
Yesterday’s 28.20″ (955 mb) low pressure reading in Minnesota breaks not only the 28.28″ (958 mb) previous “USA-interior-of-the-continent-record” from Cleveland, Ohio during the Great Ohio Storm of Jan. 26, 1978 (a lower reading in Canada during this event bottomed out at an amazing 28.05″/950 mb), but also the lowest pressure ever measured anywhere in the continental United States aside from the Atlantic Coast. The modern Pacific Coast record is 28.40″ (962mb) at Quillayute, Washington on Dec. 1, 1987. An older reading, taken on a ship offshore from the mouth of the Umpqua River in Oregon during the famous “Storm King” event on January 9, 1880, is tied with yesterday’s 28.20″ (955 mb.)
[…] Yesterday’s superstorm is reminiscent of the amazing low pressures reached earlier this year (Jan. 19-22) in the West, where virtually every site in California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, southern Oregon, and southern Idaho–about 10 – 15% of the U.S. land area–broke their lowest on record pressure readings. However, the lowest readings from that event fell well short of yesterday’s mega-storm with 28.85″ (977 mb) being about the lowest recorded at any onshore site.
We’ve now had two remarkable extratropical storms this year in the U.S. that have smashed all-time low pressure records across a large portion of the country. Is this a sign that these type of storms may be getting stronger? Well, there is evidence that wintertime extratropical storms have grown in intensity in the Pacific, Arctic, and Great Lakes in recent decades. I discuss the science in detail in a post I did earlier this year.”
Then they link to this Nasa article (http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence) as the alleged “evidence” for “climate change” caused by humans. Someone needs to do a point by point counter point to the Nasa article. Quickly. Please.
One of the comments on the first article refers to this link: http://www.climate.gov/#climateWatch which seems to be a NOAA global climate dashboard page.
In response, I wrote:
For the real climate soothsayers of doomsday refer them here: http://pathstoknowledge.net/2010/10/18/investigating-the-climate-of-doom for the COUNTER EVIDENCE.
CO2 has all but maxed out it’s potential warming as it at the limit of it’s specific heat capacity. This means you can double or triple the CO2 and it won’t contribute much more to warming at all. Basic physics.
Also, while CO2 has increased in the last 50 years the 130 yr temp linear+cyclic tiny upward tend remains unchanged based upon observational data.
Observational data trumps the catastrophic AGW hypothesis.
Increased CO2 has caused an increase of 6% of the plant coverage on the planet from 1980 to 1999. To plants CO2 is an essential nutrient and helps them grow faster and bigger. Biological facts of science. That is why commercial greenhouses use ~3 times the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere. CO2 = MORE GREEN LIFE on Earth to feed people.
Being anti-CO2 is being anti-life.