New 2 day record December snowfall amount to the Minneapolis/St Paul area
While there have been a few high temperature records in the desert southwest and western Oregon, the majority of weather records in the USA this week have been for cold, snowfall, or rainfall. The biggest number of records have to do with the lowest maximum temperature.
Here’s a summary of the weather records:
| Record Events for Mon Dec 6, 2010 through Sun Dec 12, 2010 | |
| Total Records: | 2002 |
| Rainfall: | 319 |
| Snowfall: | 320 |
| High Temperatures: | 71 |
| Low Temperatures: | 426 |
| Lowest Max Temperatures: | 767 |
| Highest Min Temperatures: | 99 |
Uncharacteristically for the Associated Press, they give this latest snowstorm the title of “monster”:
Rutgers snow lab has the current snow cover for 2010:
Last year, we seemed to have a bit more snow cover in the USA (and globally) at this time:
I think Rutgers is having a little joke by making snow cover “yellowish”.
Here’s a Public Information Statement (PIS) from the NWS in Minneapolis
Dec 10-11 Snowfall…New December Record
The December 10-11 snowstorm brought a new 2 day record December snowfall amount to the Minneapolis/St Paul area, and perhaps to other areas as well. The new record is 17.1 inches. This storm was bit unusual in that it was a Pacific type storm system. The snowfall amounts were in the category of what would be more typical of a storm moving out of the southwest U.S. toward the Mississippi valley.
This storm also ranks in the top 5 of the largest snowfalls in the Twin Cities. See the Minnesota State Climatology site for further details.
Here is the broad picture of the storm total snow.
PUBLIC INFORMATION STATEMENT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE TWIN CITIES/CHANHASSEN MN
800 PM CST SUN DEC 12 2010
...SNOWFALL TOTALS FROM THE WINTER STORM EVENT DEC 10-11...
THE TOTALS BELOW ARE SEPARATED INTO SNOW...AND ICE AND SLEET
CATEGORIES...THEN BY AMOUNT...AND ARE NOT NECESSARILY THE
FINAL AMOUNT FOR EACH LOCATION.
SNOW REPORTS LISTED BY AMOUNT
INCHES LOCATION ST COUNTY TIME
------ ----------------------- -- -------------- -------
23.00 5 SE OSCEOLA WI POLK 0900 AM
22.00 EAU CLAIRE WI EAU CLAIRE 0500 PM
TELEVISION STATION WQOW.
21.50 NEW MARKET MN SCOTT 0930 PM
21.50 SHAKOPEE MN SCOTT 0700 PM
21.00 OAKDALE MN WASHINGTON 0330 AM
20.00 RED WING MN GOODHUE 0800 AM
20.00 MAPLEWOOD MN RAMSEY 0330 AM
19.20 EAU CLAIRE WI EAU CLAIRE 0100 PM
18.50 4 NNE MENOMONIE WI DUNN 0945 PM
18.00 MENOMONIE WI DUNN 0800 AM
18.00 EAST FARMINGTON WI POLK 0630 PM
18.00 3 SSW BURNSVILLE MN DAKOTA 0615 PM
18.00 2 W PRIOR LAKE MN SCOTT 0900 PM
17.50 3 NW MINNEAPOLIS MN HENNEPIN 0100 PM
17.40 LAKEVILLE MN DAKOTA 0900 PM
17.20 WOODBURY MN WASHINGTON 0900 AM
17.20 1 W CARVER MN CARVER 1000 PM
17.10 MINNEAPOLIS MN HENNEPIN 0130 AM
MEASURED AT THE MINNEAPOLIS/ST. PAUL AIRPORT
17.00 EAU CLAIRE WI EAU CLAIRE 1100 AM
17.00 2 N MENOMONIE WI DUNN 0630 PM
16.50 SAVAGE MN SCOTT 1130 PM
16.30 HASTINGS MN DAKOTA 0830 PM
16.10 BLOOMINGTON MN HENNEPIN 0600 PM
16.00 RIDGELAND WI DUNN 0100 PM
16.00 DURAND WI PEPIN 1030 PM
15.50 CHANHASSEN MN CARVER 0130 AM
MEASURED AT THE NWS OFFICE
15.20 ST LOUIS PARK MN HENNEPIN 1030 PM
15.00 1 SSW DELANO MN WRIGHT 0630 PM
14.70 WACONIA MN CARVER 0745 AM
14.50 3 SSW WHITE BEAR LAKE MN RAMSEY 1030 PM
14.20 STANLEY WI CHIPPEWA 0930 AM
13.70 LESTER PRAIRIE MN MCLEOD 0930 AM
13.50 1 ESE CHASKA MN CARVER 0700 PM
13.50 ELK MOUND WI DUNN 0700 PM
13.00 STILLWATER MN WASHINGTON 1200 PM
13.00 JIM FALLS WI CHIPPEWA 0930 AM
12.50 NORTH BRANCH MN CHISAGO 1100 AM
12.50 1 ENE CAMBRIDGE MN ISANTI 0630 PM
12.00 FARIBAULT MN RICE 0900 PM
11.50 ANDOVER MN ANOKA 0145 AM
11.00 HAUGEN WI BARRON 1130 AM
10.00 ST JAMES MN WATONWAN 1230 PM
10.00 CUMBERLAND WI BARRON 0730 AM
9.50 NORTH BRANCH MN CHISAGO 0430 PM
9.00 VESTA MN REDWOOD 1230 PM
8.00 MANKATO MN BLUE EARTH 0715 PM
7.00 4S ST CLOUD MN STEARNS 0630 PM
6.00 WINTHROP MN SIBLEY 0830 PM
Here is a Radar Replay during the time of some of the heavier snow (9 am to 3pm).
Snow Depth as of December 12
jakers says:
December 13, 2010 at 11:36 am
Sam Parsons says:
December 13, 2010 at 10:01 am
“So it’s cold where you are. And the British Isles, and Scandinavia. But did you notice the red and yellow dots on the map scattered across the entire Western US vs purple and blue in the Southeast?”
I hate to get technical on you, but if you will Google “us chill map” and read the temperatures, not the lower wind-chill numbers, you will see that the record highs are items such as 73F in San Diego. Now, mind you, I know San Diego very well and I have family there that I am talking to now, so I recognize that 73F really is blistering hot in a place that is reliably 70F all year around; however, treating that kind of temperature as a record high and comparing it to the disastrous lows in Florida or Texas is LAUGHABLE and desperate. You just burned up your credibility for this year. “R. Gates” has managed to burn up his/her credibility forever.
Permit me to explain. In a normal winter in Central Florida, there will be three to five days in which the temperature falls below 32F for a period of one to two hours. (Yes, you read me right. The ordinary person in Central Florida will never see ice on the ground.) Tonight, the temperature is going below 32F just after sunset and will not recover until well after dawn. For Florida, that is comparable to taking a direct hit from a tsunami. Once again, the citrus industry will be pushed further south. No one should compare that to 73F in San Diego.
It looks like Wisconsin got dumped on harder then Minnesota but it matters little unless you are the guy shoveling it. Ah, fond memories of a boy with his sled, living in south central Wisconsin. (that’s the 50’s for you younger folks) The one thing we knew about was snow the other was an almost annual promise of at least one snow day when the school buses didn’t run. I know lots of modern kids who have never had a snow day so you could go sledding in the sunshine of mid day. At least Mother Nature is making sure my grandchildren have that experience.
The green Ireland got white two weeks ago and the snow is still here. It’s just too cold to melt fully. No warming here. It started 2007 and since then Ireland has snow every year. This year for the second time. My kids didn’t have snow every year and only for a day or two and now, after they are young adults, they get the change to experience it every year for a week or more. That’s not fair.
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” <<< they know it now!!!
Methinks the 25% sceptic becomes ever shriller. 😉
DaveE.
Strange: the map shows a red dot (High Temp) in South Colorado, right where we are, but it has been very cold here in the end of November, and kind of normal in December, no unusual warmth to speak of. What’s up with that?
Dodged it-21inches at old domicile, 8 here.
Gotta believe AZ and FL are feeling it worse tho.
La Nina, negative PDO, Sun still a bit quiet. So … could just be noise. But I always like to ask the rhetorical question, what would the end of the interglacial look like? And what would be the result?
So it’s cold where you are. And the British Isles, and Scandinavia. But did you notice the red and yellow dots on the map scattered across the entire Western US vs purple and blue in the Southeast?
Yes, we can work out that average temperatures are normalish. We’re not stupid.
The point is that we are meant to be in the grip of the “hottest year evah”.
At such a time there will still be cold days. Even very cold days. But having a large range of places having record lows does not fit.
If we agree that the temperatures for the end of the year are within fairly normal bounds, then the “hottest year evah” is a non-starter.
The sceptics don’t need to show that the world is abnormally cold. Ordinary will do. It is up to the AGW to put record lows and “hottest ever” in a consistent framework.
Your veggies will also suffer … We had crop damage in SWFL earlier, but they are now saying it could go to severe in the next few days. While we love to laugh at the global warming hysterics, I don’t think people pay enough attention to what the cold is doing to food crops worldwide … As in yikes.
R. Gates says: “In the bigger climate picture, Cold=dry, not wet, and has for millions of years on earth.”
And I could say that cooling causes the heavy rain/snowfall followed by the future cold desert dry air when ocean evaporation decreases. Harder to live when its cold and with no food crops from being cold and dry.
Last winter I was in Crystal River Florida when it was 15F. The local radio stations were talking about “Gulf-effect” snow. I think they had just coined that phrase. Any talk of Gulf-effect snow down that way so far this year?
Damn Di-Hydrogen Oxide.
Precipitating out of the atmosphere (Leeching), coating everything in a film that retards the practical use of everything from sidewalks to Jumbo Jets.
When will this madness ever end!
Move Al Gore to the Antarctic Peninsula, and all this goes away.
/Sarc – OFF.
For those who’d like a direct display of the difference cooler temps can make on less moisture being pumped around the hydrological cycle, it is interesting to look at this graph of anomalously dry areas of the world for the past few months:
http://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu/maproom/.Global/.Precipitation/Anomaly.html
And then compare it to the area of interest in the current La Nina:
http://sharaku.eorc.jaxa.jp/cgi-bin/amsr/elni2/elni2.cgi?lang=e
What you’ll notice quite predictably is that the warmer than normal areas show wetter than normal conditions, and the cooler than normal areas show lower than normal precipitation, reinforcing the general rule of climate that cool=dry and warm=wet, as this is the foundation of the hydrological cycle.
As put forward by R. Gates that the water cycle is accelerating because of AGW.
I propose that measuring global warming with thermometers with all it’s inherent faults to hundredths of a degree is basically unsound.
Using R.Gates logic it would be better to measure this AGW in inches and feet,
this would be a more accurate test. The only problem I fore see is that the warmists would revert to clause one if precipitation did not match their theory.[sarc off]
“In the bigger climate picture, Cold=dry, not wet, and has for millions of years on earth.”
In the Denver area, this is what’s known as “too cold to snow”, a frequent occurrence in January and why we like humidifiers on our furnaces.
R. Gates says:
December 13, 2010 at 10:33 am
If the hydrological cycle is accelerating on a global basis, as appears to be the case by the latest research
======================================================
Gates, I’m not sure I can follow your train of thought on this one.
If temperatures rising drives the HyC, and causes it to speed up.
The HyC puts CO2 into the atmosphere.
If the HyC is speeding up, then it’s putting more and more CO2 into the atmosphere.
As temperatures increase, the HyC speeds up, and the HyC puts more CO2 into the atmosphere.
Which is saying that CO2 follows temperature rise.
How much CO2 is the HyC contributing? and how much is man made?
R. Gates says:
Greater snowfall is an indication of an accleration in the hydrological cycle…
So far, so good. But what does that acceleration mean? It means more heat is LEAVING the planet. We’re cooling. The heat that was added to the oceans during the absolutely normal warm half of the PDO cycle from the mid ’70s to 1998 or so has now got to get off the planet. It does this by evporating water from the oceans, that condenses at altitude (dumping a load of heat) and falling as rain and snow.
Take a look at the ocean surface of the mid Pacific. That’s a darned cold anomaly phase. It’s not warmer in the world, it’s colder. And a load of heat is evaporating from the cceans and cooling the surface, then condensing and falling bringing more cold to the land.
not a cooling of the earth. This finer point seems to be missed by some.
And other just have no clue…
The coolest place on earth is also the driest and gets very little actual snowfall…and that is Antarctica.
Another truth snuck in to mislead the naive into a belief in the whole pot of stew. Yes, if you are dramatically below freezing, it’s hard to have water in the air. Completely pointless factoid, though. The oceans are not below freezing…
So we’re back to the water driven heat engine model:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/12/11/which-way-to-the-feedback/
where you can EITHER warm the ‘heat in’ end or COOL the ‘heat out’ end. And, might I make a tiny little suggestion? Go look out the window. The “cold end” is getting colder. A LOT colder. (And we’ve only just begun. We’ve got a couple of decades of this ahead of us and the ocean lags by about 6 to 12 years…)
When I see skeptics point to greater snowfall as any indication that AGW must not be happening it does make me chuckle a bit.
Then get ready to be rolling on the floor laughing your *** off as your eggnog squirts out your nose…
It takes tremendous energy to move the mass of moisture in snow from the ocean to cover your driveway.
Absolutely true. Said energy LEAVING the ocean, being taken to altitude by the convection process, then condensing into nice clouds and DUMPING that heat, which then leaves to space.
There is a very nice picture of it happening here:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/12/07/heat-rises-who-knew/
As an acceleration of the hydrological cycle has long been predicted by GCM’s
Oh Puh-lease. What have they NOT predicted? It’s going to get warmer, but we’re going to have a little ice age; and we’re going to have droughts, except the hydrological cycle will be bringing floods.
Look, this is just a load of … (self snip)… MODELS are not PROOF of ANYTHING. They are human constructed FANTASIES. I’ve run a supercomputer doing modeling (including a few weeks of runs for a Stanford guy getting his Ph.D. doing cloud models). I can make a model give you any answer you like. That doesn’t mean it has any truth in it at all. Models are best used “to inform our ignorance”, not as any statement about what is or is not real. Learn that. It matters.
when looking at rising CO2 levels (as that is what the earth has done for millions of years when CO2 levels rise)
Except when it doesn’t… like when we had that nasty little Ice Age with dramatically higher CO2 levels. Oh, and that unfortuante point about CO2 changing 800 years AFTER the temperature changes… Effect always precedes cause in the Global Warming post-normal ‘science’.
and heavy record snowfalls are exactly that, I would suggest that some skeptics really take a look at all that is implied in that accleration.
And I’d suggest you go take a long hike. Out into a large field of snow. Put on some snow shoes and take a pack. Proceed until you run out of food. Then hug a bear. I think at the end of that process you will find two things:
1) Snow is cold. More snow is more cold. Snow falls from the sky. Snow got cold way up in the sky in the clouds; it did not rise from the ocean as snow. This represents heat dumped to the sky, and now freezing your toosh.
2) Bears are fond of “meat cicles” and don’t mind if they are frozen. Bears are equal opportunity employers and do not care if you like them or not. They will eat all commers on an equal basis. Polar bears will travel hundreds of miles to inform you of this. Bears are not your fluffy friends. “Hug a bear for world peace. Do it ‘For the Children’. Please, the world is depending on YOU!”
For an advanced course, you could then postulate that to get all that water into the sky would take a load of heat. That heat leaves the oceans as the water evaporates. Evaporting water lowers the surface temperature (thus the cold phase PDO and very cold anomaly center of the Pacific. It takes about 18 years for water in the central Pacific to reach Alaska, so ‘watch this space’ for the next decade+ as the cold spreads out). So in your scenario, the center of the Pacific would need to be warming a LOT to power all that snow as the world warms. It’s not, it’s getting colder. The heat is leaving the planet and not being replenshed fast enough as the sun is taking a brief nap…
But don’t worry, you can keep making those same tired arguments. You’ll have ever fewer followers, though. As every year from here on out we’re sliding further down that Razor Blade Of Climate Life called the PDO Cold Phase. Enjoy the ride.
SteveSadlov says:
December 13, 2010 at 1:37 pm
“La Nina, negative PDO, Sun still a bit quiet. So … could just be noise. But I always like to ask the rhetorical question, what would the end of the interglacial look like? And what would be the result?”
There is a national park northwest of Boulder CO. If you are in the basin, where the tourist villages are, you can see a snowstorm on the peaks and that storm is there almost year around. At the end of the interglacial, the permanent snowstorm comes down the mountain. Glaciers are piles of snow. The areas of Canada that are covered with snow permanently will be extended southward. That is how the glacier reached Kansas City. It is all very simple really, and it is all weather.
We need to refocus the topic. Talking about snowfall is fun and all, but the weather event that we are suffering today is not snowfall. The problem in most of the USA is not snow. It is an air mass that is unusually large, unusually cold, unusually extensive, and unusually early. To make matters worse, this is three years running that the USA has suffered such an air mass, though this particular one is by far the worst. In Florida, this is the third year running that we have suffered such an air mass and we expect to suffer from unusual cold for three more months, as we did in ’09 and ’10. The normal daily high in Central Florida is 75F and we have not enjoyed that normal for two years. The fact that Warmists have failed to address this matter shows so very clearly that they refuse to discuss the elephant in the room. The last time something of this severity occurred was 1974, a year that the citrus industry retreated 50 miles south and James Hansen predicted the imminent end of the interglacial.
R. Gates says:
In the bigger climate picture, Cold=dry, not wet, and has for millions of years on earth.
Another partial truth.
What this ignores is, among other things, TIMING and LOCATION.
There are places where this relationship is reversed, such as the western USA, during fairly long periods of time:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/12/10/wet-cold-and-hot-dry-cycles/
In those places you can count on a coldening to be reflected in MORE water and more wet, not less. Though yes, as you enter an Ice Age the END RESULT is a very much dryer and more sterile environment. As we’re “about due” for our present interglacial to end, and plunge us into a new Glacial Ice period, I must wonder why M. Gates desires us to push mightily in that direction…
Also, as a cycle swaps FROM warming TO COLDER you get an increase in rain and snow as the oceans cool. (They lag the land by quite a while, so you get these inflection point artifacts). The air cools off dramatically, and THAT drives the heat engine to cool the oceans for a long time (and thus the added precipitation).
M. Gates lives in a static world where all things happen immediately. One where temperatures do not need mass, lag times, and specific heat to indicate heat gain or loss. One where the oceans are immediatly warmed the moment a bit more sun happens and instantly cool when the sun naps. One of “models”…
Odd things are happening with pressure gradient over the Arctic and it may be related to both the lower than average sea ice and the bottom line is that it may increase the chance of cold outbreaks to points south of the arctic in the future…as counter-intuitive as this seems.
Unfortunately, the Sea Ice is right about the middle of the pack for the last decade or two. It’s also about the same as it was the last time a Hot PDO swapped to a Cold PDO (back when we had submarines surfacing at the N.Pole in open water, with photographs…). But yes, “odd things are happening” with the pressure gradient as tons of increadibly frozen cold air plunges down from altitude where it’s dumped it’s heat to space and races back toward the equator to pick up more from the oceans.
Along the way, that fridged Polar Air Mass hits a load of Moist Warm Air that’s blowing in off the oceans. And the collision dumps a load of rain and snow. (Releasing the heat in that moisture in that warm moist air, letting it leave to space too…).
Repeat this for about, oh, 25 years more, and you start to reach the end of this PDO phase (rather like during the “New Little Ice Age” scare of the ’70s that I lived through…) when the oceans will have lost that stored ‘excess heat’. Then the whole thing can flip to the cold phase for another 30 years and you can be singing from the Global Warming himnal again.
Look, you have a MAJOR problem here. A bunch of us are now old enough we’ve lived through an entire PDO cycle, end to end. We’re starting to have “Groudhog day” moments mixed in with Deja Vu. We’ve been here before. We know what comes next. And it’s cold. Very cold.
I REMEMBER the “loopy jet stream” from the days of my youth on TV (in Black and White then…). I REMEMBER the reports of bitter cold from Europe as the warm 1940’s turned into the fridgid 1950-60s. I REMEMBER running out to touch the bit of snow that fell in my home town in the central valley of California in the early 1960s (and how most folks had never seen that before). BUT I also remember going to talk to several of the Very Old Folks in town, some in their 80’s and more. And I remember them saying “Well, it snowed like this a long time ago when I was young, but then it got very very hot in the 1930s… this isn’t really anything new, just going back to what it was.”
So I’m sorry, but you can’t erase those memories. You can’t erase the cold before the 1930s and you can’t erase the heat OF the 1930s and you can’t erase the cold of the ’60s and ’70s and now we’ve peaked in the 1990’s at about the same as the 1930s and I KNOW what comes next because this is where I came into this movie a long long time ago. And I remember things very very well…
BTW, last year it snowed in the Central Valley of California again. First time in, oh, about 1 PDO cycle… We ought to have about 15 years of it if this cycle repeats instead of rhymes… or ought that to be rimes (as in ‘rime ice’ 😉
So if you want this “hydrological argument” of yours to work, you need to add the effects of variance by geography and time lags. Otherwise it’s just a load of yellow frozen hyrological argument… and I’m not eating any.
Oh, and R.Gates:
You’ll need to explain how extra heat input, with retained excess heat, to our heat engine is showing up as a colder “hot side” as well as a colder “cold side”…
“Oh, and that unfortuante point about CO2 changing 800 years AFTER the temperature changes”
I keep reading about this here, but I haven’t seen any links posted (note – I’ve only been reading here recently). I’ve found a few articles but was wondering if there were any that are better at explaining and documenting this than others?
“MODELS are not PROOF of ANYTHING. They are human constructed FANTASIES. I’ve run a supercomputer doing modeling (including a few weeks of runs for a Stanford guy getting his Ph.D. doing cloud models). I can make a model give you any answer you like. That doesn’t mean it has any truth in it at all. Models are best used “to inform our ignorance”, not as any statement about what is or is not real. Learn that. It matters.”
Isn’t the First Law of Computers:
Garbage In – Garbage Out?
R. Gates is the most effective troll I have encountered. Anthony offered us a really wonderful topic, the third great over-achieving arctic air mass in as many years, and R. Gates managed to turn the entire conversation to snowfall and his utterly fanciful “advanced hydrological cycle.” When you have that kind of gift for sales, you really should get into a sales job.
REPLY: Yeah, I’m thinking of assigning him to the back room. He’s quite a waste of effort for everyone. – Anthony
R. Gates, you are full of statements made by others that you repeat without thinking. In NE Oregon, El Nino means less winter precip, and especially the kind that stays around. We kinda dry out. La Nina brings us lots of moisture that stay around in the form of snow. So a blanket statement (one I have mistakenly made) does not actually mirror reality when things go cold or warm. The “wet” stuff shifts around, as does the “dry” stuff. Same is true for the “cold” stuff, and the “warm” stuff. When “wet” shifts North, we get snow pack up the ying yang with lots of irrigation water during the Summer. When “wet” shifts South, we get skunked and have to cut down on crop irrigation in the Summer.
In other words, the hydrological cycle doesn’t increase or decrease globally, it just shifts around.
For starters, because it appears you are in need of a tutorial, in learning about shifting weather pattern variations, go to the last page of the ENSO update to see why we get snowy wet when things go cold out in the Pacific.
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf