From Science @ NASA.gov
The upper Midwest was hit by a powerful winter storm this past weekend as more than 17 inches of snow brought down the roof to the Metrodome football complex (link added by WUWT) in Minneapolis. NASA’s Terra satellite flew over the upper Midwest the next day and captured an image of that snowy blanket left behind.
When NASA’s Terra satellite flew over the upper Midwest on Sunday, Dec. 12 the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument captured an image at 17:20 UTC (12:20 p.m. EST). The MODIS Image was created by the MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
Have a look:
The image clearly shows the snowy blanket on the ground that covered South Dakota, southern Minnesota, eastern Iowa, northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin and Indiana. In the satellite image, northern Minnesota appears darker because there was less snowfall. The snow storm mostly affected the lower half of the state, which appears as a brighter white in the image.
The National Weather Service (NWS) reported that 17.1 inches of snow fell in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota on Saturday. Some of the suburbs of the twin cities reported as much as 21 inches of snow. NWS also noted that 60 mph wind gusts caused high snow drifts there and the Minneapolis airport was even closed for several hours on Dec. 11.
On Sunday, Dec. 12, the National Weather Service had issued blizzard warnings for northwestern Illinois, eastern Iowa, northern Michigan, and southeast Wisconsin. Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota and South Dakota reported road closures due to snow and accidents this weekend. On Monday morning the cleanups continued.
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from mars says:
What is the point in reporting these cold extremes as counter-examples to global warming?
Global warming is GLOBAL!
Thank you for pointing that out. Now can you please point out that same fact with reference to the Russian heat wave last summer while South America was experiencing Antartic conditions?
To TimM
Yes the truth is that for all the fun with weather we have here it isn’t climate
I know it’s not climate – that’s why i mentionned it. Many of the comments here are bashing about ”where’s my global warming” because they got a snow storm. Well that’s the point – neither there snow storm or the east coast warming is relevant to climate – bash about the weather anytime, it’s not climate (yet).
latitude says:
December 14, 2010 at 7:41 am
Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
December 14, 2010 at 5:21 am
I thought “global warming” says winters will start later not sooner.
==============================================
Yep, the whole migrating sooner, longer growing seasons, etc
Chalk another prediction up to being wrong……..
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Gladly.
Wow, nice 10 MB photo….if you follow the Missouri down through SD to the last lake and last dam, then go about 1 inch to where she jogs South again, I’m about a half inch to the NE.
Will you LOOK at those lake effect convection streamers passing over Lake Superior!
Spectacular. Its like a giant hand with fingernails scratching across the surface.
Notice that convection extending WAY south over the snow cover, too.
Lake effect snow is one of the most fascinating and august meteorological phenomena on the planet, no doubt.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Northern Minnesota is darker because it’s completely forested, and many of those trees are evergreen conifers. Like a previous poster said, it shields us from the wind and brings us those frigid temps you always hear about. It was -33˚F yesterday morning in International Falls, and -22˚F here. I can assure you we have snow.. about 15 inches of it.. on the ground. And it’ll stick around until the end of March.
Jantar:
You are right. No single weather event, heatwave or cold spell, can be used to prove or disprove Global Warming.
But MORE EXTREME WEATHER EVENTS ARE EXPECTED AS A CONSECUENCE OF CLIMATE CHANGE.
With Global Warming, there is more energy in the Climate System. With more heat, more waper vapor. So heatwaves become hotter and more common, droughts become drier, and precipitation more intense.
Remember, more intense precipitation events. In summer, this means extreme rainfall. In winter this means extreme snowfall: more super blizzards!
A reminder that this was predicted a while ago is this 1997 documentary on the Discovery Channel: “Raging Planet: Blizzard”
(see the mention of Global Warming on 4:39 “Global Warming is taking hold.As the Planet gets warm, all the forms of extreme weather, hot and cold, will become more common. Blizzards will come across the polar areas with ever incresing ferocity”)
And:
(see from 5:40)
By the way, I live in Peru, and I received the blast of polar air that brought extreme cold to Chile and Argentina. Lima received a relatively mild impact compared with Buenos Aires or Santiago, but last season was one of our coldest winters. It was no surprise, since we were entering a moderate to strong La Niña, and Peru is the “ground zero” of ENSO. This, combined with a strongly positive Antarctic Oscillation, caused the cold spell.
You are now suffering the effect of the swing in the Arctic Oscillation towards the negative phase, as happened one year ago.
There is also the possibility that Global Warming is altering the behaviour of the Polar Oscillations. In particular, Arctic sea ice reduction means more heat liberated in Autumn and Winter from ocean trought the thinning ice. More heat means warmer air (this means warming causes melt that causes more warming, this is called “Arctic Amplification”) that favour high pressure over the Arctic, driving the Arctic Oscillation toward the negative phase. Negative AO means cold weather in Europe, Western Siberia and continental USA , and warm weather in Canada, Greenland, East Siberia and the Arctic Basin.
These effects are still not well understood, but one thing is sure: there was a clear warming trend since the 1970s, and this warming trend has continued unabated to the present. 2010 is so far the warmest year in the GISTEMP and NCDC datasets, second warmest in HADCRUT and RSS datasets, and tied with 1998 as the warmest year in the UAH dataset.
lowercasefred says:
December 14, 2010 at 4:26 am
Hmmm. What I called an “impact crater” is not on the database. There is a small one, “Rock Elm” which is 6km in diameter a few miles to the northwest, but the big ring about 100 km diameter is not in the database (nor are the two fainter rings).
Does anybody know what these structures are if not impact craters?
fred, Not totally sure what you are looking at but here in Minnesota our license plates carry the motto…land of ten thousand lakes. Check out Mille Lacs Lake, a excellent walleye fishery, it might be your crater.
lowercasefred says:
December 14, 2010 at 4:14 am
And follows up with:
lowercasefred says:
December 14, 2010 at 4:26 am
With another observant reader noting:
HankHenry says:
December 14, 2010 at 9:05 am
The one crater ESE of the Twin Cities area may be the Grover
Bluff crater. However, the photo make it appear much larger than the
8 mile diameter credited to the Grover Bluff Crater.
If you look closely like lowercasefred did, the larger crater has a series
of two more “ghost craters” overlapping it toward the northeast.
These have been so scraped smooth By the various glaciers as to have
been heretofore unidentified.
The small crater toward Eau Claire could be the 8 mile Rock Elm crater
HanHenry mentioned… but maybe not. Other “rings” defined by
semicircular river courses or swamps and drainage patterns show up
in the photo too.
Please see the Wisconsin relief map:
http://www.wisconline.com/maps/art/landforms.jpeg
And the ImpactDataBase map for North America:
http://www.passc.net/EarthImpactDatabase/NAmericaRED.jpg
There are other possible astroblemes in the image besides the one being talked about. That it is higher than surrounding terrain means nothing – pedestal craters are common. I’ve notice that a large number of lakes in southern Minnesota are circular with central islands, looks like (doesn’t mean that it is) a strewn field.
The big one on the Wisconsin side of the river is on the crater map linked to above. Another interesting circular feature is just SSE of the Iowa Great Lakes.
lol we could have a mini ice age and the GISS would still say it was one of the warmest periods ever… snark off
Well, all of you Doubters and Denialists, the person from mars supports my stance:
“But MORE EXTREME WEATHER EVENTS ARE EXPECTED AS A CONSECUENCE OF CLIMATE CHANGE.
With Global Warming, there is more energy in the Climate System. With more heat, more waper vapor. So heatwaves become hotter and more common, droughts become drier, and precipitation more intense.
Remember, more intense precipitation events. In summer, this means extreme rainfall. In winter this means extreme snowfall: more super blizzards!”
Of course, he/she didn’t mention teen pregnancies, but, by the same token, he/she didn’t once mention a polar friggin bear. So, I have the AWESOME POWER of CAPITALISED MIS-SPELLINGS behind my thought-train.
Toot! Toot!
Being from Mars, I guess that he/she would be familiar with solar induced global warming……
@Kaboom:
Yeah, and ‘our Martian’ has to explain this little problem:
“Megadroughts” in the Midwest. 100 years long kind of things in California. During the MWP. Far worse than anything we have today:
A paper by the NIPCC that talks about megadroughts. Has some choice words in it., but generally seems to link the droughts with hotter times in the MWP.
http://www.nipccreport.org/articles/2010/oct/27oct2010a3.html
Then this nice little kicker:
You can almost hear them thinking “Game, Set, and Match”
😉
At any rate, it looks like as we’ve cooled from the MWP, the frequency, duration, and extent of large drouths has moderated. (My Dad used to say it that way, drouths… I feel bad for having complained at him about it. Found out later it was just an older form of the word and perfectly fine…) That implies further moderation as we continue to cool.
The paper shows a consistently lessening problem over long periods of time, though.
SO, my Favorite Martian needs to explain just how it’s going to be getting all so much worse
” So heatwaves become hotter and more common, droughts become drier,”
Or he can explain how the MWP was so much hotter than it is now.
Either one is fine with me.
I’ll wait. (but not too long… it could take a while… a very long while 😉
E.M.Smith says:
“Or he can explain how the MWP was so much hotter than it is now”
Well, all paleoclimate indicates that the MWP was not as warm as the last decades. It was warmer in the North Atlantic, but cooler in the Tropical Pacific (that is, there was a predominance of La Niña). See this maps:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/medieval-warm-period-intermediate.htm
And a post on a paper on South America:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/South-American-hockey-stick.html
But let’s assume that this reconstructions are all wrong and the MWP was warmer than today.There is a problem insisting that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than present:
The “hockey stick”is not only for temperature. It is also for climate forcing: now there are record levels of greenhouse gases. In effect, the “temperature hockey stick” go back to 2000 years, but CO2 and CH4 levels are at record levels in MILLIONS of years.
This is an impressive “hockey league”:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Hockey-stick-or-hockey-league.html
So, if the MWP was warmer than today, it will be really odd. And will be a very disturbing result, because:
1) the forcing in the Middle Ages was much smaller than today, so climate sensitivity is really much higher. So WE CAN EXPECT A MUCH BIGGER GLOBAL WARMING THAN GLOBAL CLIMATE MODELS PREDICT.
2)Since with much higher forcing the climate hasn’t warmed more than in the MWP, most of warming is “in the pipeline”. So we can expect a lot more of warming even our emissions drop to zero today. If we not stop emitting now, a climate catastrophe is certain, with more than 5ºC of warming.
See here:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Do-critics-of-the-hockey-stick-realise-what-theyre-arguing-for.html
Keep criticizing the hockey stick. Maybe you are right, and climate change is much worse than global climate models predict.
from mars,
So far, absolutely none of the temperature datasets you are citing has shown to be very accurate or reliable. There is still pretty solid evidence that 1936 may well have been the hottest year in the last 75, but you NO LONGER see that in the datasets which you cite, because they have been routinely “adjusted”.
As has been demonstrated MANY times on this site, earlier years get adjusted DOWNWARDS, while later years get adjusted UPWARDS, and suddenly you have a magical trend!
I will agree with you on the following:
It is highly likely that the global average temperature has risen approximately 0.6 degrees centigrade from 1979 – present. It is also relatively likely that man has made SOME (but not very much) contribution to that 0.6 degrees change.
Also, it is HIGHLY likely that 2012-2013 is gonna look almost precisely like 1978-1979 weather-wise, and erase all of that increase. Even the “climate models” which you probably love are currently showing this.
Climate is a NATURAL phenomenon.
from mars,
Interesting how you completely ignore all of the recent studies that show that the MWP was a GLOBAL phenomenon, and not merely isolated to the North Atlantic. “skepticalscience” is unfortunately short on both skepticism and science, but you will probably only learn that if you spend a much larger amount of your time reading the real science that goes on at sites like this one.
The problem is, apparently you haven’t been at this site long, so you don’t realize that over the past 2 years we have already thoroughly debunked every argument you have made so far in this thread. Check out the archives here, you will find them highly informative.
I’ve read that the climate cultists have developed scripts to spam any post on blogs they follow with pro-warmist propaganda, including links to discredited papers. I suspect that is what we are running into now, or perhaps some undergrads done with finals early.
PeterB in Indianapolis:
Have you seen the link to SOUTH AMERICAN PALEOTEMPERATURES?
Here is the link to the paper “Ammonium concentration in ice cores: A new proxy for regional temperature reconstruction”:
http://www.leif.org/EOS/2009JD012603.pdf
It is interesting to me, since I live from 22 years in Peru, South America (Mars has an awful climate, you know).
The MWP was evident also in South America, but STILL COOLER THAN PRESENT TIME. You should know, since WUWT posted about this article:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/01/study-ammonium-as-ice-core-proxy-shows-strong-medieval-warm-period/
And I repeat what I said before:
“So, if the MWP was warmer than today, it will be really odd. And will be a very disturbing result, because:
1) the forcing in the Middle Ages was much smaller than today, so climate sensitivity is really much higher. So WE CAN EXPECT A MUCH BIGGER GLOBAL WARMING THAN GLOBAL CLIMATE MODELS PREDICT.
2)Since with much higher forcing the climate hasn’t warmed more than in the MWP, most of warming is “in the pipeline”. So we can expect a lot more of warming even our emissions drop to zero today. If we not stop emitting now, a climate catastrophe is certain, with more than 5ºC of warming.
Keep criticizing the hockey stick. Maybe you are right, and climate change is much worse than global climate models predict.”