Southwestern USA, 7 day cumulative percent of normal, shown below:
Source from water.weather.gov
Have a look at the 7day totals:
Source water.weather.gov
California benefits, Lake Mead benefits. That “Lake Mead will go dry due to global warming” is forestalled at the moment.
And the national composite (big file, 3400 pixels wide) for the last 24 hours:
My friend Jan Null who runs the Golden Gate Weather Services in San Franciscco writes in with these links:
The San Diego and Los Angeles NWS offices have posted some excellent briefing materials about the ongoing heavy rain event. See:
http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/sgx/WeatherBrief1221.pdf and
http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/lox/scripts/headline_download.php?get=20101221_1019.pdf
Since this event doesn’t follow the traditional ENSO patterns that NOAA predicts, I’m sure somebody will find a way to blame it on “global warming”:
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Water content in snow can vary from as little as 3 inches of snow (nearly slush) to as much 60 inches to an inch of rain. At least according to the weather folks in Denver. This was in a story 9News ran with respect to a viewers question – is it ever too cold to snow. The gist of the story comes down to, it might be too cold to evaporate surface water, but it is never too cold to snow. Hence, snow in the Antarctic even in it’s dead of winter.
R. Gates says:
December 21, 2010 at 8:52 pm
Not often discussed here on WUWT, but the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO).
A veritable fount of wisdom you aren’t. The MJO is an NFL touchdown celebration performed by Julian Edelman and named by Commentator John Madden.
REPLY: always add a /sarc tag, people can’t always determine this for themselves. Here’s info on the MJO:
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/MJO/mjo.shtml
-Anthony
We are living in “Interesting Times”. I rejoice really. Buy more pop-corn!
Wasn’t it that…
Got on a board a west bound seven forty seven
Didn’t think before deciding what to do
All that talk of opportunities, TV breaks and movies
Rang true, sure rang true.
Seems it never rain in Southern California
Seems I’ve often heard that kind of talk before
It never rains in California
But girl, don’t they warn ya
It pours man it pours.
Out of work, I’m out of my head
Out of self respect I’m out of bread
I’m under loved I’m under fed
I wanna go home
It never rains in California
But girl don’t they warn ya, it pours, man it pours.
Will you tell the folks back home I nearly made it
Had offers but don’t know which one to take
Please don’t tell them how you found me
Don’t tell them how you found me give me a break
Give me a break
Seems it never rains in Southern California
Seems I’ve often heard that kind of talk before
It never rains in California
But girl, don’t they warn ya
It pours man it pours
Was it not that some guy called “Al Baby” by an English Lord, recently moved to California?
La Nina is usually frigid cold and dry for NE Oregon. But the weaker, thus wider AO circulation is interacting with the Jet Stream to cause on-shore systems all along the West coast to be much wetter. Our snow pack, under these conditions, is predicted to be above normal, maybe even way above normal. But we won’t be at -20 for weeks on end. The last time that happened, the Wallowa River froze up three or four winters ago. Mind you, that river is partially fed by warm springs as it snakes through the Wallowa Valley. It has to be polar cold for that river to freeze when it gets in the Wallowa canyon. That year we had very little snowpack and ended up having to shut down irrigation canals way earlier than usual.
I, for one, am glad for wetter conditions. Instead of “minus friggin frostbite degrees”, we are at temperatures that are doable in terms of living comfortably. Snow can be removed. Frigid cold temperatures are much harder to plow out of my driveway.
However, it was 12 degrees last night and yesterday’s high was 18 degrees. Cold enough.
Pretty amazing:
An “Atmospheric River” is so moist it can “move about 50 million liters of water per second, equivalent to a 100-meter-wide pipe gushing water at 50 kilometers per hour”.
Can they include this behavior in climate models? Atmospheric Rivers are very common but the events that trigger them are unknown?
http://tenaya.ucsd.edu/~dettinge/atmos_rivers.science.pdf
And I would add the MJO. However, this oscillation appears more often in weak La Nina months or neutral months. We are in a stronger La Nina period so I don’t expect this MJO condition to be around much longer. I do expect the negative, thus wider AO to stay put for a while. The pressure system parked off our shores (possibly kept there by the wider negative AO circle?) along the Washington and Oregon coast will keep us wet and cold.
Thanks R. Gates, MJO article is very interesting and appears to throw a wrench into forecasting.
“Strong MJO activity during the past winter [2007] is believed to have modulated the La Niña resulting in atypical La Niña impacts in in the western U.S.”
Humans and big oil are still causing forrest fires in southern Cal. Don’t believe what you read.
Joe Romm will get on another messaging rant.
JRR Canada says:
December 21, 2010 at 8:27 pm
So another drought as predicted by the team computer models?
Wait. It is a special kind of drought, this one. Dry drought is bad enough, but wet drought is simply devastating.
It’s rotten rain.
How bout an ARKstorm?
http://urbanearth.gps.caltech.edu/winter-storm/
Gotta Luv USGS…too bad we couldn’t plan for and BANK all this water.
Quite amazing actually. If you ever fly in a light plane (low altitude) from the USA (CA) down to the Baja, you can easily tell exactly where the border is; because the ground color suddenly changes from green to brown going south.
So how the hell did all this rainfall know to stop at the Mexico/US border ??
And speaking of which,
California Greenies continually refuse to allow the construction of more storage facilities in California, to collect this water, when wee get it.
Wait till next summer, when the Socal golf courses are screaming for more free water from Nocal precious rivers that feed the whole Monterey Bay fisheries ecology. And the farmers along Hiway-5 will leave their fields fallow along that hiway for a quarter mile or so, so that they can advertise that the Congress, is mandating their dustbowl.
Wonderful !
John from CA says:
December 22, 2010 at 8:40 am
Thanks R. Gates, MJO article is very interesting and appears to throw a wrench into forecasting.
“Strong MJO activity during the past winter [2007] is believed to have modulated the La Niña resulting in atypical La Niña impacts in in the western U.S.”
_____
You’re welcome. It does appear that several forecasters are still a bit behind the curve in looking at the MJO, and thus they try to fit their analysis of certain events to more traditional ENSO models and expectations, but the very real but shorter term MJO effects need to be taken into account as variations or modulations on the longer term ENSO effects. And though some (or perhaps many) here on WUWT may disagree with me on this, I suspect it would be of value for more researchers to investigate the relationship between the MJO, traditional ENSO events, and the so-called El Nino Modoki:
http://www.imarpe.gob.pe/tsm/Enso/Antec%202006/modoki-final.pdf
http://www.usclivar.org/Organization/MJO%20WorkingGroup/MJOscience.html
http://web.unbc.ca/~ytang/MJO.pdf
Finally, I still find it interesting that some posters here want to look to the Far Northern Pacific for all the moisture hitting CA (especially last weekends). Undoubtedly cold air from the north slammed into the subtropical jet right over Southern CA, but main source of moisture was clearly subtropical, and of the “pineapple express” variety, though the addition of the colder air from the north modulated the warmer temps that are often associated with “Pineapple Express”/MJO events.
Another tropical storm yesterday for Nova Scotia. Rain, 60-120 mph wd , storm surge ( high tides at full moon), flooding and temperatures in the 40’s. This is 3 tropical storms in 3 weeks – one on each Monday. Its going to stay ugly but warm until after Xmas. No snow for Santa.in
The weird thing is the lack of wind when there is no storm (gale to hurricane). Since November 1 I have had no production from my wind turbine. Four days had high winds, the turbine furled and the rotor stalled. One day gusts kept sending output voltage above 120v AC and the inverter shut off on high limit. The other 47 days, the wind never blew hard enough to start the blades.
It’s been a warm , strange fall and winter has begun the same.
Clearly the above average rainfall is a sure sign of AGW…unless..it is below average rainfall, then that is a sure sign of AGW.
No matter what happens it is a sure sign of AGW.
That’s what a real ‘Unified Theory’ is.
Back in the Sixties, there was a wildly popular spectator sport that involved watching mansions slide down California hills. It was so popular, that a movie was made about the adventures of a collection of “California people” during their slide down a hill. The movie had some good actors and was wildly popular. On Amazon, you can buy books about various California drenchings. Unbridled rain in California is well known among those of us who have been around for a while.
Wow. A bit of rain in America, and it’s a big story on WUWT.
Meanwhile, Queensland has turned into a lake.
“Clearly the above average rainfall…”
….has happened before, and will happen again….
http://arwi.us/precip/Sympro2003/Roos.pdf
See page 5.
Merry Christmas Gents, always a good read here…
Very interesting links R. Gates!
They refer to MJO as a subtle trigger for ENSO due to the Easterlies and Kalvin Wave formation; 6-12 months prior to ENSO onset. If the decadal variation is correct we should have seen less MJO 2000-2010 and increased activity for the next 10 years.
MJO activity appears to increase during La Nina dominated decades yet is independent of ENSO?
I see AO mentioned, but not NPI. NPI goes nonrandomly in & out of phase with AO on a variety of timescales. Some of coupling states exhibit longevity. NPI also goes nonrandomly in & out of phase with SOI on a variety of timescales. Clarification: We’re not talking about random phase drifts; we’re talking about switch-flipping. So in layman’s terms, it might be constructive to think of NPI as a sort of coupling pivot between the Pacific & the Arctic. Knowing the state of ENSO isn’t as useful for predicting interannual Pacific Northwest variability as knowing the state of NPI (our local branch of the northern annular mode [NAM]). This can be clearly shown using complex correlation (which can see switch-flipping, enabling avoidance of mainstream climate science’s Simpson’s Paradox-based “reasoning”). The coupling matrix is nonrandomly multimodal.
RoHa says:
December 22, 2010 at 2:41 pm
Wow. A bit of rain in America, and it’s a big story on WUWT.
Meanwhile, Queensland has turned into a lake.
_____
Both events, including the heavy snows in Europe, do not in any way “prove” that AGW is a valid hypothesis, but are entirely consistent with the acceleration of the hydrological cycle. For millions of years the earth has consistently responded to higher CO2 with an acceleration of the hydrological cycle. This natural negative feedback process takes CO2 out of the atmosphere through the acclerated weathering of rock. This is part of the basic carbon cycle on earth and is quite well established science. A very nice simple summary of the carbon cycle/CO2 relationship can be found here:
http://www.columbia.edu/~vjd1/carbon.htm
And some recent studies seems to show this hydrological acceleration is exactly what is occurring with our 40% increase in CO2 over the past few hundred years:
http://www.umass.edu/newsoffice/newsreleases/articles/104895.php
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2010/10/global-warming-river-flows-oceans-climate-disruption.html
It has long been my hypothesis that the great water erosion in Western Colorado, Utah, and down through the Colorado River were caused by an extreme Pineapple Express about 11,500 years ago. What we are seeing today is still only a drop in the bucket compared to what future generations will have to endure.
Paul Vaughan says:
December 22, 2010 at 3:44 pm
======
The NPI dramatically shifted in 2009 but the data appears to be incomplete for 2010.
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/jhurrell/indices.info.html#np
AO and NAO shift was also dramatic in 2009.
http://ioc-goos-oopc.org/state_of_the_ocean/atm/ao.php