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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R. Gates says:
December 22, 2010 at 12:09 pm
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.
===================
No.
From Bastardi’s blog later on the same day:
“I will be putting on a free site video later today explaining why the people saying this is the pineapple Express into California don’t know what they are talking about. The “connection,” so to speak, to the subtropics is non-existent, cirrus bands moving away from the max are not bringing in moisture. Instead you are seeing the product of systems that are very cold overall, slamming into a) an area that has been warm, the Southwest and b) higher terrain. The fast jet APPROACHING the coast, and then high ground, starts piling air up in front of the coast. But that very cold water in the northeaster Pacific has to be causing lower-than-normal 1000-500 mb thickness, and taking that air into the West is what is doing this. There have bee no convective bombs going off east of Hawaii and then feeding northeast, and convection around Hawaii is feeble at best.”
“Again, that plume of moisture is high level and moving AWAY from the scene, not into it. We have a La nina and a remarkably cloud-free subtropic. Blaming it on that is like blaming the common cold for… I better not say, one can get in trouble with that implication.”
=====================
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
R.Gates
Dec 22nd 3.44pm
Re your first link: – http://www.columbia.edu/~vjd1/carbon.htm
While we worry about possible global warming from the additional CO2 we put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, if there was no CO2 in the atmosphere the global climate would be significantly cooler.
Proof? Constant repetition of such statements as this, doesn’t make it true. Why is it that whenever proof is asked for it’s never forthcoming? Prove me wrong, show me the proof.
Decreased weathering means less CO2 being drawn from the atmosphere by weathering reactions, leaving more CO2 in the atmosphere to increase temperatures.
CO2 is heavier than air. So, nothing to worry about here, it will come down anyway. To feed us, as we’ve evolved to be Carbon Life Forms because of it and its well known, except to AGWScience, properties. Who will educate the educators?
Where I live(southern California) we only got swiped by the end of the storm. It’s still been a steady 6 or so days of light/medium rain with occasional breaks. I can only remember one other time in the last 13 years it’s rained for almost a week.
R. Gates says:
December 22, 2010 at 3:53 pm
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.”
How old are you? Twelve? The events in California and Britain/Europe are par for the course! There is nothing earth shaking in either of them. On several occasions in my rather long life, I have endured periods of drenching rain that lasted for months. For example, St. Louis in 1973, 1982, and 1993. In 1982, I regularly crossed a bridge that usually stood 60 feet above the Missouri River when the river water was lapping the beams directly underneath the highway. I have endured heat wave, drought, snow that refused to melt for months, you name it. That kind of stuff is common place. If you are going to talk about weather or climate, you need to get a little experience outdoors.
If the weather that we are experiencing now, somewhere in the world, is evidence of an advancing hydrological cycle then that cycle has constantly advanced throughout my lifetime and, in fact, is now slowing, not advancing.
I swear to g-d that pro-AGW folks have no ability whatsoever to recognize a fact, describe it, put it into perspective, and not exaggerate it to high heaven.
1DandyTroll says: (December 22, 2010 at 4:10 am) Can we really trust those imaginary satellite picture…
Neat, Dandy! I needed that.
For the last few days CA has had water–not weather!
Re: John from CA
Casual readers might not notice that you’re mixing raw values & anomalies. Websites should never provide only anomalies. I’m not against the provision of anomalies, but it gets mighty irritating when one often has to make a seriously concerted effort to track down either raw values or a climatology to go with the anomalies — absolutely unacceptable.
Watch out for sloppy joins in the AO time series. Plan on doing a lot of diagnostics. That whole record needs a consistent rework (to overcome the current patchwork of era-dependent anomalies) that is mindful of seasonality (to overcome untenable EOF assumptions). The AO series available are still useful, just not nearly as useful as they could be for data explorers. The custodians should be able to do a much better job.
And the NOAA continues to predict a dry winter.
http://rimoftheworld.net/6239
Are they on the same planet we are?
The quiet sun has affected the polar vortices especially in the northern hemisphere to shift all the Earth’s air circulation systems equatorward.
During the late 20th century period of active sun the reverse happened with the air circulation systems shifted poleward.
The solar influence is strong enough to modify the characteristics of the system response to El Nino and La Nina events although ENSO events (or more precisely the net state of all the global ocean surfaces combined) do also in turn modulate the solar forcing.
In due course I think we will find that the changes in solar activity levels alter the vertical temperature profile in the atmosphere via chemical reactions involving ozone and that differential heating or cooling at different levels in the atmosphere actually reverses the sign of the effect normally assumed by established climatology.
Thus a cooling stratosphere is actually a natural climate response to an active sun and a warming stratosphere is actually a natural climate response to a quiet sun.
CO2 and CFCs not involved after all.
“If the weather that we are experiencing now, somewhere in the world, is evidence of an advancing hydrological cycle then that cycle has constantly advanced throughout my lifetime and, in fact, is now slowing, not advancing. ”
Exactly. And the measure of the speed of the hydrological cycle is the latitudinal position of the air circulation systems and/or the meridionality/zonality of the mid latitude jests.
More jetstream meridionality means more clouds and a higher global albedo for less solar energy into the oceans and net system cooling. The opposite for more zonality.
More meridional jets requires a warming stratosphere which occurs when the sun is quiet and not when it is active. An active sun gives a cooling stratosphere as per past observations.
A more active sun speeds up the hydrological cycle as part of system warming by causing a cooler stratosphere so that energy can flow upward faster but at the same time more energy enters the oceans for net warming overall because cloudiness and albedo both decline.
A less active sun slows down the hydrological cycle as part of system cooling by causing a warmer stratosphere so that energy flows up more slowly but at the same time less energy enters the oceans for net overall cooling because cloudiness and albedo both increase.
Paul Vaughan says:
December 22, 2010 at 7:56 pm
Watch out for sloppy joins in the AO time series. Plan on doing a lot of diagnostics. That whole record needs a consistent rework (to overcome the current patchwork of era-dependent anomalies) that is mindful of seasonality (to overcome untenable EOF assumptions). The AO series available are still useful, just not nearly as useful as they could be for data explorers. The custodians should be able to do a much better job.
=====
Thanks Paul
The AO link I posted:
“Daily and monthly AO (AAO) indices are constructed by projecting the daily and monthly mean 1000-hPa (700-hPa) height anomalies onto the leading EOF mode.”
I also ran across this paper:
EOF representations of the Madden-Julian Oscillation and its connection with ENSO
Kessler, W.S., 2001: J. Climate, 14, 3055-3061
http://faculty.washington.edu/kessler/abstracts/k01-eofmjo-abstract.html
data: http://faculty.washington.edu/kessler/mjo/revision.html
Yup, we got about 8″ so far and our average for December is 1.6″ just east of LA!!
Re: John from CA
Thanks for those MJO links. A few clicks (to look at the graphs) and it was crystal clear that the EOFs are spatial derivatives. This goes a long way towards understanding why the early ’90s SOI pattern baffled the mainstream climate science community. (The preceding insights without reading any text — indeed, pictures are worth 1000s of words.) Do they realize the connection with QBO? (might have to read to see, with an eye to how IOD ties in…)
Thanks again John — much appreciated.