Must be Durban season. From Princeton University here’s a highly charged press release lapped up by some MSM professional worriers today that uses words like “erratic and extreme” to describe that it’s getting rainier in some places, a whole third of the planet in total, except in South America, where it isn’t, and over Russia and the Indian Ocean, where the data was “…voided due to a lack of consistent data.”.
And despite the title of the press release, here’s this little speculative nugget from the lead author:
“We have not yet looked for direct ties between weather variability and increased carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, but I would not be surprised if they are connected in some way,” Medvigy said.
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Erratic, extreme day-to-day weather puts climate change in new light
The first climate study to focus on variations in daily weather conditions has found that day-to-day weather has grown increasingly erratic and extreme, with significant fluctuations in sunshine and rainfall affecting more than a third of the planet.
Princeton University researchers recently reported in the Journal of Climate that extremely sunny or cloudy days are more common than in the early 1980s, and that swings from thunderstorms to dry days rose considerably since the late 1990s. These swings could have consequences for ecosystem stability and the control of pests and diseases, as well as for industries such as agriculture and solar-energy production, all of which are vulnerable to inconsistent and extreme weather, the researchers noted.
The day-to-day variations also could affect what scientists could expect to see as the Earth’s climate changes, according to the researchers and other scientists familiar with the work. Constant fluctuations in severe conditions could alter how the atmosphere distributes heat and rainfall, as well as inhibit the ability of plants to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, possibly leading to higher levels of the greenhouse gas than currently accounted for.
Existing climate-change models have historically been evaluated against the average weather per month, an approach that hides variability, explained lead author David Medvigy, an assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences at Princeton. To conduct their analysis, he and co-author Claudie Beaulieu, a postdoctoral research fellow in Princeton’s Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, used a recently developed computer program that has allowed climatologists to examine weather data on a daily level for the first time, Medvigy said.
“Monthly averages reflect a misty world that is a little rainy and cloudy every day. That is very different from the weather of our actual world, where some days are very sunny and dry,” Medvigy said.
“Our work adds to what we know about climate change in the real world and places the whole problem of climate change in a new light,” he said. “Nobody has looked for these daily changes on a global scale. We usually think of climate change as an increase in mean global temperature and potentially more extreme conditions — there’s practically no discussion of day-to-day variability.”
The Princeton findings stress that analysis of erratic daily conditions such as frequent thunderstorms may in fact be crucial to truly understanding the factors shaping the climate and affecting the atmosphere, said William Rossow, a professor of earth system science and environmental engineering at the City College of New York.
“It’s important to know what the daily extremes might do because we might care about that sooner,” said Rossow, who also has studied weather variability. He had no role in the Princeton research but is familiar with it.
Rossow said existing climate-change models show light rain more frequently than they should and don’t show extreme precipitation. “If it rains a little bit every day, the atmosphere may respond differently than if there’s a really big rainstorm once every week. One of the things you find about rainstorms is that the really extreme ones are at a scale the atmosphere responds to,” he said.
Although climate-change models predict future changes in weather as the planet warms, those calculations are hindered by a lack of representation of day-to-day patterns, Rossow said.
“If you don’t know what role variability is playing now, you’re not in a very strong position for making remarks about how it might change in the future,” he said. “We’re at a stage where we had better take a look at what this research is pointing out.”
Medvigy and Beaulieu determined sunshine variation by analyzing fluctuations in solar radiation captured by the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project from 1984 to 2007. To gauge precipitation, the researchers used daily rainfall data from the Global Precipitation Climatology Project spanning 1997 to 2007.
Medvigy and Beaulieu found that during those respective periods, extremes in sunshine and rainfall became more common on a day-to-day basis. In hypothetical terms, Medvigy said, these findings would mean that a region that experienced the greatest increase in sunshine variability might have had partly cloudy conditions every day in 1984, but by 2007 the days would have been either sunny or heavily cloudy with no in-between. For rainfall, the uptick in variation he and Beaulieu observed could be thought of as an area experiencing a light mist every day in 1997, but within ten years the days came to increasingly fluctuate between dryness and downpour.
The researchers observed at least some increase in variability for 35 percent of the world during the time periods analyzed. Regions such as equatorial Africa and Asia experienced the greatest increase in the frequency of extreme conditions, with erratic shifts in weather occurring throughout the year. In more temperate regions such as the United States, day-to-day variability increased to a lesser degree and typically only seasonally. In the northeastern United States, for instance, sudden jumps from sunny to bleak days became more common during the winter from 1984 to 2007.
In the 23 years that sunshine variability rose for tropical Africa and Asia, those areas also showed a greater occurrence of towering thunderstorm clouds known as convective clouds, Medvigy said. Tropical areas that experienced more and more unbalanced levels of sunshine and rainfall witnessed an in-kind jump in convective cloud cover. Although the relationship between these clouds and weather variations needs more study, Medvigy said, the findings could indicate that the sunnier days accelerate the rate at which water evaporates then condenses in the atmosphere to form rain, thus producing heavy rain more often.
Storms have lasting effect on daily weather patterns
Although the most extreme weather variations in the study were observed in the tropics, spurts of extreme weather are global in reach, Rossow said. The atmosphere, he said, is a fluid, and when severe weather such as a convective-cloud thunderstorm “punches” it, the disturbance spreads around the world. Weather that increasingly leaps from one extreme condition to another in short periods of time, as the Princeton research suggests, affects the equilibrium of heat and rain worldwide, he said.
“Storms are violent and significant events — while they are individually localized, their disturbance radiates,” Rossow said.
“Wherever it’s raining heavily, especially, or variably is where the atmosphere is being punched. As soon as it is punched somewhere in the tropics it starts waves that go all the way around the planet,” he said. “So we can see waves coming off the west Pacific convection activity and going all the way around the planet in the tropical band. The atmosphere also has the job of moving heat from the equator to the poles, and storms are the source of heat to the atmosphere, so if a storm’s location or its timing or its seasonality is altered, that’s going to change how the circulation responds.”
These sweeping atmospheric changes can interact with local conditions such as temperature and topography to skew regular weather patterns, Rossow said.
“Signals end up going over the whole globe, and whether they’re important in a particular place or not depends on what else is happening,” he said. “But you can think of storms as being the disturbances in an otherwise smooth flow. That’s why this is a climate issue even though we’re talking about daily variability in specific locations.”
The impact of these fluctuations on natural and manmade systems could be as substantial as the fallout predicted from rises in the Earth’s average temperature, Medvigy said. Inconsistent sunshine could impair the effectiveness of solar-energy production and — with fluctuating rainfall also included — harm agriculture, he said. Wetter, hotter conditions also breed disease and parasites such as mosquitoes, particularly in tropical areas, he said.
On a larger scale, wild shifts in day-to-day conditions would diminish the ability of trees and plants to remove carbon from the atmosphere, Medvigy said. In 2010, he and Harvard University researchers reported in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that erratic rain and sunlight impair photosynthesis. That study concluded that this effect upsets the structure of ecosystems, as certain plants and trees — particularly broad-leafed trees more than conifers — adapt better than others.
In the context of the current study, Medvigy said, the impact of variability on photosynthesis could mean that more carbon will remain in the atmosphere than climate models currently anticipate, considering that the models factor in normal plant-based carbon absorption. Moreover, if the meteorological tumult he and Beaulieu observed is caused by greenhouse gases, these fluctuations could become self-perpetuating by increasingly trapping the gases that agitated weather patterns in the first place.
“We have not yet looked for direct ties between weather variability and increased carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, but I would not be surprised if they are connected in some way,” Medvigy said.
“Increases in variability diminish the efficiency with which plants and trees remove carbon dioxide from the air,” he said. “All of a sudden, the land and the atmosphere are no longer in balance, and plants cannot absorb levels of carbon dioxide proportional to the concentrations in the environment. That will affect everybody.”
The study was published online Oct. 14 by the Journal of Climate, and was funded by grants from the Princeton Carbon Mitigation Initiative and the Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Nature et les Technologies.
Contact: Morgan Kelly
609-258-5729
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But to read the abstract at AMS JoC, it seems like an entirely different paper than the press release headline:
Trends in daily solar radiation and precipitation coefficients of variation since 1984
David Medvigya,b and Claudie Beaulieub a Department of Geosciences
b Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
| Abstract |
|---|
This study investigates the possibility of changes in daily-scale solar radiation and precipitation variability. Coefficients of variation (CV) were computed for the daily downward surface solar radiation product from the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project and the daily precipitation product from the Global Precipitation Climatology Project. Regression analysis was used to identify trends in CV. Statistically significant changes in solar radiation variability were found for 35% of the globe, and particularly large increases were found for tropical Africa and the Maritime Continent. These increases in solar radiation variability were correlated with increases in precipitation variability and increases in deep convective cloud amount. The changes in high-frequency climate variability identified here have consequences for any process depending nonlinearly on climate, including solar energy production and terrestrial ecosystem photosynthesis. In order to assess these consequences, additional work is needed to understand how high-frequency climate variability will change in the coming decades.
Keywords:Climate change,climate variability,ISCCP,solar radiation,coefficient of variation
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And when you read the conclusion of the paper below, all that hype about weather variability in the press release seems to melt away. It also seems South America isn’t being cooperative:
Unlike other tropical land areas, tropical South America generally experienced decreases in deep convective cloud fraction (Fig. 8a). We found that these decreases were linked to a sudden change in deep convective cloud amount that occurred in the Amazon around 1995 (Fig. 8b). We do not know of any artifacts in the ISCCP dataset that could have led to this persistent change.
Conclusions
We conclude that there have been detectable changes in high-frequency solar radiation and precipitation variability over the past few decades. Changes in solar radiation CV were large and positive for tropical Africa and the Maritime Continent (Fig. 3). Interestingly, correspondingly large changes in tropical South America mainly occurred only during December-January-February (Fig. 4). These continental locations where we detected changes do not overlap with the mainly oceanic regions where trend detection is sensitive to long-term changes in satellite geometry (Evan et al. 2007). Although we also detected negative trends in solar radiation CV at high latitudes (Fig. 3), these high latitude trends should be regarded with caution because sampling errors and cloud detection errors are much larger there than at lower latitudes.
Solar radiation CV was correlated with precipitation CV and deep convective cloud amount throughout much of the tropics. In particular, the Maritime Continent and tropical Africa had significant increases in all three quantities. Links between convective activity over continents and temperature have already been suggested (Del Genio et al. 2007). It is notable that changes in deep convective cloud amount (and solar radiation CV) were much lower over tropical oceans than tropical land. Because marine tropical lapse rates are expected to be nearly moist adiabatic under climate change (Held and Soden 2006), we would not necessarily expect surface warming to cause increases in deep convective cloud amount. The possibility of a causal relationship between deep convective cloud amount and solar radiation CV and precipitation CV requires further study.
We expect that increases solar radiation CV will decrease the productivity of terrestrial ecosystems (Medvigy et al. 2010). Photosynthesis increases with insolation, up to a critical point, and then the response saturates. An increase in the number of low insolation days will therefore reduce photosynthesis, while an increase in the number of high insolation days will have little effect. Quantifying the future capacity of the terrestrial biosphere to sequester carbon should take into account changes in high-frequency variability. Furthermore, increases in solar radiation CV can make solar energy conversion systems less efficient (Ianetz et al. 2000) and impact the thermal properties of buildings (Matiasovsky 1996). Finally, increases deep convective cloud amount may result in increases in diffuse radiation. While this can have a positive effect on terrestrial ecosystems (Gu et al. 2003), it can also make it more difficult to effectively orient solar cells. There are several key aspects of high-frequency variability that require further investigation. First, the physical mechanisms that ultimately control the degree of high-frequency variability require further investigation. Climate models can also be used to understand current and potential future changes, but this is challenging because high-frequency variances are seldom reported in model output, and thus are rarely validated.
In addition, the higher-order statistics of solar radiation and precipitation are likely to be sensitive to some of the most uncertain model parameterizations, including those for clouds.
Another area requiring further investigation is the analysis of CV trends in other climate variables, including temperature (Vinnikov et al. 2002). Finally, at least in the case of precipitation, variances can be sensitive to extreme event frequency and intensity (Goswami et al. 2006). Analysis of this connection would be greatly aided by additional weather station data from tropical land areas. Given the large number of processes that are nonlinearly sensitive to climate, improving our understanding of current and future high-frequency variability should be a high-priority area of research.
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The last part looks like a plea for more money, and according to the web page of the lead author, Medvigy, high frequency climate variability is his pet interest:
Medvigy is particularly interested in high-frequency climate variability and its implications for terrestrial ecosystems. Strategies for adaptation to climate change hinge on the expected changes in the distribution functions of climate variables.
Scientist John Ray in my mailing list summed it up pretty well with this comment:
The first thing to note here is that we are NOT dealing with a global phenomenon. Changes in cloud cover were observed for only one third of the globe. We are looking at local effects. And what did changes in cloud cover affect? Hold on to your hat for the amazing news: RAIN!
Maybe Princeton and the University of Maryland people should get together and compare notes over lunch:
Linked: aerosol pollutants and rainfall patterns
Increases in air pollution and other particulate matter in the atmosphere can strongly affect cloud development in ways that reduce precipitation in dry regions or seasons, while increasing rain, snowfall and the intensity of severe storms in wet regions or seasons, says a new study by a University of Maryland-led team of researchers.
Rain = H2O
Carbon Dioxide = CO2
There is a correlation both have an O and a 2 in them.
And H4CO4 is wet carbon dioxide. It’s cooler than CO2.
It has a very short life as it absorbs radiation and is split into H20 and CO2.
Wow, I’m just so confused now. So there is an in-between for sunny and dry and cloudy and rainy?
I recall hearing that the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.
R Taylor says:
November 16, 2011 at 6:14 am
More carbon-dioxide results in a greater biosphere, the component of our planet that adapts to reinforce equilibrium. If you want weather to be more stable, feed the plants.
Heck yes R! Even one of AGW’s CO2 saints, Arrhenius, thought that. Here’s what he had to say on the subject:
Page 63, Worlds in the Making (1908)
Don’t agree with most of his hypothesizing for his leaning on Tyndall’s mistakes who misinterpreted Fourier and so it goes round and round. But I do agree with him on that one point, that is true. Better climate, warmer, wetter, more plants for more food. At least he liked fellow humans. Wish his followers would. They are striving to send us back to the times he was hoping mankind could escape from.
polistra says:
November 16, 2011 at 4:05 am
“…This is clearly caused by jet streams that get stuck. However, we’ve seen this before in the ’30s, and we came out of it.”
Jet stream stuck? Airliners are still regularly having a 100 .. 200 km/h tailwind when flying to Europe
bubbagyro says:
November 15, 2011 at 9:19 pm
Why don’t they teach physics, statistics and math to “climate scientists”?
Climate scientists are taught that climate is a linear response to forcing and feedbacks, allowing it to be modeled withing the limits of current technology.
If climate was non-linear, modelling would show no skill at predicting future climate. Funding climate modelling under those circumstances would be a huge waste of taxpayer money.
Thus, for funding to continue, climate must be linear. Climate Science understands the mathematics of funding much better than they understand the climate.
Billions of dollars have been siphoned out of every other science program in the name of Climate Change. Instead of developing new technologies, the money has been spent on forecasting the weather 100 years in the future, to the benefit of none.
Space exploration ushered in an age of miniaturization and automation, with much of our modern industry the result. Prosperity on a massive scale the result.
What has Climate Science to show for the billions it has received? Intermittent, unreliable power that no one can afford, that pollutes worse than the technology it replaces. Economic meltdown in the countries that have adopted the recommendations of Climate Science.
This is a revealing comment.
“We have not yet looked for direct ties between weather variability and increased carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, but I would not be surprised if they are connected in some way,” Medvigy said.
If you replace “increased carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere” with “angry Leprechauns” or “a vengeful God” the sentence makes the same sense.
Bonus question; what’s the difference between science and religion?
All the criticisms of this study are fully justified as it is apparently a blatant appeal for funding. The money should be denied on the basis of this work as it clearly indicates no understanding of global data, which is inadequate for temperature reconstructions and even worse for precipitation data, or climate mechanisms.
Stephen Brown asks about data. Here is an illustration of the inadequacies. The headline of an August 2006 Science journal article reads, “No one can predict the heavy summer rains that bring the Sahel back to life each year.” They explain why it can’t be done; “One obvious problem is a lack of data. Africa’s network of 1152 weather watch stations, which provide real-time data and supply international climate archives, is just one-eighth the minimum density recommended by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Furthermore, the stations that do exist often fail to report.” It is just as bad in most parts of the world including the 70 percent that are oceans, the deserts (19 % of the land surface), mountains, forest (boreal and tropical). The record is also distorted because as Atkinson showed precipitation is higher in urban areas – another influence of the urban heat island effect. Precipitation in all its forms are the most variable and difficult to accurately measure.
The increase in variability, especially in the mid-latitudes from 30° to 65° is created by the switch from predominantly zonal flow of the circumpolar vortex with fewer and low amplitude Rossby Waves to predominantly meridional flow with more and higher amplitude Waves. The cause is the transition from a warming world, which was the condition from the mid 1980s to the late 1990s, to the cooling world that began after 1998. Hubert Lamb studied the variation in cyclonic events that is a manifestation of such changes. More recently, the late Marcel Leroux examined the patterns in his 2005 book “Global Warming: Myth or Reality? The Erring Ways of Climatology.” As I said in the article for which I am being sued, the IPCC blocked and perverted climate science advance, for 30 years. If the authors of this article had done a literature search that precedes the IPCC they might have written a better article. Of course, it would not have received funding or even be able to include a plea for funding.
Just what data did these researchers use that allows them to come to such sweeping conclusions? The projects they cited cannot possibly have instrumentation capable of measuring enough locations world-wide to state with such certainty it’s sunnier, cloudier, rainier or dryer now then twenty or thirty years ago!
Rapid mode of circulation (Leroux) ? Is Arctic actually getting colder (decadal trend) ?
I would imagine that a snowball earth would have very little climate variation. GK
Perhaps this is ultimately where the Alarmists will take thier narrative – CO2 drives our weather. Despite the absurdity of this claim, it does make sense from a purely political point of view. Any variation off the “normal” weather (ie idea conditions of partly sunny, breezy, and 75 deg C) can be blamed on humans. Actually, it is quite ingenious.
“We usually think of climate change as an increase in mean global temperature”
Uhhmmm actually no, that would be “Global Warming”, climate change means just that: change, which can be up (MWP) or down (LIA) or way down (continental glaciation). and these are what passes for scientists these days.
BDH
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
November 16, 2011 at 2:15 am
….Well then, the heck with it!
My Tribute to Gavin Schmidt:
I’m a climatologist, and I’m okay,
I sleep all night, I blog all day.
I dress up weather as warming,
and scare the deniers away!
Now that I’ve finally purged that from my system, I’ll hit the “Flush” button and forget about it…
____________________________________________
You forgot the video of the guy in shorts… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xToPCaNxaow&feature=related
I figure if you had to stick that song in my head I owed you the visual.
……
Upon reading this press release, the first thing to come to mind is Stephen Wilde’s more “loopy Jets” I have noticed a change in weather patterns in North Carolina but it is very much associated with those “loopy Jets” that have altered the direction from which we get weather. Normally for the last decade it has come from the west moving east and slightly north. That has changed and we get weather from all directions now.
You can sort of see what I mean with this animation of the jet stream if you look today (wed) http://classic.wunderground.com/US/Region/US/2xpxJetStream.html
or
http://www.glenallenweather.com/links/jetfor.htm
The horrors of the day to day variability are bad enough, but what about the hour to hour variability? It could be 24 times worse! Think of the children.
I would like to congratulate the authors of this paper on discovering an example of simple probability, in which for three possible outcomes (weather becomes more variable, weather stays the same, or weather becomes less variable) there is an equal probability of each of the possible outcomes at any given location for a given time period. Doesn’t make for a very dramatic press release, though.
Jay Davis says:
November 16, 2011 at 7:55 am
Just what data did these researchers use that allows them to come to such sweeping conclusions?
Yes, especially given the “high frequency variability” lurking within them, that screws “everything” up so much that they don’t know $h**!
Reading through these posts about the ongoing deluge of PR science issuing from the climate community, which seem be approaching more than daily frequency, I’m reminded of the story of the man who bragged to his friends that his dog Jocko was the most perfectly trained dog in the world. When asked what proof he had for this assertion he replied, whenever I give him the command “Jocko, come here or not” he is always 100% obedient. Seems to me to be an almost perfect analogy for the current state of “consensus climate science”.
The first thing I would look at is the raw data. Specifically, what is the level of resolution of the satellite data. I suspect that, over the years, resolution improved, which would have the effect of making weather appear more variable.
In the end it’s just weather, which we all know goes through multi-year cycles. In all probability, that is what Medvigy has found evidence of.
A good read (my testament) about US weather extremes in the not-so-distant past and one that can usually be found at the library:
“
Braving the Elements: The Stormy History of American Weather”
by David Laskin
Laskin also provides good review of USA weather as the first settlers experienced it coming over from ‘the old continent’ … the harsh winters, the tornadoes, the floods and the droughts …
Amazon review found here:
http://www.amazon.com/Braving-Elements-History-American-Weather/dp/0385469551
.
It seems they have rediscovered the wheel. Colder climate results in greater fluctuation in temperature due to lags in heat transport. Then the real change to greater variability should be during the decline of the past eleven years.
I’m sure I read somewhere that you’re meant to put glue in the bag first before starting the deep breathing. Or is it something to do with getting grant money.
CAGW… measuring the wrong thing (air temp instead of heat content) poorly, (scattered readings, only twice a day usually averaged over a month, sometimes over just the land on a planet 2/3 covered by oceans), for too short a time period (30 years of maybe reliable data for a potential 60 year cycle), without adequate knowledge of the system inputs (what is that glowing ball in the sky?, clouds, clouds, we don’t need no stinking clouds), producing useless (too far into the future) or incorrect (MET?) predictions without demonstrating causality or correlation (causality without correlation?). And WE are the skeptics?
Daily variability is weather.
Weather is not climate.
Haha, even the warmists OWN arguments are now conflicting with their slush-fund research!
During el ninos there are less storms in Australia (albeit more on the west pacific); in fact it is downright calm. The relationship between warmth and storms is not linear, even in an el nino (warm) year or two.
Historically, more storms generally happen during colder periods, such as in the Little Ice Age. The reason for this could be the overall temperature differential, ie storms are stronger and more likely when two temperature differential air masses meet.
If the poles warm faster than the tropics during global warming, which seems to be happening (mostly due to the sun I suspect), then storm levels might be expected to decrease, as the overall T differential decreases. This seems to be occuring. So more heat doesn’t nercassarily correlate with more storms, what you need is more T differences between regions. (Non- linear relationships are hard for the left to understand, since it goes against the grain of ‘evenness’, as also does elliptical orbits rather than circular etc etc).
The Medieval Warm period was also known for its calm balmy weather, and probably because the T differential between the poles and tropics was less than in the Little Ice Age. The Pacific Ocean was named because of its overall pacifist (ie calm) nature, compared to the Atlantic, because it distributes heat further, as it covers more of the globe.
But of course, the extreme greens dont even think there was a Medievel Warm period, so no wonder they dont get it.