Source of title inspiration here
From NOAA Headquarters.
Colorado mountain hail may disappear in a warmer future
NOAA-led study shows less hail, more rain in region’s future, with possible increase in flood risk
Summertime hail could all but disappear from the eastern flank of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains by 2070, according to a new modeling study by scientists from NOAA and several other institutions.
Less hail damage could be good news for gardeners and farmers, said Kelly Mahoney, Ph.D., lead author of the study and a postdoctoral scientist at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. But a shift from hail to rain can also mean more runoff, which could raise the risk of flash floods, she said.
“In this region of elevated terrain, hail may lessen the risk of flooding because it takes a while to melt,” Mahoney said. “Decision makers may not want to count on that in the future.”
For the new study, published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, Mahoney and her colleagues used “downscaling” modeling techniques to try to understand how climate change might affect hail-producing weather patterns across Colorado.
The research focused on storms involving relatively small hailstones (up to pea-sized) on Colorado’s Front Range, a region that stretches from the foothill communities of Colorado Springs, Denver and Fort Collins up to the Continental Divide. Colorado’s most damaging hailstorms tend to occur further east and involve larger hailstones not examined in this study.
In the summer on the Front Range, precipitation commonly falls as hail above an elevation of 7,500 feet. Decision makers concerned about the safety of mountain dams and flood risk have been interested in how climate change may affect the amount and nature of precipitation in the region.
Mahoney and her colleagues began exploring that question with results from two existing climate models that assumed that levels of climate-warming greenhouse gases will continue to increase in the future (for instance, carbon dioxide, which is at about 390 parts per million today, increases in the model to 620 ppm by 2070).
But the weather processes that form hail – thunderstorm formation, for example – occur on much smaller scales than can be reproduced by global climate models. So the team “downscaled” the global model results twice: first to regional-scale models that can take regional topography and other details into account (this step was completed as part of the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program). Then, the regional results were further downscaled to weather-scale models that can simulate the details of individual storms and even the in-cloud processes that create hail.
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Finally, the team compared the hailstorms of the future (2041-2070) to those of the past (1971-2000) as captured by the same sets of downscaled models. Results were similar in experiments with both climate models.
“We found a near elimination of hail at the surface,” Mahoney said.
In the future, increasingly intense storms may actually produce more hail inside clouds, the team found. However, because those relatively small hailstones fall through a warmer atmosphere, they melt quickly, falling as rain at the surface or evaporating back into the atmosphere. In some regions, simulated hail fell through an additional 1,500 feet (~450 meters) of above-freezing air in the future, compared to the past.
The research team also found evidence that extreme precipitation events across all of Colorado may become more extreme in the future, while changes in hail patterns may depend on hailstone size — results that are being explored in more detail in ongoing work.
Mahoney’s postdoctoral research was supported by the PACE program (Postdocs Applying Climate Expertise) administered by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and funded by NOAA, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Western Water Assessment. PACE connects young climate scientists with real-world problems such as those faced by water resource managers.
“With climate change, we are examining potential changes in the magnitude and character of precipitation at high elevations,” said John England, Ph.D., flood hydrology specialist at the Bureau of Reclamation in Denver, Colo. “The Bureau of Reclamation will now take these scientific results and determine any implications for its facilities in the Front Range of Colorado.”
NOAA’s mission is to understand and predict changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun, and to conserve and manage our coastal and marine resources. Join us on Facebook, Twitter and our other social media channels.
Co-authors of the new paper, “Changes in hail and flood risk in high-resolution simulations over the Colorado Mountains,” include Michael Alexander (NOAA/Earth System Research Laboratory); Gregory Thompson (National Center for Atmospheric Research) and Joseph Barsugli and James Scott (NOAA/Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, CIRES).
Crystal ball gazing again, guys? Maybe they should try a Ouija Board.
The UK Met Office followed up their Barbecue Summer forecast of a few years ago with a statement that UK children will never see snow again. Being arse over tit once is excusable (if not allowable for earning bonuses), but twice running?
Like this study, it all depended on the output of other climate forecasts. Why can’t they just take Phil Jones’ word for it – global temperatures stopped rising in 1995, but CO2 levels have not. “A travesty”, as Kevin Trenberth puts it, but true.
After I moved to Colorado in July ’88, we had a foot of hail in August. They had to get the snowplows out of storage to clear the Interstate. Good grief, what have I done? Then, perhaps a decade later, we had over 6 feet of hail at an intersection on the road to work (strange wind conditions) also in summer. Completely buried cars and a truck. No one injured. And all of this at only 6,000 feet. With many assorted hail storms in-between. almost none predicted. So I conclude that we have very strange weather and predictions 60 years out aren’t even SWAGs. In short, no one knows. Predicting that far out is safe, they won’t be around to explain why it didn’t happen.
It’s a travesty that curve fitters are still using the science moniker.
All Hail Mahoney!
Obviously there is another line, but as it is a new year, goodwill etc!
“Finally, the team compared the hailstorms of the future (2041-2070)…”
Can I get a money-back guarantee if those future hailstorms don’t match the models?
My heirs will cheerfully collect from their heirs.
What’s the “fudge factor” count in that model, guys?
What are these people ingesting? It can’t be unadulterated tea or coffee. First they do not have a very good model for hail. It is what it is, useful as a predictor of potential. That is all. The remainder of this is a fairy tail.
That says it all, doesn’t it?
These “scientists” have gotten previous models monumentally wrong. Why in the hell should I believe them now? GIGO applies, here.
Apparently stupid is here to stay.
This all depends upon global warming which has stalled this century. No warming no effect.
Another dire warning that hail might not freeze over.
That’s GREAT! No hail = no tornados, right?
Any chance of eliminating hail in Texas? I replaced my roof in North Texas 3 years ago due to hail damage, and the roof to another house in South Texas this summer for the same reason. Sounds like a good thing to me.
Whats with all these post-doctoral kids writing all of these politically biased nonsense studies the last 5 years.
Tell the hundreds of people who had to replace their roofs in the foothills where I live that hail is no longer falling. What a joke.
“…the team compared the hailstorms of the future…”
Welcome, to the hailstorms of tomorrow!
Causality, guys. You know nothing about the “hailstorms of the future”. What you compared were the outputs of your models to the outputs of your models…
We need to cut our emissions NOW to save the hailstones.
Hopefully, children won’t know what NOAA funding was like instead.
Do we really need to worry about this?
Time for me to trot out the call for PhD Recall again. I willing to bet a lot of the “science” coming out about climate and environmemtal issues, is really the flush of doctoral theses overseen by supervisors that haven’t had an original thought for 20 years. Serious examination needs to be made of the current educational and degree granting processes at colleges. Doug s. has it: apparently stupid is here to stay, and I would add, it apparently has tenure.
TFNJ says January 9, 2012 at 8:39 am:
“The UK Met Office followed up their Barbecue Summer forecast of a few years ago with a statement that UK children will never see snow again. Being arse over tit once is excusable (if not allowable for earning bonuses), but twice running?”
===========
And all the various Council Storage Depots are full to the rafters with rock-salt and grit for the iced up roads during this very harsh UK winter which the Met Office forecast just a few months ago
Still, winter has not yet turned into spring – so there is still time –
How does flooding (assuming there’s a way of putting a number on its severity) correlate with the frequency of hail so far? Are low hail years high-flood years and vice versa?
Given my intimate knowledge of hail during TEXAS summers, I will find this under “modelling results not checked against facts and then published, looking stupid” for when I retire and become a professor.
@ Green Sand: I’ll finish it for you…
“All Hail Maloney”
Thanks for the baloney!
How does hail damage roofs? Does it cause cracks or open seams that then let in rain or vermin? would a metal roof withstand them?
Except when you get one cell dropping hail and then another cell comes after it dropping heavy rain. The left over hail will increase the run-off.
What’s the likelihood of this scenario vs. theirs? Not sure, but it seems you would get a larger total run-off when adding the water from two storm cells than you’d ever get from just one.
Kelly Mahoney :
http://www.google.com/imgres?q=Kelly+Mahoney+noaa&um=1&hl=en&client=firefox-a&sa=N&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=s&biw=1244&bih=594&tbm=isch&tbnid=1iVHQT4yYFXOAM:&imgrefurl=http://www4.ncsu.edu/~gary/forecastlab/alumni.html&docid=zczya9v9YZeEzM&imgurl=http://www4.ncsu.edu/~gary/forecastlab/images/kelly_wasis_cropped.jpg&w=496&h=477&ei=nR8LT8ijMIi02AXo0aiCAg&zoom=1&iact=hc&dur=30&sig=107079452240296593069&page=1&tbnh=131&tbnw=143&start=0&ndsp=21&ved=1t:429,r:4,s:0&tx=130&ty=97&vpx=678&vpy=135&hovh=220&hovw=229
Here’s Mahoney before she learned her B.S. in Meteorology…
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/newsletter/2009nov/index.html
Here’s the problem…. she uses UNIDATA Modeling software…. to ‘FACILITATE AMBITIOUS CAREER PATHS”….
Initially, many beginning undergraduate researchers possess vague ideas regarding the requisite level of rigor for scientific research, the scientific method itself, and the “tools of the trade” used in research. Despite this initial intimidation, it isn’t hard to recruit interested students, especially if the project involves winter storms, hurricanes, or severe weather. In my research group, once students progress to the data analysis stage of a project, Unidata visualization software and data sources are typically involved. When students realize that they can undertake meaningful analyses and create professional-quality graphics within a short period of time, they are encouraged, and their initial trepidation diminishes. In this sense, Unidata products and services “lower the entry barrier” for undergraduate research. Many of the undergraduate research ventures culminate in a presentation; these presentations invariably feature graphics generated using Unidata software. A large fraction of undergraduate researchers go on to attend graduate school; positive undergraduate research experiences can facilitate ambitious career paths.
Unidata software = PHD IN A CAN.
These “model children” with BS and PHD’s can’t seem to do real science anymore… they use modeling software. They haven’t advanced much beyond “PLAY DOH”.
No matter what BS they spew, Piled Higher and Deeper, the reality will always reveal itself in the fullness of time.
Dr. Mahoney, Present any goofy theory you like but please don’t burden me with any related foolish taxes and fees in the meantime. Perhaps you might be more successful with “Catalog Modeling” or “cat walk modeling”, that’s where you have your strong points… they are not in your science modeling.
They claim that the small hailstones will travel through an additional 1,500 feet of above freezing air, which will cause them to melt before they hit the ground. At terminal velocity, hailstones should travel though that additional distance in about 5 seconds. I’m not Climate Scientist(TM), but I can’t believe you’re going to get that kind of melting in that short length of time.
Flash floods? The water content of a hail storm is usually negligible. Converting that quantity to rain will hardly result in a major flood.
Jeez, they are never happy. Less hail, more runoff.
I loved living in Iowa. The farmers always had a complaint.
Too cold, too hot, too wet, too dry, too sunny, too cloudy, not enough snow cover, too little snow cover, too short a growing season, too long a growing season, humidity too high, humidity too low, too windy, not enough wind (wind affects cross-pollination; too much makes it hard to hand cross-pollinate the seed crops, too little wind and the corn crop does not pollinate well = fewer kernels formed).
AND there was always some sort of government remuneration for having complaints.
The kicker is that, despite the always horrible conditions, they keep having bumper crop after bumper crop!
I grew up in Colorado. Some of the worst floods i can remember were after hailstorms.
I can think of no benefits to hail dropping for the sky in preference to rain (melted hail). Ask any farmer or insurance adjuster. Even if these NOAA “scientists” are correct in their prediction, Less hail and more rain in Colorado can only be considered a good thing, on balance.
IN 2005, Phil Jones of CRU did not seem to be convinced that the evidence was in yet:
.This is partly why I’ve sent you the rest of this email. IPCC, me and whoever will get accused of being political, whatever we do. As you know, I’m not political. If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn’t being political, it is being selfish.
Source: http://www.di2.nu/foia/1120593115.txt (hat tip: http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/)
Remarkably selfish for those who foresaw apocalypse , and many of them leaned on the support of CRU and the IPCC. So while Jones himself may not have been leaping up and down with alarm over imminent catastrophe, others such as Al Gore were so doing, and so doing without getting a ticking-off from any of a motley crew of scientists pursuing ‘the cause’ they held so dear. Amongst the lucative spin-offs were no end of scientific studies along the lines of ‘what if we take the model projections seriously, what would happen to X?’ Now X might be polar bears, or tne sands of the Sahara, or snow in England, or glaciers, or ice caps, or sea levels, and so on and on and on without end. Now we have a ‘threat’ to hail in Colorado. Add it to the list.
I wonder how easy it is to get research grants for work that begins ‘what if the GCM projections are not worth the paper they could be printed on, X is largely beyond our control, but we can’t resist some speculations about it?’ Now some such research might even be worthwhile. but I fear the decoupling from the ‘The Computer Has Spoken, Beware of the Doom’ line might make for a tougher time in raising funds.
How severe did it get? Well, on May 24th, 1626, a hailstorm struck central Germany and dropped one meter of hail.
— Sally Baliunas
http://youtu.be/wcAy4sOcS5M
Can I include this on the list of things I hope to never see in my lifetime?
If I lived in Colorado, I would plan for a large number of extreme hail “events” over the next couple of years. The Gore affect wins every time.
So the Stratosphere is going to be above 0C in 2070? There will be no Convective action?
Every time someone make a statement like that usually the opposite happens….
I speak as one that has been spit out of the top, and bottom of thunderstorms-
one particular rocky mtn. storm comes to mind…..
Roger Knights says:
A metal roof will withstand hail, but may be severely dented depending upon the size of the hail. Tile can crack. Most rooves out here are made from asphalt shingles, however, which take a beating from severe hail storms. Simply put, yes, hail can cause cracks and open seams which will then proceed to leak in places that you cannot get to (a corollary to Murphy’s Law). Most of the denizens of my neighborhood have already replaced their rooves due to a few recent (heavy) hail storms, and most of the homes are under 10 years of age.
If I’m not mistaken, Colorado has not really warmed anyway, correct?
Mark
Spent 20 years on the Front Range, until ’91, was a storm spotter for the NWS and kept precip. records for the same.
Retired Engineer says: January 9, 2012 at 8:47 am
After I moved to Colorado in July ’88, we had a foot of hail in August. They had to get the snowplows out of storage to clear the Interstate. Good grief, what have I done? Then, perhaps a decade later, we had over 6 feet of hail at an intersection on the road to work (strange wind conditions) also in summer. Completely buried cars and a truck. No one injured. And all of this at only 6,000 feet. With many assorted hail storms in-between. almost none predicted. So I conclude that we have very strange weather
Bingo! Colorado has the most unpredictable weather in the nation. Severe weather for Kansas and east starts in the foothills and plains. Weather forecasters come here to train because of our weather*. Fort Collins has had softball-sized hail, right through house roofs, killed an infant IIRC.
* Colorado native’s weather attitude: if you don’t like it, wait ten minutes.
How I wish the politicians would cut off all funding for the bankrupt pseudoscience of Climatography.
it is to be hoped that children will grow up not knowing what climatographers do for a living.
What is the first clue your model may be crap?
… So the team “downscaled” the global model results twice: first to regional-scale models that can take regional topography and other details into account (this step was completed as part of the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program). Then, the regional results were further downscaled to weather-scale models that can simulate the details of individual storms and even the in-cloud processes that create hail.
Don’t meteorologists already use such “weather-scale” models for their forecasts?
Mahoney and her colleagues began exploring that question with results from two existing climate models that assumed that levels of climate-warming greenhouse gases will continue to increase in the future (for instance, carbon dioxide, which is at about 390 parts per million today, increases in the model to 620 ppm by 2070).
By the Mauna Loa Observatory data, 390 ppm was the 2010 annual average reading. So the rate of increase in the model is 230ppm in 60 years, an average annual rate of increase of 3.8 ppm/yr.
Averages of annual rate of increases over certain recent periods:
1981-2010 1.71
1991-2010 1.79
2001-2010 2.04
1981-1990 1.55
1991-2000 1.54
While the rate of CO2 increases does appear to be increasing, their model has an average rate of increase that’s more than double the rate of any recent period except 2001-2010, with that one being very nearly double.
Wow, to get this apparently exponential increasing in the rate of change to get that average rate, it’s like their models have built-in assumptions of the complete death of carbon trading/rationing, the annihilation of nuclear power, and the collapse of all renewables including biofuels, leaving mankind nothing for energy but dirty old fossil fuels. Well, isn’t it wonderful to know they think that highly of their fellow humans and their abilities to solve problems like generating “low carbon” energy.
What other interesting assumptions are tucked away into their models? For example, what do they expect the precipitation-causing particulate levels to be from all that burning of assorted dirty fossil fuels that will lead to that meteoric rise in CO2 increase rates?
Does that mean all their Anti warming measures are going to fail then. They haven’t got much faith in the IPCC either!
Hail falls in the summer. Flooding in Colorado occurs during spring runoff. I hardly think that summer precipitation falling as rain instead of hail is going to pose a flooding problem.
Merely more modern day phlogiston. History will ultimately show that CAGW/global climate change was the alchemy of our times. How I hope to live to see that day fulfilled.
Children not knowing in the future what hail is are far more likely to not know what honest science is right now.
Dennis Nikols P. Geo says: ‘ … The remainder of this is a fairy tail.’
I knew fairies had wings, but ?
Gee, maybe I should make a model that shows that up is down and we will all fall off into space if we don’t do whatever the socialists want. (That would probably rake in the grant money wouldn’t it. /sarc) These people are starting to get on my last nerve.
What a steaming pile of unadulterated crap.
Sorry for being so articulate, but I AM Australian…
Good one DJ
Here’s what they truely learned; DO NOT PUT PREDICTIONS IN PRESS RELEASES THAT CAN BE PROVED WRONG WHILE YOU ARE STILL GAINFULLY EMPLOYED AS A PROGNOSTICATOR.
By 2070, every person currently in the work force will be retired. I will have been dead for at least a few decades. If they had projected this for 2025 or even 2035, they could potentially subject themselves to humiliation, in the style of Mike Mann, James Hansen, Phil Jones, IPCC, etc.
TimiBoy said on January 9, 2012 at 11:24 am:
Which means what, you can bend like a large lorry?
C’mon, mate. While we tend to be polite, going by some of the words I’ve seen around here you sound more like a blooming English toff!
😉
Nothing like fudging the model to fit the desired outcome.
For that Ft. Collins, hailstorm, July 1979: (from wiki) A violent forty-minute hailstorm bombed Fort Collins, CO, with hail up to grapefruit size. Two thousand homes and 2500 automobiles were severely damaged, and about 25 persons were injured, mainly when hit on the head by the huge stones. A three month old baby died of a fractured skull, struck by a large hailstone while being carried by his mother, who was running with him to seek cover. (The Weather Channel)
I remember a hailstorm in 1985 that covered most of Denver and Boulder – slightly larger than golf-ball size.
This research makes no sense.
In southern Europe where summer hail regularly devastates the grape crops, the higher the temperatures the worse the hailstorms, so how is a bit of global warming going to abolish hail?
I have seen hail a foot deep in Provence after a blistering August day.
Hmmm … so they took a global climate model. They “downscaled” the results of that global climate model and used them as inputs for a regional climate model. Then they downscaled those regional climate results and fed them to a weather model.
What’s next? Feed the results of the weather model back into the global climate model?
Near as I can tell, their whole trajectory doesn’t intersect with reality anywhere, which is a neat trick indeed.
w.
you know as soon as I see the term ‘computer modeling’ thesedays I ‘turn off’. It is as if these guys are playing pac-man on their computer screens or something similar. “let me see, if I do X with YY and remove NN we will end up with DTYI…. Ahhhhhhhh less hail and rabbits with shorter ears.”
Do they use imaginary numbers to count imaginary hailstorms? Maybe they should use future numbers that haven’t been invented/discovered yet. There must be a mathematical model for creating/finding them. /sarc
The kool-aid mantra has to be pre-programmed in the modeling software somehow.
It shows up in the bias. Is it in the bios too ?
Having lived in Oklahoma & seeing several very nice cars demolished by softball-sized hail, I would gladly like to be one of the masses who no longer knows what hail is.
However, the chances of that ever happening are like a hailstone’s chances in Hell.
What the hail do I care?
Next is using an ecological model to see how many species are going to die in the in the following 50 years.
Oh, wait… That has been done already.
“…the team compared the hailstorms of the future…”
Another product of the electronic Ouidja Board employed at AGW Central. Recently augmented by increasing funding this quasi-religious machine continues ex-cathedra.
What they compared was the outputs of their old Ouidja Board to the outputs of their New Ouidja Board.
As a wheat farmer’s daughter, less hail seems like an altogether good thing. Many times, I have breathed a prayer, “Please God, don’t let it hail…”
Is that the NOAA’s FLAT Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.
Using this approach you could equally suggest that AGW will mean more rains of fish , but to give them cerdit 2070 is a nice long way away , and who by will remember this ‘claim’ ?
Yawn. Another over simplified model of a complex system making predictions too far into the future which will never be verified or disproved. I mean, who is going to be reading that paper/thesis in 2070? Even the author will likely have passed away from old age by then!
You mean I won’t get a new roof every ten years?
… and any hail that falls will be rotten hail!
I don’t like it when WUWT just posts AGW religion propaganda without any debunking or ridicule in the article but instead passes that work down to the comments.
Ditto “goofy.”
What’s the prognosis for sleet?
I would have thought that by using augmented-reality to draw any kind of scientific conclusion or to even use it and suggest that it was a proof of concept of what reality for the next 70 years is going to be, is unequivocally Null and void within the scientific arena.
“Open the pod bay doors, Hal.”
Interesting. Every time I have ever seen hail in Nevada it was always on very hot days. I have yet to see it hail in the winter. I always just assumed that hot days caused intense convection into the stratosphere. Or are they saying the stratosphere is going to be well over freezing because of global warming?
Good news for lowering my Colorado homeowners insurance and auto insurance rates? I lost a car in the 70’s to a hail storm. However under the broken window fallacy just imagine the economic loss. I paid for a year of college at Colorado State by painting houses damaged by one of the hail storms. I made some side money helping re-roof houses damaged by hail.
for the man who asked “how does hail damage a roof?” You must have never seen a car that has been through a bad hailstorm. There was a notorious storm in Fort Worth a few years back that left almost every car in town looking like it had been worked over with a ballpeen hammer.
Shingled roofs don’t stand up to a beating like that.
First of all I don’t believe this for a second.
But what pretzel logic, to infer that less damaging hail would be a bad thing.
The premise must be : “if man caused it, it must be bad”
I’m ROFL.
Hail damages things, people would be happy to be rid of it.
Why in Alberta, insurance companies pay for seeding the atmosphere to reduce hail formation.
How much did this useless exercise in Wank-o-Matic science cost us?
O, the triviality!
Willis Eschenbach
January 9, 2012 at 12:03 pm
Hmmm … so they took a global climate model. They “downscaled” the results of that global climate model and used them as inputs for a regional climate model. Then they downscaled those regional climate results and fed them to a weather model.
###
They did WHAT! Oh my, better not give these kids sharp scissors.
I’m sure glad I just skimmed the story earlier.
Think dollars. It used to be called ‘grantsmanship’. Now you just sit in an air-conditioned office, tell them you want to study the effect of ‘climate change’ on X, the money rolls in, and you get an easy ‘publication’ out of it. Contribution to science: zilch. Contribution to career: invaluable.
/Mr Lynn
“In this region of elevated terrain, hail may lessen the risk of flooding because it takes a while to melt,” Mahoney said. “Decision makers may not want to count on that in the future.”
The hail here usually melts in hours – often minutes. And having lived in Colorado for 25 years, I’ve never seen a hail storm bring as much moisture as some of the longer, harder, rainstorms that we have had. So I consider this concern to be completely unfounded.
An “experiment” using models again? *groan* So does more hail mean less flooding? Is hail damage preferable to flood damage?
Hrmmm, no more hail? That would be nice! I live at 7000 feet in Arizona, and I get a LOT of hail. I don’t mind the small stuff, but anything bigger than a nickle does damage, and I get a lot of the big stuff (egg size and larger). I’ve seen hail smash all sorts of roofs, punch out car windows, etc, etc.
Yeah, I’m sooo scared by the claim that it might be a thing of the past. What’s the next scare story? Global warming might put me at higher risk of winning the lottery?
pat says:
January 9, 2012 at 9:57 am
“Flash floods? The water content of a hail storm is usually negligible. Converting that quantity to rain will hardly result in a major flood.”
Speaking from 18.5 years in Colorado and 9.5 in Wyoming, hail is always accompanied by localized flooding. It falls in concert with a deluge of rain. The hail plugs up the storm drains and the water rises. In 1982 I had our roof replaced when golf ball sized hail beat it to a pulp. In that event the hail built up on the uphill side of a house in Wheat Ridge and pushed it off its foundation. Every car in a shopping center in Edgewater had the front and rear windows beaten out. A friend found himself floating in his car in an intersection in Aurora.
Hail storms are created by violent convection currents. They always occur in warm weather, so warming would aggravate the situation, if anything. They never occur in cold weather.
These Boulder “scientists” have been smoking some of the potted plants growing in the office.
This story is just a bunch of Mahoney.
DesertYote says: January 9, 2012 at 5:10 pm
They did WHAT! Oh my, better not give these kids sharp scissors.
—–
This is what happens when you remove all potentially dangerous items and situations from a child’s life. S/He never learns the lesson that life is so dangerous and unpredictable that ALL risks must be removed or minimized, no matter what the costs. This how their parents, teachers, coaches, and all other adults have modeled life to them. How can we then expect them to act differently?
This is why I let my kids use pointed scissors, sharp knives and many (but not all) of my power tools. They are still alive and well with no significant scars, but have confidence and skills that other kids lack.
My rankling goes WAY UP when they start indoctrinating and scaring children. That’s over the top. Bye-bye, scammers.
Please change my above comment to read:
DesertYote says: January 9, 2012 at 5:10 pm
They did WHAT! Oh my, better not give these kids sharp scissors.
—–
This is what happens when you remove all potentially dangerous items and situations from a child’s life. S/He
neverlearns the lesson that life is so dangerous and unpredictable that ALL risks must be removed or minimized, no matter what the costs. This how their parents, teachers, coaches, and all other adults have modeled life to them. How can we then expect them to act differently?This is why I let my kids use pointed scissors, sharp knives and many (but not all) of my power tools. They are still alive and well with no significant scars, but have confidence and skills that other kids lack.
wermet: this is obviously why your kids and you are mentally damaged. You just don’t beieive!
It occurs to me that these researchers do not understand how hail forms.
Although this is projected for the year 2070, we can check up on this prediction by monitoring the amount of hail in the summers to come, as well as the rate of CO2 increase, where they have it at about 4ppm per year.
One prediction I am following here where I live locally is that the Coquitlam Glacier will be all gone by the year 2100, as expressed here:
http://www.straight.com/article-175290/metro-vancouver%3F%3Fs-last-glacier-drip-drip-massive-sheet-ice-disappears
Assuming a linear rate of decrease, by the end of next year there should be a reduction of the glacier by almost 5% from 2008. There never seems to be any follow up by the media with climate predictions.
By the way, the Canadian government is declaring war against radical environmental groups in Canada:
“…the Harper government clearly aims to do what Barack Obama cannot or will not do in America, namely stand up to the growth-killing professional green movement.”
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/01/09/terence-corcoran-a-war-on-green-radicals/
And in Spain where peaches are grown, Calanda, Aragon, the trees have a netting cover to protect the trees/crop from——-summer hail storms. Hail drifting often occurs to provide a winter scene if only for a few minutes before melting.
My gosh it’s apparently Global warming here in Australia because we just had summer hailstorms in Victoria and now its flooding in outback areas of Western Australia, and in other areas of that state they have Bushfires raging. But its all happened before, hot one place, cold one place, wet another, used to be called variable weather, but then there is no money in that simple deduction. The village idiot rules – nothing really changes in the warmist world.
This story is so sad. 🙁
However, we have been assured by R. Gates that we should get more snow (in winter?) in a warmer climate, and we are now being told that the models predict less hail in warmer summers in a part of Colorado. Dr. Viner, formerly of CRU, had told us back in 2000 that winter snowfall would, within a few years, become:
I don’t know what Colorado temps were like in the ‘hottest’ decade on the record (~2000 to 2010) but we had these weather events.
and finally….
Hailstorms were just a thing of the past.
NOAA should stick to coastal weather forecasts and severe storm warnings. Garbage like this “study” makes it a laughing stock.
To Ms. Mahoney and her fellow researchers:
I’ll just leave this here… http://tinyurl.com/6shqps2
To KBray and a few other commenters: http://xkcd.com/481/
Yes it is. Better known as FLATUS.
I always wanted to move to Colorado. But now I have been turned off to the prospect. I can’t afford to deal with all the hail damage that follows the Gore Effect and related bias science publishing mill.
I offer herewith the Compleat Meta-Met Model. It consists of two lines of code:
Do the opposite of whatever the Met recommends.
Repeat.
cjcc says:
January 10, 2012 at 7:44 am
You must be “TEH BOYFRIEND”…
defending his fair maiden.
During my recent not-quite 3-year stay in Boulder, I lived in fear of being caught out in the open on my bicycle when one of the frequent, fierce, hail-producing storms swept out of the Rockies on summer afternoons. Fortunately, during that period, it seemed the most severe storms tracked a little further to the East, like this one:
http://www.skyviewweather.com/2011/06/13/severe-storms-result-in-hail-across-portions-of-ne-colorado/
and my photo of the hail-producing, cumulonimbus cloud taken from Boulder, looking eastward:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/splinx/5832850997/#/photos/splinx/5832850997/lightbox/
@KBray: ‘Fraid not, my friend. Just someone who finds vitriol such as yours unnecessary and unproductive. And Ms. Mahoney needs no such defending, I’m sure.
cjcc says:
January 10, 2012 at 2:33 pm
You seem like a reasonable fellow, but it seems that young folks such as Mahoney have been misled by a climate warming “agenda”, that lead to “cap and trade” schemes on carbon as has now been instituted in California. It is a foolish money grab.
Questionable studies such as Dr. Mahoney’s only reinforce the “agenda” and lead to greater acceptance of the impending “calamity”.
The expense of funding of this foolishness is my issue as it is not reasonable, affordable, or practical and bankrupts private enterprise.
I question how these good kids got “programmed”.
I think the direction of this science is shameful.
I believe the kids, like Mahoney, have been duped.
Good kids, bad training.
They acquire institutional blindness.
I’m sure Dr. Mahoney is a nice person.
It’s her study that’s goofy.
And not one of us is immune from being shown to be a moron in the fullness of time…
Dang it! Just replaced my roof (Denver area resident) two summers ago. I’ve been contemplating putting a steel sheath on the roof. As these clowns are always wrong with their predictions, it looks like I would be wise to do so. Meh.
There is another cycle going on here. It is the cycle of biased science grad students that need to graduated and out the door before the full gravity of climate cooling becomes obvious and not containable. Thus the sausage factory is in high gear even when the evidence is turning. This is also the case with the ticking clock for securing climate change billions in commitments from developed to developing countries in the IPCC party time schedule.