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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  IMAGE: 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….
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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.”
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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).
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.
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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…