reader “agimarc” writes: As with the Lower 48 states, spring is late and cold here in central Alaska. Fairbanks reported a record low of 2 degrees F above zero Sunday, breaking the previous record of 8 from 1924.
Here in Anchorage, looks like we are around 3 – 4 weeks late with ice of local lakes and snow off the ground. Winter was not particularly hard, but it all changed with a very cold April. And at this point it does not appear things will be warming up soon. So much for manmade global warming due to carbon dioxide emissions.![usak_yestlows_i5_points[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/usak_yestlows_i5_points1.png?quality=75)
Story here: http://www.adn.com/2013/04/29/2883299/interior-alaska-sees-record-breaking.html
Yes, have a look at the image at right.
Here is a complete list of record lows for Alaska in the past 7 days, 996 new record lows were set (click low temp and details tab):
http://wx.hamweather.com/maps/climate/records/7day/usak.html?cat=maxtemp,mintemp,snow,lowmax,highmin,
And the cold is now creeping into the USA, look at the difference between Denver and Kansas City:
Expect a whole new crop of record lows for the USA, and some serious issues to develop with agriculture in the nation’s breadbasket as a result.
This in contrast to last year at this time of 49% of the corn crop planted and the five year average of 31%
The Weather Channel picked the wrong year to name winter storms, the snow and cold may be their Achilles Heel (h/t to Steve Goddard):
Winter Storm Achilles: Snow and Cold Kick Off May | Weather Underground
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Mr Green Genes says:
May 1, 2013 at 12:46 pm
Oh, and mpainter, don’t forget, -40C = -40F (= 233.15K).
We hosted an exchange student from Chile one winter several years ago. As the temperature dived during one of our typical Wisconsin cold spells, I would tell him the temp in Fahrenheit and he’d ask for the conversion to Centigrade to get his bearings.
We routinely have a few days that hit 20 below zero (Fahrenheit) each winter, and overnight might hit 30 below. I recall one day telling him that the early morning temperature as he was preparing for school was -40 degrees, and when he asked whether that was F or C, I told him “both.” Fortunately, that doesn’t happen here every winter.
Another story: I used to walk past a bank clock that would print out the temp in degrees C, and then the time, and then the temp in degrees F, seconds later. I got pretty good at doing the C to F calculation before the clock told me the answer. I’d just double the degrees C, slide the decimal point to the left one column and subtract that, then add 32. So, for example, 20 degrees C was: 40-4.0=36+32=68, and 34.4C was 68.8-6.9=61.9+32=93.9F. Going the other way was tougher though.
Fahrenheit is a human scale, i.e. 100° was seen as the hottest day and 0 was approximately the coldest. Celsius is a scientific scale, based on the properties of water. It is also digital, which means that it is based upon the number of fingers on the typical human hand.
The choice between the two is purely arbitrary and political. Americans, as in many things, have chosen the more human scale. In America we have experienced 0° days and 100° days, and thus know that Daniel Fahrenheit got it right. One June, in Delhi, I saw that it was almost reaching 50° every day, which the locals called a heat wave. I’d rather say that it was about 20° hotter than a human being could stand than that it was half way to boiling distilled water.
Rather more useful to humans, eh? And FWIW, IMHO Rankine would be better for scientists than Celsius, since it is more precise and a bit less arbitrary. What’s so great about water anyway? Or rather, distilled water at standard temperature and pressure. Bit of a mouthful, eh?
DirkH says: @ur momisugly May 1, 2013 at 5:25 pm
…As somebody stated, H2O and CO2 are the only two gases that emit IR from the atmosphere to space, so that says that an Earth without CO2 and H2O in the atmosphere would be incapable of radiatively cooling its atmosphere. Is CO2 therefore responsible for a 33 deg C warming of the planet? That sounds to me more and more like a fairytale because the people who spread this fairytale never computed the alternate system, in which the atmosphere could only cool by giving heat to the surface which could then radiate IR to space. Such a planet would have an atmosphere hotter than the surface.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
What is left out is the time interval during which greenhouse gases act.
If you look at a comparison of the humid Brazilian rain forest and the dry N. African Desert it is obvious the effect of the addition of water vapor (GHG) is not to raise the temperature but to significantly lower the diurnal range of the temperature. The monthly high is 10C lower and the monthly low is ~ 10C higher in Barcelos, Brazil than in Adrar, Algeria in May. Water (and CO2) act as a ‘coolant’ in the day time by absorbing and redirecting incoming sunlight and as an ‘insulator’ in the night time by absorbing and redirecting outgoing earthshine.
See my comments for the analysis of the Barcelos, Brazil and Adrar, Algeria temperatures:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/21/some-thoughts-on-radiative-transfer-and-ghgs/#comment-1040071
and
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/21/some-thoughts-on-radiative-transfer-and-ghgs/#comment-1041066
Hat tip to Sleepalot @ur momisugly July 21, 2012 at 4:53 am who first pointed out the actual effects of the GHG water vapor on the temperature by comparing high vs low humidity in those towns.
wws says: @ur momisugly May 1, 2013 at 9:19 pm
…. And we’re gonna have all that oil and gas that those yankees up north are gonna have to keep paying us for. heh.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
ERRRrrrr, My farm is sitting on top of the Triassic Basin shale gas formation in North Carolina so this Yank is not really worried.
No reply from WWS… yep, you can always tell a Texan, but you can never tell him much. They have ears but they don’t listen.
Ever heard of Ron Paul corn? Doesn’t make much corn but it sure has big ears.
Just like Ross Perot corn… makes niblets but sure has big ears.
Then there’s Bush’s best corn. A highly invasive species that occupies other countries and collapses the world markets, corny I know, but it has to be said.
And as I look out the window here in NW Europe, there is still not a single leaf on the trees.
Come on, chaps, this is May. How can they still be talking about global warming with a straight face?
.
Primal Outdoors says: May 1, 2013 at 1:17 pm
When I left Valdez two days ago, there was still up to eight feet of snow in town in shady spots.
___________________________________
There was too on a BBC report from northern UK a couple of days ago – a great pile left by the snowploughs in a hospital car-park.
But the really comical thing was that the BBC cameraman was doing everything possible to keep it out of shot. It was only the newspaper still that showed it. Typical Biased Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) – only the best propaganda is good enough for them.
.
I wish some of that cool air would drift this way. Going to be in the upper 90s with crazy winds today in Southern California.
Kevin Kilty says: @ur momisugly May 1, 2013 at 11:30 am
Many years ago I did a spectral analysis of annual temperature for the USGS, and using pre 1965 data (1950 to 1965 if I recall right) I found a large second harmonic of the annual signal, the phase of which might move quite a lot from year to year. A retarded phase, which we certainly saw this year in the moderate February/March period, often leads to a cold April/May. …
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
John, the Inconveinent Skeptic may have the physics behind that figured out.
15″ of snow in SE Minnesota yesterday and today. Fishing opener is next weekend and ice just went out in Mpls area’s big lakes – a month later than last year. Many northern MN lakes are likely to remain ice covered for the fishing opener. Cartoon yesterday: “Fishing Opener Sale – Ice Augers $29”
David Jones
I’m not “politically correct”… LOL…
We use the metrics that best fit our situation. Meters are an ungraspable measure, as are cm, to those used to feet and inches. 3 feet of snow is like 1 meter, however 1 foot of snow is like 30cm, an essentially useless number.
I still think in both F and C, so for temperature I’m somewhat bilingual. The speedo in my car reads in km/h, but all the rest is in US, since to me MPG makes more sense than l/100km (higher number = better mileage).
Even some branches of government backed off on that total immersion idea, for example building plans for permits are accepted using feet and inches.
CodeTech says:
May 3, 2013 at 3:25 am
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Metric in Canada – the mind is a funny thing as it can be conditioned to certain ways of thinking. I grew up in feet and inches and all through school I never really thought about the fact that most of our science was done in metric units or even mixed units and it was the same in University. When the government changed everything to metric they came out with standards for engineering drawings and even the spelling of METRE for a unit of distance and METER for a measurement device. As a result, I think in millimetres, metres and kilometres (and everyone still talks feet inches and miles as the whole of the prairies west of some point in Manitoba were surveyed in 1 mile by 2 mile blocks so there is always a road allowance every mile east west and every 2 miles north south).
But what is interesting, whenever I hear someone use centimetres, I convert to millimetres first because for 40 years I worked only in centimetres and metres so my “mind” knows that four feet is roughly 1600 mm, a foot is 300 mm, six inches is 150 mm and so on. Not exactly, but as an example the culverts I have crossing the creek on my farm are 900 mm culverts (approx. 3 feet). So it all depends how your brain has been trained. If someone told me they had a 90 cm culvert, my brain would have to change it to 900 mm to visualize it and while odd, that is how it is.
Course, in Alberta we have a funny thing of doing distance. If someone says how far is it to the next town, you might get “10 minutes” rather than 10 miles or 16 kilometres as people on the prairies tend to think of distance in terms of travel time. The brain is a wonderful thing.
Correction – for 40 years I worked only in millimetres and metres …
Ah, I see that the metric chauvinists have started to complain about their lack of flexibility again…
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/degrees-of-degrees/
Goes into it to some depth. (Though I note that the graph comparing the different scales as been removed from wiki-media… guess I’ll have to go hit the wayback machine…)
Why have zero below 0 C? Because the salt mix used gives a CONSTANT zero. Plain water freezes at many different temperatures, depending on all sorts of things… so you can’t get a constant calibration point with it.
Why not 100 degrees between points? Because the scale was originally set up so that you could just use dividers to make the marks on the glass. Divide by two kind of thing… So you are not dependent on some OTHER scale precision to get your marks precise… ( a 12.5 or 6.25 degree line division on a thermometer isn’t all that useful…)
Besides, the original Celsius ran backwards, so had to be flipped around. And it’s been recalibrated a time or two…
Which triple point ends up at 0.01 C BTW as it the scale is a bit ‘off’ from what it ‘should be’…
As of now, the Celsius degree is just a special form of Kelvin. (Yes, I capitalize it. Get over it… I choose to honor the man.) So it’s changed direction, changed calibration, and is now defined in terms of a different scale.
I think I’ll stick with F thanks… folks don’t screw around with it as much and the prissy “rules” on how to capitalize or use it are much looser (read: human comfortable).
And just FYI, the English Foot is also rather stable. And NOT based on the size of anyone’s foot.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/06/06/chasing-the-greek-foot/
Why use things with 360 units, 60 units, 12 units, 180 divisions (F between 212 and 32…)?
They are easy to divide and factor rich. Fractional math is a whole lot easier than decimal math and you can keep infinite precision. (Until and unless you choose to reduce the fraction to a decimal value). So what’s 1/3 in decimals? An infinite series… 1/3 of a foot is 4 inches. 1/3 of yard is one foot. Exact. One third of a meter is?… 33.333333333333333 just keep going… cm.
The “old measures” had many such “conveniences” built into them. As I do a lot of “mental arithmetic” I find the “old conveniences” very convenient… Even the old values for Pi as a fraction have that convenience. You can choose your precision by what fraction to use, and then it’s all just fraction math to simplify fractions. At the end, you can leave it a fraction or do one long division as you like it. 22/7 for most things is fine. 333/106 is more precise. Then any of 335/113 or 52163/16604 or even more if more precision is desired.
So a circle of 1 foot radius has a 44/7 circumference. Want more precision? Then it is a 666/106 circumference. or a 104326/16604 circumference. No calculator needed.
Make your circle 33 cm radius and use 3.14159. Your circumference is?… I’ll wait while you get the calculator…
One of the ‘complaints’ about the foot (and the cubit) was that there were several variations in length. Chase that back a ways, you find an ancient use. Navigation was done via the stars and degrees. At different latitudes, those give different distances (or vs longitude). The makers of the Meter ran into some of the same issues (and the meter is wrong as a result) when attempting to make it a standard based on the earth from pole to equator. What the ancients did was to build in some calculations into different ‘rulers’. So some “cubits” are square root of 2 of some others. Useful when making 45 degree slopes on pyramids or roofs. Other units have a Pi relationship built in (for making henges and such round things).
Basically, folks complaining about that feature just didn’t (and don’t) understand how the tools were used. (We still do that kind of thing today with a ‘casting ruler’ that is used in making molds such that the finished product comes out the standard size. Avoids a lot of shrinkage calculations… someone finding one of them in 1000 years could ‘complain’ that we didn’t have a standard sized ruler…)
So yes, I’m sticking with the Foot, that has at least a 5000 year history of stability, and perhaps longer.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/01/30/unifying-the-cubits-the-yard-and-the-rod/
With the night sky, two sticks, and a bit of string with a rock on the end I can recreate the Pole/Perch/Rod and from that a variety of feet and cubit measures with very high repeatability and precision limited only by my skill. I don’t need to ask someone to make a krypton laser and send me a copy of the specific count of waves, nor even run off to France and measure against a platinum rod. For all practical purposes, I can make a ‘good enough’ and STANDARD unit even under primitive conditions and even if isolated on an island somewhere.
IMHO, much more “scientific” than a (botched) surface measurement from pole to equator that was then divided down and eventually turned into a metal bar (of not quite the right size) that has since been standardized to an unrelated number of waves of laser light…
Think old Babylonian stuff isn’t important? Well, S.I. uses it…
Though they got the sizes 2 times too large… and the meter is off fractionally.
But for folks who are unable to handle more than one thing, I do use metric when needed; but it really would be beneficial if you were to learn that there is more to the world than Just On Mandated Standard. And very often those older systems were much more convenient to create and to use. We, globally, rejected the “Decimalized Clock” that was proposed at the same time for the simple reason that it is hard to make fractions on one and the units were too big. 8 hours is 1/3 of a day. Working 8 hours is more direct than saying 3.33333 repeating… of the “decimal hours”. Similarly the 10 months idea got trashed. Dozens are just more “factor rich” and make anything needing division simpler to do. That some of us like the same convenience in our linear measures and volumes is no surprise.
So yes, we CAN do that decimal stuff and DO use it when it is benefit. The rest of the time we use what works better. For temperatures, F is just more convenient. Hardly ever a need for a decimal point, for one thing. Much more precision in whole digits. A range from 0 F at a point most folks don’t want to deal with any colder to 100 F at “quite hot enough thanks”, so anything outside that range is clearly “make preparations” range. For cooking, the oven goes to 200 F for slow cooking, 300 F for gentle roasting, 350 F for medium, 400 F for hot baking (biscuits and such), 450 F for Pizza and 500 F for specialty breads, pizzas and some meats. Nice neat divisions. For some things, I’ll drop a medium oven down to 325 F or up it to 375 F to get specific browning effects (breads mostly but some roast birds) and the Turkey often gets 275 F for a long slow roasting. So simple jumps by 100, then cut in half by 50s or quarters by 25s. Simple fractional relationships.
So I just don’t see any reason at all to use C outside the chem lab, or when doing things with molten metals where the F scale gets a bit large in the size of numbers and the added precision is not useful. (For things below about -50 F it starts to make more sense to use Rankine, though Kelvin can be useful if you don’t need the precision. K is also good for molten metals and flame temps.)
One final note: It’s not just the USA who “uses what is convenient”. Aside from Belize and Caymans that also use F, some folks in Europe use “variety scales”.
So lighten up a little. Pour a pint of beer or a cup of wine, have a few ounces of cheese, made with a Réaumur scale, and enjoy our individuality. It’s OK for folks to be different from each other, honest…
It may seems hard to believe on a 90 degree day, but a piece of this energy is prog’ed to retro into CA and provide a late season incident – at least some cold and even a bit of precip.
To understand America’s (and until a few years back, the Anglo-sphere’s) resistance to the metric system, read this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Measuring-America-United-Greatest-History/dp/1400130905
This review will give you the short version – with the bark on:
http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/1248/Measuring%20Am.htm
E.M.Smith May 3 10:12am:
I’m so pleased to find someone else agrees about the usefulness of the Fahrenheit scale for the weather. Here in the UK 0 degrees F is about as cold as it ever gets and 100 degrees F is about as hot as it ever gets, so a pretty perfect scale. Conversely, -17 to +38 doesn’t seem so sensible.
Good thing we have transportation devices to move food around.
Oh! wait – anti-human voters intend to take those away from us.
As for high temperatures this time of year, I expect a significant spread as the sun is strong so warms the day a lot.
Wierd spring on the mid-Wet coast, it froze a couple of weeks ago, today was over +22C high.
As for wordings, my rule of thumb is that if someone says “dinner” for a noon meal they must have grown up in farming country east of some mountains.
It makes more sense that they were mixing C with degrees F. 37degrees F is 2.7 degrees C. So that would be 2.7C about 0C.