An attempt to stimulate discussion about the causes of an unexpected event which occurred after the huge eruption of Tambora Volcano in 1815
Guest Essay by Caleb Shaw
Volcanoes cause cooling, right? No.
Having got your attention, I would like to bring up three historical incidents, hoping I may generate some interesting explanations for something I myself have no definite answer to.
On April 10, 1815 the Tambora Volcano exploded. It is estimated it blew 39 cubic miles of ash skywards. (A three-mile by three-mile by three-mile cube is only 27 cubic miles.) (I have no idea how many Manhattans that is.)
The noise was so loud it was heard 1200 miles away. Ships over the horizon assumed it was the cannon of a ship in distress and sailed around looking for another ship, and on one island troops were marched off to reinforce other troops because it was assumed an outpost was under attack. Then the great cloud of ash began to spread across the sky.
It is estimated 10,000 people were killed immediately by the blast, as many as 70,000 more by starvation or diarrhea brought on by the heavy ash fall, and another 4600 by tsunamis ranging from six to thirteen feet. The blast, as large as four Krakataus, penetrated the tropopause, roughly 11 miles up near the equator, and reached 16 miles further into the Stratosphere, to a total height of 27 miles. There, high above the circulations of Haley and Ferrel Cells, it began to spread out around the Globe.
By June 28, 1815 the inhabitants of London were noting amazing, brilliant and long-lasting sunsets.
The following summer, 1816, was remarkably cold over many northern lands, marked by frosts and ruined crops. It is remembered as “The Year Without A Summer” and, in my neck of the woods, as, “The Year Of Eighteen Hundred And Froze To Death.” Here in New Hampshire, where hay was an export that fueled the horse-drawn transport big cities, not even enough grass could be grown to feel local livestock. While the wealthy could import hay from Pennsylvania, the poor knew hunger, and many simply had to slaughter their livestock. In the following years populations of many towns in New England shrank, as people never wanted to see such a summer again, and the rock-free lands of Ohio sounded warmer, and actually were further south.
The link between Tambora and that cold summer seems plain, but here comes the third and, to me, intreauging item from 1817. It involves a quote from John Daly’s site which many know well, that begins,
“It will without doubt have come to your Lordship’s knowledge that a considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been during the last two years, greatly abated….”
This statement by the President of the Royal Society in London is dated November 20, 1817, and is not what I would have expected. I would have expected Tambora to increase the ice at the pole by making the entire earth colder. The fact the ice apparently decreased is a polar puzzle.
The question then becomes, “Do volcanoes reduce the amount of ice at the poles?”
In the comments at WUWT the commenter Philip Bradley suggested that Tambora’s ash may have fallen on the polar ice, reducing the albedo and increasing the melting. I’m not sure enough ash would fall, that far north, and remain uncovered by snow long enough, to have such a dramatic effect.
I’d be interested to hear the ideas of others. My personal guess is that, even though the climate was colder back then, the AMO still went through warm and cold phases, and just happened to be moving into a warm phase, involving a slosh of warmth moving north, and Tambora accentuated this slosh.
As I have explained elsewhere, “I call this my Slosh Theory, and it is based upon a highly scientific experiment I did at age three in the bath tub. Timing was everything. If you got the timing down, you could generate such a tremendous wave that half the water left the bathtub and wound up on the floor.
My mother did not appreciate my research and stunted my scientific growth, which explains why I became a writer.”
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TRM says:
July 8, 2013 at 5:10 pm
To answer your question, the time resolution of ice cores for the times of those eruptions is a matter of centuries.
Actually, the resolution is annual: http://www.leif.org/EOS/cp-9-749-2013-Toba.pdf
lsvalgaard says:
July 8, 2013 at 5:44 pm
I’m talking about the time resolution for the temperature proxies like 18O index: not the adjustment of the depth scale time using ash and sulfate concentrations.
Most of the decade of the 1810’s was cold. The great Climatologist Helmut Landsberg considered the year 1812 to be the coldest in northern hemisphere instrumental records.
Taxed says:
July 8, 2013 at 1:05 pm
Having dug a little deeper into the topic, a interesting fact has turned up.
While europe was having a “year with no summer” over in Russia they were having a hot and dry one. This been the case l think help’s to explain the cold weather in both europe and China. What seems to have happen was that they was two large blocking highs. One sat over the North Atlantic and the other over Russia. The blocking high over the North Atlantic would have forced the Polar jet up over Greenland and to come back down south again very close to Western europe. Bringing with it cold and wet weather rather like what happen in the summer of 2012. Now with there also been a blocking high over Russia then the jet would have had to push up to the north again and into the Arctic so as to flow over the top of this blocking high. Once clear of this blocking high, what seems to have happened it that the jet took a deep dive to the south over China. Bringing with it bitter winds from the north.
_________________________________
Taxed as above has pointed to a phenomenon I was wondering about, the shifting of the polar jets following the injection of very large amounts of dust and gas up to 40 kms high into the stratosphere from the Tambora eruption.
Tambora lies quite close to the equator where the solar energy inflows are always highest.
As the global temperatures decreased by large amounts leading to the cold years following the eruption the only reasonable explanation is that the injection of dust and gases from the eruption into the stratosphere were responsible for this cooling.
I would suggest the following mechanism for both the lower latitude cooling and the polar warming events following the Tambora eruption ,
The solar energy inflows during this period would have remained constant and no more than the normal variations so as this solar energy, the surface heating energy from the sun was not getting through the stratospheric dust and gas veil to the surface and is not accounted for elsewhere around the low latitudes, it would seem very likely that the stratospheric dust and gases from Tambora eruption were both reflecting some incoming solar energy but most likely due to their dark colouring, were also absorbing a great deal of this formerly surface destined solar energy spectrum.
The consequences would have been a steady build up in and a long lasting stratospheric warming event as the dust and gas veil spread around the globe and a cooling of the surface below the stratospheric dust cloud and gas veil.
The solar energy budget was just reallocated between the absorption of solar energy by Tambora’s stratospheric dust and gas veil, some reflectance of that solar energy by that dust and gas veil and and the reduced solar induced surface heating due to the shading by the dust and gas veil
The consequent substantial warming of the dust and gases and therefore the stratosphere would have produced effects almost identical to but a lot longer lasting to the Sudden Stratospheric Warming events which are now known to abruptly shift the polar jets locations and change their flow structures leading to extreme cold outbursts in some lower latitude near polar regions and extreme warming in higher latitudes including the actual polar regions.
With the long lasting dust and gas veils from the Tambora eruption this stratospheric warming effect would have had a slow build up relative to the rate of the onset of the SSW events and a much longer wind down as the stratospheric dust and gas veil slowly dissipated over a period of years.
As “Taxed” above points out , there were areas of extreme warmth in northern regions as well as extreme cold in other regions, all of which point to a major and in this case, long lasting shift in the polar jets akin to a SSW event.
But this time, created by the interception of incoming solar energy by the Tambora created stratospheric dust and gas clouds and the consequent heating of those dust and gas clouds leading to the creation of a stratospheric warming event of years long duration and the consequent shifting of the polar jets which allied with the reduction of solar heating of the surface due to the shading effects of the dust clouds would have led to extremely cold temperatures in some regions .
A secondary effect would have been for the polar jets to trap and redirect some of this dust around some areas allowing greater solar surface heating which would have reinforced any warming in those other areas as per Taxed post above.
I’m back. 103 comments…..sheesh!
I spent the afternoon studying the connection between near record rainfall and busted belts on old, lumbering 1985 rider mowers. The rain makes mowing impossible even as the grass grows like crazy, so that when you do mow the blades get stressed in deep lushness, and in 90 degree temperatures the Lord-knows-how-old belt disintegrates into small chunks of hard rubber.
The local small-engine-repair guy has a two week backlog of work, but was kind enough to help me locate a belt and give me instructions about how to do the job. After a fair amount of sweating and swearing I was done, and the blame thing actually works!
It wasn’t the easiest job, and success has boosted my ego no end. I feel I can handle anything, and am ready to take on chaotic systems.
A couple of commenters sounded as if they felt that, because it is difficult to see a volcano-effect, there must be no effect. To me this is a bit like saying a thousand atomic bombs going off has no effect. Of course it has an effect.
After Pinetubo I could lift my fist and cover the sun in a way that allowed me to see the “rays” without being blinded by the actual sun. The “rays” were much longer than they are now, as if the sun was shining through dirty glass. Also my tomatoes stayed green. So don’t tell me volcanoes “have no effect.”
The problem is we don’t really understand the oceanic cycles, even without volcanoes. We have all these wonderful new satellites, that were not around when I was a kid, giving us amazing insights, but unfortunately politicians are demanding certain results, and not allowing scientists to do what they do best, which is not so much to create, as to observe. Tisdale sets a good example, for he simply reports what he observes. Some others do the same, but they almost seem apologetic about it, as if they feel guilty for sneaking some real science in.
Bob Tisdale gave me one link which suggests volcanoes prompt a zonal flow, whereas Dr. Tim Ball describes a wonderful meeting of minds (I’ve got to get that book) which suggests volcanoes prompt a meridional flow. (“Meridional” sounds so much better than my word “loopy.”) This may prompt some to throw up their hands in despair and quit.
Don’t do it. Don’t give up the ship. I wanted to quit today, lieing all sweaty in the grass with dratted bugs crawling all over me, for it seemed scientifically impossible to remove the old mower belt, let alone put on a new one, however by gritting my logic I eventually figured out all the pulleys and shields and nuts and bolts.
In the same way we can figure out this climate system, even if it is chaotic. After all, it is just so many actions and reactions. However it is a bit like a tangled fishing line with lots of loops. You want to just whip out a knife and cut the snarl away. However pretend you have no knife. It is actually quite possible, and very gratifying, to untangle the mess. (I take eight small children fishing on a regular basis, so I’m an expert on untangling fishing lines, if nothing else.)
One insight, which I thought was good, was the comment about how the ash would effect the land immediately, but take longer to effect the oceans, which in a sense have momentum and “remember” the pre-volcano situation.
Bob Tisdale’s observations, (buy his book,) give us inklings of the pre-volcano pattern, though we still don’t understand all the parts. It is a bit like watching a child levitate back and forth in mid air, without knowledge of the seat, ropes, and tree-branch overhead, which form the swing the kid’s upon. However we do glimpse a sort of pendulum, swinging back and forth like clockwork.
OK. The pre-volcano situation is like a child on a swing, and the oceans are the boss, and in control of the winds. Then a volcano goes off. Suddenly there is a new boss in control of the winds. To continue my analogy, it is as if you are pushing a child on a swing, and suddenly this weirdo comes in from the side and gives the kid a push. Obviously the pendulum is going to go all out of whack.
In other words, maybe the pattern goes zonal, and then meridional. The initial effect of ash is to make the air disobey the sea, and abruptly be zonal, which gives is a warm winter after the volcanic eruption. (A chance to get ready.) However this knocks the sea’s regular pattern out of whack, which then effects the atmosphere to become loopy, (excuse me…I mean meridional.)
Then you have heat waves in Alaska and frosts in Florida.
That’s the idea bopping about my brains tonight, (perhaps due to too much time under a hot sun, today.)
However I feel it is also important to consider where you are, in the pre-volcano cycle, when the volcano blows. If the pendulum is going one way, about to enter a La Nina, the effect is likely to be quite different from when the pendulum is headed the other way, about to enter a La Nina.
And considering we don’t even fully understand the pre-volcano cycle yet, I sure do wish the blasted politicians would back off, and quit demanding results when we’ve only just started.
.
Correction to above comment: “If the pendulum is going one way, about to enter a La Nina, the effect is likely to be quite different from when the pendulum is headed the other way, about to enter a EL NINO.”
It’s late. Time for this boy to hit the sack. Heartfelt thanks to all who commented.
fhhaynie says:
July 8, 2013 at 6:00 pm
I’m talking about the time resolution for the temperature proxies like 18O index
Look at Figure 6 of http://www.leif.org/EOS/cp-9-749-2013-Toba.pdf
Looks annual to me.
Lief,
That’s layer counting, not temperature proxie data like 18O. Look up the high resolution 18O Greenland data. The observable annual signal flattens out for years before around 1200 AD (slow diffusion in ice). http://www.kidswincom.net/climate.pdf.
Caleb says:
July 8, 2013 at 8:21 pm “After Pinetubo I could lift my fist and cover the sun in a way that allowed me to see the “rays” without being blinded by the actual sun. The “rays” were much longer than they are now, as if the sun was shining through dirty glass. Also my tomatoes stayed green. So don’t tell me volcanoes “have no effect.””
We had the most amazing red orange sunsets after Pinetubo. And for the pilots in the group, we noticed a pronounced haze that whitened the sky from it’s normally deep blue. Then there was the nasty winter that followed. Coincidence?
fhhaynie says:
July 9, 2013 at 5:59 am
That’s layer counting, not temperature proxie data like 18O.
Look at Figure 3 of http://epic.awi.de/12532/1/Ras2005a.pdf
“Example of 1.2 meter of GRIP data and annual layer markings (grey vertical bars) from
about 8.8 ka b2k. The annual layers are identified as matching pairs of spring and summer indicators:
[…] In this section the annual layer identification procedure is supported by high-resolution δ18O data, corrected for diffusion.”
Lief,
Good illustration. At 8.8ka bk2 the actual 18O index has a very low amplitude. As you go back further in time, the amplitude decreases. What would you expect the amplitude to be at 22ka or 480ka? Adjusting for diffusion on an annual basis is speculative for these times. It becomes an artificial adjustment.
fhhaynie says:
July 9, 2013 at 7:35 am
Adjusting for diffusion on an annual basis is speculative for these times. It becomes an artificial adjustment.
Possibly, but there is a lot of speculation already. You are arguing that a climate signal should not be expected for the Toba event and since none is observed we cannot rule out that there was a Toba-induced climate effect. Also possible.
I agree. There must have been an effect on climate temperature, but the ice core proxie temperature data does not have the resolution to show a one or two year change for those old eruptions. We could speculate that what the temperature change rate would be for those old eruptions and back calculate what to expect in a diffusion “corrected” proxie record.
Just follow the natural cycles by the sun clearly evident from looking at maximum temps. Volcanic eruptions may delay the sun a bit, short time, but not by much….
All such reductions In sea ice extent will be during stronger negative NAO/AO conditions, it would have happened without any volcano. 1816 was well placed at the peak of solar cycle 6, at the Ap index drop out that happens in many solar cycles at maximum:
http://www.solen.info/solar/cycl6.html
Ulric Lyons says:
July 9, 2013 at 8:36 am
1816 was well placed at the peak of solar cycle 6, at the Ap index drop out that happens in many solar cycles at maximum
Except that Ap is not correlated with temperatures, e.g. http://www.leif.org/research/Ap-GCR-TSI-Temp-1978-2012.png
henry@ulric
I already told them the same thing, using different data
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/08/1815-1816-and-1817-a-polar-puzzle/#comment-1358147
It seems they want to believe this stuff (of volcanic eruptions influencing the climate, rather than the weather)
funny that we never even heard about “climate change” when these idiots (USA FRANCE UK) did all these nuclear tests in the Pacific….
HenryP says:
July 9, 2013 at 9:19 am
funny that we never even heard about “climate change” when these idiots (USA FRANCE UK) did all these nuclear tests in the Pacific….
The effect of nuclear bombs on weather and climate was much discussed ever since the 1950s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter
henry@leif
hence we did see a small cooling period in the seventies, contrary to what could be expected from the observed increase in maximum temps.
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
I never excluded that explanation for that cooling period.
HenryP says:
July 9, 2013 at 9:30 am
I never excluded that explanation for that cooling period.
Flip-flopping
Subsequent to the Royal Society meeting in the fall of 1816 the Royal Navy sent an expedition to Spitsbergen to check out the status of the ice. They found that by then the ice was back to normal and the ships got trapped in ice in July 1817 and were forced to abandon one of their ships in order to get back to Britain. So whatever happened in the Arctic in 1816 it was short-lived.
leif says
Flip-flopping
henry@leif
it is difficult to prove?
although reports now coming out showed drastic reduction of greenery in the pacific after the tests,
which I now think is a telltale sign….
(I observed cooling in places on earth where they chopped the trees down, look at Tandil, in Argentine,
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2013/02/21/henrys-pool-tables-on-global-warmingcooling/
especially minima – table 3)
lsvalgaard says:
“Except that Ap is not correlated with temperatures, e.g. http://www.leif.org/research/Ap-GCR-TSI-Temp-1978-2012.png”
There should be plenty of inverse correlation with global temperatures, as your graph shows, because of ENSO type response. Only and temperatres at higher latitudes will display a direct correlation. Interstingly there were La Nina conditions between late 1815 and mid 1816, which does not suggest strong cooling from Tambora.
Ulric Lyons says:
July 9, 2013 at 1:12 pm
There should be plenty of inverse correlation with global temperatures
Except there isn’t: http://www.leif.org/research/Correlation-Ap-Temp-Not.png
@thingodonta July 8, 2013 at 3:46 am:
“…One point, the ash apparently went towards the N/NW, which winds occur in the dry season from ~April to ~October. Sicne Tambora is just south of the equator (and not far from where I work in East Nusa Tengarra), that’s a long way to the north pole.”
This is the same argument I used in the 1980s about CFCs produced in the cities in the northern hemisphere supposedly then producing the Ozone Hole at the South Pole: That’s a long way to the South Pole.
It gets even stranger when one considers that those same cities where the CFCs were being released had ozone alerts.
Operative questions then become:
Why didn’t the CFCs react with the ozone in those cities up north?
How did the CFCs get all the way to the South Pole before reacting with ozone somewhere in between?
How did CFCs cross all these atmospheric systems: The north Mid-latitude cell, the north Hadley cell, the Intertropical Convergence Zone, the south Hadley cell, and the south Mid-latitude cell? All before finally taking root in the South Polar region, there to gobble and gobble and gobble ozone?
But maybe the biggest question is: What mechanism carried the CFCs on a beeline to the South Pole? No vacations in Bermuda, no stop-overs in Bali, no weekends in Rio. Just hop the Express Train to Penguinsville.
Yep, that’s a long way to the South Pole.
Leif, your first link does show inverse correlation, the yearly data is too crude to see it well in places though, like in 1997/98. I still say the critical factor for low sea ice extent is negative AO/NAO, which has happened regularly without any help from volcanic eruptions.
Ulric Lyons says:
July 9, 2013 at 7:16 pm
Leif, your first link does show inverse correlation, the yearly data is too crude to see it well in places though
You can’t have it both ways, if the data is too crude you cannot use it. Also you didn’t like the global data, so we use CET instead. Since there is a strong seasonal variation of CET but not of Ap, one has to do one [or both] of two things, either compute running means over the year of the daily [or monthly] data and compare those with Ap or work with the CET anomalies [that removes the seasonal variation]. In either case one can see that there is no correlation whatsoever: http://www.leif.org/research/Ap-CET-Uncorrelated.png or http://www.leif.org/research/Correlation-Ap-Temp-Not.png
I think we have had this crop up before, so you are going in circles. Ap is not correlated with temperatures.
I still say the critical factor for low sea ice extent is negative AO/NAO, which has happened regularly without any help from volcanic eruptions.
This has nothing to do with Ap and sea ice extent is not correlated with AO/NAO on a daily or monthly basis. So this is a strawman thrown in to complicate matters.
@Caleb Shaw …
See this post at Steve Goddard with a historical article found in a Google book …
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/07/09/1816-shock-news-18000-square-miles-of-ice-broke-away-from-greenland/
RE: Phil. says:
July 9, 2013 at 9:36 am
Hi Phil. It’s getting to be that time of year. I’ll be expecting interesting input from you as the minimum-sea-ice posts appear.
I’ve been doing some research, with all the links in this post. Apparently the sea ice went through some wild swings after the “mystery volcano” and Tambora. Besides the refreeze you mention there were two others, but also times of decreased ice.
“The uncharted coastline of east Greenland became clear of ice around 1820, and in 1822 Scoresby, in the midst of an arduous whaling voyage, sailed along some 400 miles of this inhospitable landscape, charting it, and naming point as he went in honour of scientific and other friends, chief of which was Scoresby Sound, named for his father. Almost all his place names survive today.”
It looks like Steve Goddard got researching as well. How many Manhattans is a 18000 square mile discharge of ice? I wonder if that was the same ice that was amazing people right into August on the north coast of Ireland at that time?
There must have been a howling north wind in the Fram Straits to push out all that ice. That gets me thinking about Dr. Tim Ball’s assertion that the jet stream was very meridional.
My brains are sort of smoking with all the information people have shared. I awoke at three AM with odd, dream-like thoughts of lightning discharging down the smoke of Volcano’s. It made perfect sense at the time, but faded by dawn. My mind needs to incubate all the data before new ideas hatch. Unfortunately some think that just because I fixed the mower, I should mow.
Thinking about all this stuff, I’ll probably drive into the pond. Then they’ll be sorry.