Top post for a day or two, new posts will appear below this one.
Normally quiet and reserved WeatherBell senior forecaster Joe D’Aleo (co-founder of the Weather Channel with John Coleman) almost never writes (email subject lines) like this. When he does, it gets my attention. A new forecast shows the cold blast in the eastern half of the USA extending well past Groundhog Day, Feb 2nd, according to their models. WeatherBell has had an excellent track record this winter so far. He says he hasn’t seen anything like it since 1918 when the big flu pandemic hit the USA. Have a look:
D’Aleo writes in a follow up email about the forecast graphic below.
This is the GFS model depiction of the mean anomaly (in degrees C) for the 16 day period through 12z on February 6th.
It covers the coldest period of the winter season climatologically in most areas. The other global models agree through at least 10 days. This is the most severe run thus far. We have been alerting clients to it for weeks. Here is the day by day anomaly for the mean of the GFS ensemble runs which agree on the steadiness and generally the severity of the cold.
The mainstream media blames it on global warming of course.http://news.yahoo.com/global-warming-freezing-104500272–politics.html
UCAR downplayed the last brutal cold as being brief unlike the cold of the 1970s and 1980s.http://www2.ucar.edu/atmosnews/opinion/10928/cold-but-brief
Lets revisit their insightful analysis after the next few weeks.
1917/18 and 1993/94 were winters Joe Bastardi and I have been looking at. See the similarity of the SSTA in the Pacific in Jan/Feb 1918 to this year.
January 1918:
January 2014:
That warm pool in the Gulf of Alaska drives the persistent Alaska and western ridge and downstream cold vortex. That year had an extremely cold January.
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Powerful stuff. readers may recall that 1918 saw the great flu pandemic in the USA.
WeatherBell models expert Dr. Ryan Maue adds:
http://twitter.com/RyanMaue/status/425700249076654080
Meanwhile, weather, not climate, is hitting the US government hard:
Federal Government Shuts Down for Snow Storm Offices in Washington, D.C., are closed for the second time this winter.
Snow falling in Washington area; 4 to 7 inches expected, as flights canceled across US
Anyone remember deep south (Texas) saw the coldest weather ever recorded in the 1980s? It was in the single digit temperature even as far as San Antonio and Houston. I clearly remember it because in Houston, the outdoor fish pond had a thick layer of ice that I could walk on. Not sure what the rest of USA experienced.
Someone brought up vitamin D. Vitamin D deficiency is very common during the winter. It makes it a much more likely for us to get sick. We’ve been taking it at the right dosage for years now and I can tell that it works very well against flu, cold, sinus infection, allergy attacks and so on.
1918 also saw a very severe summer drought in Texas. All the ponds dried up and everyone had to haul water.
Richard of NZ, I think your time line is wrong there were few soldiers coming back from Europe before late November 1918.
From wikipedia
“In the United States, the disease was first observed in Haskell County, Kansas, in January 1918, prompting local doctor Loring Miner to warn the U.S. Public Health Service’s academic journal. On 4 March 1918, company cook Albert Gitchell reported sick at Fort Riley, Kansas. By noon on 11 March 1918, over 100 soldiers were in the hospital. Within days, 522 men at the camp had reported sick. By 11 March 1918 the virus had reached Queens, New York.
In August 1918, a more virulent strain appeared simultaneously in Brest, France, in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and in the U.S. in Boston, Massachusetts. The Allies of World War I came to call it the Spanish flu, primarily because the pandemic received greater press attention after it moved from France to Spain in November 1918. Spain was not involved in the war and had not imposed wartime censorship.“
john robertson says:
January 21, 2014 at 9:57 pm
So Al Gore is in Washington for the next two weeks?
Perhaps AL can make even more money by being paid not to visit.
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There’s a picture on the BBC which purports to show him talking with Matt Damon at Davos. According to AccuWeather, snow is forecast over the weekend …
@ur momisugly Gail Combs:
My Grandfather was one of the ones who died. Left Grandma with five young kids to raise alone. She put all of them through college too.
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Two of my grandmother’s brothers died during that epidemic.
I was looking with interest at the paper someone posted upthread about salicylate toxicity and mortality during the Spanish flu epidemic. I’m going to give that some more thought–they may be onto something there. However, one thing that can’t be overlooked is the lack of antibiotics during that era and a lack of understanding that bacteria and viruses really do cause disease. The existence of viruses wan’t suspected until the 1890’s and the first virus wasn’t seen under a microscope until the 1930’s when the electron microscope was invented. It’s estimated that upwards of 80% of fatalities weren’t caused by the flu itself but by secondary infections, specifically bacterial pneumonia which can kill within hours without immediate treatment. Even today, most flu deaths are caused by associated pneumonias.
Also, the upswing in the incidence of CHD beginning in the early 20th century has been linked to exposure to the 1918 H1N1 strain as well as to outbreaks in 1957 and 1968. (There was another one in the 1930’s, around 1933, but I haven’t seen any stats on that one.) Gordon and Thom first suggested in the mid-70’s that the sharp decline in CHD deaths after 1968 may be directly related to an absence of big influenza epidemics after 1968. We’ll just have to wait and see what the rate is from the 2009 outbreak.
Michael Mann:
The Ode to Global Warming (Apologies composed in haste)
Put another log on the fire
Cook me up some data and some trees.
And go out to the car and let’s conspire.
Wash my graphs and sew my old blue jeans.
Come on, baby, you can fill my hype,
And then go fetch my slippers.
And boil me up another pot of tea.
Then put another log on the fire, babe,
And come and tell me why you’re leaving me.
We had a normal January thaw in Illinois not too long ago. Predictably, the contrast with -15 F was proof of extreme weather and …. well you know. It goes without saying that whatever happens next drought, flood, F5 or flu wise, the water cooler conversation concerns “the climate.” So it’s warm in Europe and Australia and NOAA may very well conclude that, after adjustment, January is the hottest *ever*.
All I want to know is if that warm spot in the Gulf of Alaska will have the Deadliest Catch guys fearing global warming because they have less ice to chip off their boats.
The only good thing about this cold (-2F this morning) is that the neo-stalinists in the megalopolis (DC to Boston) get inconvenienced. It might convince a few more not living off the public trough that AGW is a farce.
About 8 years ago it was +2 deg C this time of year with no ice on my pond. This year it was -30 deg C this morning and parts of the pond have frozen right to the bottom (over a foot of ice).
Do I worry about a gradual 0.5 deg C increase in world temperatures over the next 50 years or whether the propane truck shows up this week so my pipes don’t freeze?
1045 and 1 deg F here in central Maine.
IOW typical winter.
Jtom,
We busted thru $4.25 May Natural gas earlier, which triggered alot of buying(probably many buy stops resting there) and are just below. If end of season storage would drop close to 1T, it would be shocking and you would make tons of money on each contractbe a rich man.
Last year, we bottomed just below 1.7T in storage and that was with some sustained cold from this point on. In order to drop below 1Trillion Cubic Feet in storage, we would need to take out of storage more than another 300 billion cubic feet than we did vs last year(since we are at -372 bcf vs last year right now). Late last Winter and early Spring were very chilly and saw sustained big drawdowns. It will be hard to beat that by such a wide margin.
The -AO pattern over the last week and now is pushing the cold hard in the eastern half of the country, that uses the most ng(while the west is getting the flip side.
I was thinking the AO may increase and the cold gets directed farther west and the East Coast could moderate as we get into early Feb.
One thing that has been a theme this cold weather season with the models in week 2 is that they underestimate the tenacity of this cold weather delivery pattern and from time to time, attempt to break it down with a strong southern stream jet, undercutting from the Pacific and spreading mild oceanic air zonally across the country.
We have managed to do that for brief periods on several occasions but the models, like the 06Z GFS go in that direction every once in awhile, then come back to reality and show a continuation of bitter cold.
There are however, some increasing signs of a pattern change as we enter early Feb and the potential for the mild oceanic air to undercut the cold and spread east for a time but with low confidence because the tools used at that time frame have not been too reliable.
Dialing in persistence with decent weight has oftenworked best when models try to change things this Winter. They did, however catch the change of the AO from positive to negative earlier this month, and the intense focusing more in the East.
This pattern of more frequent cold weather in North America has been going on since 1998. The unique aspect of this winter cooling is that the winters have been getting colder in every region and state in United States and Canada since 1998 except the far Canadian north and the Atlantic Coast provinces [due to a warm Atlantic] . However since 2010 these areas are also now cooling. As the decline of Northern Hemisphere SST continues and North Atlantic and North Pacific Oceans SST continue to decline, winters like we are just having may be more frequent. The colder winters are stretching into a cooler spring( as in Canada) and even starting earlier in the fall( as in United States) This pause in the rise of global temperatures could run until 2035/2045 as the ocean cycles pole to pole run for 30-35 years [like 1880-1910 and 1945-1975] . Strong El Ninos like 1997/1998 happen less frequently during cool ocean phases [last one 1877/78] It is a pity that the warming alarmists sidetracked the entire globe from what really may lie ahead.
snow says:
January 21, 2014 at 1:53 pm
With this pattern is there any chance of moister for the west coast? No rainy season at all for the west coast so far. They could sure use the rain and mountain snow…………………………………………………………………….Little if any hope through Feb 7
Look at his posted last night by Ryan Maue:
https://twitter.com/RyanMaue/status/425881763433312256/photo/1
1062mb is only 2mb shy of the highest pressure ever in the US (Christmas 1983).
2013 was fourth warmest year on record. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2013/13
Meh…..half the country is cold, the important half (my half, since I live in Washington, and no, not the city of Washington) is warm. Quite frankly, it’s NOT national news when its cold in DC or NYC. But that’s my gripe on the eastern bias. More important IMO is that the entire west coast is in hard drought conditions. The Sierra have very low snow totals. The Cascades are ~1/2 of normal. Unless this pattern breaks, there will be severe consequences for California agriculture. Western Washington depends heavily on winter snow melt to feed the reservoirs to supply the urban areas with municipal water during the summer.
Except it wasn’t. NCDC has added about 1C of additional “warming” (mostly by cooling the past) in their adjustment procedure.
Anthony Watts says:
January 21, 2014by
“A new forecast shows the cold blast in the eastern half of the USA extending well past Groundhog Day, Feb 2nd, according to their models.”
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Several weeks ago, I entered a post about “predicting the weather” via the phase of the Moon and was told by a resident expert hereon that such predictions are little more than fanciful. I told him I agreed …. but that I was an adamant believer in this one.
Well now, being that we are now experiencing an extended uncommon “cold spell” of extreme low temperatures that we haven’t been subjected too for several years now, I will be brave and make my prediction as to when this “cold blast” will end.
My prediction is based on what I was told many years ago, early 1970’s to be more exact, and has served me well in the years since, ….. so we will see iffen I get lucky again.
Thus said, my prediction is that this “cold blast” will terminate on January 30th or 31st at the latest and the temperatures will begin their rise back to “normal”.
Now I will have my fingers crossed for luck …. because my predicting abilities are now “on-the-line”. HA HA H
I didn’t see anyone here mention it yet, but there is a superb book on the 1918 influenza pandemic: The Great Influenza by John Barry. The book contains a chilling description of the cytokine storm, by which the immune system basically destroys the lungs in an attempt to fight the virus. Once I read that, I never failed to get my annual flu shot!
@roy: The Dilemma of Influenza
Here is a link to a summary of the Hoyle/Wickramasinghe paper which includes the missing graphics.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/life-00d2.html
Alarmism is beneath you. Correlation = Causation is beneath you. Argument by innuendo is beneath you. The 1918 flue epicemic had more than cold weather. It had a virulent easily transmissable virus and a vector – the returning servicemen and GIs that carried the flu to the far corners of the earth. Save the alarmism for the alarmist sites.
I’ve read from several very convincing sources “Spanish ‘flu” spread on the back of the millions who were jabbed straight after WW1.
Countries that did not get the jab were almost unaffected.
No, I’m not going to be satisfied unless it stays below zero for several weeks at Edward Markey’s house in MA. You can add State College, PA to list also.
January 21, 2014 at 12:44 pm
Richard of NZ says: “Umm, readers might remember that 1918 saw a global influenza pandemic….
It is now know that most of those fatalities were actually the result of aspirin toxicity. Medicos were dispensing the stuff by the half-handful hourly. Once toxic symptoms showed, back off a bit. Look it up.”
I looked it up. Most of the fatalities were not caused by aspirin toxicity. In fact there is no forensic evidence at all of any aspirin toxicity. Just speculation that some doctors may have over prescribed aspirin for some patients. 75 million people died from the flu.