Extreme weather phenomena called atmospheric rivers were behind intense snowstorms recorded in 2009 and 2011 in East Antarctica. The resulting snow accumulation partly offset recent ice loss from the Antarctic ice sheet, report researchers from KU Leuven.
Atmospheric rivers are long, narrow water vapour plumes stretching thousands of kilometres across the sky over vast ocean areas. They are capable of rapidly transporting large amounts of moisture around the globe and can cause devastating precipitation when they hit coastal areas.
Although atmospheric rivers are notorious for their flood-inducing impact in Europe and the Americas, their importance for Earth’s polar climate – and for global sea levels – is only now coming to light.
In this study, an international team of researchers led by Irina Gorodetskaya of KU Leuven’s Regional Climate Studies research group used a combination of advanced modelling techniques and data collected at Belgium’s Princess Elisabeth polar research station in East Antarctica’s Dronning Maud Land to produce the first ever in-depth look at how atmospheric rivers affect precipitation in Antarctica.
The researchers studied two particular instances of heavy snowfall in the East Antarctic region in detail, one in May 2009 and another in February 2011, and found that both were caused by atmospheric rivers slamming into the East Antarctic coast.
The Princess Elisabeth polar research station recorded snow accumulation equivalent to up to 5 centimetres of water for each of these weather events, good for 22 per cent of the total annual snow accumulation in those years.
The findings point to atmospheric rivers’ impressive snow-producing power. “When we looked at all the extreme weather events that took place during 2009 and 2011, we found that the nine atmospheric rivers that hit East Antarctica in those years accounted for 80 per cent of the exceptional snow accumulation at Princess Elisabeth station,” says Irina Gorodetskaya.
And this can have important consequences for Antarctica’s diminishing ice sheet. “There is a need to understand how the flow of ice within Antarctica’s ice sheet responds to warming and gain insight in atmospheric processes, cloud formation and snowfall,” adds Nicole Van Lipzig, co-author of the study and professor of geography at KU Leuven.
A separate study found that the Antarctic ice sheet has lost substantial mass in the last two decades – at an average rate of about 68 gigatons per year during the period 1992-2011.
“The unusually high snow accumulation in Dronning Maud Land in 2009 that we attributed to atmospheric rivers added around 200 gigatons of mass to Antarctica, which alone offset 15 per cent of the recent 20-year ice sheet mass loss,” says Irina Gorodetskaya.
“This study represents a significant advance in our understanding of how the global water cycle is affected by atmospheric rivers. It is the first to look at the effect of atmospheric rivers on Antarctica and to explore their role in cryospheric processes of importance to the global sea level in a changing climate,” says Martin Ralph, contributor to the study and Director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the University of California, San Diego.
“Moving forward, we aim to explore the impact of atmospheric rivers on precipitation in all Antarctic coastal areas using data records covering the longest possible time period. We want to determine exactly how this phenomenon fits into climate models,” says Irina Gorodetskaya.
“Our results should not be misinterpreted as evidence that the impacts of global warming will be small or reversed due to compensating effects. On the contrary, they confirm the potential of the Earth’s warming climate to manifest itself in anomalous regional responses. Thus, our understanding of climate change and its worldwide impact will strongly depend on climate models’ ability to capture extreme weather events, such as atmospheric rivers and the resulting anomalies in precipitation and temperature,” she concludes.
###
The study, “The role of atmospheric rivers in anomalous snow accumulation in East Antarctica”, was published recently in the American Geophysical Union’s Geophysical Research Letters. Co-authors are Nicole Van Lipzig (Regional Climate Studies research group, KU Leuven), Kim Claes (KU Leuven graduate student), Maria Tsukernik (Brown University), Martin Ralph (University of California San Diego) and William Neff (University of Colorado Boulder).
I recall a similar finding a couple of years back:
“Is the Long-Awaited Snowfall Increase in Antarctica Now Underway?”
http://www.cato.org/blog/long-awaited-snowfall-increase-antarctica-now-underway
-Chip
nuff said.
added around 200 gigatons of mass to Antarctica, which alone offset 15 per cent of the recent 20-year ice sheet mass loss,” says Irina Gorodetskaya.
But there results are from several years ago. How can this analysis suddenly offset the ice loss? If the ice loos is properly measured, then this contribution would already be automatically included.
Or is that mass loss just modeled? And this presents a corrections. What are these guys actualy saying?
“they confirm the potential of the Earth’s warming climate to manifest itself in anomalous regional responses.” Not to mention weather, and seasonal, annual, and decadal climate variability, which brings us to the current state of a colder than average Arctic and warmer than average Antarctic:
http://cci-reanalyzer.org/DailySummary/#
“atmospheric rivers”…what a contrived concept. But sexy-sounding. Kinda like the polar vortex(TM).
Roy (Dr. Roy)
My unabridged edition of OED gives ” WIND ” as a synonym for “atmospheric rivers.”
G
Jet stream(s).
They’ve been around………..forever and well known in meteorology for?
Next, someone can think up a really cool name for that special snow that only falls because of an atmospheric river.
@Mike maguire. Yes its cslled bullsnow
Yep. Like so much that has to do with catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. “Social cost of carbon”, “carbon neutral”, “carbon pollution”, etc. These terms all need to be removed from any dictionary they’ve wormed their way into.
Contrived is the word, Roy. But, good for press releases. Note that “they can cause devastating precipitation when they hit coastal areas”, so here is another reason to wring our poor, overwrought hands.
Do AOGCM’s have the resolution needed to properly model “atmospheric rivers”? Suppose 20% (a guess) of the rainfall in semi-arid places like California arrives via atmospheric rivers that models are incapable of representing. Under these conditions, projections of future changes in precipitation would be even more dubious than they already are. The same thing applies to projections of ice cap loss.
I think they call this one the Penguin Express. /s
RWturner
The Penguin Express — perfect —
Eugene WR Gallun
+1
Eugene, Thanks +2 and LOL, sure hope it don’t get to like pine apples though we could have rivers of pine apple juice mixed with penguin …
Maybe a month ago there was a stream of water coming out of the gulf that ran up to about Indiana on surface radar, looked to be less than 50-100 miles wide, and near a thousand miles long, very weird looking, to me it looked like a stream of water from a fire hose.
We get that a couple of times every winter.
We call it “the Pineapple Express” and it does indeed look like
a gigantic stream of water from a fire hose, aimed from Hawai’i
to Vancouver. There is not generally a lot of wind, but there sure is
a lot of water. In the summer we drink it and use it for hydro power.
— Bad News
It is good to see Dr. Spencer weighing in with more than a sigh . . ./sarc
Do you happen to go watch the LSSU Lakers play when they go down to Huntsville at the local university?
Here are the paper abstracts concerning these extreme snowfalls.
No, this is sound, observed science. However, increasing snow amounts can cause falling global temperatures going forward. Check out the snow blitz theory.
Indeed and their disclaimer at the end of the press release is truly pathetic. The late Marcel Leroux explained -see Dynamic Analysis of Weather and Climate, Springer 2010- that in Antarctica since the 1970s, the frequency of depressions has increased and that these are also getting deeper as a result of stronger catabatic winds and expulsions of more, stronger MPHs.
So warm air advection along the reliefs of the Peninsula creates a regional rise in temperature but also brings back more moisture to the pole. This acceleration of atmospheric circulation contradicts CAGW.
It means “send us money so we can spin ^H^H^H^H study this contrived concept”.
They’re getting sloppy . It should have been “atmospheric torrents”.
Could have read, “Atmospheric, river like, Jet stream-like torrents, mimicking and blasting the South Pole like the Eastern USA polar vortex of the cataclysmic winter of 2014 during the Warmest Year Evaaah.
Wouldn’t it be more like the training effect we get here in Florida when a low pressure off the coast continually streams rain over a narrow area?
Florida” is the rest of the name
@Tom in Florida, that is what happens with the Pineapple express, it sends a as you called a “train” of moisture from Hawaii Island area into the general direction of the west coast from Oregon to BC Canada and can bring large amounts of moisture and unseasonable warm air in the winter months. On the East side of the Rockeys they can in a very short time bring on strong “Chinook” winds with large increases of temperatures, rainfall on top of snow packs (avalanche danger is very high), cause flooding and fast melting of snow etc. It is pretty much a part of any winter here and we just live with it (and prepare for it). At times with the right conditions if it clashes with an Arctic cold front it can also bring heavy snow fall as we had here in BC in early Jan. about 45 (18″) cm. in 36 hrs.
“atmospheric rivers”
=========
nothing new. I called them “feeder troughs” during our sailing days in the south pacific. long before climate change was invented. A long line of low pressure, typically 1000 miles or more in length, with high winds leading into a deeper low. common around the Tonga, Fiji, New Caledonia area. they were a bitch to sail across, but it was a much bigger mistake to run before them.
🙂
Just like the atmospheric river of AGW BS — a serious mistake to “go with the flow”.
I keep mixing up Antarctic ice sheet with Antarctic sea ice. So, while the sea ice is at all time record highs, the ice sheet is shrinking at 68 gigatons per year. That is interesting. I wonder what sort of method they used to come up with the 68 gigatons per year. I seem to remeber reading an article about this here on WUWT, anyone have the link?
I’m puzzled by how they know what was happening in 1992, Jeff. Supposedly we have only just had “accurate” measurements in the last year or so. (And even they are only guesstimates).
Even 20 years is not long enough to identify real trends. For instance, we know how rainfall elsewhere goes in cycles with the oceans.
At the disastrous rate of about 0.013%/yr. We’re all DOOOMED!
Or, to put it another way:-
In some years, there is less rain, and you get net ice loss. While in other years you get more rain, and you get net ice gain.
I think it will be snow down there and no rain
Atmospheric rivers? So AGW has now reversed gravity? Wow. What’s next, the spin of the Galaxy?
I expect some other spin is at work here …
Ladies and Gentlemen…
The “Show why Antarctic expansion is caused by global warming” contest is in full swing!
The heats are over, and the contestants who successfully talked the back leg off a donkey, now move forward to the semi-finals.
So … step forward the Belgian team, with their snappy performance entitled “Atmospheric rivers .. it snowed a lot in 2009 and 2011 but but but but its still shrinking!!!”
“The heats are over, and…”
The Pause?
A river is just liquid water seeking the easiest path to get downhill. Earth’s atmosphere is way more complex than that.
But if they want to call it an “atmospheric river”, oh well… I’ll give them some artistic license.
air flows much like water, we just aren’t aware because we can’t see it. the rule of thumb sailing is that air will travel 100 miles laterally to avoid a 1 mile rise.
Fred, indeed. Air is a fluid just like water, just 1/800th as dense as water is all.
What no mention of polar bears?
“Our results should not be misinterpreted as evidence that the impacts of global warming will be small or reversed due to compensating effects”
This blatant sycophancy to global warming in conclusions is incredibly annoying. Yes it is NOT evidence that the impacts of global warming will be small, it is actually NOT evidence of it being large, small or medium. It is evidence of nothing having to do with forecasting global warming or global climate. It is simply observation of antarctic snow and ice behavior with a bow of obedience and tithe to the GW oligarchy.
Speaking of polar bears, it is interesting that tigers in India were never brought up in GW propaganda since their population was severely affected in a similar period as polar bears. Maybe it’s because it’s hard to spin a species is dying out due to warming when they thrive in warm weather. Anyways the tigers are on a strong rebound after poaching, lack of prey, habitat destruction and conflict with villagers caused a decline. Simply stunningly beautiful animals that are on a rebound due to sensible government action, which fortunately was immune to GW nonsense and influence.
actually it is not evidence at all period, but I think you said that.
Good on the tigers, but don’t give these jerks any ideas – they’ll get the spin out ahead of the data and alarm the peoples again.
“Maybe it’s because it’s hard to spin a species is dying out due to warming when they thrive in warm weather.”
Actually tigers do quite well in Siberia where winters are about -40. And remember that there were lions in Alaska during the last ice age.
Rule one for biogeographers: Never ever assume that the current distribution of an animal or plant is either natural or climate-limited unless there is actual evidence for it.
‘Our results should not be misinterpreted as evidence’ – there fixed
Have they anything to say about the existence (or non-existence) of such “rivers” (i.e., winds) in the past, before we entered this new and amazing period of “Extreme Weather” (brought to us by the Weather Channel and friends).
As soon as W. Blitzer created “The Situation Room” (CNN), we had to have situations.
What an odd word, too. Places. I suppose that must be geopolitcially correct. Glad I don’t have boob tube.
The winter of 1996/97 was the last time that a large “skyriver” hit the west coast. That storm was a direct hit into California with rain that made one think of the phrase, biblical proportions. If there had been a touch more power in that system, then the consequences could have been catastrophic to Northern California. Everything down to and through Sacramento, would have been in grave danger. The entire SF/Bay Area region could have been severely affected. Prior to that the other major events were 1964/65 the big one, 1954/55 heavy, 1945/46 weak, and on back to the teens where the 9 year pattern appears to break up and switch to around 11 to 12 years. The 1970s was the first break from the 9 year cycle. It should have been an extra wet year in 1973/74. Instead the last California drought set in. The years 1984, 1996 and 2008 were the extra wet years with 1996 being the biggest. Now here it is drought once again for the last 3+ years. Is this going to signal a shift that will see the return of the 9 year flood cycle as part of an overall shift in the regional pattern? If so, then there should be a West Coast flood in the next 2 years. Interesting how the droughts may be punctuating phase changes in regional climate of the west coast.
“Interesting how the droughts may be punctuating phase changes in regional climate of the west coast.”
Out east, storms track the jet stream, and I think the PDO moves where it hits the west coast from California to up in ~Washington and back, maybe there’s more to it on a shorter cycle.
You left out the flood of 1961 when the rain didn’t stop. One third of California was underwater from El Centro to north of Sacramento.
That shows my bias. I have always thought of California as being the area north of San Francisco, where I grew up. I have heard of the flood you speak of. Any part of California has the potential for these types of events. I will look for a regional climate map for the southern part of the state. I wonder if there is any local patterns that might show up. This 9 year flood event is more of a coastal hit then the El Centro flood. I,ll look it up. Thanks for mentioning it.
the rivers existed long before global extreme weather warming. years ago a tropical cyclone bounced off Fiji and came through Tonga. A narrow trough off the low extended northward, and when it passed over Samoa almost 2 days after the main cyclone body had passed, the trough funneled down through the harbor in Pago Pago with such force it tore the spreaders out of the sail boats. Which is quite something, as the harbor itself is an ideal hurricane hole.
Geologists know that “extreme” geological events, especially the very extreme but very rare ones, are the ones that we see preserved in the geological record. Minor, everyday events get washed away with the ordinary passage of time. Only the strongest have the force to change the surface and the power to overcome the everyday processes that repair those changes. This is not the catastrophist theory of old, but the outcome of common-sense understanding of force and power.
Climatologists are coming from a steady-state understanding of the world geologists (reluctantly) came to in the mid-1800s. It is telling that the geological community was fighting the Christian view of God creating a set piece that only God could modify to a significant extent. The current climatological view as seen in the IPCC reports is a religious view of a world in natural stasis unless provoked by Man. Extreme but irregular events that created the MWP, the LIA and the post-1965 warming are not part of their belief system.
It is no wonder that geologists are the bete noires of the Warmist communities. We’ve learned our lesson, risen above our mistake, advanced 150 years from where they are.
Further to this idea of punctuated equilibrium, most of the time represented in sedimentary layers consists of the boundaries between layers.
Just as the climate should be viewed. Long yawns punctuated by tremendous expenditures of energy.
Another reason that the “Warmists communities” hate geologists is that we think in terms of natural processes and can decipher ma nature, and this faculty of thought will throw them every time.
Trouble is, so many “environmental geologists” have entered geological schools and we know what they think about climate.
Doug
Can you explain, to a non-geologist, the banding in rock strata with 22 kyr spacing corresponding to the orbital precession cycle. This is a conspicuous feature visible to the naked eye in many strata such that it is used to help dating. What geological perturbation linked to precession causes these contrasting layers?
None. Show me such periodic layers in rocks. I am highly skeptical.
You may be skeptical, but I agree with Phlogiston, the banding is there,
Where?
Tell me, I pray you, where?
I don’t know where you live, but if it is in the eastern US the Triassic-Jurassic lacustrine rift deposits of the Newark Supergroup are probably the most easily accessible example. They are exposed in numerous places from Nova Scotia to North Carolina.
I suggest you look up the term BIF (banded iron formation)
Never better said.
Tell that to the British Geological Society – The have partaken of the Kool Aid by the gallon (Imperial)
+1
Can they please just stop destroying an interesting article with bone-headed references to AGW.
You’re asking for waaay too much.
I was thinking the same thing. All was going nicely, sciencey and all, then BAM! It looks so out of place it’s not even funny. It’s almost like an editor said “we need to insert this to get published and get attention and get more funding for future studies”.
What’s worse, guys like John Cook can add this to his pile of “heavily supports AGW” papers.
If they did not refer to AGW they risk not getting past Pal Review (TM).
instead, use well considered references to bone-headed AGW.
These are extreme events only because it’s an alarmists term. To be read as “send me more money.”
What I wonder about – if the “Science is Settled”, why do they keep funding this crap?
Does the public require a daily brain bashing to keep in line? Most, that I talk to, are already sufficiently bashed. Well this “news” is too late to get into State of the Onion.
Absolutely. Cut the funding, there is nothing left to discover. Anything worthwhile, Al Gore already discovered it. What every hasn’t been discovered can’t exist.
Since we can’t find anything that caused the warming, it must be CO2. QED (c) IPCC
So, I guess there were no ‘atmospheric rivers’ in the Arctic in the 2000s and now they have returned, because the ice cap decrease has reversed so dramatically.
My 5 bucks says that we are not going to read about that anytime soon.
“Our results should not be misinterpreted as evidence that the impacts of global warming will be small or reversed due to compensating effects. On the contrary, they confirm the potential of the Earth’s warming climate to manifest itself in anomalous regional responses. Thus, our understanding of climate change and its worldwide impact will strongly depend on climate models’ ability to capture extreme weather events, such as atmospheric rivers and the resulting anomalies in precipitation and temperature,” she concludes.”
Models again!
Important to keep the global warming gravy train running.
‘Earth’s warming climate…’ has nobody told them that it has stopped warming? They need to insert any one of the 52 (I think?) reasons why it isn’t warming but once the ‘Pause’ is over all that extra record-breaking ice will melt.
Are these atmospheric “rivers” weather or climate?
Yes.
If they perpetuate the alarmism they will be called climate. Otherwise the 1/5th effect will be called weather.
California’s Pineapple express is a well known example of an atmospheric river and its location and angle of attack on the Sierra Nevada and Cascades explains most of the extreme precipitation events in California. I think the concept is a good one, and does a far better job of explaining natural heavy rainfall than Trenberth’s suggesting extremes are caused by a “warmer and wetter world”.
Jim, as a weatherman who has studied a bit of snow, can you tell me if the standard of ” an inch of rain equals a foot of snow ” is close to accurate? If so, 5 cm ( 2.54 cm / in ) would be 2″ of rain or equal to 2 foot of snow. I was in Marquette, MI when we got over 2 foot during the May 10, 1990 we got over 22 inches.
DD, I use the rule of thumb that an inch of rain equals 10 inches of snow, so we almost agree. But my rule of thumb depends on the quality of snow. Heavy wet snow will hold higher values of water compared to dry powdery snow. Whatever the rule of thumb, 2 foot of snow in one day is a lot of moisture.
Atmospheric rivers are weather events that are constantly transporting tropical moisture convected from the tropical warm pools towards the poles. They are relatively thin bands of moistures and thus have very local effects. The location of those rivers landfall is determined by pressure systems that form over the oceans, so there is likely a seasonal and decadal pattern due to ocean oscillations.
How about “atmospheric moisture stream”?
That has a more appropriate ring to it. But I think that the meteorologists have some say in this. Let’s hear what they have to say. This should be old hat to them.
Jim, with all due respect, they are not rivers. Yes if you want to push for more funding by all means call them rivers but rivers they ain’t;
Jet stream used to be good enough. Or strung weather front.
Sorry, I am with Jim. The term has been around for over 25 years. http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/atmrivers/questions/
A rose is still a rose …
Stephen, I dont think that exact definition of a river is the critical issue. Certainly compared to the Amazon, atmospheric rivers pale in comparison. Nonetheless it has been estimated that “at any given time, an
average of more than 90% of the total poleward atmospheric water vapor transport through the middle latitudes is concentrated in four to five narrow regions.”
Envisioning those narrow bands if meridonal moisture transport as rivers, and seen in satellite imagery, is visually useful. And most serious scientists will never confuse the volume of moisture in atmospheric rivers with land based rivers.
The snow torrents from atmospheric rivers —- hmmm! Maybe we should help out their prose
Eugene WR Gallun
>And most serious scientists will never confuse the volume of moisture in atmospheric rivers with land based rivers.
I’m not so sure about that.
If I assume an air current 100 miles wide, 2 miles thick, moving at 30 MPH, the mass flow is 4.97023E+13
lbs/hr. If 2% of the mass is water, the flow is water is 9.94046E+11 lbs/hr or about 4,453,000 cu ft/sec.
For comparison, the Mississippi average flow at New Orleans is 600,000 cu ft/sec. The Amazon is 7,381,000 cu ft/s.
“I’m not so sure about that.”
PLS, thanks for doing this, it confirms what I suspected.
I did a rough calculation on how much water one of the hurricanes that came up out of the gulf rained out along its way north as about 1/3 the volume of Lake Erie.
PARTLY.. As if it’s melting… maybe it’s that’s warm ocean water melting the ice from underneath. No, that can’t be it. Sea ice is not only at an all time high but is thicker than they thought. This is a mystery. It must be those rivers of air, or maybe volcanoes or it could be the heat hiding in the deep ocean.
Conjecturing to prove your point on CAGW. Well we didn’t know about the rivers of air that carried water vapor. Really? That’s new? Oh and it confirms global warming. Thankfully, I don’t belong to that organization. An ever enduring question, ‘How do so many supposedly intelligent people become so deluded so easily?” . When does enough regional anomalous create a new paradigm? Or just the same one going forward? They didn’t find the Antarctic in a status quo. Looking at it differently, what would it be doing if AGW weren’t here? Melting? By the way, what happened to all of that latent heat? Were is it? Didn’t the temperature warm as the water vapor was converted to snow? All that back radiation that AGW has been so fervent about causing global warming?
Catastrophic Anthropogenic Regional Warming (No TM)
replace warming with your “paradigm” = CARP or rearrange for CRAP
That’s funny… CARP… sadly Obama has just sited “the warmest year on record” as a national security issue.
About the only thing not attributed to global warming is beheadings. No doubt that will change in the run-up to Paris.
Nope. They’ve got you covered there: The CAGW religion believes that Islamic terrorism is caused BY our presence and military and social and economic presence in the MidEast which is caused BY our need for oil which is caused BY our energy policies and economic demands for oil which is causing our (lack of) catastrophic anthropenic global warming the last 18 years and fours months.
if we did not use any fossil fuels and were enveloped in the hippies’ 100% sustainable economies of early death and horse-drawn carts across mud-filled roads pulling stone plows to feed cold peasants starving each winter in natural fibers huddled around locally-grown wood fires heating locally-drawn water (which last happened sometime in the early 1200 BC’s before the copper and lead and salt mines were first dug out) then we would have no Islamic violence.
Other than the 700 AD – 1600 AD invasions of Spain, France, Israel, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, all of North Africa, all of the East African coasts, all of today’s Mideast, India, Afghanistan, southern Russia, and half of eastern Europe up to the siege lines around Vienna. I mean, if it were not for our capitalistic energy policies and our dependence on the evil fossil fuels, Islamic violence would never have occurred since Mohammend conquered Mecca and Medina in 1400 years ago. ALL terrorism since then has been totally created by our energy policies and the discovery of oil in the MidEast by the colonist British between 1910 and 1920. /sarchasm – the gaping whole between Obama and reality
Ferdberple, the head loppers are already cashing in on global warming.
http://breakingenergy.com/2014/12/09/water-terrorism-how-militant-groups-are-taking-advantage-of-climate-change-impacts/
Okay, so the story goes…
“It is the first to look at the effect of atmospheric rivers on Antarctica and to explore their role in cryospheric processes ”
This would clearly imply that it is THE FIRST STUDY of the phenomenon. Obviously it has a name, but they’ve never studied it and it’s effect on Antarctica. But for some reason, they have absolutely no problem declaring from the onset that what they are studying for the first time is:
A: Unusual.
B: Caused by AGW…
“The unusually high snow accumulation in Dronning Maud Land in 2009″
” Earth’s warming climate to manifest itself in anomalous regional responses. ”
How did they come to the conclusion that this is an unusual process? Really? A season with a lot of snow in Antarctica is unusual???
How long have humans been established in Antarctica? How far back do the snow fall records go for this to be remarkable?
The authors of this appallingly bad paper seem to have been thinking of ‘Camelot’ when they are surprised that things aren’t the same every year (lyrics suitably amended for the southern hemisphere):
ARTHUR:
It’s true! It’s true! The crown has made it clear.
The climate must be perfect all the year.
A law was made a distant moon ago here:
January and February cannot be too hot.
And there’s a legal limit to the snow here
In Camelot.
The winter is forbidden till June
And exits September the second on the dot.
By order, summer lingers through March
In Camelot.
Camelot! Camelot!
I know it sounds a bit bizarre,
But in Camelot, Camelot
That’s how conditions are.
The rain may never fall till after sundown.
By eight, the morning fog must disappear.
In short, there’s simply not
A more congenial spot
For happily-ever-aftering than here
In Camelot.
Camelot! Camelot!
I know it gives a person pause,
But in Camelot, Camelot
Those are the legal laws.
The snow may never slush upon the hillside.
By nine p.m. the moonlight must appear.
In short, there’s simply not
A more congenial spot
For happily-ever-aftering than here
In Camelot.
Up to two feet of snow fell in Antarctica; not once but maybe nine times in 3 years! Who knew? They didn’t in May 2009 because the Princess Elisabeth is a summer only station, manned November to February:
http://www.antarcticstation.org/
almost as contrived as this….
” The resulting snow accumulation partly offset recent ice loss from the Antarctic ice sheet”
Are these events actually anomalous “extreme weather events” like they claim? The EAIS is up to 4,500 m thick and that is in places that receive 25-50 mm of snow per year. The 4,500 m of glacier ice represents about 45,000 m of snowfall, then factor in sublimation as well as flow rate, and that would require even more snowfall to accumulate the ice sheet. I would think that an area that dry would require “anomalous” years of high snowfall throughout its entire history to accumulate that much ice.
P.S. Does a gradual thickening of the AIS over time account for why previous interglacial periods had higher sea levels?
As Jim Steele noted above, atmospheric rivers have been talked about for a long time. The “Pineapple Express” is one I have used many times to explain to the uninitiated how “normal” some of our so called “extreme” weather events are. We have known for a long time the havoc a “blocking high” can have when warm pacific air meets colder artic air or descends the east slope of the rockies. As much as some want to call it climate change, it’s just weather. Growing up with ranch people who were born at the same time as my country (Canada) was born provides a good perspective on weather, adaptation, and how lucky we are to live in an era of energy abundance.
Most people can understand the concept of an “atmospheric river” in the age of dailey satellite representations on the six o’clock news. Whether it is technically “correct” is irrelevant (IMHO). It gets the message across and people might even understand the weather better.
No axes to grind. Have a good day. Sitting under a high, enjoying the radiation. 😄
Vancouver Island sees the Pineapple Express from time to time. It’s characterized by copious rainfall and mild temperature. The charts at the time show a pretty narrow flow stretching from near Hawaii to our coast.
The term ‘atmospheric river’ implies that the water at the discharge point originated (left the ocean surface) far away and stayed airborne over hundreds of miles before suddenly rising, cooling and dumping on us.
That’s somewhat believable since it’s a winter phenomenon with nice warm temps, but I wonder if someone can describe the mechanics of it.
What’s happening at the half-way point for example; is it raining or evaporating or neither?
the interesting thing is that it is an extended low, that for some reason doesn’t collapse along its short axis.
the closest analogy I can think of is the air curtain you see in the doors of supermarkets. Somehow the moving air acts as a wall, preventing air from moving through the wall.
A 2011 article in EOS defined an AR as
(1) integrated water vapor (IWV) concentrations such that if all the vapor in the atmospheric column were condensed into liquid water, the result would be a layer 2 or more centimeters thick; (
2) wind speeds of greater than 12.5 meters per second in the lowest 2 kilometers; and
(3) a shape that is long and narrow, no more than 400–500 kilometers wide, and extending for thousands
of kilometers, sometimes across entire ocean basins.
It is not clear how much precipitation is release over the AR’s entire path, but ARs release most of their moisture upon reaching the mainland and mountainous regions where uplift creates condensation and precip
Hmm. Looking at the graphic, had to remind myself that lows spin clockwise and highs counter-clockwise in the upside down part of the world. (With apologies to those south of the equator.)