By P Gosselin
2°C downward correction
Overall the NOAA had been forecasting a very mild winter for this year. But that forecast has been cooled down a bit, at least the early part of the winter.
The NOAA’s latest GFS run has substantially cooled the temperature outlook for December. In its earlier projection, it saw December in Europe coming in 1 to 2°C warmer than the long-term mean:
But using the latest available intimal conditions, the NOAA has a completely new mean temperature forecast for December 2023:
The December projection for Europe as whole comes in almost 2°C COOLER. That’s quite an impressive correction.
So unstable are models that attempt to look into the nea5r future of a chaotic system that they know far more little about than they like to make the public believe.
Hat-tip: SnowFan here.
Currently the GFS foresees “extreme cold wave around St. Nicholas in Central Europe,” reports Snowfan. “Now also the German DWD sees lots of snow. Analysis: With -20°C extreme frost on the Zugspitze and -27°C in NE Europe. ECMWF and GEM remain with plenty of snow in Germany at the beginning of December 2023. DWD: Snow low pressure “OLIVER” is on its way to Germany. ECMWF remains with early winter cold wave in Central Europe until well into December. NCEP remains with increasingly wintry cold in large parts of Europe.”
But, as the NOAA longer term weather forecasting has shown, there’s always a great amount of uncertainty. Anything under 5 days can be considered a forecast, and everything beyond 10 days is just weather speculation.
I appreciate NTZ bringing attention to this. The mainstream climate community often underemphasizes the role of natural variability and the inherent uncertainties in climate projections. Given the global diversity of climates, it’s inevitable that certain regions will experience either colder or warmer-than-average months. Understanding regional climate change is a complex task. What I find perplexing is the consistent use of the color red in forecasts for every month; it doesn’t seem to fully capture the nuanced and varied nature of these changes. This year, the Western U.S. experienced temperatures below the average, while the Eastern U.S. saw temperatures above average. Due to limitations in the accuracy of surface station measurements, determining the precise extent of the cold or warm conditions is challenging. If the surface data indicate a cold anomaly, the actual temperatures are likely even colder than what is reflected in the collected data.
They only have warm shades in the crayon box.
Plus there is the Urban Heat Island effect with 90% of the weather stations in urban areas
UHI can travel for miles downwind with the prevailing wind. When they are trying to find temperature anomaly differences in the hundredths digit, even a little UHI goes a long way to biasing some rural stations.
So possibly no boiling weather while trimming the tree this Xmas?
I will say it again. Snowfall records will be a feature of weather reporting for the next 9,000 years.
This month has not yet ended and Anchorage has a new snowfall record for November 2023:
So a 70year monthly record bettered in half the month.
Snow is made from water. Water comes out of oceans. Warmer ocean surface means more atmospheric water that means more snow over land below 0C – Simple.
The modellers are beginning to understand this simple process:
https://tc.copernicus.org/articles/17/4691/2023/
But they have not yet made the connection that as the ocean surface gets hotter, the snowfall eventually overtakes the snow melt and permanent ice begins to accumulate. The ice goes downhill into valleys that get hard to warm above 0C because it takes a lot of sunlight to get it to melt and any fresh snow increase reflection. Once the ice mountains form and the sea level reduces, the temperature on the ice has a higher differential with the ocean surface due to the temperature lapse rate and increasing difference in elevation.
The IPCC modelers haven’t figured out that the output of the Sun varies, either.
Snow and ice in Anchorage’s forecast for the 27th and 28th, and heavy snow on the 30th. I wonder how many of those modelers felt in would be too warm for snow, and the increased precipitation would only be in rain. Regardless, they once again reached the wrong results.
The Earth is currently in an 11,700-year cold interglacial period between very cold glacial periods.
The interglacial periods usually last about 10,000 years so a glacial period may start at any time.
The Grand Solar Minimum that has just started might be the catalyst to start a new glacial period.
yeah right…
After a humongous high pressure system has sat on Europe all summer, pulling down the tropopause so much you can climb Mont Blanc and visit the stratosphere.
That thing pulled all the water out of Europe, there’s nothing there to store/retain any heat and there’s nothing in the ground/soil anymore to retain any water. No tress. No plants. No nuffink.
Fortunately it dumped a lot of water onto the UK so things are ‘holding up’ so far.
Temperature right now (07:55GMT 26 Nov) in Marseilles on the Mediterranean coast is hovering around freezing despite the Mistral (a supposedly HOT wind) blowing a near Gale Force 10 offshore, carrying away what heat there left in Central France.
The Doomsday Machine is rolling…………
I’ll say it dumped lot of water on the UK! Where I walk my dogs, has been like a swamp! Instead of walking boots, i’d’ve been better off with snorkel and flippers
UK is going to get more water, the frozen kind that was supposed to be “a thing of the past”.
Weather Map and Snow Conditions for United Kingdom (snow-forecast.com)
Sorry for some reason posted the wrong image. Try again.
Weather Map and Snow Conditions for United Kingdom (snow-forecast.com)
Looking at the map, I assume the red dots are where snow is expected. If so, one of them is directly over where I live. Now where did I leave my skis?
The US is using more cheaper natural gas.
The winter that has begun in North America and Europe may be the longest winter in decades in these regions. A great deal of energy will be needed.
Though much of December may be on the balance warm relative to averages, a significant stratospheric warming event in December is going to severely disrupt the polar vortex and drive Arctic air deep into the N. America and Europe starting about the 2nd or 3rd week of January and going on into February.
From Joe at weatherbell:
Vortex knocked off the pole
Looks like we are getting that Dec 5-15 this year (the same look at Dec 1-10 1960 keep in mind to get there thw warming had already begun, which its doing this week
Severe weather Europe has lots of good weather stuff every few days.
https://www.severe-weather.eu/
It is just weather.
It seems, Joe Bastardis forecast was correct, despite the laughing contrarians 😀
Yep! Looking more and more like it all the time and that includes the initial winter forecast he put out in the Spring.
Ha! They still aren’t even close.
This is going to be a winter that tests the electrical power generation for much of Europe I think.
All of the models with the possible exception of the JMA have been showing pretty much the same thing for the European winter until recently with the CSFv2 lagging behind all the other model ensembles in showing the coming cold and snow.
Joe shows the huge change in the models in his latest Saturday summary. The part on Europe begins at about the 1 minute mark.
WeatherBELL Analytics
But now here is what the ECMWF is showing for weeks 1 &2
And weeks 3 to 6
Correction. The part on Europe begins at about the 11 minute mark. Sorry.
Time to buy season passes ski tickets at your favorite ski slopes.
The Sun has just started into a Grand Solar Minimum. That should cool the planet for 40 years or so. We should hope that the GSM isn’t a catalyst for another glacial period.
Solar physicist, Valentina Zharkova, discovered how two magnetic dynamos at different depths in the Sun give the 11-year sunspot cycle and another cycle of around 400 years. She says that the Sun is going to be cooling enough to lead to a mini-ice age for around 40 years with probable crop failures starting in a few years.
‘Modern Grand Solar Minimum will lead to terrestrial cooling’
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7575229/
NOAA agrees, and forecasts that the Sunspot Number currently around 100-200 will start dropping starting in 2025 and reaching single digits in 2031 and zero in 2040 when their forecast ends. The cooler sunspots are associated with hotter areas that increase solar output and fewer sunspots will reflect a lower solar output along with a lower magnetic field allowing more galactic cosmic rays to increase cloud cover and trigger more volcanoes leading to the earth cooling.
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/predicted-sunspot-number-and-radio-flux
My favorite NOAA forecast, more normal than normal for the next 3 months:
Here’s mine!
NOAA has lost their way and are failing to forecast weather, at all.
In most of the US today it is too cold to go outdoors for any length of time without technology, in the form of warm clothes.
There was a VEI4 or VEI5 volcanic eruption o/a Sept 24 in Canada, roughly at the NW corner of their Saskatchewan Province. Volcanic SO2 aerosols from this eruption will quench the current El Nino and will probably drive temperatures down to a La Nina level over the coming months.
Should be a colder than expected winter..
This El Nino was already failing to meet the hype and appears to be trying to transform into a Modoki.
rah:
The cooling volcanic SO2 aerosols were the reason for the El Nino temperature drop between Sept and Oct.
rah:
Here is the image of the eruption
Here is a map from USGS.gov that lists all volcano eruptions and 4.5+ earthquakes.
No volcano eruptions from April 2022 through October 2023 in North America.
Funny, the Canadian government and the Saskatchewan government make no mention of any active volcano in Sakatchewan.
There wasn’t an eruption anywhere in Canada in 2023. Trying to sort out what’s there – it’s too far north for the mount Meager volcano which may have heated up slightly in 2022 but certainly didn’t erupt. It’s a puzzler.
In fact I would go so far as to say that there is no volcano at all in the location posted, let alone one that may have erupted. BurlHenry you are either lying your ass off or you’re a gullible idiot that someone else has lied to and you never even bothered to check out this information.
NOAA will have to revise its hurricane prediction, too.
The hurricane season is officially over November 30, with fewer than normal hurricanes. NOAA didn’t predict this.
But the ACE is well above the average for every basin and so that is what they will focus on. When one looks at it, the only really big storm this year in the Atlantic was LEE. All the rest were compact storms.
As I write this at my central Indiana home it is raining and 36 deg. As an Alpine and Cold weather warrior I will tell you this is dangerous weather for the outdoorsman and when it happens that arctic cold air comes right behind it, it gets potentially deadly real fast for those not prepared to deal with it.
The only loss of life to cold weather we had in 3rd Bn. 10th SFG(A) occurred when a team up in the white mountains got wet in this kind of weather and then an arctic blast came on the heals of it that night. The whole team was hypothermic and contact was lost with several team members as they struggled to get off the mountain.
The next day the body of the single fatality was found. He had been one of those that got separated. He tried to cross a fast running stream on a log. He fell and the strap of his ruck caught on a branch sticking out holding his head and shoulders above the water with the rest submerged. When we found him there was a dome of ice over his head from the splashing water.
He was wearing a large ALICE pack and the shoulder straps have quick releases easily reached so a soldier can drop the ruck very quickly. Obviously in that case the guy was so hypothermic that he had lost all situational awareness. All he apparently knew was he had to get down off the mountain as quickly as possible.
Thank you for your service.
tough gig being a mountain soldier….
Yes it is, but I would think being a jungle soldier is just as tough, if not tougher. Diseases, infections, insects, snakes, heat, etc………….
All soldiering is tough. Wandering away from your unit is not a good survival technique.
Hypothermia effects mental acuity and by stage 2 there is a serious decline in the ability to reason, problem solve, and even in memory. The whole team was suffering from stage 1 or 2. That is part of what makes hypothermia so dangerous when there is no one in their right mind to take the proper actions for survival.
I don’t need no stinkin’ charts or graphs. We will have a substantial cold spell this winter. How do I know? I planted a new coconut palm last month. I should have waited for spring but I did it anyway. That palm will now die when the inevitable cold spell comes in.
I suspect that the citrus growers down there are going to take a hit this winter.
Actually, citrus needs a cold spell or two to sweeten. But with coconut palms, one cold night can kill them. And I mean real cold, under 40F, not Florida “cold” which is anything under 60F.
“Anything under 5 days can be considered a forecast, and everything beyond 10 days is just weather speculation.”
Yup. The recent ‘forecast’ of wet (pineapple express) weather on the west coast. Didn’t happen.
Sometimes the limit is three days.
??
“that they know far more little about”
??
Thanks for the article.
Another wave of very heavy snowfall in the Alps is forecast.
Hannibal couldn’t have crossed the Alps today with his Elephants.
Arctic air will not leave Europe.
