Trixology
Weather => General Weather Discussion => Topic started by: wurzelmac on January 17, 2014, 05:06:07 PM
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Hi WeatherCatters,
just want to report that we suffocate under the snow - I think it is enough!
(http://wetter.unterwurzacher.at/bilder/IMG_5952.JPG)
Cheers,
Reinhard
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Hi Reinhard
Yeah it looks like you have had your share of the white stuff this year
we have had 16" i take that back 17" and that has been enough for me but they are calling for 1-3 more inches tonight how much have you had so far this snow season?
cheers
[cheers1]
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Dear Reinhard, Randall, and WeatherCat users fed up with the weather status quo,
I don't have exactly the same pain, but you can bet I dearly wishing for a change in the weather pattern. Here is a photo of the hills near my house:
(http://canebas.smugmug.com/Nature/Calamities/Drought-parched-California/i-gVDjQsB/0/L/IMG_3459-L.jpg) (http://canebas.smugmug.com/Nature/Calamities/Drought-parched-California/i-gVDjQsB/A)
These hills should be a vibrant green by now. We are under a red flag warning for fire - in January!?!?!!?
Last year in May, the warnings were justified:
(http://canebas.smugmug.com/Nature/Calamities/Wildfire-in-hills-above-Ivy/i-PscNSxj/0/L/IMG_2475-L.jpg) (http://canebas.smugmug.com/Nature/Calamities/Wildfire-in-hills-above-Ivy/i-PscNSxj/A)
It stands to reason that if California is stuck in a drought, the same mechanism is leaving you guy stuck with endless snow.
Let's all hope for an end to this weather rut!!
Cheers, Edouard [cheers1]
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We've had several storms that dropped 2 feet each and we currently have 2 feet on the ground.
Reinhard, your photo is brilliant! I can see you are an expert in snow removal.
Edouard, yours are scary.
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@ Randall
At the moment we have approximately 100 cm of snow (39 inches?) - since snow-season begun I measured 207 cm (81.5 inches) of new fallen snow.
@ Edouard
Hopefully you get some of the cold & wet from the northeast - here in Europe news have told an extreme Cold in America.
@ BlickJ11
[snow] Today I have done the removal of our whole roof - it is getting a bit warmer and the fallen snow is - maybe - a bit too heavy for our nice old roof. ;) Worked 6 hours to remove the snow from the roof and then from the street...
(http://wetter.unterwurzacher.at/bilder/IMG_5969.JPG)
now I am in for a beer (or three...) [sweat2]
Cheers,
Reinhard
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A short update:
http://www.unterwurzacher.at/galerie/Galerie_2014/05_Neuschnee.html
Yes, the subtitles are german, but I think you all can imagine ...
Cheers,
Reinhard
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Thanks for sharing the photo essay.
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Dear Blick, Reinhard, and WeatherCat fans,
Hopefully you get some of the cold & wet from the northeast - here in Europe news have told an extreme Cold in America.
Unfortunately, the reason for the bitterly cold weather in the eastern part of the United States appears to be the same as our drought. There is a huge bubble of high pressure in the Pacific right in front of the normal jet stream path on the west coast of North America. So the jet stream is forced unusually far north and then plunges back down into the rest of the United States bringing arctic air as it does.
So at least for Randall, Steve and other folks in the Midwest and East coast of the United States, the weather causing California's drought is also producing the horrible cold and snow. Honestly, I suspect you can find repeating weather features such that even your snow Reinhard is tied into this static weather pattern.
Edouard, yours are scary.
I'm afraid so!! (http://www.canebas.org/Weather/LWC_forum/Custom_emoticons/eek2.gif)
Cheers, Edouard [cheers1]
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I know it must sound clich? by now, but it all comes from global warming. Yes! That's right. The extREME cold is being caused by global warming. Here's the mechanism:
1> Arctic Summers that melts all the sea ice exposes darker Arctic Ocean to solar thermal loading.
2> Fall and Winter barometric pressures at surface are higher due to thermal unloading as air temperatures are lower than ocean temperatures.
3> Rising air near the ocean surface destabilizes arctic oscillation. (Note that when the surface pressure is lower in the polar region, the middle latitude jet stream is able to flow strongly and consistently from west to east due to the higher differential in air pressure between regions. However when the surface pressure is higher in the polar region, there is less difference in pressure between the polar and middle latitudes, causing the jet stream gyrate between polar and middle latitudes.)
4> The north/south oscillation strengthens permanent cyclones in the Pacific and Atlantic, creating drought conditions on the west coast of the US and a situation where arctic air can easily penetrate across Canada and the Central US as well as penetrating through to England and Europe without being blocked by the North Atlantic oscillation.
Gee! I tried to simplify that so that it would be easy to communicate, but I still ended up writing quite a bit.
Anyway, here's the links where I got my information, if anyone wants to dig deeper.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_oscillation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_oscillation
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7a/Arctic_Oscillation.png/250px-Arctic_Oscillation.png)
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Dear Bull Winkus and WeatherCat climate observers,
I know it must sound clich? by now, but it all comes from global warming.
Not to disagree exactly but to throw in what I think is a very appropriate word of caution. The first computer simulations predicting the effects of global warming date from the early 1990s. There has been a lot of effort invested in trying to understand what CO2 emissions are doing to the global climate. Yet, nobody seems able to make accurate long-term climate forecasts. Even more troubling, it is clear that the short term forecast models are not longer as accurate or consistent as they once were. If climate change were purely and simply a result of human-caused greenhouse gases, we would expect to be able to predict in advance phenomena like the current drought in California. That is not happening. As late as November of 2013, the National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center was predicting a normal rainfall year for California.
There is an inconvenient truth to toss back at Al Gore. For the vast majority of earth's history, the climate has been much more varied and extreme than the past 10,000 or so years in which human civilization flourished. So contrary to our expectations, the climate we have experienced during all that time was - paradoxically - an anomaly. While humans clearly have benefited from it, past earth climatic history is clear: there is simply no reason to expect it to continue - global warming or not.
That unfortunately throws a particularly difficult monkey wrench into the hopes that simply reducing greenhouse gases with restore the "balance." The physics behind the effects of greenhouse gases is clear and unassailable. The trouble is that we have no clear understandings of the circumstances that have lead to the mild climate anomaly that has permitted human civilization to thrive.
The upshot is that the effects of human activity could have already destabilized climatic conditions such that they cannot return to their former benign conditions. Since the past conditions in which humans had thrived was an anomaly: what guarantee do we have that reducing greenhouse gases will restore a climatic condition, that statistically speaking, should not have persisted in the first place?
What is point of view suggests is that we are gambling with the idea that reducing greenhouse gases can reverse the destabilizing of what once was a benign climatic situation. The alternative point of view is to resign ourselves to a future period of more extreme climatic variations and prepare for it. Given that we live in a time of limited economical resources, we are being forced to choose between one of these two strategies and clearly there is a political preference for the more fairy-tale outlook that we can undo the damage humans have done. What if we can't?
Obviously the fate of millions, perhaps billions, could rest on using our resources wisely to confront the mostly likely outcome of climate change.
Definitely not a happy thought . . . . (http://www.canebas.org/Weather/LWC_forum/Custom_emoticons/pout.gif)
Edouard
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Quite thoughtfully stated Edouard. I see your talents extend beyond automobile restoration and Weathercatting.
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Can't say that I disagree, Edouard. You encapsulated the issue beautifully! This ole Earth has seen some mighty big swings in climate. In the first two graphs, the present time is on the right. In the third, the present is on the left.
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/65_Myr_Climate_Change.png)
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/Ice_Age_Temperature.png)
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Epica-vostok-grip-40kyr.png)
When you say the current climate condition is an anomaly, you must be referring to the relative stability of the current Holocene (11,700 years BP to now). Although, there was a short glacial period known as the Younger Dryas stadial, which began at approximately 12,900 BP and ended approximately 11,500 years BP, and another significant cooling known as the 8.2 kiloyear event.
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/57/Greenland_Gisp2_Temperature.svg/800px-Greenland_Gisp2_Temperature.svg.png)
I mention this most recent stadial, The Younger Dryas, because the onset was said to have occurred over a period of 10 years. That's abruptly quick in geologic terms. But it goes to show you? there are much larger forces than man at work here, and quite a few of them at that!
Perhaps the question scientists should be trying to answer is, "What makes the last 11 thousand years so different from before?" In other words, "What happened to create the current level of stability in such a sweet spot?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
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Hello Bull, Blick, Edouard and all other weather scientists,
it is a true pleasure to read through all your well thought statements for me. For thus weather is only a nice hobby to me, your posts help me to dive deeper into this - really fascinating!
Cheers,
Reinhard
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Dear Blick, Bull Winkus, Reinhard and WeatherCat weather ponderers,
There is a certain irony in the looking at climate in recent geological time. Just before humans had any impact on climate, the earth was swinging in and out of ice ages. We are in an interglacial period and the science strongly suggests that this period of beguine weather would have ended in another ice age. Some long term computer climate simulations still suggest that another ice age will finally occur even with the introduction of human generated greenhouse gases.
Thus, if humans had for some reason not developed technologies that produced greenhouse gases, humans might have attempted to artificially generate those gases to try to prevent another ice age. Perhaps that is something we all should keep in mind when listening to proposals to "engineered climate modification."
As the old saying goes: "You can fool some of the people all the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool Mother Nature!" [biggrin]
Cheers, Edouard [cheers1]
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Serious weather warnings regarding this coming weekend - hopefully not too much snow arriving. :o
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Hi Reinhard and WeatherCat climate watchers,
Serious weather warnings regarding this coming weekend - hopefully not too much snow arriving. :o
Well, the drought wasn't broken by a long shot, but there has been a slight change around here. We had a bit of rain last night. 5-times as much rain as we have for all of January . . . . . 0.05" (http://www.canebas.org/Weather/LWC_forum/Custom_emoticons/eek2.gif)
However, there is a chance for some more rain tonight, another chance on Sunday, and the medium rain models now bring rain into the area the following weekend. That's all smoke and mirrors until the rain actually starts falling, but if the weather changes around here, it stands to reason that the weather patterns would be shifting globally.
All we can do is hope!
Cheers, Edouard [cheers1]
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but if the weather changes around here, it stands to reason that the weather patterns would be shifting globally.
Cheers, Edouard [cheers1]
It better not change Edouard, we have not had any snow and ice yet, and I was hoping t was going to stay that way until Spring finally arrives. [biggrin]
[cheers1] JC [cheers1]
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We got a foot of snow in the mountains of northern Utah. We're pulling for rain for our neighbours to the west Edouard.
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Here is a link to photos from our region (http://www.dolomitenstadt.at/2014/01/31/schicken-sie-uns-ihr-persoenliches-schneefoto/) - incredible snow!
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Wow Reinhard. Thanks for the photos.
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Wow Reinhard. Thanks for the photos.
x2!!!!!!!!
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X3 !! Amazing!