Storm Diego blasts California, will roar across southern US with snow, ice, rain, floods

Smoke from a California wildfire [image credit: BBC]

From huge wildfires to cold stormy weather in a matter of a few weeks in California.

A powerful storm will crawl across the southern tier of the U.S. over the next several days, delivering snow, ice, rain, floods and even a few tornadoes, says USA Today.

A powerful storm that slammed southern California Thursday will crawl across the southern tier of the United States over the next several days, delivering a nasty mix of snow, ice, heavy rain, floods and even a few tornadoes.

Ahead of the storm, Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin declared a state of emergency for all 77 counties in her state.

Space weather may predict future climates

While this may all seem a bit vague, it looks like a step in the right direction.

Historic space weather could help researchers better predict future events and atmospheric cycles, a new study in Space Weather reports.

This finding comes from scientists at the University of Warwick, who tracked space weather in solar cycles for the last half century, reports The Space Reporter.

That then revealed a repeatable pattern in the way space weather activity alters over each solar cycle.

Global temperature drops by 0.4°C in three years

Misleading manipulation of climate-related stats is an ongoing issue, as explained here.

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, says David Whitehouse @ The GWPF.

In science communication however, a simple graph can be worth far more than pictures particularly when the main point is that the last four years have been the hottest on record.

Strong chance of a new El Niño forming, says WMO

The last one finished in mid-2016 and was one of the strongest on record.

The World Meteorological Organization says there’s a 75-80% chance of the weather phenomenon forming by next February, BBC News reports.

The naturally occurring event causes changes in the temperature of the Pacific Ocean and has a major influence on weather patterns around the world.

It is linked to floods in South America and droughts in Africa and Asia.

Climate silly season continues: UK’s future climate

Hot on the heels of the latest, much-derided US climate report, the UK Met. Office’s crystal ball gazers have waded in with their own prognostications. They offer a ‘range of future scenarios’ which are based on concentrations of trace gases in the atmosphere, because that’s what they believe matters the most. Their predictions, or projections, are…predictable. Look out for words like ‘could be’ and ‘up to’.

The UK’s most comprehensive picture yet of how the climate could change over the next century has been launched today by Environment Secretary Michael Gove.

The UK Climate Projections 2018 (UKCP18) include:

— UK’s most comprehensive projections of climate change
— Data gives most detailed picture yet of temperature, rainfall and sea level rise over next century
— Cutting-edge science to help businesses and homes plan for the future

Wildfire? Homes Burned, People Killed? Must be Global Warming.

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Spot the crackpot. Clue – it’s not President Trump.

American Elephants

California  Governor Jerry Brown has said that “hundreds of billions” of dollars could be needed to adapt to man-made global warming in “the span of a few years” The Democrat added that “And it’s not millions, it’s billions and tens and probably hundreds of billions even in the span of a few years. We’ve got lots of work to do.”

California does have a “Climate Adaption Strategy” that is supposed to reduce the vulnerability of populations to the effects of future global warming like higher sea levels, more intense storms and more crop failures.

President Donald Trump said he’d pull federal funding if California did not “remedy” its wildfire problems, which Trump blamed for poor forest management practices for large wildfires.

Brown did mention that better forest management was necessary to getting fires under control, but then went on to say “those who deny” man-made global warming were “definitely contributing”…

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Ian Wilson: A Severe Case of Cognitive Dissonance

[For details on the graph see below]

Update 12/11/2018: Ian Wilson’s 2019 El Nino forecast can be found here.

Cognitive Dissonance: When a person or a group of people have attitudes, beliefs or behaviors that are in conflict with each other. Generally, this produces a feeling of mental discomfort that leads to an alteration in their attitudes, beliefs or behaviors that moderates their mental discomfort and restores balance.

I believe that the level of cognitive dissonance that we have about the influence of lunar tides upon El Nino events has become so large that something has to give.

In a series of blog posts in November 2014:

http://astroclimateconnection.blogspot.com/2014/11/evidence-that-strong-el-nino-events-are_13.html

I showed that between 1870 and 2025, the precise alignments between the lunar synodic [phase] cycle and the 31/62 year Perigean New/Full moon cycle, naturally breaks up into six 31-year epochs each of which has a distinctly different tidal property. Note that the second of these 31-year intervals starts with the precise alignment on the 15th of April 1870, with the subsequent epoch boundaries occurring every 31 years after that:

Epoch 1 – Prior to 15th April  1870
Epoch 2 – 15th April 1870 to 18th April 1901
Epoch 3 – 8th April 1901 to 20th April 1932
Epoch 4 – 20th April 1932 to 23rd April 1963
Epoch 5 – 23rd April 1963 to 25th April 1994
Epoch 6 – 25th April 1994 to 27th April 2025

I claimed that if the 31/62-year seasonal tidal cycle plays a role in sequencing the triggering of El Niño events, it would be reasonable to expect that its effects for the following three epochs:

A New Space Weather Metric

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Hard to see a daily view there, but the multi-decadal view is worth a look.

The Next Grand Minimum

This is an interesting post at Spaceweather.com.

The daily Thermosphere Climate Index (TCI) is now on Spaceweather.com. TCI is a relatively new space weather metric that tells us how the top of Earth’s atmosphere (or “thermosphere”) is responding to solar activity. During Solar Maximum, the top of our atmosphere heats up and expands. Right now the opposite is happening. Solar Minimum conditions are in effect, and this is causing the upper atmosphere to cool off

TCI was invented by Martin Mlynczak of the Langley Research Center along with other NASA and university colleagues. For the past 17 years they have been using the SABER instrument onboard NASA’s TIMED satellite to monitor the wattage of infrared emissions from the top of the atmosphere. Recently, they realized that those measurements could be used to summarize the state of the thermosphere in a single daily index, the TCI, expressed in watts (W). Moreover…

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Met Office fakes the Foehn effect

Descending air in the atmosphere rises in temperature as it is adiabatically compressed in the pressure gradient created by gravity acting on atmospheric mass. This has been known for centuries. However, the MET Office has decided to do away with this fundamental fact of physics in a short video it has produced.

Here is some more information on what we mean by the Foehn Effect pic.twitter.com/h8Zr9XJ2Y2

— Met Office (@metoffice) October 23, 2018

Even their own website page on the Foehn effect (now safely screenshotted and web-cited) tells us:

“ foehn air… becomes warmer and drier on the leeside after it is compressed with descent due to the increase in pressure towards the surface.”

Winter deaths in Scotland at highest level in 18 years

Scottish winter forecast [credit: BBC]

Whatever the causes may be, an excess of mild weather and/or low heating bills can safely be ruled out.

The number of people who died in Scotland last winter hit a 18-year high, new statistics have revealed.

There were 23,137 deaths between December 2017 and March 2018, according to the National Records of Scotland – the highest figure since 1999/2000, reports BBC News.

It also revealed that the seasonal increase in mortality – the number of “additional” deaths in winter – was significantly higher than in 2016/17.

The main underlying causes of the deaths were influenza and pneumonia.

Nothing Unprecedented about The Sea Surface Temperatures for Tropical Storm-Hurricane Florence’s Full Storm Track

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The title speaks for itself. Bob Tisdale dismantles the extravagant climate claims…

Bob Tisdale - Climate Observations

It’s been a couple of weeks since Hurricane Florence made landfall as a Category 1 storm. The weakening from a Category 4 storm must’ve really tweaked alarmists.

NOAA just updated their much-adjusted ERSST.v5 sea surface temperature dataset to include September 2018 data. So let’s take a look at the September sea surface temperature anomalies for Florence’s full storm track. 

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UK: ‘Near normal’ September follows record-breaking hot summer

Forecaster highlights the jetstream over the UK [image credit: BBC]

‘Record-breaking’ turns out to mean ‘as warm as three other UK summers’, but now things have calmed down. Probably just a temporary return to sanity until the next weather event, however unexceptional for the UK, gets the usual suspects agitated again.

The UK’s record-breaking hot summer was followed by a return to more typical weather in September, the Met Office has said.

Provisional figures show last month’s mean temperature across the country was 12.4C – safely below the all-time record for September of 15.2C, set in 2006, says BT News.

The average maximum temperature last month is estimated to have been 16.3C.
This was also well below the 2006 record of 19.2C.

Hurricane Florence: climate dynamics context

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A sort of post-mortem look at various issues surrounding Hurricane Florence. If pressed for time, ‘the take home point is that convincingly attributing any of this to human caused global warming is very challenging’ – see the summary.

Climate Etc.

by Judith Curry

“Impending massive hurricanes bring the best out of weather twitter and the worst out of climate twitter” – Joseph Maykut

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US ‘monster’ hurricane set to strengthen

Image credit: sanibelrealestateguide.com

Right on cue at the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season, three major storms are barrelling westwards. So far, the first one looks like being the most powerful. Mandatory evacuations for more than a million people near the US east coast have been declared.

North Carolina’s governor warns the state Florence will be a “life-threatening, historic hurricane”, reports BBC News.

Hurricane Florence – the most powerful storm to threaten the Carolinas in nearly three decades – is expected to strengthen, say forecasters.

Harry Wexler: Father of weather satellites

Tiros 1 instruments [credit: NOAA]

These are extracts from an ESA article. In 1954 British science-fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke wrote to Wexler promoting satellite ideas. In 1960 after years of work and lobbying the first weather satellite was launched.

Wexler was a man of vision, ready to face danger and to give his all to collecting useful data.

He was the first scientist to deliberately fly into a hurricane and also participated in polar expeditions.

His was the mind behind the very first meteorology satellite and even before it reached orbit, he was already dreaming of a global network of satellites to watch the weather worldwide.
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[He] gained a PhD in meteorology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1939.

How a volcano short-circuited Earth’s ionosphere to trigger “Year Without A Summer”

Volcanic eruption

‘The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora was one of the most powerful in recorded history, with a Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) of 7’, says Wikipedia.

The unusually cold year of 1816 has been linked to one of the most powerful volcanic eruptions in recorded history, and now we may know how, says New Atlas.

A new paper explains how electrified ash from the eruption could have “short-circuited” the Earth’s ionosphere and triggered the “Year Without A Summer.”

The year 1816 was a weird one, climatically speaking. Months that would normally be warm and pleasant were cold, rainy and overcast, leading to crop shortages across much of the Northern Hemisphere.

A new paper out of Imperial College London explains how electrified ash from the eruption could have “short-circuited” the Earth’s ionosphere and triggered the “Year Without A Summer.”

Five things we learned from last year’s Great American Eclipse

Credit: NASA

Temporary weather effects and more. For more background, there are several extra links in the original ScienceNews article.

A year after the total solar eclipse of 2017, scientists are still pondering the mysteries of the sun.

It’s been a year since the total solar eclipse of August 21, 2017, captured millions of imaginations as the moon briefly blotted out the sun and cast a shadow that crisscrossed the United States from Oregon to South Carolina.

“It was an epic event by all measures,” NASA astrophysicist Madhulika Guhathakurta told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in New Orleans in December. One survey reports that 88 percent of adults in the United States — some 216 million people — viewed the eclipse either directly or electronically.

Volkswagen in dispute with Mexican farmers over ‘hail cannons’

Mexican VW [image credit: retro-motoring.com]

This sounds totally bizarre – a local version of geo-engineering?

Mexican farming communities accused German auto giant Volkswagen on Tuesday of “arbitrarily” provoking a drought in the central state of Puebla to protect its newly manufactured cars from hail, reports Phys.org.

Volkswagen, which has a major plant in Puebla, has been using “hail cannons”—sonic devices that purport to disrupt the formation of hail in the atmosphere—to disperse storm clouds menacing the thousands of new cars parked on its lots.

Historic space weather could clarify what’s next

Solar flare [image credit: NASA/SDO]

Quoting from the research article’s plain language summary: ‘We find that some aspects of the space weather climate are in fact reproducible, they can be inferred from that of previous solar maxima. This may help understand the behaviour of future solar maxima.’ Solar wind variation is highlighted.

Historic space weather may help us understand what’s coming next, according to new research by the University of Warwick, says Phys.org.

Professor Sandra Chapman, from Warwick’s Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics, led a project which charted the space weather in previous solar cycles across the last half century, and discovered an underlying repeatable pattern in how space weather activity changes with the solar cycle.

Why is Heathrow so hot?

In the report ‘hottest day ever’ must mean ‘since the weather station was installed’, but we’re used to this kind of excitable exaggeration in BBC climate reporting. At least they are admitting the obvious here, that Heathrow has certain heat-related factors built-in.

It’s Europe’s busiest airport, says BBC News, and as well as attracting millions of passengers could Heathrow also be a magnet for the sizzling heat?