New York Today reads New York Major Snowstorm Barrels In
Of course Jim’s flight out is cancelled. So you are wondering why this is “The Liljegren Blizzard Effect”?
Well, in December, the DHS convened a nearly last minute meeting in Washington DC. The day of the meeting, the papers read Snow blankets U.S. East; Washington offices, many schools closed. For that blizzard “.. federal government offices were shut for the day”, but the meeting was small involving only a few people. Other than Jim everyone was officed in DC. They rescheduled for the next day, he sat in a hotel for a day and the meeting took place the next day. Jim returned in time to attend my nieces graduation dinner.
As a result of that meeting, a larger meeting was convened inviting people from several parts of the country. Jim and Dave were to present early this afternoon. This happens to be mostly Jim’s part of the project, so he’s doing the main presentation. He flew out yesterday afternoon. Dave had custody of his kids and (lucky for him!) couldn’t leave yesterday, so planned to board an early flight.
Naturally, a blizzard swooped in.
During breakfast, I got a call from American Airlines: Jim’s outgoing 5pm flight was already canceled. Later I got a call from Jim– the entire meeting is cancelled as many attendees probably won’t arrive and things are expected to be so bad that even some in New York City can’t attend.
I’ve been getting periodic calls from Jim and American Airlines about various and sundry cancellations and attempts to reschedule flights out of New York. In the meantime, Jim was trying to get a bus to Newark airport to catch the flight AA scheduled out of that airport.
Last he called, he reported that while waiting for the bus, he’d tried to get out of the blustering wind and snow to stand in the lobby of a convention center at 101 Park Avenue. No dice; evidently the people in the convention center will not take pity on a poor midwesterner buffeted by high winds and pelted with snow. He has to wait outside. Jim’s diagnosis: “That’s New York hospitality for you!”
Oh well. You go to New York to report on work you are doing to save them from terrorists. The snow machine turns on and the New Yorker’s make you stand outside in the blustering wind. Such is life. (Good thing his coat is thick and he’s wearing the wool flannel trousers I made him! )
I told Jim I was tracing out another set of pants based on my attempts to write a script that will make trouser patterns people can download. (So far: two pair of mostly successful trousers. In between I made a polar fleece jacket for Mom. Jim is wearing ‘mach 1’ and ‘mach 2’ a few times and I’m tweaking the pattern draft based on observations. Some use between updated drafts helps diagnose issues fully. For example: The 2nd pair is a “slimmer” fit and had a “less ample rear” adjustment coded. The third pair is even slimmer, and I’m adjusting the front pockets a bit based on Jim’s diagnosis of the pockets. Obviously, the sewing activities is distracting from writing climate posts!)
If he manages to get home, we’ll have nice roasted chicken. I think I should go get some nice wine too. . .
‘Mach 1’ and ‘Mach 2’ pants? They must be extremely streamlined. 😉
Was that a sonic boom I heard?
Harold W–
Absolutely!
Do you spot weld the trouser seams? ;o))
He’s stuck in Newark!!
“lucia
He’s stuck in Newark”
I am sure there must be lots for him to do in Newark; places to go and sights to see. The locals have a variation of the game of ‘Pooh Sticks’, gambling for small stakes on the order that mobsters float between the Central Avenue and Bridge Street bridges.
Kudos on designing “climate” appropriate pants!
Wonder how soon will it overtake the Gore effect?
DocMartyn,
Oh… there is a whole saga. If he’d delayed, and not tried so hard to get home he’d be stuck in Brooklyn. The upside of that would be that he’d get better food because the hotel in Brooklyn had a better restaurant than the hotel at the Newwark airport. The downside would be that the taxpayer would be paying more for the hotel in Brooklyn. Either way he really wouldn’t be getting out much. It’s a blizzard.
I don’t think Jim will be making it to the gambling dens. They may have closed for weather too!
David: Jim and I tend to be cold. I was delighted when I found fairly inexpensive mostly wool machine wash fabric! I suspect this was left overs from a factory that makes uniforms for some boyschool way up north (Maine?) But it’s beautiful fabric, and made nice slacks. Plus, I don’t need to dry-clean, which is nice if you want to wear things often (and/or the cuffs get dirty or slushy!)
Heck, the pants I’m making today are 50/50 poly/wool. They claim to be dry-clean only. But I know better….
(Seriously, if you sew, you can test the ‘dry clean only’ claim. You cut a chunk off the fabric and toss it in the washing machine. The only thing washing did was make it shrink — just like 100% cotton. There was no other noticeable issue after washing. So… I threw the fabric in the washer, shrank it and *then* made the pants. If I hadn’t pre-shrunk the fabric before sewing the pants would shrink about 5″ in length after making. That would certainly be a good reason that slacks should be “dry clean only” if made from not preshrunk fabric. But…well… bag that. This is about $10 of fabric and I’m trying to learn pattern drafting. They are not going to be “dry clean only”! Oh. Do not try this with 100% wool. It will felt if tossed in the washer. But 50%/50% blends often are machine washable– and this fabric is now!)
“Oh well. You go to New York to report on work you are doing to save them from terrorists. The snow machine turns on and the New Yorker’s make you stand outside in the blustering wind. Such is life. (Good thing his coat is thick and he’s wearing the wool flannel trousers I made him! )”
If I did not think I knew you better, Lucia, I would swear you were making a pitch that you were making the world safe from terrorists through pattern making and sewing.
“If he manages to get home, we’ll have nice roasted chicken. I think I should go get some nice wine too. . .”
Talk about stark contrasts: a night in Newark, New Jersey or roast chicken and wine at home.
Yes. On the contrasts…. the reason he is stuck in Newark is that he wanted to maximize the chance of getting home. It looked like he might be able to fly out, so he left Brooklyn. He knew that if he stayed in Brooklyn he was stuck in Brooklyn. In the end, if he’d had to rank the choices, stuck in a hotel in Newark was the least desirable of the three choices.
On the clothing: I merely mean that if you are going to get stuck in the blustering wind, it’s good to have a thick coat and wool flannel trousers. Those slacks are much warmer than any dress trousers I can find in ready to wear! He loves those in winter.
He loves them so much that’s one of the reasons for my deciding to draft patterns. He wants more home-made pants not only because he can’t find stuff that fits him, but he’s discovered that some of the stuff looks ‘normal’ (i.e. as if he could have bought it as ready to wear) but the fabrics can be warmer.
(The one issue is those pants are baggy in the seat. Of course, this is often an issue– but still, it would be nice to cure it. And… it is turning out to be easier to solve by drafting from scratch even if that seems to be taking a long time from the POV of blog readers. The sewing binge is also resulting in quite a bit of “research” on places to buy fabric for men’s slacks, looking at what’s available in ready to wear and so on. You might think finding fabrics for men’s clothes is easy– but that means you haven’t visited the fabric stores in the US. It’s 50% crafts and of the fabric, that’s 90% polar fleece, stuff for kids, quilting, bridal-wear, and generally stuff for women’s skirts etc. There is very little ‘nice for men’s trousers’ stuff. )
Lucia, I think you know that my first comment in my post above was a lame attempt at humor – although my wife contends that people do not always realize my attempts as such.
With all your interests and skills I would suppose we should call you a Renaissance Lady -seriously.
Also, Lucia, I was wondering where on your blog could or should I post a comment that would be off topic for the thread. I made comments about warming trends versus cloudiness and a question about Norwegian cooking on a thread that was next to dead and I received no replies. I also wanted to briefly comment on my recent experiences learning Bayesian statistics using R.
Nothing is off topic on this thread!!
I showed my Chinese Post-Doc the ‘Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam’ sketch by Monty Python today. Watching someones face as they discover MP for the first times is a joy.
He asked, ‘is there more of this?’
This post is taken from a thread that was nearly dead and it may well be that my post is what finally killed it. I promise to give up the ghost on this post if I see no interest here.
BillC and Andrew_FL, since the thread on which we were discussing the Weng paper and potential cloud effects on satellite temperature trends for the troposphere is closed, I’ll relate here that I was able to find 451 land based stations around the globe that had at least 10 years of mostly complete daily data for cloud cover, precipitation and mean temperature. I was attempting to download from KNMI on a continuous and automatic manner into R from the station data listed there, but for some unknown reason could not make it work – even after rereading what Steve McIntyre did awhile back. I went to the source of the data provided by KNMI and was able to conveniently download it into R. I have found that KNMI in attempts to present the data in the most likely useable forms sometimes make the downloading of extensive data into R more difficult. In such cases going back to the original source of the data that KNMI invariably provides makes the downloads easier.
To make a long story short, I measured temperature trends at each of these 451 stations with no precipitation and under cloudiness conditions at the ends of the cloud cover scale and found that the less cloudy conditions resulted in significantly higher temperature trends than the more cloudy conditions. This result may or may not have a bearing on the question that I posed about the Weng paper findings of higher trends under clear sky conditions over the oceans from satellite measurements of the troposphere. Was that finding an artifact of the satellite measurement due to clouds as the authors of Weng claimed, or at least implied, or was the difference real?
My investigation has also made me think about the resolution of station data versus satellite data and how this might affect the findings in Weng. I do not have a detailed feel for the uniformity of cloud conditions over the oceans, but I would guess that using the 2 degree by 2 degree areas for satellite measurements is doing some averaging over rather different cloud conditions.
I just tried to comment and it disappeared…
bill_c;
I just arrived and saw a “database error”. Let’s see if this gets in.
Why the heck didn’t he take the train to Newark. Wouldn’t have to wait outside and the train had to be better than the roads yesterday. Believe me, they were an absolute nightmare.
BobN,
I suspect he took the bus to the train station? Or I didn’t catch exactly what he said. Rest assured, while Jim doesn’t always know everything about everything, the one thing he does know by heart is the transportation system in New York and environs. Also Boston, and Washington DC. On the other hand, he doesn’t know much about the Chicago system.
However, I don’t know anything about the New York transportation system, so it’s easy for me to misreport. But I think he was waiting for a bus.
Kenneth,
I had a comment earlier I think it got lost, probably on my end.
A shorter version: What you’ve done sounds very interesting. Can post results or even see if you can put the data online somewhere for me to look at?
bill_c (Comment #122787)
I’ll collect my results in decent form and attempt to link to them from this thread.
One time it took five days to get back from AGU. Beautiful day in SF. Look at the posters Friday morning. Friend says hey, big storm developing back east. Panic, go to Oakland airport (like Newark without the amenities). No seats on earlier planes, scheduled plane is well, not gonna go. Book a flight headed east but not past the snow line. Call Ms. Rabett to find an airport hotel. Get to the next airport, rebook for some ungodly hour for the next stage, find an airport bus, go to the hotel, check out the beers and go to sleep wake up, call Ms. Rabett to book hotel for the next stage and so on and so forth. Get home, and dig the house and car out. Don’t complain.
Eli,
In 1998, Jim was stuck on the DES GROSSELIERS a Canadian icebreaker for longer than that. The Polar Sea came to get them and they were helicoptered off. Then, on the return trip, the Polar Sea had to answer a distress call. But there was a lot less running around. He just sat on the various ships. That’s probably what it was like on the russian not-an-icebreaker. Aurora Australis.
The iphone is a godsend during these things these days. He could now do lots of checking online instead of calling me or the travel agent!
My understanding is beers were consumed in the Newark hotel.
Jim got home last night. Cab ride is usually 30 minutes, it took 2 1/2 hours. But I figured it would be a bit long when I put the chicken in. Still was a little longer than I expected, but the roast chicken, rice, wine, & greenbeans were delicious!
Please send a few of those blizzards out west. Global warming has set up shop in SoCal with a big high pressure ridge offshore and it has been gorgeous and upper 70s to low 80s for two weeks. We are enjoying being outside but our mountains are still brown and dry as a bone right now which is unusual but not unprecedented. I’d like to put my order in for 15″ of precip. for February.
ivp0,
I wish I could. I’d love to send you some of this too:
Yikes! I guess all the global warming migrated west this year.
bill_c (Comment #122787)
“Can post results or even see if you can put the data online somewhere for me to look at?”
The data for the cloudiness levels versus temperature trend analysis were taken from:
Klein Tank, A.M.G. and Coauthors, 2002. Daily dataset of 20th-century surface air temperature and precipitation series for the European Climate Assessment.
Int. J. of Climatol., 22, 1441-1453.
Data and metadata are available for mean temperature, precipitation and cloud cover for stations at:
http://www.ecad.eu/dailydata/predefinedseries.php
I used the blended ECA dataset and found stations that had at least 10 years of complete or very nearly complete data for temperature, precipitation and cloud cover. I compared the temperature trends for 2 levels of cloud cover: 0, 1 and 2 versus 7 and 8. I used only those days with no precipitation.
The results are listed in the linked tables and give the station ID number, the start and end year for the trends and the trends for the 2 cloud cover levels. There were 427 unique stations, after removing duplicates, used for the calculating average trends and standard deviations.
As summarized in the tables the mean trend and standard deviation for cloudy days were:
Cloudy Mean Trend = 0.203 degrees C per Decade with SD = 0.509
While for the clearer days were:
Clear Mean Trend = 0.303 degrees C per Decade with SD = 0.734
The estimated pooled variance for the combined data is:
sd^2= (n1-1)*sd1^2+(n2-1)*sd2^2)/(n1+n2-2)=0.400
The estimated standard deviation becomes:
sd12=(sd^2*(1/n1+1/n2))^(1/2)=0.043
And the t.value = (0.303-0.203)/0.043 =2.33
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/1600x1200q90/197/zus6.png
http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/1600x1200q90/30/pvbw.png
“Still was a little longer than I expected, but the roast chicken, rice, wine, & greenbeans were delicious!”
Plus your husband was kept warm with clothes that you had made for him. Lucia, you know how to treat a man.
Kenneth,
I grabbed the cloud cover and the mean temperature raw data sets that you linked to and will begin to play with it. I suspect it may take a little while. Thank you…
bill_c (Comment #122806)
Also I did do the trends with precipitation days included and obtained cloudy day mean trend=0.219 with a standard deviation= 0.431 and a clearer day mean trend= 0.303 with a standard deviation= 0.746 and finally obtained a t.value=2.01