I don’t check the ENSO forecasts each week. I was a bit surprised to see the current forecast is for neutral conditions to continue and then be followed by… La Nina:
I know this can happen. But I generally expect El Nino – La Nada – La Nina – La Nada – El Nino – La Nada – La Nina and so on.
Out of curiosity, if it goes back to La Nina, will that be considered a separate event? Or do they call it one big long La Nina? What’s the criterion?
I’m guessing RSS will post their anomaly before UAH this month. Roy seems a bit busy:
Power is gradually being restored in and around Huntsville. UAH is closed till tomorrow, which would be my first day back to work in a week…except that I have to go to DC for the biannual NASA Aqua satellite review.
Yesterday I helped with the tornado cleanup effort in Fords Chapel, a small community northwest of Huntsville on the edge of Anderson Hills…an area that has now gone through its second major tornado disaster. The church group I was with spent most of our time with chainsaws cutting up downed trees and dragging them to the road to be picked up.
BTW: I have reason to believe a frequent commenter lives near Memphis where some people are flooded out. I read blowing the levee near Cairo is supposed to help waters retreat there too. Hope you’re on high ground you are yours have not been harmed or majorly inconvenienced by this.
Also, anyone who sees RSS post– let me know!
… He then instructed them to fill the pipes with explosives, a process that will take about 20 hours.
Yep. Explosives! Cairo! Believe it or not, this is an Illinois/Missouri/Kentucky weather/politics issues.
It’s been raining. A lot. I think Andrew_KY (who lives in Ohio) has complained about it. The Ohio and Mississippi rivers have been rising and flood waters threaten to wipe the town of Cairo, Illinois off the map. If flood waters rise a tiny bit further, the Army Corp of Engineers are going to blow up a downstream levee, which will permit flood waters to spill over farmland in Missouri. The location of the levee is marked with an “A” below, Cairo is just upstream:
View Larger Map
Needless to say, the decision blow up one levee to safeguard the ones upstream is controversial. In particular, farmers in Missouri don’t like it. Lawsuits were filed: The SCOTUS ruling is that the Army Corp of engineers may blow up the Birds Point Levee if they judge this necessary. (My understanding is that blowing it up follows a plan established in the late 1920s. It’s been blown once before.)
While looking for videos that might show people the level of flood waters, the condition of nearby cities etc. I found this. It starts out somewhat neutral, but the point of view of the person making the video becomes very evident about 1/2 through. If you enjoy anti-Obama rants, scroll to the middle. Heck, if you don’t like them, you should scroll..
Yep: Weather. Not climate. The New York Times story is a more neutral and does not intimate anything about conspiracy theories, the end of the world and does not involve discussions of masonic symbols.
PS. I hope Roy Spencer in tornado stricken Alabama is ok and gets the UAH anomaly out soon. Then I’ll get back on my regular temperature anomaly discussions.
Update 10:06pm: I saw a tweet that said the first blast went off.
Lincoln Park (Chicago)
Molly in Downers Grove (next town over)
Thundersnow
Comment from SteveF:
SteveF (Comment#67802) February 1st, 2011 at 5:40 pm Edit This | Reply w/ Link
Cara Lucia,
Que sofrimento!
This is why I long ago moved to Florida. Today: 77F, breeze from the SW. Tomorrow: 78F, breeze from the west. Next day: 80F winds form the NW.
Curse you Steve!
Fenelon says the storm’s central pressure is equivalent to a Category 3 hurricane. He says this storm is a different type of event but that comparison shows the magnitude of the winds.
That wind map was seems to correspond to 7:30 am. By that time it seemed calm around here relative to portions of the night; I’ll be curious to read the peak speeds. Seems to me this is very early for the gales of November:
For those wondering how he current weather compares to historical storms, here is a list from The Chicago Tribune:
In Chicago, the barometric pressure could drop to 29.05, breaking the record of 29.11 for October, meteorologists said.
The weather service predicted that the storm will have the second-lowest pressure ever detected in the Great Lakes region. The Great Ohio Blizzard on Jan. 26, 1978, holds the No. 1 spot. This new storm’s pressure would be lower than that for the previous No. 2 Great Lakes event, the Armistice Day storm of Nov. 11, 1940. It would also surpass the storm on Nov. 10, 1975, that led to the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior.
My dead tree version of the Trib’ included a list of storms over the great lakes and included the anniversary storm, Nov. 10, 1998 when the barometer hit 28.55 in. somewhere over the great lakes. About a week later, my husband gave a presentation about his trip to the Arctic to weathermen in Iowa. During breaks they were all discussing the similarity between that storm and the Nov. 10 Edmund Fitzgerald storm. It must not have been as strong over Chicago though.
I found a cool new toy to check out the sea ice (and other things!) The toy is a program available as a downloadable .exe file. It will let you do cool things like quickly access images for sea ice or sun spots. The programmers have also coded features to let you subtract images separated by 1 day, month, or year, and also subtract two images of your choice.
To use the program, first visit the download page by clicking the little image link below:
The program is an .exe file and will run on your pc. Once you click, an icon will appear on your desktop. Chose that application to run; the program will connect to a host at iVu; the main page of iVu will display.
On the top panel, find the “file” view pull-down menu. Pull down, and then select JAXA. Afterwards the scan option to select from preconfigured choices of JAXA data.
You will then be able to scan the previous and current day ice. (Or, if you prefer the previous and current week sea ice.) A typical single day image will look like this:
Now, for the feature that will be most useful for ice watcher, pick “overlay” to subtract the most recent ice data from the previous data:
You can do similar things to check out sea ice, and sun spots.
The product developers currently letting people download this for free. They are also eager to learn what other features users might enjoy from their product. So, they’d love it if you would download iVu, play around with it bit and provide feedback on other features you’d like. You can leave feedback in comments.
Many people have already entered guesses for July’s UAH anomaly. I guessed 0.435C based on Channel 5 anomalies. Bill Buckner suggested that NOAA maps suggest lower surface temperatures than Channel 5. ( Channel 5 is not a perfect indicator of UAH temps. I can provide statistics on that later. )
Here’s the 30 day image from NOAA :
I don’t know B… I see a lot of white which is near a zero anomaly; I see very few negative anomalies. The weather in Antarctica looks pretty warm.Of course, that’s probably not an equal area projection, but still. Plus, surface temperatures and troposphere temperatures don’t always match.
I’m still betting on 0.435C based Channel 5. (I’m also mystified why Chicago isn’t blue on that map. It’s seemed consistently cool for July. Tom Skilling’s blog indicates it’s the coolest Chicago July in 118 years. )
If you want to watch how the temperature evolved, here is an animation of NOAA temperatures for the most recent 30 days.
[sockulator(../musings/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/noaa_animation.php)sockulator]
(I suspect this will update, so if you read this month’s after publication, it may show whatever the most recent 30 day temperatures are on the date you read it. I’m not sure. But the maps have time stamps, so you’ll be able to tell.)
Other NOAA global circulation animations available here: here.
Guesses so far:
Hmm.. I should enter these in a spread sheet and compute the average. Then we can compare that to Roy’s official reading when he posts it in a few days.
As a Chicagoan, I always chuckle when I read UK news reports about killer weather. Take this example from the UK Met office which begins
Britain is turning into a pressure cooker as hot, steamy air and intense sunshine roasts the country and kicks off the first serious heatwave of summer.
My reaction: July is two days off. We’re in the northern hemisphere. It’s getting hot here too. What do you expect?
Then, I just about bust a gut when I read the temperatures corresponding to “roasts” or “pressure cooker”:
The Met Office expects a high of 30C (86F) today, but warns that later in the week it could climb to 32C (90F) or even higher. And there could be many more uncomfortable nights ahead as thick clouds help to trap the day’s heat and humidity, with night temperatures of 18C (64F).
Believe it or not, the average June high for my zip code is 84F; the average low is 57F. Many local weather readers may well prefer 75F to 87F, but they probably wound not described 86F as a “pressure cooker” or “roasting”. More likely, they’d suggest it’s a nice day to take a swim.
According to Wikipedia, the all time high temperature for Chicago is 109F. (Yikes!) The timesonline report an all time high for Britain of 101.3F.
Admittedly, right now, we’re sitting pretty relative to the UK. Our current temperature is 74F. I walked to the grocery store and bought veggies for dinner. I do feel sorry for the Europeans sweating in 86F temperatures. If you want to avoid running the air conditioning, I’d suggest wearing a damp towel on your head and sipping a cold mojito. That’s what I plan to do in July.
I know very little about James Hansen’s tax plan. One of the reasons is that Hansen himself said very little about it during his recent well publicized speech commemorating his 1988 presentation to Congress. He blew his powder on more explosive sound bites, distracting everyone from actions he is proposing.
Still, Boris did notice Hansen mentioned this tax plan and is keen to discuss it. So, I’d like to open a formal thread here.
Meanwhile, Tokyo Tom mentioned the plan over at Volokh, and later wrote a post, which includes links to some discussion. So, those who want to learn more about the plan might want to visit the post and read more. In case you miss it, Tom includes a link to Hansen’s 2 page pdf with a very brief discussion of the tax plan and a link to “Who owns the sky” which evidently explains this plan further.
This book review from Amazon suggests the book won’t tell us much more than Hansen’s brief discussion:
Barnes’s system of pricing permits is modeled in part on Alaska’s plan, in which oil companies that drill in the state make payments that are distributed to Alaska residents through a dividend-producing trust. He likewise proposes that the revenues from emissions-permit sales should go to the public, with each citizen receiving an equal monetary share. In this very brief and disappointingly thin sketch of his system (he leaves the nuts and bolts to others), Barnes frequently sounds as if he’s making a repetitive sales pitch. Skeptics on both the left (who may not buy his free-market solutions) and the right (who may object to yet another tax on business) are unlikely to be moved by this book.
On a blog strategy matter, I’m going to throw out some advice to those who support Hansen’s position or the Hansen/Barnes tax plan.
Don’t write blog posts apologizing for or explaining Hansen’s frustration that people aren’t jumping to adopt his vaguely described plans. Don’t write posts suggesting you think people should get creative and figure out some way to punish those with views that differ from yours. Don’t spend time telling readers that because Hansen is from Iowa and has an earned Ph.D., “It might be worthwhile thinking about what, exactly, the man is quite so peeved about.”
It’s not in your interest to encourage anyone outside Hansen’s choir to think about Hansen’s outburst.
If you (or for that matter Hansen) want to focus people’s minds on action,the best way to focus people on action is describe a proposed action in some detail.
You may discover people disagree with you, but consider the alternative: They aren’t even aware of the proposal! And even if people don’t accept your full proposal, if you discuss actions, you might actually find common ground.
Currently, I have no strong opinion about the tax plan. This is primarily because I don’t know much about it. I’ve read the Hansen’s pdf and the newspaper articles and I still don’t know much about it.
So if you think it’s a good plan, and you hope to get people on board, it’s in your interest to spend your own time providing a coherent explanation of the plan. Include details about how the tax might be implemented.
The two paragraphs in Hansen’s pdf provide a very vague description of atax on carbon. Will wood be taxed? If not, people will buy wood burning stoves and fell trees. No matter which carbon sources are taxed, it seems likely the tax will lead to increased food and clothing costs. If implemented poorly, it could favor imports from countries with no carbon tax; thereby encouraging consumption of high carbon footprint bananas and mangoes rather than locally grown apples.
But maybe I’m wrong.
Even if I’m wrong, I know that with tax plan, details matter. So if there are details, describe the features in your own words. Feel free to drop links to further reading, but remember, readers rarely click links. So, exercise your fingertips and type out your argument!
With that, I encourage anyone who admires Hansen’s plan, and actually knows what the heck it is at any level of detail to explain the darn thing.
