A massive crack extending for 19 miles across the Pine Island Glacier in Antarctica was discovered last October by NASA scientists working in the area. The crack is 260 feet wide, 195 feet deep and will eventually extend all the way across the glacier, calving a giant iceberg that will cover about 350 square miles. This image was captured by the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument on NASA’s Terra spacecraft on Nov. 13, 2011.

With an upper level ridge overhead and the associated high pressure to the west of us, a very large east-west pressure gradient developed over the Cascades, approaching 10.5 mb earlier today. 

Washington State Sea Level Pressure Forecast for 10AM this Morning..big gradient over the Cascades

That is very large for any time of the year.  In fact, large east-west pressure gradients extended over the entire region, resulting in strong easterly flow, particularly in gaps.  For example, the winds accelerated westward to nearly 50 kts (58 mph) at Tatoosh Island on the northwest tip of the Olympics peninsula (see plot)

Our local models knew this was going to happen–here is the forecast winds from last night’s run–a little low, but it had the idea:

The areas around Tatoosh was the site of many shipwrecks, with strong easterly winds, fog, and rocks ending the careers of many a vessel. And winds accelerated to 40-50 mph at several locations over the the western side of the Columbia Gorge, with winds at the Crown Point viewpoint reaching 71 kt (82 mph)!

Aloft, there was strong southeasterly flow crossing the Cascades that descended over western Washington and Oregon.  And as that air descended the western Cascade slopes it warmed by compression. Here are the observations from the Seattle profiler (time increases to the left) today.  20-35 knot winds from the SE right above the surface.

The result of this SE flow was that the temperatures surged where it reached the surface, with some locations around Seattle getting into the low 60s.  The forecasts were way too cool today,  mainly in the lower 50s–one forecast error that few people are complaining about.

Have you noticed that at many locations the temperature is staying up even when the sun is down? At 9 PM it is 52F at Renton Airport–a location experiencing moderate southeasterly flow.   But at Olympia it is 32F.  Olympia is in the south Sound dead wind zone and the ground is radiating heat to space, but with little warm air mixing down.   Why is there a dead zone over the south Sound?  Because they are in the lee of Mt. Rainer….a huge obstacle to the southeasterly flow.

And in the dead zones and valleys, where the easterly flow is unable to surface, the radiative cooling fostered by clear skies will allow a cold dead layer to form and air quality to degrade, such as in Pierce County, where a burn ban has been called.   Here is the air quality plot at S. Tacoma provided by the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency:

This general weather pattern with easterly flow and fine, warm weather should continue at least through Tuesday, and the latest European Center run suggests no precipitation at least through next Friday.  An amazing spell in the middle of winter.  And the rest of the U.S. is also unusually warm., with over a hundred stations breaking daily high max or min records today alone.  January was the third least snowy winter and the warmth has been an economic boon to many—reducing heating costs across much of the nation and allowing construction to continued unabated.  Bad for some ski resorts and sled manufacturers.  But in total it is undoubtedly good for the economy and for a certain political party.

Perhaps high pressure is not so boring after all…

Figure 1. Departure of temperature from average as analyzed by the GFS model, for February 2, 2012. Remarkably cold air was present over Europe and western Alaska, while very warm air was over central North America and Siberia. This image is being generated experimentally by wunderground, and will be regularly available on our web site in the future.

Meanwhile, a snow drought for the U.S.
In the U.S., it’s been the opposite story, with temperatures 10 – 15°F above average continuing this week over much of the nation. January 2012 is in the weather record books as the 3rd least-snowy January for the contiguous U.S. since snow records began in 1966, and December 2011 ranked as the 11th least snowy December on record. With no major snow storms in the offing over at least the next ten days, it’s looking probable that the non-winter of 2011 – 2012 will set numerous record-low seasonal snowfall totals. The National Weather Service sends out a daily “Weather and Almanac” product for several hundred major U.S. cities that we make available on wunderground. I went through yesterday’s statistics for those cities that reported measurable snow this winter. Only nine cities out of 166 major U.S. cities in the lower 48 states reported above-average snowfall as of February 1; 157 cities received below-average snowfall. The big winner in the snow sweepstakes has been Alaska, which is boasting 8 of the top 10 locations for heaviest snowfall this winter. While the 27.75 feet of snow that has fallen on Valdez has gotten a lot of attention, more remarkable is the 18.8 feet of snow Yakutat has received. That’s more than 12.5 feet above what they usually have by this time of year.

The big losers in the snow stats for this winter are the cities along the lake effect snow belts on the Great Lakes. Most notably, Syracuse, New York is nearly four feet of snow below average for this time of year. Perhaps more exceptional is Williston, North Dakota, which has received just 1.8″ of snow this winter–more than two feet below their average for February 1.

Have a super weekend, everyone, and I’ll be back Monday with a new post.

Jeff Masters

Press Release 12-019
Global Extinction: Gradual Doom as Bad as Abrupt

In “The Great Dying” 250 million years ago, the end came slowly

The geology of Griesbach Creek in the Arctic tells an ancient tale of slow extinction. Credit and Larger Version

February 3, 2012

The deadliest mass extinction of all took a long time to kill 90 percent of Earth’s marine life–and it killed in stages–according to a newly published report.

It shows that mass extinctions need not be sudden events.

Thomas Algeo, a geologist at the University of Cincinnati, and 13 colleagues have produced a high-resolution look at the geology of a Permian-Triassic boundary section on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic.

Their analysis, published today in the Geological Society of America Bulletin, provides strong evidence that Earth’s biggest mass extinction phased in over hundreds of thousands of years.

About 252 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, Earth almost became a lifeless planet.

Around 90 percent of all living species disappeared then, in what scientists have called “The Great Dying.”

Algeo and colleagues have spent much of the past decade investigating the chemical evidence buried in rocks formed during this major extinction.

The world revealed by their research is a devastated landscape, barren of vegetation and scarred by erosion from showers of acid rain, huge “dead zones” in the oceans, and runaway greenhouse warming leading to sizzling temperatures.

The evidence that Algeo and his colleagues are looking at points to massive volcanism in Siberia as a factor.

“The scientists relate this extinction to Siberian Traps volcanic eruptions, which likely first affected boreal life through toxic gas and ashes,” said H. Richard Lane, program director in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research.

The Siberian Traps form a large region of volcanic rock in Siberia. The massive eruptive event which formed the traps, one of the largest known volcanic events of the last 500 million years of Earth’s geologic history, continued for a million years and spanned the Permian-Triassic boundary.

The term “traps” is derived from the Swedish word for stairs–trappa, or trapp–referring to the step-like hills that form the landscape of the region.

A large portion of western Siberia reveals volcanic deposits up to five kilometers (three miles) thick, covering an area equivalent to the continental United States. The lava flowed where life was most endangered, through a large coal deposit.

“The eruption released lots of methane when it burned through the coal,” Algeo said. “Methane is 30 times more effective as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

“We’re not sure how long the greenhouse effect lasted, but it seems to have been tens or hundreds of thousands of years.”

Much of the evidence was washed into the ocean, and Algeo and his colleagues look for it among fossilized marine deposits.

Previous investigations have focused on deposits created by a now vanished ocean known as Tethys, a precursor to the Indian Ocean. Those deposits, in South China particularly, record a sudden extinction at the end of the Permian.

“In shallow marine deposits, the latest Permian mass extinction was generally abrupt,” Algeo said. “Based on such observations, it has been widely inferred that the extinction was a globally synchronous event.”

Recent studies are starting to challenge that view.

Algeo and co-authors focused on rock layers at West Blind Fiord on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic.

That location, at the end of the Permian, would have been much closer to the Siberian volcanoes than sites in South China.

The Canadian sedimentary rock layers are 24 meters (almost 80 feet) thick and cross the Permian-Triassic boundary, including the latest Permian mass extinction horizon.

The investigators looked at how the type of rock changed from the bottom to the top. They looked at the chemistry of the rocks and at the fossils contained in the rocks.

They discovered a total die-off of siliceous sponges about 100,000 years earlier than the marine mass extinction event recorded at Tethyan sites.

What appears to have happened, according to Algeo and his colleagues, is that the effects of early Siberian volcanic activity, such as toxic gases and ash, were confined to the northern latitudes.

Only after the eruptions were in full swing did the effects reach the tropical latitudes of the Tethys Ocean.

The research was also supported by the Canadian Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Exobiology Program.

In addition to Algeo, co-authors of the paper are: Charles Henderson, University of Calgary; Brooks Ellwood, Louisiana State University; Harry Rowe, University of Texas at Arlington; Erika Elswick, Indiana University, Bloomington; Steven Bates and Timothy Lyons, University of California, Riverside; James Hower, University of Kentucky; Christina Smith and Barry Maynard, University of Cincinnati; Lindsay Hays and Roger Summons, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; James Fulton, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; and Katherine Freeman, Pennsylvania State University.

-NSF-

Media Contacts
Cheryl Dybas, NSF, cdybas@nsf.gov
Greg Hand, University of Cincinnati, handgl@ucmail.uc.edu

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering. In fiscal year (FY) 2012, its budget is $7.0 billion. NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 colleges, universities and other institutions. Each year, NSF receives over 50,000 competitive requests for funding, and makes about 11,000 new funding awards. NSF also awards nearly $420 million in professional and service contracts yearly.

Snowiest Places in the World

NORTH AMERICA

It is likely that probably the snowiest regions in the world are in the coastal mountains of British Columbia and southern Alaska above the 3,000 foot level. Unfortunately, there are no weather sites to make measurements in these areas. The Thompson Pass location in Alaska (mentioned below) is indicative of how much snow probably falls in such locations. The Thompson Pass site is no longer making observations. What we do have records for in North America are noted below.

The snowiest place we have measurements from (historically-speaking) in North America are the two sites in the mountains of western Washington (both situated around 5,000-6,000 feet) on the slopes of Mt. Rainier and Mt. Baker. At both places world records have been established for greatest annual snowfall:

Greatest seasonal snowfall: 1,140” at Mount Baker Ski Resort 1998-1999

Greatest 12-month snowfall: 1,224.5” at Paradise Rainier Ranger Station between Feb. 19, 1971 and Feb. 18, 1972

The greatest depth achieved at either location was 367” at Paradise R.S. on March 10, 1956.

However, it is in the Sierra of California that even greater depths of snow have been achieved, specifically at Tamarack, a site located at 7000’ near where the Bear Valley Ski Resort is now in the central Sierra. In March 1911 the snow depth reached an amazing 451” (37.5 feet!), the greatest snow depth ever measured anywhere in North America (but not the world!). A seasonal total of 884” fell at Tamarack during 1906-1907, a Sierra and thus California record.

Other North American sites recording phenomenal seasonal snowfalls and depths include:

974.1” Thompson Pass, Alaska (just north of Valdez) in 1952-1953. Maximum depth unknown, the Alaska state record for such is 345” at White Mountain March 1, 1942.

963” Mt. Copeland (near Revelstoke), British Columbia, Canada in 1971-1972. Maximum depth unknown.

903” Crater Lake, Oregon in 1949-1950. Maximum depth 252” on April 3, 1983.

846.8” Alta, Utah (in the Wasatch Mountains) in 1982-1983. Maximum depth 179” on April 7, 1958.

837.5” Wolf Creek Pass, Colorado (in the San Juan Mountains) in 1978-1979. Maximum depth 251” on March 31, 1979.

Valdez, Alaska is the snowiest sea-level town in the world with an average of 320” falling each season. This winter has been one of its busiest with 104.9” this past January alone (reaching a maximum depth of 84” on January 12th). So far this season 333.2” has already accumulated at Valdez.

The port of Valdez on Alaska’s south-central coastline is the snowiest sea-level town in the world with an average of 320” of snowfall per season. Photo by Don Pitcher.

Here is a list of the 10 snowiest locations in the U.S. by annual average snowfall (various periods of record):

680” Paradise Rainier Ranger Station, Washington
552” Thompson Pass, Alaska
530” Mt. Baker Lodge, Washington
530” Crater Lake, Oregon
516” Alta, Utah
471” Soda Springs, California
445” Tamarack, California
442” Stampede Pass, Washington
436” Wolf Creek Pass, Colorado
429” Silver Lake Brighton, Utah

JAPAN

Impressive as the depths recorded in North America might seem, the deepest snow on earth accumulates in the Japanese Alps of Honshu Island around the 2,000-6,000’ level. The average annual snowfall is estimated to be in the 1200-1500” range (see The Climate of Japan by E. Fukui p. 171). On Feb. 14, 1927 a snow depth of 465.4” was measured on Mt. Ibuki at 5,000 feet. In fact, these amazing snow depths are a singular tourist attraction since a highway that transects the mountains is kept open all winter. It is known as the Yuki-no-Otani Snow Canyon.

A roadside and topside view of the famous Yuki-no-Otani Snow Canyon in the Japanese Alps of Honshu Island. The greatest snow depths ever measured on earth are in this region. Photos from buzzhunt.com, photographer(s) unknown.

Even low-level (in fact sea level) locations on the west coast of Honshu have recorded incredible snowfall and snow depths. Only Valdez, Alaska is snowier in this regard. Tsukayama recorded 68.2” of snow in 24 hours on December 30-31, 1960, a world record for a low elevation site. The snow depths are so extreme in the towns of this region that warm-water sprinklers are imbedded in the streets to melt the snow.

Snowfall in the towns along the Sea of Japan in Niigata Prefecture are so deep that artificial snow-melting systems must be employed. These warm-water sprinklers, which run down the middle of a street in Imokawa, keep the community functioning during the winter. Photo by M. Ishii.

EUROPE

The Alps of Europe above the 6,000-foot level also have recorded exceptional snow depths. Santis, Switzerland (elevation 8,200’) reported a snow depth of 325” in April 1999 following one of Europe’s snowiest winters. A world record point snowfall of 67.8” once fell in just 19 hours at Bessans in the French Alp region of Savoie on April 5-6, 1959. This winter has seen some very impressive snowfall in the Alps and on January 24th (last month) a depth of 226” was reported at the ski resort St. Anton Am Arlberg in Austria at the 2,800-meter (9,240-foot) level. Perhaps the deepest snow on record for the Balkans has fallen just this past week in Serbia where depths of up to 78” have been reported.

Curiously, one of the snowiest places in the world is in the Western Great Caucus Mountains of Russia near Turkey and the Black Sea. This is the region where the winter Olympics will next be held. Achishko (elevation 6,200’) has measured snow depths as high as 315”. Snow depths in the Swedish and Norwegian mountains reach up to 20 feet during particularly snowy winters.

OTHER SNOWY PLACES

Prodigious snowfalls occur in high mountain areas all over the world, but by and large these places are uninhabited. Particularly snowy mountains include the Alps of the South Island of New Zealand above 3,000 to 4,000 feet. The southern tip of the Andes near Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia, in Chile and Argentina, experiences tremendous snow accumulations above the 3,000- to 4,000-foot level as do the southern flanks of the high Himalayas east of the 80° longitude.

Surprisingly, the arctic and Antarctic receive very small amounts of snowfall due to lack of atmospheric moisture. It is estimated, in fact, that the South Pole is one of the driest places on earth. It is impossible to actually measure precipitation here because of the high winds, but less than one-tenth of an inch of precipitation (just one or two inches of snow) probably falls on an annual basis.

P.S. For metric conversions please note that 1” is about 2.5 cm and one meter about 3.3 feet.

Christopher C. Burt
Weather Historian

“Current Surface Plot”

(Courtesy of HPC)

“Regional Radar”

(Courtesy of Wunderground)

“Regional Advisories”

(Courtesy of NOAA)

“Forecast Discussion”(Updated 2/2)
Very boring seven day period for all of the Northeast under a zonal Pacific flow with few embedded shortwaves. This discussion will be quick and to the point.

Friday- A weak disturbance will approach western New York with widespread strato-cumulus across much of the Northeast north of Pennsylvania. South of the New York southern tier sunshine will prevail with temperatures reaching into the upper 40s as far north as the Pennsylvania turnpike. The low cloud deck and excess moisture around 10,000ft aloft will allow for the development of flurries and sprinkles mainly across New York State and northern New England. Highs in this region will be around 5F above normal. Sunshine may also peak out across southern and eastern New England. By Friday night light lake effect snow activity across New York will begin to dwindle with increase drier air in the lower levels of the atmosphere. Any snow accumulation remain at an inch or less.

Saturday- Another weak disturbance approaches the Northeast with more widespread clouds particularily later in the day. Highs will be nearly 5-10F above normal for all locations with sunshine in the morning. Most snow shower activity with the disturbance will focus across northern New England and across New York. Snow accumulation will remain below 2in for all locations. Conditions will remain dry outside those listed regions.

Sunday/Monday- Warmer temperatures will enter much of the Northeast with highs nearing 10F above normal with partly cloudy skies for all areas.

Tuesday- A cold front will approach the region, but weak dynamics will prevent any QPF. A few lake effect snow showers are possible across typical snow belts, but accumulations will remain in the nuisance category. Highs will be about 5F above normal for all locations.

Wednesday-Friday- Sunshine with warmer than normal temperatures will continue to be the theme with no areas of weather hazards or interests. Temperatures will range from the lower 30s over northern Maine to low 50s near Washington DC for highs. Lows will be seasonal to slightly above.

Post Friday- Guidance has been hinting at a cold shot towards the weekend, but even this colder air will only put things likely at ‘average.’ No significant threats of snow look likely over this seven day period outside a few flurries and snow showers across the snow belts. QPF will remain below .1in for most all locations. A few models have hinted at a coastal storm towards Sunday scraping some locations, but for now I am not overly enthusiastic given the setup.

“Regional Satellite”

(Courtesy of Penn State Meteo.)

“Current Water Vapor Loop”

(Courtesy of Penn State Meteo.)

“Lake Effect Snow Conditions” (Updated 2/2)
Very few chances of lake effect exist in the next seven days as high pressure dominates the daily weather forecast. A weak disturbance will approach northern New York State on Friday and will assist in the development of a few snow showers across northern New England. Model QPF is generally less than .03in so this will not be a big deal. A bit of Ontario-enhancement will allow for 1-2in snow totals Friday evening across the Tug Hill Plateau into northern Vermont throughout the western facing Greens. Another weak disturbance will approach western New York State in the Saturday/Sunday time period with a bit of lake enhancement. High shear values aloft and dry air will prevent any organized lake effect activity from forming, but a few streamers and showers are possibly mainly across the Tug Hill Plateau with a wind direction at 330 degrees. Any accumulation will remain below 3in. GFS indicates a bit of lake effect across the Finger Lakes given the northerly flow on Sunday, but any accumulation will remain below 1-2in favoring towns such as Dryden and Cortland. Warm air advection will cutoff any activity by late Sunday night as H85s begin to rise above 0C. A cold front will move through the region Tuesday with winds shifting to a north-northwesterly flow. H85s will drop sub -10C and will allow for a bit of instability to develop. This period has the highest threat of lake effect activity. But given the unfavorable direction, most organized streamers will not develop. Instead a more widespread multi-streamer event is likely across central New York with light to moderate amounts. Given the northerly flow, most lake effect snow activity will remain north of Pennsylvania outside Crawford, Erie, and Warren counties. Little to no lake effect is likely over the Laurel Highlands or western Maryland over the next 7 days. The best location will be across the Tug Hill Plateau and northern Vermont (higher elevations towards Mt. Mansfield) where 7-day totals of 4-8in are possible.

“Current Great Lakes Water Temperatures”

(Courtesy of NOAA)

“Current River Ice Reports and Ski Conditions” (Updated 2/2)
Given temperatures nearly 20F above normal over the last few days, much of the Northeast has little to no sign of winter outside the higher elevations in northern New England. Ice reports are few and far between with hardly any reports for mainstem rivers and even lakes. South of the New York freeway and the Massachusetts turnpike thin to no ice exists on most all waterways. This has definitely hurt the ice fishing industry given the frequent warmups preventing any large freezes. In fact cold spells have become the rarity and not thaws this winter. Outside locations in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont the ice remains to thin for any activity to take place. This will heighten the dangers over the next week for anyone near waterways; please use caution and remember to always check the thickness.

The ski and snowboard industry has also been hit hard this winter with continued cancellations each weekend plaguing many resorts including those up through Stowe and Killington. Frequent rainfall as far north as the Canadian border has prevented a powdery snow pack across the northern New England resorts. Farther south there has been a complete lack of natural snow even across the snow belts into the Laurel Highlands and Garret County, Maryland where Wisp, Seven Springs, etc. have had little to no natural snow over the last seven days. The outlook for the next week will continue the poor conditions with a zonal flow and general lack of precipitation. Even the upslope/lake effect machine will remain quiet instead of aiding the snowbelt resorts. The best conditions over the next week will be across northern Vermont where several weak disturbances will allow the upslope effect to squeeze out a probable 3-5in over the seven day period. Still though for early February odds, this is very poor.

-Link to official reports page from NWS… Link.
-Link to local ski resort snow conditions… Link.

“Current Northeast Snow Depth and Northeast Wind chills”

(Courtesy of Wunderground)

“Long Term Outlook” (Updated 2/2)
I have just posted my February forecast below. The next two week period looks to feature well above normal temperatures with well below normal precipitation; therefore the likelihood of snowfall is below climatological averages. The MJO will continue to rotate through phases 6-8 over the next two weeks with strong forcing. Composites indicate a mild pattern from this regime over the Northeast. The arctic oscillation is actually anomalously low (near the record low values of 2010) which is quite coincidental given the record high values back in December. But the other teleconnections are not in favor to send this arctic air across North America especially given the swirling Alaskan Vortex. Much of this cold air has been focused across Europe into parts of Siberia. Model prognostics indicate a dominate 1060hPa anticyclone (models will verify too high for pressure) over Siberia. Arctic air will flood this region of the world over the next two weeks, while North America is sitting under a zonal Pacific regime. Very few perturbations in the jet will characterize a very dry period over the next two weeks. This is supported by recent global model runs indicating less than .4in for most of the Northeast over a 16 day period.

Any potential for snow will remain slim. A few ensemble runs have noted the February 10-12 period as of particular interest, but the placement of the polar and subtropical jet do not appear favorable. While there will be occasional cold fronts with 1-2 day periods of cooler weather, the overall pattern is mild with many days running 5-10F above normal. I cannot rule out an unexpected snow threat, but it is likely this will appear at the last minute on guidance if it should occur. Given the end of the Nina flow, chaos has consumed most model guidance especially post 3 days. Therefore any model output should be taken with a grain of salt. If one can get past operational and ensemble model output, the overall pattern is similar to that of much of this winter.

“Current NAO and PNA Predictions”

(Courtesy of NOAA)

“Anchorage, Alaska Tower Cam”

*Back due to popular demand!

“Monthly Temperature/Precipitation Outlook”(February)(Updated 2/2)
Using the MJO teleconnection and I rollover technique, my February forecast will be a continuation of the mild theme of the past nearly 12 months. Current ECMWF ensemble and GEFS guidance suggests the monsoonal patterns in the Indian Ocean will maintain MJO phases 5-8. Looking at quick composites of these phases and their associated global surface temperature anomalies, there is a clear indication of positive numbers over much of North America, particularily across the United States. While many forecasters have pointed at other indices including the -AO, the general Pacific and Atlantic regimes continue to lock up the cold on the other portions of the globe. This will likely continue through much of February. As we enter the end of the month, the MJO phase composites become a bit more favorable towards phases 1+. This may allow a bit of colder air to bleed south out of Canada. Current CFS and ECMWF weeklies indicate anomalous warmth across much of the eastern United States. This is also supported by several operational model runs. Given the La Nina-lag effects, February will likely be a very mild month for many climatological reporting stations.

Temperatures- Given the La Nina rollover effects, mild Pacific air will continue to flood much of the lower 48. I am predicting anomalies of (+)3.0-(+)3.5F for most all climatological reporting stations. This fits the regime of the past several winter months also.

Precipitation- The general zonal flow will inhibit most strong cyclogenesis and middle latitude cyclone development for at least the first half of the month. Precipitation looks to average at or below normal for most all climatological reporting stations. Snowfall is a difficult variable to predict given any possible outlier that can easily skew totals. None the less I will use probabilities for this forecast… higher likelihood of below normal snowfall

“Temperature and Precipitation Outlooks from Climate Prediction Center for next 30 days”

(Courtesy of NOAA)

“Lower Susquehanna Valley Doppler”

(Courtesy of WGAL)

Follow my 24hr forecasts on Twitter… Link and Facebook… Link.

“10mi northeast of Harrisburg 2011-2012 winter statistics”
(Snow Stats)
Monthly Total (October)- 5.5in
Monthly Total (November)- 0.0in
Monthly Total (December)- 0.4in
Monthly Total- (January)- 5.2in
Seasonal Total- 11.1in
Winter Weather Advisories- 2
Winter Storm Warnings- 1
Ice Storm Warnings- 0
Blizzard Warnings- 0
Freezing Rain Advisories- 1
Winter Storm Watches- 1

(Temperature Stats)
Lowest High Temperature- 29F
Lowest Low Temperature- 10F
Wind Chill Advisories- 0
Wind Chill Warnings- 0

(Snow Storms Stats)
Historic October Nor’easter – October 29 – 5.5in of wet snow
322 Lake Effect Snow Band – December 17 – 0.3in of wet snow
Weak Clipper – December 29 – 0.1in of snow
322 Lake Effect Snow Band – January 18 – 0.2in of snow
Southwest Flow Event – January 21 – 5.0in of dry snow

Add caption

On one hand there is the well-known frogprognosticator of Snohomish, Washington–otherwise known as the GroundFrog.   At a solemn ceremony on Saturday, the wise frog predicted good weather for the remainder of the winter for the Northwest–a prediction that is consistent with the latest two-week forecast of the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center for the western U.S.:

On the other hand, Punxsutawney Phil, the well-known groundhog of Gobbler’s Knob, PA, saw his shadow, which implies 6 more weeks of winter.

Let me assure you that these forecasts are not inconsistent, considered their locations.  An atmospheric upper level pattern with a ridge on the West Coast and a trough over the eastern U.S. is consistent with their predictions and quite reasonable.  In fact, here is the latest 15 day forecast at 500 hPa from the NWS GFS model that is showing such a feature–ridge over the west, trough over the east.

 Clearly, the innate wisdom of animals has something to teach us.

That’s the official word posted at groundhog.org from Punxsutawney Pennsylvania’s famous prognosticating rodent, Punxsutawney Phil, who saw his shadow this morning. According to tradition, this means that a solid six more weeks of winter can be expected across the U.S. When the sun rises in San Francisco, this morning, wunderground’s Alan T. Groundhog can give us an additional shadow-based forecast for the coming winter (video here.)

Figure 1. Wunderground’s prognosticating groundhog, Alan T. Groundhog, prepares to go in front of the blue screen with wunderground meteorologist Jessica Parker.

How did this this crazy tradition start?
It all started in Europe, centuries ago, when February 2 was a holiday called Candlemas. On Candlemas, people prayed for mild weather for the remainder of winter. The superstition arose that if a hibernating badger woke up and saw its shadow on Candlemas, there would be six more weeks of severe winter weather. When Europeans settled the New World, they didn’t find any badgers. So, they decided to use native groundhogs (aka the woodchuck, land beaver, or whistlepig) as their prognosticating rodent.

What winter? The non-winter of 2011 – 2012
Considering winter hasn’t really arrived in the lower 48 states yet, I’m not sure how much validity we can give to fearless Phil’s forecast. Here in Michigan, like in most of the U.S., we’ve basically had three straight months of November weather. There have been no major snowstorms, and frequent sunny days with highs in the 50s–twenty five degrees above average. January 2012 is in the weather record books as the 3rd least-snowy January for the contiguous U.S. since snow records began in 1966, the Rutgers Snow Lab reported yesterday, and December 2011 ranked as the 11th least snowy December on record. With the latest 2-week forecast from the GFS model showing a huge ridge of high pressure dominating the Western U.S. and no major snowstorms over the U.S. through mid-February, the winter of 2011 – 2012 has a chance to end up as the second least snowy winter in U.S. history. Temperature statistics for January will not be available until next week, but I expect the month will end up being a top-five warmest January, with temperatures about 4 – 5°F above average. We won’t be able to beat the 8.7°F above-average temperature posted during the warmest January in U.S. history, which occurred in 2006. If U.S. temperatures remain 4 – 5°F above average during February, the winter of 2011 – 2012 will be the warmest in U.S. history. The five warmest U.S. winters since record keeping began in 1895 have all occurred since 1992, with the winter of 1999 – 2000 holding the record for warmest winter. Winter average temperature in the contiguous U.S. has been increasing by about 1.6°F per century since 1895 (Figure 2.)

Figure 2. Winter temperatures in the contiguous U.S. during the period 1895 – 2011 increased at a rate of about 1.6°F per century. The warmest winter was 1999 – 2000, and the coldest was 1978 – 1979. Image credit: NOAA/NCDC.

What’s going on?
This January’s remarkable warmth and lack of snow contrasts starkly with what happened during the previous two winters. January 2011 was the 5th snowiest and 35th coldest in U.S. history, and January 2010 was the 7th snowiest and 55th coldest. Wunderground meteorologist Angela Fritz had this to say in her blog post yesterday about what’s been going on this winter: In December, we were reporting that the lower-48′s unseasonably warm weather and lack of snow was due to a particularly positive Arctic Oscillation (AO) index. The Arctic Oscillation is a measure of the jet stream’s strength. A positive AO is a stronger than average jet stream, and it tends to keep cold air bottled up in the Arctic. During a positive AO, the Arctic is colder than average, and the mid-latitudes are warmer than average. In December and early January, the AO was positive. In mid-January, the AO went negative, which we expect to have the opposite impact. A weak jet steam means cold, Arctic air can escape to the south, and that’s what we’ve been seeing in Europe this week. This cold air has yet to spill southwards into the Eastern U.S. like it usually does during a negative-AO period. However, the long-range GFS model is predicting a modest cold air outbreak will occur over the Eastern U.S. around February 15.

Jeff Masters

This weekend will see a marked change in the weather as the dry spell makes way for snow and ice in many parts.

Over the past few days we have seen the coldest spell of winter so far, as very cold air has flooded across the UK from the continent. Temperatures have dropped as low as -9.4 °C in Shap, Cumbria, and -10 °C is possible in places tonight.

Snow showers are expected along parts of the eastern coastline today and tomorrow, but most places will continue to see bright, dry and cold conditions.

Things are set to change as we go through into Saturday, however, as an Atlantic front moves in from the west.

Paul Gundersen, Chief Forecaster at the Met Office, said: “As this front moves in from the west it will come up against cold air and we’re likely to see a mixture of rain, sleet and snow across the UK.

“It’s a finely balanced situation, so there is some uncertainty about which areas will see the most significant snowfall, but at the moment the risk is highest in central and eastern areas where we could see up to 5-10cm of snow.

“With this risk of snow and ice over the next few days it is important people stay up to date with our weather forecasts and warnings for the latest information.”

Later on Saturday it is likely that northern and western parts of the UK will see slightly less cold conditions take over, with rain more likely than snow. However, with the rain falling on cold ground, there is a widespread ice risk.

Thereafter this east/west split is likely to continue, with the south and east remaining cold with ice and freezing fog likely. The north and west should be milder.

Image extracted from Met Office video.

Thunderstorms are forecast to develop near the Northwest edge of the most unstable air by Thursday evening and/or Thursday night.  The most vigorous thunderstorm development is likely take place across northwest Texas and southwest Oklahoma, in and near the yellow shaded areas on the latest SPC Severe Weather Outlook shown below:

Folks living in and near the areas described above should remain alert on Thursday and Friday.  Listen to NOAA Weather Radio or a trusted media source for later updates and possible watch and/or warning information.

The threat of locally heavy rainfall and possible severe weather will shift Eastward into the Mississippi Valley region over the weekend.  Folks in that area should watch for later updates as this system progresses.

For more information on the winter weather aspects of this storm system, please see this post.

Figure 1. Comparison of the 1990 and 2012 USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Maps. Image credit: USDA and Arbor Day Foundation

Northwards, ho!
While humans are generally not attuned enough to nature’s rhythms to tell if the climate is changing, plants and animals know the climate is changing. Many species of animals, insects, and plants have shifted their ranges poleward and to higher elevations in recent decades because of global warming. The 2007 IPCC report stated that “numerous studies document a progressively earlier spring by about 2.3 to 5.2 days per decade in the last 30 years in response to climate warming. That report also documented over 400 species that have moved their ranges poleward or to higher elevations because of climate change. For example, conifer trees expanded northwards into former tundra areas at a rate of 12 km per year between 1982 – 2000 in portions of Canada (Fillol and Royer, 2003.) Holly plants moved northwards by several hundred kilometers in recent decades into coastal Norway, Northeast Germany, Denmark, and coastal Sweden in response to warming temperatures (Walther et al., 2005.) As the climate continues to warm, plant and animal species previously unknown in many regions will appear, and will disappear from places they used to inhabit.

Figure 2. Change in the boundary line between conifer forest (taiga) and tundra between 1982 (grey line) and 2000 (white line) over Canada. In the grey box marked “Transect”, the rate of northwards migration was 12 km per year, or 228 km (142 miles) in nineteen years. Image credit: Fillol and Royer, 2003, “Variability analysis of the transitory climate regime as defined by the NDVI/Ts relationship derived from NOAA-AVHRR over Canada”, Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 2003. IGARSS ’03. Proceedings. 2003 IEEE International.

Jeff Masters

Photographer: Stu Witmer
Summary Author: Stu Witmer

What’s going on here? I’ve asked around and received some interesting possibilities, but so far no one I’ve talked to has ever seen this particular effect before. I took these photos on a recent trip to Iceland. It was about 9 a.m. on September 11, 2011 after a light snowfall. Temperatures were right around freezing. GPS on my camera gives the image location as 65.767733, -17.169181 and the altitude at 1,434 ft (437 m). This is just off the west side of the Holasandur volcanic sand desert in the island’s north. The mountain in the background is the Gaesafjoll volcano and the camera is facing east (ENE). I can say that it had been very windy for several days. On one of those days, we were on Breidamerkursandur, the black sand beach on Iceland’s south coast. The wind was so strong it knocked me over. Down on the deck I was relentlessly buffeted by intensely blowing sand. When I stood up again I noticed that the sand was not blowing much higher than my knees. I wondered if something similar was going on with the snow. A strong wind, blowing consistently from upper left, might then explain the shadows. i.e., the snow-laden wind would carry streaks of load past the rock on either side, and the shadows would reflect simple interruptions in that sheet of blowing granular material. In the “close-up”, you can see that the snow is pretty wet (though it need not have been so when it fell). Wet snow can still be redistributed if winds are sufficiently strong. Looking closely it appears that some of the “shadow” track have melted and then partially re-frozen with water glazing the surface. Click here or on the related link below for the details of other possibilities.

Photo details: Top – Camera Maker: HTC; Camera Model: PC36100; Focal Length: 4.9mm; ISO equiv: 117; Color Space: sRGB. Bottom – Camera Maker: Canon; Camera Model: Canon PowerShot SD1300 IS; Focal Length: 17.3mm; Aperture: f/5.6; Exposure Time: 0.0020 s (1/500); ISO equiv: 125; Exposure Bias: none; Metering Mode: Matrix; White Balance: Auto; Flash Fired: No (enforced); Orientation: Normal; Color Space: sRGB. Software: GIMP 2.6.1.

• Holasandur, Iceland Coordinates: 65.767733, -17.169181
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It is the one-year anniversary of the Groundhog Day Blizzard in Chicago.

The storm brought the area from central Oklahoma to the lower Great Lakes and central New England between 1 and 2 feet of snow spanning Jan. 31 to Feb. 2, 2011, affecting over 100 million people along its path.

To see photos of the blizzard in Chicago, click here.

The area from northeastern Missouri to northeastern Illinois was hit the hardest.

Wind gusts to 60 mph in the Chicagoland area brought travel to a standstill with haunting images of stranded vehicles in waist-deep snowdrifts along the Lake Michigan shoreline. The storm resulted in power outages, school closings and halted mail service for a time.

Chicago was buried under 20.2 inches of snow from the storm.

Hundreds of cars were stranded on Lake Shore Drive Wednesday, Feb. 2, 2011, in Chicago. A winter blizzard of historic proportions wobbled an otherwise snow-tough Chicago, stranding hundreds of drivers for up to 12 hours overnight on the city’s showcase lakeshore thoroughfare and giving many city schoolchildren their first ever snow day. A year later, temperatures are in the mid-50s and flirting with record highs for this date. (AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato)

This AccuWeather.com Facebook fan photo was taken by Jan in Claremore, Okla., on Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2011, before snow headed toward Chicago and Detroit.

More Photos of the Chicago Blizzard

Submit Your Photos to the AccuWeather.com Facebook page

Content contributed by AccuWeather.com Expert Senior Meteorologist Alex Sosnowski.

Public release date: 1-Feb-2012

Contact: David DeFusco
david.defusco@yale.edu
Yale University

From his vantage point high above the earth in the International Space Station, Astronaut Ed Lu captured this broad view of Hurricane Isabel. The image, ISS007-E-14750, was taken with a 50 mm lens on a digital camera. Wikipedia.

Tropical cyclones will cause $109 billion in damages by 2100, according to Yale and MIT researchers in a paper published in Nature Climate Change.

That figure represents an increased vulnerability from population and especially economic growth, as well as the effects of climate change. Greater vulnerability to cyclones is expected to increase global tropical damage to $56 billion by 2100—double the current damage—from the current rate of $26 billion per year if the present climate remains stable.

Climate change is predicted to add another $53 billion of damages. The damage caused by climate change is equal to 0.01 percent of GDP in 2100.

The United States and China will be hardest hit, incurring $25 billion and $15 billion of the additional damages from climate change, respectively, amounting to 75 percent of the global damages caused by climate change. Small islands, especially in the Caribbean, will also be hit hard, suffering the highest damages per unit of GDP.

The research reveals that more intense storms will become more frequent with climate change. “The biggest storms cause most of the damage,” said Robert Mendelsohn, the lead economist on the project. “With the present climate, almost 93 percent of tropical cyclone damage is caused by only 10 percent of the storms. Warming will increase the frequency of these high-intensity storms at least in the North Pacific and North Atlantic Ocean basins, causing most of the increase in damage.”

The authors based their estimates on a future global population of 9 billion and an annual increase of approximately 3 percent in gross world product until 2100. “More people making a lot more income will put more capital in harm’s way,” he said.

Tropical cyclones today cause $26 billion in global damages, which is 4 percent of gross world product. North America and East Asia account for 88 percent of these damages, because these regions have powerful storms and well-developed coastlines.

The future economic damage from tropical cyclones will be less than $1 billion a year in Europe and South America because there are few storms there, and the damage in Africa will be low because, Mendelsohn said, there is “relatively little in harm’s way.” Damages in Asia and Central America are expected to grow rapidly in concert with high economic growth. The Caribbean-Central America region will have the highest damage per unit of gross domestic product—37 percent.

“When you calculate damages as a fraction of GDP, island nations are hit disproportionately hard,” he said.

###

The paper, “The Impact of Climate Change on Global Tropical Cyclone Damage,” is available at http://www.nature.com. It used a tropical cyclone integrated assessment model that was developed with Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at MIT. “The paper demonstrates how to integrate the atmospheric science of tropical cyclones and economics,” said Emanuel.

The tropical cyclone model is used in conjunction with climate models to predict how the frequency, intensity and location of tropical cyclones change in the seven ocean basins of the world. The paths of 17,000 synthetic storms are followed until they strike land. The authors used historical data to estimate the damages caused by the intensity of each cyclone and what was in harm’s way. The paper revealed that minimum barometric pressure predicts damages more accurately than maximum wind speed.

AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

A major atmospheric jet stream pattern change is underway this week, though, which will bring more seasonable temperatures to Alaska by late in the week.

Figure 1. Departure of temperature from average as analyzed by the GFS model, for January 30, 2012. Remarkably cold air was present over northern Alaska, Eastern Europe, and Southern Asia, while very warm air was over the Central U.S. and much of Siberia.

European cold wave kills 58
Alaska isn’t the only place suffering exceptionally cold temperatures this week. At least 58 people have died in the European cold wave over the past week, according to ABC News. Hardest hit was the Ukraine, where 30 people, most of them homeless, died.

Alaska’s -79°F reading bogus
I reported in yesterday’s post that a personal weather station located about 180 miles north of Fairbanks, the Jim River DOT site, apparently recorded a low temperature of -79°F Saturday morning (January 28, 2012). This is very close to the coldest temperature ever recorded in the U.S., a remarkable -80°F (-62.2°C) reading from Prospect Creek, AK (about a mile away from Jim Creek), on January 23, 1971. However, it turns out the that the electronic temperature sensor on the weather station at Jim Creek is only rated to -40°F. Furthermore, the voltage on the lithium battery that powers the stations drops dramatically below -50°F, resulting in bogus low temperatures. Here is the official work on the low temperatures at Jim River from the NWS:

PUBLIC INFORMATION STATEMENT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE FAIRBANKS AK
252 PM AKST MON JAN 30 2012

…CLARIFICATION OF TEMPERATURES FROM JIM RIVER DOT CAMP…

TEMPERATURES THIS PAST WEEKEND AT THE ALASKA DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION JIM RIVER MAINTENANCE CAMP AT MILE 138 DALTON HIGHWAY…STATION JMTA2…HAVE BEEN REPORTED AS LOW AS 79 BELOW.

THE TEMPERATURES ARE NOT CORRECT. THE WEATHER STATION IN USE AT THE JIM RIVER DOT CAMP IS A PERSONAL WEATHER STATION THAT IS NOT RATED FOR TEMPERATURE COLDER THAN 40 BELOW. THE UNREALISTICALLY LOW TEMPERATURES ARE BELIEVED TO BE A FUNCTION OF THE BATTERY FAILING AT VERY LOW TEMPERATURES.

THERE ARE NO OFFICIAL…NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE STANDARD…TEMPERATURE MEASUREMENTS AT JIM RIVER DOT CAMP.

Jeff Masters

Photographer: Laaifat Mohamed;  Laaifat’s Web site
Summary Author: Laaifat Mohamed; Jim Foster

The photo above showing a corona enshrouding the waxing gibbous Moon was observed above a lovely old church in Normandy, France. Jupiter is to the right of the Moon. Note the crescent shape of the clouds — and the corona. The metallic colors of a corona results when minute water droplets that compose mid-level clouds are of the right size to deflect moonlight. The moonlight is bent and spread out by these tiny droplets in such a way to produce overlapping colors. Photo taken on December 7, 2011.

• Caen, France Coordinates: 49.1831, 0.3694
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University of Colorado Boulder Professor Gifford Miller is shown here collecting dead plant samples from beneath a Baffin Island ice cap. A new study led by Miller indicates the Little Ice Age began roughly A.D. 1275 and was triggered repeated, explosive volcanism that cooled the atmosphere.

A new University of Colorado Boulder-led study appears to answer contentious questions about the onset and cause of Earth’s Little Ice Age, a period of cooling temperatures that began after the Middle Ages and lasted into the late 19th century. According to the new study, the Little Ice Age began abruptly between A.D. 1275 and 1300, triggered by repeated, explosive volcanism and sustained by a self- perpetuating sea ice-ocean feedback system in the North Atlantic Ocean, according to CU-Boulder Professor Gifford Miller, who led the study. The primary evidence comes from radiocarbon dates from dead vegetation emerging from rapidly melting icecaps on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, combined with ice and sediment core data from the poles and Iceland and from sea ice climate model simulations, said Miller.

While scientific estimates regarding the onset of the Little Ice Age range from the 13th century to the 16th century, there is little consensus, said Miller. There is evidence the Little Ice Age affected places as far away as South America and China, although it was particularly evident in northern Europe. Advancing glaciers in mountain valleys destroyed towns, and famous paintings from the period depict people ice skating on the Thames River in London and canals in the Netherlands, waterways that were ice-free in winter before and after the Little Ice Age.

“The dominant way scientists have defined the Little Ice Age is by the expansion of big valley glaciers in the Alps and in Norway,” said Miller. “But the time it took for European glaciers to advance far enough to demolish villages would have been long after the onset of the cold period,” said Miller, a fellow at CU’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research.

Most scientists think the Little Ice Age was caused either by decreased summer solar radiation, erupting volcanoes that cooled the planet by ejecting shiny aerosol particles that reflected sunlight back into space, or a combination of both, said Miller.

The new study suggests that the onset of the Little Ice Age was caused by an unusual, 50-year-long episode of four massive tropical volcanic eruptions. Climate models used in the new study showed that the persistence of cold summers following the eruptions is best explained by a sea ice-ocean feedback system originating in the North Atlantic Ocean.

“This is the first time anyone has clearly identified the specific onset of the cold times marking the start of the Little Ice Age,” said Miller. “We also have provided an understandable climate feedback system that explains how this cold period could be sustained for a long period of time. If the climate system is hit again and again by cold conditions over a relatively short period — in this case, from volcanic eruptions — there appears to be a cumulative cooling effect.”

A paper on the subject is being published Jan. 31 in Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical Union. The paper was authored by scientists and students from CU-Boulder, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, the University of Iceland, the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The study was funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the Icelandic Science Foundation.

As part of the study, Miller and his colleagues radiocarbon-dated roughly 150 samples of dead plant material with roots intact collected from beneath receding ice margins of ice caps on Baffin Island. There was a large cluster of “kill dates” between A.D. 1275 and 1300, indicating the plants had been frozen and engulfed by ice during a relatively sudden event.

Both low-lying and higher altitude plants all died at roughly the same time, indicating the onset of the Little Ice Age on Baffin Island — the fifth largest island in the world — was abrupt. The team saw a second spike in plant kill dates at about A.D. 1450, indicating the quick onset of a second major cooling event.

To broaden the study, the team analyzed sediment cores from a glacial lake linked to the 367-square-mile Langjökull ice cap in the central highlands of Iceland that reaches nearly a mile high. The annual layers in the cores — which can be reliably dated by using tephra deposits from known historic volcanic eruptions on Iceland going back more than 1,000 years — suddenly became thicker in the late 13th century and again in the 15th century due to increased erosion caused by the expansion of the ice cap as the climate cooled, he said.

“That showed us the signal we got from Baffin Island was not just a local signal, it was a North Atlantic signal,” said Miller. “This gave us a great deal more confidence that there was a major perturbation to the Northern Hemisphere climate near the end of the 13th century.” Average summer temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere did not return to those of the Middle Ages until the 20th century, and the temperatures of the Middle Ages are now exceeded in many areas, he said.

The team used the NCAR-based Community Climate System Model to test the effects of volcanic cooling on Arctic sea ice extent and mass. The model, which simulated various sea ice conditions from about A.D. 1150-1700, showed several large, closely spaced eruptions could have cooled the Northern Hemisphere enough to trigger Arctic sea ice growth.

The models showed sustained cooling from volcanoes would have sent some of the expanding Arctic sea ice down along the eastern coast of Greenland until it eventually melted in the North Atlantic. Since sea ice contains almost no salt, when it melted the surface water became less dense, preventing it from mixing with deeper North Atlantic water. This weakened heat transport back to the Arctic and creating a self-sustaining feedback system on the sea ice long after the effects of the volcanic aerosols subsided, he said.

“Our simulations showed that the volcanic eruptions may have had a profound cooling effect,” says NCAR scientist Bette Otto-Bliesner, a co-author of the study. “The eruptions could have triggered a chain reaction, affecting sea ice and ocean currents in a way that lowered temperatures for centuries.”

The researchers set the solar radiation at a constant level in the climate models, and Miller said the Little Ice Age likely would have occurred without decreased summer solar radiation at the time. “Estimates of the sun’s variability over time are getting smaller, it’s now thought by some scientists to have varied little more in the last millennia than during a standard 11-year solar cycle,” he said.

One of the primary questions pertaining to the Little Ice Age is how unusual the warming of Earth is today, he said. A previous study led by Miller in 2008 on Baffin Island indicated temperatures today are the warmest in at least 2,000 years.

Other co-authors on the paper include CU-Boulder’s Yafang Zhong, Darren Larsen, Kurt Refsnider, Scott Lehman and Chance Anderson, NCAR’s Marika Holland and David Bailey, the University of Iceland’s Áslaug Geirsdóttir, Helgi Bjornsson and Darren Larsen, UC-Irvine’s John Southon and the University of Edinburgh’s Thorvaldur Thordarson. Larsen is doctoral student jointly at CU-Boulder and the University of Iceland.

*TIED DAILY RECORD LOW OF 62 BELOW SET IN 1909
**EXCEEDS DAILY RECORD LOW OF 58 BELOW SET IN 1989

The cold snap is expected to continue through mid-week, with more -65°F temperatures possible in the interior valleys north of Fairbanks. Warmer air is expected to arrive state-wide by Thursday.

Figure 1. It’s a tradition! Photo taken Sunday, January 29, 2012, by one of our more adventurous wunderphotographers. Image credit: wunderphotographer TerezkaSunshine.

All-time U.S. low temperature record threatened?
The coldest temperature ever recorded in the U.S. was a -80°F (-62.2°C) reading from Prospect Creek, AK (about 180 miles north of Fairbanks) on January 23, 1971. A weather station just a few miles from Prospect Creek, the Jim River DOT site, appears to have recorded a low temperature between -78°F and -79°F Saturday morning (January 28, 2012), shortly before the weather station lost power. Keeping the power going at -70 is very tough, and it is not a surprise to see that the station lost power during this extraordinary cold snap. Power just returned this morning to the site, where the temperature was -66°F at 7 am AKST. Wunderground’s weather historian Christopher C. Burt is corresponding with Alaska’s state climatologist to get more information on whether the data during the power outage will be recoverable, and how reliable these near-record low temperature might be.

Jeff Masters

Air pollution plays a significant role in reducing global crop productivity, finds a new study that shows the negative impacts of air pollution on crops may have to be addressed at an international level rather than through local air quality policies alone. (Credit: iStockphoto)

U. LEEDS (UK) — Air pollution from North America causes Europe to lose 1.2 million tons of wheat a year, a new study shows.

Satellite photo of the Tasman Sea. Wikipedia.

Oceanographers have identified a series of ocean hotspots around the world generated by strengthening wind systems that have driven oceanic currents, including the East Australian Current, polewards beyond their known boundaries. The hotspots have formed alongside ocean currents that wash the east coast of the major continents and their warming proceeds at a rate far exceeding the average rate of ocean surface warming, according to an international science team whose work was recently published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Paper co-author, CSIRO’s Dr Wenju Cai, said that while the finding has local ecological implications in the region surrounding the hotspots, the major influence is upon the ocean’s ability to take up heat and carbon from the atmosphere.

In Australia’s case, scientists report intensifying east-west winds at high latitudes (45º-55ºS) pushing southward and speeding up the gyre or swirl of currents circulating in the South Pacific, extending from South America to the Australian coast. The resulting changes in ocean circulation patterns have pushed the East Australian Current around 350 kilometres further south, with temperatures east of Tasmania as much as two degrees warmer than they were 60 years ago.

“We would expect natural change in the oceans over decades or centuries but change with such elevated sea surface temperatures in a growing number of locations and in a synchronised manner was definitely not expected,” said CSIRO’s Dr Wenju Cai.

“Detecting these changes has been hindered by limited observations but with a combination of multi-national ocean watch systems and computer simulations we have been able to reconstruct an ocean history in which warming over the past century is 2-3 times faster than the global average ocean warming rate,” says Dr Cai, a climate scientist at CSIRO’s Wealth from Oceans Research Flagship.

The changes are characterised by a combination of currents pushing nearer to the polar regions and intensify with systematic changes of wind over both hemispheres, attributed to increasing greenhouse gases.

Dr Cai said the increase of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has been the major driver of the surface warming of Earth over the 20th century. This is projected to continue.

He said the research points to the need for a long-term monitoring network of the western boundary currents. In March next year, Australian scientists plan to deploy a series of moored ocean sensors across the East Australian Current to observe change season-to-season and year-to-year.

Lead author of the paper was Dr Lixin Wu, of the Ocean University of China, with contributing authors from five countries, many of whom are members of the Pacific Ocean Panel working under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organisation.

The research was partly funded by a grant from the Australian Climate Change Science Program supported by the Australian Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency.

Using considerable resources, Ivar’s brought in a large team to repair and dry the restaurant and on Friday it reopened, to the relief of many.  As an aside, the ferry Cathlamet came in to the dock around 5:55 AM and the captain (Torger Skolman–I AM NOT MAKING UP THIS NAME) had to run the engines at half speed ahead in the dock to keep the ship form heaving in the slip and popping the auto apron off the car deck.  A piling contractor in Everett Harbor measured gusts to 47 mph.

    As many of you know, this restaurant was destroyed in another (and stronger) westerly wind surge through the Strait in October 2003.   For this week’s event, we started with relatively high tides (see tide table below), with the peak around 7 AM.

On Thursday morning, a low pressure system moved eastward over southern B.C., resulting in a large pressure difference building down the Strait (rising to about 6 hPa between Quillayute and Bellingham by 3 AM, and nearly as high at 4 AM).  Air accelerated down the Strait, producing strong westerly winds over this gap and immediately downstream (see wind plot at 4 AM below).   So with strong

winds building the waves, relatively high tides, and northwesterly winds pushing water towards the restaurant, Ivar’s Mukilteo Landing restaurant was in Neptune’s crosshairs.

But I was still worried.  Was the sacrifice of Ivar’s enough to placate the anger of the weather gods?  Would they take on my most cherished weather site, the Langley Hill radar?  The answer came quickly.

The Langley Hill Radar: Exposed and vulnerable

 On Saturday morning, the radar showed a line of intense precipitation approaching the coast (see image at 2:35 AM, 9:53 UTC).  Reds indicate very intense precipitation;  such precipitation rates are often associated with thunderstorms.

Sure enough the U.S. lightning observation network (which can determine the location of lightning strikes by the electromagnetic radiation being emitted by them) indicated a line of lightning strikes associated with the strong radar echos (see below, for half hour ending 2:30 AM)

As the band of high precipitation and lightning passed over the Langley Hill site, the radar ceased to function, and was taken out of service for several hours until National Weather Service personnel could restore its function.   A taste for the intensity of the lightning could be sampled by this wonderful image from Greg Johnson’s webcam near Hansville (see below) at 1:36 AM.

I suspect there is only one way to stop the meteorological carnage: we must place some sort of sacrificial offering at the top of the Langley Hill tower.  But what?  Or whom?

Weather Blogs Must Be Stopped!

Cape Verde – January 19th, 2012

The roughly symmetrical patterns of swirls and curves in the clouds in this image are cloud vortex streets, also known as von Karman vortices. They were created by low-level winds rushing over the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of northwestern Africa.

Von Karman vortices form nearly everywhere that fluid flow is disturbed by an object. In this image, the “object” that is disturbing the fluid flow is the group of Cape Verde islands. As a prevailing wind encounters the island, the disturbance in the flow propagates downstream of the island in the form of a double row of vortices which alternate their direction of rotation.

Photographer: Richard H. Hahn; Richard’s Web site
Summary Author: Richard H. Hahn; Jim Foster

The photo above showing a phenomenal display of lenticular clouds was observed near Estes Park, Colorado on the evening of January 5, 2012. I was on the south side of Deer Mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park when the setting Sun lit up the western sky in shades of copper and tangerine. Lenticular clouds are a type of wave cloud that typically occur on the lee side of mountain ranges and form when air is forced upward as it moves over higher terrain. In winter, these clouds are often accompanied by downsloping winds ushering in warmer weather to the Front Range of the Rockies. The lack of snow in the foreground is evidence of prior downsloping and of the relatively warm, dry conditions that have prevailed in Colorado during the early winter. Photo taken at 5:02 p.m.

• Estes Park, Colorado Coordinates: 40.372778, -105.519167
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   In much of eastern U.S., winter hasn’t really taken hold, with record maximum temperatures occurring on many days, and monthly averages being way above normal.  Here are the anomalies (difference from normal) of the daily-average temperatures across the U.S. for the past 90 and 30 days (see below).  For the last  90 days nearly all locations over and west of the Rockies has been much warmer than normal..with some places of the the northern plains as much as 8F above typical temperatures.  That is really large.  Guess who has been cooler than normal?   The western side of the Pacific Northwest.  We can’t win! Cooler than normal temperatures have extended down to coastal CA and the far southwest, chilling those poor golfers and retirees in Palm Springs and Tucson.

 The last 30 days has shown the same pattern,except that the warmth over the upper plains and Rockies have became even more accentuated.

To illustrate, here are the high temperatures across the U.S. yesterday.  60s in NY and New Jersey and 30s into the northern plains.

While most of the continental U.S. is mild and comfortable, western Alaska is having one of their coldest years on record.  My colleague Mark Albright (past WA state climatologist) noted that Fairbanks during January 2012 is on track to be the coldest January in the past 40 years.  King Salmon at the head of Bristol Bay is running -24 degrees F below normal for the month so far with an average temperature of -8 F. The coldest January on record averaged -3 F in 1956 at King Salmon where records go back 68 years to 1955.

80 miles west of Fairbanks at the confluence of the Tanana and Yukon Rivers lies the town of Tanana. After a low of -58 F yesterday followed by a high of -47 F, today is even colder with the latest reading of -60F this morning.  Even more amazing, the Jim River site (180 miles N of Fairbanks) near Prospect Creek reported -77 F this morning. Prospect Creek holds the record for coldest place in the United States at -80 F on 23 January 1971.  Yes, they were within 3F of the COLDEST TEMPERATURE EVER OBSERVED OVER THE U.S.

Now what is the cause of this?    A very disturbed atmospheric flow configuration. Here are the anomalies…differences from normal… of the  heights of the 500 hPA pressure surface (about midway up in the atmosphere).  Ridging (higher than normal heights) over much of the U.S. and an anomalous deep trough over Alaska and western Canada.  A very persistent pattern.

According to the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center this usual situation is not over yet.   Here are the predictions for the next 6-10 days.  MUCH warmer than normal conditions over the much of the U.S. (even us) as well as being  considerably drier than normal.  Cooler than normal over Alaska and southern Florida.

The reason…the U.S. ensemble systems are going for a BIG ridge over the western U.S.  Here is the prediction for Friday at 4 PM for 500 hPa heights.  The European Center forecasts (the gold standard) show the same thing…after Thursday the weather over the western U.S. goes dead.

We have a few wet weather systems to get through before then…starting tomorrow morning… but no lowland snow or major storms.  We now have only a month left of western WA winter—after the 3rd week of February the worst is almost always over the lowlands.  The sun becomes stronger, bulbs push up, and the lawns need to be mowed again.  And yes, we can start thinking about those tomato plants.