etudiant

My limited experience would suggest choosing Buffalo or Rochester over Syracuse. I always found the worst weather when driving from Toronto to New York was centered around Syracuse. There was a cartoon character, Joe Btfsplk, who always had a black cloud over him. I concluded he was a Syracuse resident.

I can only admire the faith of eclipse lovers who give credence to cloud forecasts a week out. As is, there is still a weather pattern to digest this week. Once that is past, the models may have some credibility. Until then, not so much, at least imho.

Buffalo NY seems like the best place to see the eclipse, it's in the center of the totality path and one can vacation in Niagara Falls afterwards. Plus there is a decent airport, so access is easy. Rochester NY is equally good, but there is less to see there for after the eclipse.

Sobering. Iirc, the Hekla/Katla eruptions were very rich in fluorine, which made them especially lethal for both livestock as well as people. Oraefajokull is very much an unappreciated hazard, an explosive VEI 5 event would halt North Atlantic air traffic entirely.

Keflavik airport is at the end of the peninsula. If it gets isolated by these eruptions, it would be crippling for Iceland, tourism is a huge part of the economy. Are there any contingency plans that have been prepared or are they confident that these eruptions will remain contained?

In defense of the activists, the issue with wind turbines is that they very effectively kill larger raptors, who are oblivious to turbine blades while soaring. Those birds are few and slower breeders than the little passerines that get killed smashing into buildings. Separately, turbines also do a number on bats, which are almost equally important ecologically as birds, but happily not vulnerable to buildings.

The Fermi paradox is quite separate from the life emergence question. Life on earth seems to have started at least 2 billion years ago, possibly as soon as the oceans cooled to less than bathtub temperature. Even if it then took a couple of billion years for life to evolve enough to get vertebrates such as fishes, reptiles and birds, that still left a half billion years of life getting periodically hit by stuff such as the Permian extinction, much more devastating than the more modest Chicxulub event. So life on earth was puttering along for ages with no indication whatever of any industrial intelligence emerging until now, and even here the drive was for stasis, as the Chinese and Roman empires showed. The cultural revolution that led to our current industrial society reflects the combination of the European religious upheavals and the brutal fighting that it produced so that industrial muscle and understanding became a critical national asset. Imho, that combination was essential to drive our world to where it is today, reaching out to the other planets and listening for other aliens with intelligence. On that basis, the past 500 years of human development should be seen as a one in a million event in the past 500 million years of complex life on earth. There are, at a guess, maybe a thousand planets with earth like characteristics within a thousand light years of earth, so we have maybe one chance in a thousand that their time of having an intelligent industrial civilization overlaps with ours. Fermi's paradox really isn't one, it seems.

These numbers are from 40+ years ago. Is there nothing more current?? Pheasants have very high reproductive capacity, as do wild turkeys. I know the latter are doing very well, so surprised that pheasants are in trouble.

Don't be upset, the weenies are just a reminder to feed your pointer some as a reward. Very fine dog, do you show him?

Does this not kill the hope of longer term (say more than 4-5 days) forecasting? Certainly the models have grown a lot bigger, but they still don't verify very well in the medium or longer term.

Cherry trees are blossoming in Central Park around the Great Lawn, probably fooled by the near spring weather Fear that is not good for them. .

WU now projects 0.77 ' for their day, with another 0.32 " forecast for tomorrow. Thus far no sign of the 'heavy rain' that was anticipated.

The system appears to be bypassing NYC. Rain forecasts have fallen from 2.12" four hours ago to 1.05 " as of now. and may decline further,.Radar suggests much higher rain totals west of the city.

Perhaps balancing record cold in China and Russia?? https://www.reuters.com/world/china/freezing-temperatures-snow-ice-blanket-china-shutting-highways-2023-12-15/ https://phys.org/news/2023-12-china-cold-snap-persists.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/12/06/siberia-russia-extreme-cold-asia/

In fairness, existing 10 day forecasts show so little skill that AI voodoo may well be superior, even if the methodology is murky.

Surprising unanimity in the models that we are at an inflection point. Are they really that good?

Thank you, a somewhat disquieting insight. It suggests we should get set for 'interesting' weather. The Chinese had a saying about 'interesting times', iirc.

Makes sense, but what limits this? Is there an offsetting mechanism or could we be headed towards a much higher atmospheric moisture level?

That's cruel.

For a major hurricane striking the continental US, Idalia was as gracious as could possibly be. It seems pure hype to retire the name.

I'd be surprised if it was even noticed by the passengers.The aircraft flies at 400 kts and at 40,000 ft, so well above the low level turbulence and will probably gain bonus speed thanks to the hurricane winds,

Speculating that they did not want to extend their flight. JFK to AKL is 18 hours non stop, it is one of the longest routes in the world.

So why was it not prominently chosen in the various hurricane forecasts? Certainly both the Nino conditions as well as the unusually warm Atlantic were discussed at great length.

Forecast reliability declines very rapidly going out beyond a couple of days. No one has a high skill forecast for even a working week, afaik. That is what makes the effort so worthwhile, it's a really hard problem.

Only comment that I've seen is that there had been no maintenance of these dams since Qaddafi was overthrown in 2011, due to the ongoing civil war. Nothing about their construction or function though. Iirc, Qaddafi's signature project was the 'great man made river', to divert water from the Atlas mountains to the population centers, around Tripoli and elsewhere, so he must have been actively building reservoirs. I've no idea whether these dams were part of that effort.