etudiant
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Posts posted by etudiant
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4 hours ago, LibertyBell said:
If New York is truly going to be as clear as what I just saw in the forecasts (unlikely, it's still 10 days out), then this will be where a lot of people will be coming.
The forecast I just saw for Syracuse (the closest big town to New York City for totality) is 0% high clouds, 0% midlevel clouds and 1% low clouds at 2 PM, about an hour and a half before totality.
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.
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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.
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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.
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9 hours ago, Volcanic Winter said:
Add to that both Katla and Hekla are due for explosive eruptions any time now, and the monster Öræfajökull (Or-eye-fa-yo-koolt) showed activity / inflation beginning in the 2010’s (its last eruption was in the 1700’s and it theoretically could be nearing its next one).
Katla is a bit more concerning as it has surpassed its normal length of dormancy (Katla is typically very regular with its frequent large VEI4-5 eruptions), which could point to a larger VEI 5 event forthcoming. Hekla may also be nearing a larger event, though unlikely to be larger than Katla.
Öræfajökull is the explosive wildcard as this volcano at the southern axis of the Vatnajökull glacier is the largest explosive volcano in Iceland and contains the highest peak in the country on the rim of its glacier-capped massive caldera (Hvannadalshnúkur). It’s capable of anything from VEI 4 to 6 eruptions, and tends to only go large when it does erupt. That system waking up would be downright frightening. So much so, the volcano had a different name amongst the original Icelandic settlers prior to its borderline VEI 5-6 eruption in the 14th century, and after had its name changed to mean “wasteland.”
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.
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14 hours ago, Volcanic Winter said:
Should be another imminent fissure eruption near Grindavik in Iceland. They can’t catch a break. This is going to keep happening for some time, as this form of volcanism brings repeated intrusions of magma that lead to repeat eruptions. And it’s not really ever going to be a type of eruption that Iceland can turn into a major tourism event like the gentle and predictable Fagradalsfjall eruptions the past few years.
And this is still all part of the opening salvo of the Reykjanes volcanoes waking up for a new cycle of eruptions. Systems all over the most populated peninsula in the country will continue to wake up and erupt over the next century or two.
Many of the towns on the Reykjanes including parts of modern Reykjavik are built on lava flows from the Middle Ages cycle of activity, so yeah going forward this is going to be quite a challenge for them.
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?
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8 minutes ago, Dark Star said:
Except activists aren't necessarily logical, take for instance arsonists on the left coast.
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.
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55 minutes ago, LibertyBell said:
On the level of extinction level events, the fact that we are here today at all is a testimony to the resilience of life in recovering after such cataclysmic events! Perhaps the true answer to the Fermi Paradox is that we were lucky enough to be born on a planet that is stable enough to allow evolution to progress far enough to allow us to be born. Maybe most other habitable worlds just aren't this stable for this long and life doesn't get beyond a very simple, maybe even microbial level?
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.
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3 hours ago, LibertyBell said:
Interesting that they are considered one of the main reasons the wild population of pheasants has gone down:
https://www.pheasantsforever.org/getdoc/bef628f7-35d2-4b82-bac4-2d68d7bffc75/Pennsylvania.aspx
PENNSYLVANIA—MOST WILD BIRDS OFF LIMITS FOR NOW
Forecast: Pennsylvania’s few wild pheasants live mostly in the state’s four active Wild Pheasant Recovery Areas, where hunting is closed—at least for now. There’s a small chance of finding wild pheasants in agricultural areas elsewhere. But most pheasant hunting this year will be for stocked, pen-raised birds, says Ian Gregg, game management division chief for the Pennsylvania Game Commission.
It wasn’t always so. Breeding Bird Survey data from routes run in primary pheasant range counties in southeastern Pennsylvania show that pheasant numbers increased an average 3 percent per year from 1966 to 1974. The population held steady through 1980. But then it plunged. The roadside index fell from 32 birds per route in 1966 to less than a single bird in 2005.
According to the Northeast Upland Game Bird Technical Committee report for 2015, “Loss of farmland habitat and intensification of agricultural practices on remaining cropland acres are the primary causes for these declines. In addition, the release of large numbers of game farm pheasants is thought to have greatly reduced the gene pool and survivorship of pheasants in the wild.”
The Pennsylvania Ring-necked Pheasant Management Plan 2008–2017, completed in 2009, laid out a two-pronged approach to pheasant recovery. First is restoring wild birds in designated recovery areas. Second is providing put-and-take hunting.A big part of the decline of pheasants in Pennsylvania has been loss of farmland, which dropped from nearly 8.2 million acres in 1974 to about 7.6 million acres in 2017.
In addition, according to the commission, “economic trends in agriculture intensified farming practices, herbicides, pesticides, chemical fertilizers increased substantially in use. Increased row crop acreage, urban developments, and the elimination of fencerows on agricultural lands also are thought to have accelerated the decline in pheasant populations.”
And two hard winters in 1977 and 1978 further depressed pheasant populations. The commission attempted to offset declining populations by mass producing and releasing more pheasants, but it soon became apparent that that only resulted in a bird of reduced quality, with a loss of hardiness and increased tameness.
Partly in response to declining pheasant numbers and places to hunt pheasants, but also as part of overall declines in participation in hunting, the number of hunters has fallen from a peak high of more than 700,000 in 1971 to about 65,000 to 75,000 in the past few years.
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.
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12 minutes ago, dseagull said:
So, just for informative purposes.... (because clearly the weenies are stacking up...,) what does that reaction mean?
Am I unwelcome here for sharing photos of enjoyment in the snow?
I always assumed that discussions that strayed from like-minded opinions were unwelcome here, but sheesh.
I've learned a lot here, as have others from my companies.
Guess I'll go on my weenie-way. Good luck all!
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?
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9 hours ago, North and West said:
Thought you guys might find this snippet interesting
https://apple.news/AjU1UC8ilTGabmhH9udcz5Q
Edward Lorenz was a weatherman during World War II, tasked with forecasting cloud cover before American bombing raids in the Pacific. But meteorology in those days was largely guesswork and produced only crude predictions. After the war ended, Lorenz decided to try to unlock the secrets of the weather using more sophisticated methods and harnessing the nascent power of computing. He created a simplified, miniature world on his LGP-30 computer: Instead of the millions of different variables that affect weather systems in the real world, his model had just 12 variables.
One day, Lorenz decided to rerun a simulation he’d done earlier. To save time, he decided to start midway through, plugging in the data points from the prior snapshot. He figured that so long as he set the variables at the same levels, the weather patterns would be repeated just as they were before: same conditions, same outcomes.
But something strange happened instead. The weather in his rerun simulation was different in every way. After a lot of scowling over the data, Lorenz realized what had happened. His computer printouts had rounded data to three decimal places. If, for example, the exact wind speed was 3.506127 miles an hour, the printout displayed it as 3.506 miles an hour. When he plugged the slightly truncated values from the printouts back into the simulation, he was always off by a tiny amount (in this case, just 0.000127 miles an hour). These seemingly meaningless alterations—these tiny rounding errors—were producing major changes.
That observation led Lorenz to a breakthrough discovery. Minuscule changes could make enormous differences: Raising the temperature one-millionth of a degree could morph the weather two months later from clear blue skies into a torrential downpour, even a hurricane. Lorenz’s findings were the origin of the “butterfly effect” concept—the notion that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could trigger a tornado in Texas—and, ultimately, of chaos theory. They also explain why meteorologists are still unable to forecast the weather beyond a short time frame with much accuracy; if any calculation is off by a tiny amount, the longer-term forecast will be useless.
.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.
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11 minutes ago, ecovers94 said:
I'm posting because it's that bad. it is unfathomable to me that the coldest we can pull off the first week of january is 30 degrees at night-maybe. maybe, maybe it really is time to panic about climate change. this is surreal. Plants still haven't died in parts of Manhattan.
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. .
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49 minutes ago, jm1220 said:
Based on? Here's the latest HRRR which actually went up for MBY. It may very well be that the most rain happens west of the city but I don't see a model or prediction that dropped way off.
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.
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2 hours ago, forkyfork said:
it's been pretty much locked into this outcome
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.
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2 hours ago, PrinceFrederickWx said:
Perhaps balancing record cold in China and Russia??
https://phys.org/news/2023-12-china-cold-snap-persists.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/12/06/siberia-russia-extreme-cold-asia/
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6 hours ago, weatherwiz said:
meh voodoo
From what I read, it can yield what seems to be very accurate results, but it can't explain how it arrived at the results or show the work. Big red flag. Only benefit seems to be is it produces output much more quickly.
That's what resources should be investing in...how to produce the data more quickly and efficiency.
In fairness, existing 10 day forecasts show so little skill that AI voodoo may well be superior, even if the methodology is murky.
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37 minutes ago, mitchnick said:
Despite the recent warming, the Cfs fails to get the monthly or trimonthly to +2C. It's actually done pretty well since August, which was when it last had a forecast of +2C or more by now while Euro and other dynamic models were. Nothing says it can't fail now, but I would think it'll need to change direction real soon if it's going back to +2C or more.
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Surprising unanimity in the models that we are at an inflection point. Are they really that good?
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13 hours ago, csnavywx said:
Not much. Saturation vapor pressure increases non-linearly with temperature. So do vapor pressure deficits. Intensifying drought and floods.
Thank you, a somewhat disquieting insight.
It suggests we should get set for 'interesting' weather. The Chinese had a saying about 'interesting times', iirc.
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12 hours ago, chubbs said:
Big mechanism for warming global temps during an el nino is increased water vapor in atmosphere primarily from tropical oceans. Note that this added water swamps water from HT volcano as stratosphere is only 1% of atmospheric water. Any HT water in troposphere is long gone as lifetime is only a couple of weeks at best.
Makes sense, but what limits this? Is there an offsetting mechanism or could we be headed towards a much higher atmospheric moisture level?
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On 11/5/2023 at 7:27 PM, Will - Rutgers said:
the giants are not a football team so much as an avatar of dread. they are the flashlight losing battery power in the deep dark forest. they are the first night in your apartment after she leaves you. they are a reminder that not only is there no hope, but that you are the fool for having hope in the first place. they are the GFS of sports.
That's cruel.
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On 9/24/2023 at 5:08 PM, Ed, snow and hurricane fan said:
Idalia has a decent shot at retirement. As far as the never ending CV/Atlantic MDR season, 91L, although intensity guidance seems to suggest it may not become a hurricane. SHIPS shear increases to near 30 knots in 3 days.
For a major hurricane striking the continental US, Idalia was as gracious as could possibly be.
It seems pure hype to retire the name.
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12 hours ago, EliasDePoot said:
How does it feel to fly inside a hurricane on a commercial jet? Especially one of Jova's caliber?
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,
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2 hours ago, EliasDePoot said:
Why do planes do this?
This was Jova:
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.
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2 hours ago, cptcatz said:
Interesting because if you asked somewhat what to expect with an El Nino and record hot Atlantic, that's exactly what you'd expect.
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.
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13 minutes ago, nycwinter said:
why is weather forecasting so bad a few days ago we were looking a week to 10 days without any rain now that has changed quickly.,
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.
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Occasional Thoughts on Climate Change
in Climate Change
Posted
Guess nobody told people in India that their fertility was under threat.
That said, the catastrophic slump in birth rates is pervasive across the industrialized world, with South Korea and Taiwan in the van, but Europe, North America, Japan and China all well below sustainable fertility levels.
Maybe the fault is of the media,which push unreasonable life style expectations, or maybe its aliens.
In any case, it is not a fossil fuel problem, the Ultra Orthodox and the Amish in the US both seem to have maintained historic fertility rates while surrounded by the near childless..