etudiant

31 minutes ago, csnavywx said:

Diffusion of heat down the water column via mixing or and/or subduction under a vertical salinity gradient. Stronger winds will increase the depth of the mixed layer, bringing up colder intermediate and (in some cases) deep water to mix with near-surface waters, for instance. When combined with increased heat uptake due to GHG (and other) forcing, that causes said heat to be "buried" at depth, even though surface waters may cool. This can give the illusion that the extra heat is gone, but in reality, it has simply been mixed or subducted down. The situation can change if the circulation state (via natural variability or otherwise) changes, allowing some of that heat to effectively resurface.

 

The subduction you explain makes perfect sense. It is the heat surfacing that is puzzling.

Will not the water coming up from below still be somewhat colder than the surface water it displaces? So even if it is warmer than it was without the GHG effect, it would still continue to take up heat, only at a lesser rate.  

Is this a reasonable description of the expected effect?

What is 'heat burial'?

I'd been under the impression that while polar waters were slightly below 0*C, deep ocean water was around 4*C, with the temperature falling as the depth increases in temperate/tropical waters. 

Am I off base?  Is there some paper that would help lay out the process in more detail?

6 hours ago, csnavywx said:

The difference between medicine and poison is often the dose.

So true, but for C or CO2, the dose is immaterial.

We could be eating charcoal and breathing in pure CO2, as long as we also got our wheaties and our oxygen, we'd survive. Calling them poison is just false.

It really damages the credibility of the commentator to put his/her name on stuff like that.

6 hours ago, Vice-Regent said:

It is quite toxic when evacuated in large amounts. Look no further than the tar sands industry in Canada and North America. Accordingly many drinking water sources are irreversibly contaminated by such industries among other 'toxic' effects. Air pollution will lower your life expectancy by as much as 20%.

I get what you're trying to say, but as stated it is just wrong.Carbon is not toxic, even ingested in large amounts. Neither is CO2, it is inert for mammalian metabolism, 

In fact, charcoal pills are still a routine standby for treating poisoning cases, because the carbon adsorbs the toxins and make them inaccessible to the body.

That said, carbon compounds can be very nasty indeed, Benzene derivatives make splendid dyes for fabrics, the byproducts are long lasting carcinogens.  

This Glikson piece is overwrought, starting with the 'toxic carbon' and deteriorating from there. It is not of your caliber of thoughtful postings.

Can anyone amplify on the projected well above normal temperatures anticipated by some models.

All I have is the 10 day WU forecast, which seems stuck in the low 30s after the solstice rain storm.

I'd thought that NASA had concluded, on the basis of satellite measurement, that Antarctica was still gaining mass,

More broadly though, the climate record laid down in the ice sheets suggests that abrupt changes are more likely than gradual shifts. 

This is a system with many contributing elements, some alive, some just physical. Humility seems a useful attribute when trying to understand its functioning.

Why so hard on this guy? Everyone in this business knows that the forecasts are mostly wrong.

It is only rarely that the clouds part and the forecaster nails it. He could be right in this instance, if so, I hope people will step up and recognize that.

27 minutes ago, bluewave said:

There's  nothing particularly rapid about the sea ice growth in the Arctic this month. But the record cold to the south of the Arctic in Hudson Bay area is responsible for the fast increase above average there. It looks like it could be a result of the Warm Arctic, Cold Continents pattern.

 

 

Thank you, bluewave, for this very useful presentation of the ice data.  This kind of presentation helps clarify where things stand much better.  

1 hour ago, WidreMann said:

So I guess we're in agreement that climate change is happening and that the sea ice is reflecting a period of ever increasing warming. Right?

Think that you'd get 97% agreement on that score.

Afaik, there is very broad agreement that global temperatures are up about 1 degree K since the 1880s. However, that warming has been in fits and starts, warm in the 1920s, colder in the early 1970s.

Obviously, the issue is to untangle the natural from the human impact, no easy task.  Given emissions, major changes in land use and population growth, even the details of the human impact are hard to decipher. 

That agreed, I do think that Snowlover91 has a good point, it is disconcerting to have above average ice growth in face of higher than normal air and ocean temperatures. Clearly there is something we do not understand about the process. It may be important or it may be trivial, but it should be investigated.

The various initiatives highlighted seem just common sense responses to current conditions. The 'climate change' driver is not so obvious. 

Separately, the summary speaks of 'actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions'. This is something the US has achieved, in contrast to the various Paris Accord signatories.

Imho, that reduces the value of this document, as it offers neither a rallying point nor a guide to action.

Thank you, bluewave and snowlover91, for a very informative exchange.

Wishing both of you and all the fellow weather lovers on this site a very happy Thanksgiving. We all have much to be thankful for.

Seen that the world has warmed close to a degree Centigrade since the 1880s, there should be solid evidence in the global weather records documenting this effect of increasing warmth.

Have there been any papers published that quantify the change?

6 hours ago, BrianW said:

Spend the money and use lithium batteries. They are expensive but last for a really long time and are rated to -40. Alkaline just dont work well in the cold. 

More important, the lithiums don't leak, unlike the alkalines. So your gear won't die because the battery compartment was turned into a corroded mess.

3 hours ago, bluewave said:

The latest research shows that it is. Daniel Swain has a great blog and twitter feed.

https://weatherwest.com/archives/6252

https://mobile.twitter.com/weather_west?lang=en

While our research focuses primarily on projected changes over the coming decades, other recent studies have offered compelling evidence that many of these changes are already underway. An increase in the frequency of extremely both extremely wet and extremely dry years in California has recently begun to emerge in the observational record,

 

A very interesting paper, thank you for linking it. 

It suggests climate change is not the one way trip to hot and dry as Gov Brown had indicated while setting up water use restrictions during the drought that was ended in the 2016-17 winter.

That makes it much more difficult to forecast precipitation levels, a critical issue for California especially.

27 minutes ago, LibertyBell said:

Sure scientific discussion is awesome, I was just referring to the fact that the prolonged drought in the SW which seems to be a yearly issue has spurred these fires to historic levels.

Iirc, there was extensive discussion after the very wet 2016-17 winter that there would be an explosion in chaparral growth and a consequent surge in fire danger. That was apparently a correct assessment. Whether this can be linked to climate change is more uncertain.

1 hour ago, Mojave1946 said:

Snowfall Predictions

2018-19 Winter:

 

Black Hills of S.D.: 100" - 200"

White Plains, NY: 5"

Islip, NY: 4"

LGA: 2"

Central Park: 1"

JFK: Trace

These are historically low numbers for the NYC area. Can you please expand on the elements of your forecast?

1 hour ago, raindancewx said:

Another big bulge of warmth is heading up near the border of Nino 3 / 1.2. The SOI going from +20 to +30 to around +0 again should help with that, especially if it continues to drop. The core of the heat seems to be shifting east and toward the surface.

Iirc, the 'heat'is relative, in that the subsurface water is warmer than it normally would be, but still actually colder than the surface waters.

So the effect is less surface cooling than usual as the winds help the deeper water to come up.

8 hours ago, raindancewx said:

This is kind of why I cringe a little when people say "the whole west will be warm". The rains in Arizona have really set the heat back quite a bit since September.

There seems to be no visible temperature trend here over the past 8 decades, not even an urban heat island effect. Can that be correct?

I'd think backup might be less than an hour, although that is a reasonable benchmark. The object is to collect the peak data if possible, rather than to be cut off because the district power line is down.

16 minutes ago, snowman21 said:

Standard in the U.S. is 200A service, even to most small apartments. Consider the cloud height indicator by itself can use more than 5A when the heater and blower are active. Most of the instruments have heaters that run nearly continuously in cold weather, so power consumption can add up fast. Plus there are various components and peripherals (computers and communication devices) inside the equipment cabinet which is about the size of a server rack. The whole system is pretty power hungry, more so than a major household appliance, when everything is maxed out.

Thank you, I knew US power standards have gone up considerably since the post WW2 40 amps, which was pre universal A/C and with smaller homes, but 200 amps is huge. 

Clearly, I'd not thought this instrumentation was that power hungry. Sounds like a good candidate for redesign, to take advantage of modern sensors. Maybe the shock of losing the data just when things are getting critical will kick the bureaucracy into action

32 minutes ago, snowman21 said:

Would be tough to have a useful battery backup for something that sucks down 20 amps. You really need a generator like cell towers have. Of course that doesn't preclude the airport from simply turning off the weather station along with everything else when they do an emergency evacuation.

That is a lot of power. Homes in the US used to have 40 amps total at the circuit breaker board. Here we're just feeding monitoring instruments, not fridges or ovens, so this is a lot for a scientific monitoring station. Perhaps it runs pen and ink recorders as part of the system. Certainly the instruments don't take anywhere near that much juice.

I can't believe that it would be that difficult to add some standby power, enough to keep the essential things going for an hour after the line power dies.

15 minutes ago, snowman21 said:

They do have something I believe, but not something that will keep it running for a significant amount of time. The systems have fairly substantial power requirements as they have to power the instruments in the field plus a big cabinet full of processing equipment. Keep in mind the systems, at least ASOS which is deployed at the largest 1000 or so airports, were designed in the late '80s so that's the technology we're working with though parts, mainly the sensors, have been upgraded over time at select sites.

Judging by the abrupt cutoff, they have very little backup indeed. Perhaps there was no requirement for it at the time. It would be an inexpensive and useful retrofit imho.

The Michael system has tracked west of the forecasts and appears to be coming up the coast rather than going out to sea.

Is this something NYC area residents should be concerned about?

32 minutes ago, snowman21 said:

No there really is no redundancy. The weather stations run on AC power. Once that goes, so goes the station in most cases. Many cell towers have generators to keep them going for up to a day while weather stations do not. Power probably went out nearly simultaneously across a large swath of the area taking with it the weather stations.

I'm surprised these stations don't have a cheap UPS, if only to filter the power input.

That would not incur much extra cost or servicing, but would allow the station to continue to operate for perhaps an hour after the power failed. For data collection, that should cover the critical interval.