ORH_wxman

You might have been getting worse downsloping in Somers than BDL. It seems just eyeballing that Somers would still be downsloping on a NNE wind as the storm progressed and winds turned...more than BDL would be. Perhaps that difference was enough to overcome the slight elevation advantage....esp with the winds being stronger and marginal temps. It was a fascinating storm for mesoscale terrain effects.

That was the first storm that educated me on the CT Valley snow hole. I was young and ignorant back then, so I used to always think the further west you went, the more snow you got. Then we were out 2 days after the storm at the grocery store and this lady from Springfield made a comment on how they only got an inch or two of slush and I didn't believe her, but she insisted it was amazing driving from there to ORH and going from 1-2" to over 30".

Still the best storm I have ever experienced. Had about 35" in Holden. The fact that like half of it was wet snow and tons of wind really made it unique and quite destructive. It really did a number on the coast too not much more than a year after the 1991 perfect storm.

The frequency and magnitude of ENSO hasn't changed much at all in the past century...I'm pretty sure we're going to see a La Nina in the next few years....and many more after that.

So during a La Nina, the ridge from the GOA won't retrograde like it always does? Why not? Your answers don't make any real sense. Or they aren't worth much on face value. I could easily say "cloud feedbacks are going to cause negative feedbacks and global warming will be mostly offset this century"....you'd ask me to show you some actual work on the subject rather than taking my word for it. Even if I tell you "it's obvious, the increased warming will cause more evaporation and cloud cover will increase which will reflect more incoming solar radiation"...something that mind sound decent but doesn't add up under more intense scrutiny that literature provides us.

A decrease in fog over a few decade period and no fog at all plus low pressure having trouble forming are not the same thing....and this still doesn't explain how you sustain a permanent PDO...what's going to prevent the waters south of the Aletians from warming more than the GOA?

You are talking scales of warming that are almost physically impossible. Nothing you post is passing the sanity test...nevermind not providing us with some literature that supports the idea that the PDO cannot go negative in a warming world.

So if the ridge is only semi-permanenent, then how will the PDO stay positive? This doesn't even address how the ridge is going to stay there.

Can you explain how AGW will force the anomalies in the Gulf of Alaska to stay higher than the anomalies south of the Aleutians? i'm still curious about this supposed consequence of AGW.

I would be interested in a physical explanation of why the gulf of Alaska SST anomalies will now remain warmer than the anomalies south of the Aleutians because of global warming.

I wonder why the gulf stream was below average last summer: I guess the AMOC shutdown just happened this winter.

You want an explanation of an extremely small area of the ocean on why it is way above average? You could pick out multiple areas that size that are well below or well above average across the global oceans...an area around the Gulf Stream is extra sensitive to wobbles in the current, which is why directly adjacent to it, you see extremely strong values below normal. Post some literature on why you think ENSO has no effect on Atlantic SSTs or why global warming has altered the PDO and the AMO...don't just sit there and accuse those who actually provide you with literature (that you subsequently refuse to read) as the ones who are lying or making things up.

Now you are just totally off your rocker....if you actually read up on ENSO, then you would know that all the heat that comes to the surfaces gets redistributed around the globe, such that other regions show a lagged warming to +ENSO events. One of the better prominent papers on the subject was by Kevin Trenberth years ago...read up because you clearly have demonstrated a lack of knowledge on the subject: http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/papers/jgr2001b/jgr2.html

It is impossible to have a coherent conversation on the subject if you are unwilling to do any self-education on what the AMO and PDO are and how they are measured. If you want to keep it very simple...the general trend in North Atlantic SST anomalies has been slowly downward since the mid-2000s, with the big post-El Nino spike in 2010 quite evident

I don't think you are understanding what detrended means...it means the backround signal is taken out, so we're only measuring the difference between two areas of the Pacific. The water could be almost boiling temperature and you can get a -PDO if the Gulf of AK down the West Coast is colder relative to normal than the waters south of the Aleutians. As for the AMO, you'd probably want to read up on the hundreds of papers published that describe its behavior before making silly guesses about its decline since the mid 2000s.

No, the PDO is detrended. They remove the backround global SST warming trend. The PDO is essentially a measure in the difference of anomalies in two regions of the northern hemisphere Pacific.

We'd have to see a noticeable cooling by 2017-2018 or so because by that point, we'd be more than 3 years beyond the weak solar max we had in cycle 24. It's been argued by some that the weak solar maxes are more important than the mins during decreased acitivty...so you can pretty much discard the theory if by 2018 the effects of the weak max and subsequent min have not been felt to a significant degree. I'm fairly skeptical though on it having a large impact. We may see a muted effect like we did from 2008-2012...we'll find out soon enough.

BEST only measures land temps though....granted their land temps are colder than Hadley's land temps, but if you include SST in there, then the decline from the late 1800s becomes more prominent.

Actually, the instrumental record shows the first decade of the 20th century as colder than what we know of the 2nd half of the 19th century...there was a pretty signficiant cooling that occurred during the AMO drop and solar minimum: That said, I agree it's a questionable claim that it would be colder than much of the LIA between the 14th and 18th centuries.

The article isn't that bad except for the title...the title is typical media garbage. CC didn't "cause" the drought...unless you want to play that silly semantics game about the butterfly effect (CC affects every little parcel of air)...rather than having some scientific integrity and talking about relative changes. The idea that CC can enhance droughts because of warmer temps is sound. The one bizarre part of the aritcle though was talking about the 20th century decline in rainfall in CA as if that has a lot of meaning. The paleo record shows that one of the wettest periods on record is the mid 19th century to the mid 20th century. CA has seen droughts that span decades or even centuries in the past.

Yes....Tmax has warmed significantly slower than Tmin.

Well the tropics are expected to warm the least, so it makes sense not to expect a massive jump in storm strength there. The biggest impact is expected to be how far north the TCs can sustain. Obviously there is no way to know for sure until we actually go out in time and observe for ourselves...but Gulf of Mexico SST anomalies have shown a flat trend going back to the 1800s. This actually matches well with the southeast U.S. "warming hole" that shows up on land data too.

I don't think anyone is "Writing them off" so to speak...more just criticizing a lot of the stories we read on these events being blamed by AGW. There are certainly some extremes that are supported by both empirical evidence and theoretical physical arguments...obvious being shifting the bell curve to the right on temperature extremes. That doesn't mean we need to start blaming other events on them when the evidence is either inconclusive or even against the claim.

We've already seen a drastic increase in heat content and surface temperature since the late 1800s...so obvious trends in TCs should be detectable if AGW impacted them so much....there aren't obvious trends. You can argue a very weak increase in the absolute strongest storms, which is consistent with the literature, but it's still quite small (orders of magnitude lower) in comparison to the way storms are classified themselves. There is not expected to be a detectable trend in major hurricanes of cat 4/5 until the 2nd half of the 21st century and even those trends aren't expected to be strong.

You linked me to an article that discusses blocking and Sandy....yet there's papers that refute that. The evidence isn't robust. As for strength....cliamte models show that hurricanes on average will increase their maximum sustained winds by about 1-3% in the future toward the middle 21st centruy...and perhaps to 2-10% by 2100. Again, blaming the strength on AGW is a stretch if we are talking significant attribution...maybe Katrina would have been a 106 knot hurricane at landfall instead of 110 knots if it werent for AGW. But lets be intellectually honest on the subject...the biggest reason for Katrina's strength was the loop current that season extending further north than usual and some very favorable upper level winds as it exited Florida and into the gulf. By far the biggest impact of AGW on Katrina was sea level being about 6-7 inches higher...so it made the storm surge 6 to 7 inches higher.