TheClimateChanger

What the heck is going on in Iowa? Iowa meteorologist Chris Gloninger steps down after receiving threats - The Washington Post

Iowa meteorologist Chris Gloninger steps down after receiving threats - The Washington Post

Not sure who to believe. The HRRR continues to model a high-end smoke plume over the northlands, but the I can find no mention of smoke in any NWS forecasts. The concentrations being depicted seem capable of changing the color of the sky to shades of yellow, orange or red, completely blocking the sun, reducing visibility to less than one mile, and resulting in very unhealthy to downright hazardous air quality. For the UP of Michigan, this is a long duration of some of the most dense smoke east of the Mississippi I have ever seen on the HRRR, and yet there is no mention of smoke or haze in the forecast.

While there may be a touch of haze and somewhat degraded AQI in Wisconsin and northern Illinois, this looks like a legitimate orange sky, downright hazardous air smokemaggedon for the Arrowhead of Minnesota, and perhaps the UP of Michigan later on. Several large fires in western Ontario not far from the international border with expected explosive fire behavior on Friday afternoon pouring smoke right over the border. I know they don’t issue PDS air quality advisories, but this looks like a particularly dangerous situation. Hazardous travel conditions also possible with poor visibility in dense smoke and haze.

Atrazine... nasty stuff, be careful with it. Potent endocrine disruptor, which has been observed to turn male frogs into females. Source: https://news.berkeley.edu/2010/03/01/frogs/

And for clarification, these were observed at the Federal Building, which was warmer than the current airport location. As you can see from this record for July 1945 below, the airport was found to be 1.9 degrees cooler than the downtown observation site. In 1945, the normal temperatures at the airport for the month of July were a high of 76.3F, a low of 60.0F, and a mean of 68.2F. At the downtown office, the normals were a high of 78.2F, a low of 62.0F, and a mean of 70.1F. So the temperatures in July 1936 at Milwaukee would have been 4.8F above the mean for downtown (or a whopping 6.7F above the mean for the airport site, which didn't yet exist). However, it is only 1.6F warmer than the modern normal for the airport site. When you go back through these old records, it's always incredible to see how much it's warmed. The normal July mean temperature in that era was 5.1F colder than the modern normal mean temperature. The normal high was only 3.0F warmer than the modern normal mean temperature. And the normal temperatures were much closer to modern June normal temperatures than modern July normal temperatures. Note also that these were rooftop measurements, which Watts et al. has shown can be substantially warmer than ground-based measurements. With proper siting and exposure, it may have been even cooler than reported. Source: How not to measure temperature, part 48. NOAA cites errors with Baltimore's Rooftop USHCN Station Heck of a way to run the so-called "Hottest Summer on Record."

1936 was mostly a paper tiger. Other than an 8-day heat wave, it was a very pleasant summer by modern standards. It was only hot in places where nobody lived. Keep in mind, too, that there was only 2.21" of rain at MKE in June & July combined. So you know dewpoints were likely in the 40s and 50s during the heat wave. Might not have even reached heat advisory status, since the apparent temperature would have been lower than the actual temperature. June July *Excepting the 8-day period from 7/7 to 7/14, the mean high and low were 77.0F/63.7F, with a mean monthly temperature of 70.3F. August

I think most people would be thrilled with this outcome. July 1936 was generally summer of yesteryear standards compared to recent years outside of a 7-8 day extreme heat wave. Even including the heat wave, it was generally at or below modern normals in much of the eastern US. Just by way of example, at New York City, the average high was 86.0F and the average low was 66.4F, with a mean temperature of 76.2F, which is 1.3F below the 1991-2020 normal. Excluding just 8 days [7/8-7/15], the average high plummets to 83.1F and the average low drops to 64.5F, producing a very comfortable mean of 73.8F over that 23-day stretch. With modern amenities like A/C, it wouldn't be too difficult to weather a similar stretch. Especially if it meant the rest of the month produced low temperatures not seen in decades.

Looks like there may be a pretty solid plume of smoke, including concentrated surface smoke, on Thursday extending from northern Michigan into the Chicagoland area and southern Wisconsin. Potential exists for degraded air quality.

Not super impressively ranked, and kind of cherrypicked on the date range, but it has been the 10th coldest mean minimum temperature on record for the period from May 1 through yesterday (6/18) at PIT. Obvious data quality concerns, the 1907 reading was from downtown, and the 1945 at AGC, and would likely rank higher if measured at the current observation site. On the flip side, the 1960s are probably overrepresented as the surroundings around the airport were still very rural then and the airport itself less developed.

Here is what the smoke pall looked like from 35,000 feet this morning over Illinois.

Webcams revealing some of the filthy air over the Twin Cities today:

Well, I generated the table in Excel, but the data was sourced from here: CLIMOD 2 (cornell.edu) Select "Seasonal Ranking", and then set variable to "Minimum Temperature" and summary to "Minimum", select the month or other time frame you want to see, and use station ID "MKETHR" [THR for threaded records, if you just use MKE it will only return records from the airport].

This can't be normal, can it? How can it be in the mid and upper 90s on the coast of James Bay and the south end of Hudson Bay, and in the 70s here?

You should be in a pretty good spot, especially in the coming decades. People probably said the same about southern Michigan in the 1860s, as you can see from this table displaying the average monthly coldest minimum temperature by decade at Lansing: how can you plant anything in a spot where the first freeze occurs in August and sometimes in July (like 1863)? Now 160 years later, and it seldom drops much below 50F in those months, and the first freeze doesn't occur until October. The September mean monthly minimum so far this decade is 9F higher than the August mean monthly minimum from the 1860s.

Average coldest monthly minimum low temperature in the warm season by decade, at Lansing, MI:

There can be impacts in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, and possibly Chicago.

Not seeing much talk about this, but I am becoming increasingly concerned about the potential for an impactful wildfire smoke event. That is a dense pall of smoke with a substantial near surface density. If correct, visibility can be reduced to under three miles and air quality can reach unhealthy levels.

Despite its location in the tropics and right next to the ocean, San Juan is warming at about 3.5F per century. The current normal annual temperature of 80.9F was never reached in any year prior to 1972. Last year, the mean temperature was 80.9F, which is considered to be "normal" today, but was 23rd warmest (out of 124 years) and warmer than any year prior to 1972.

Been hearing of a heat wave in Puerto Rico, so figured I'd take a quick dive into the data. Easily the hottest start to June on record in San Juan:

I've seen a little chatter on Twitter that the recent warming may be related in part to a reduction in sulfur emissions from shipping and/or water vapor from the 2022 Hunga Tonga eruption. I don't buy either of these theories - First, aerosol optical depth across the northern Atlantic has been much higher than typical due to the intense plumes of smoke from the Canadian wildfires. Moreover, wildfire smoke has a greater cooler potential by mass than sulfate aerosols emitted by shipping, and can be lofted into the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere by pyrocumulonimbus and even downstream convection. The North Atlantic heat wave is happening IN SPITE OF very high levels of climate-cooling aerosols, not DUE TO low levels of aerosols. As for the volcano theory, this theory is basically akin to a "volcanic summer" - i.e., a brief, but rapid, warming due to stratospheric water vapor. Doing some research, I could find zero evidence that this phenomenon has ever been observed prior to 2022. There can be warming from volcanoes, but it's usually due to a series of volcanoes or a few intense eruptions emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases and follows an intense volcanic winter. Obviously, Hunga Tonga is not the first explosive undersea volcano - nearly 70% of earth's surface is covered by water, so there's likely been a lot more of those type of eruptions than explosive terrestrial eruptions. Despite this, there is zero evidence of a volcanic summer ever occurring, which would be easy to detect. They've detected numerous volcanic winters. Any impact from Hunga Tonga is likely minimal, and if anything more likely to have resulted in some cooling of the climate system. In my opinion, the warming is more likely the result of continued, record-breaking, emissions of greenhouse gases, rapidly developing El Nino conditions, and perhaps positive feedback loops being triggered, with the two mechanisms proposed above a very small part of any observed warming.

For reference, here is what the 21z RAP is showing for hour 51. As you can see, this is a massive plume, enveloping all of Saskatchewan, most of Alberta and Manitoba, western Ontario, and even parts of Nunavut.

Both the RAP and HRRR agree that another massive pall of smoke will form and cover all or most of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and western Ontario early next week. Many of these areas look likely to experience degraded air quality and limited sun. A bit concerned we could see this intrude into the upper Midwest and perhaps elsewhere as we head into the middle of the week, with a northwest flow aloft west of the Great Lakes upper low. Regardless of whether this enters the US airspace, many places in Canada look likely to see unhealthy to hazardous air quality. This is the 00z HRRR depiction of vertically integrated smoke and near surface smoke. We see the south end of a dense pall of smoke, including a substantial near surface component. The RAP gives the true size of the smoke pall, as much of it lies outside of the HRRR grid.

This is why I always use to say I’m a climate skeptic. Skeptical that it wasn’t much worse than the mainstream view, not that it wasn’t happening. They say it’s warmed 1C since preindustrial, but in fact it’s warmed nearly 1C just since the 1981-2010 average. This should be a smoking gun that they’ve been downplaying this, but I doubt that’s how many will report it.