Volcanic Winter

1 hour ago, gravitylover said:

450 feet! That's the real deal.

Yeah Icelandic fissure eruptions can be pretty insane in their opening phase when the pressure is at its peak. The Laki eruption had fissures extending over 80km with jets shooting up over a thousand feet at least. But that’s the top end of the scale and thus is very rare. 

This is big for a mantle fed eruption, the larger fissure events happen from rifts formed by the central volcanoes where magma can accumulate in a chamber for centuries to millennia. 2014’s Holuhraun eruption of Bararbunga is an example, as is the Laki eruption (which was over 10x larger).

This was also reminiscent of a Mauna Loa eruption, which is impressive because Mauna Loa does very intense fissures. 

I was really sad last night because the initial news wasn’t great and there was grave concern the lava would swamp Grindavik, but fortunately the top 3/4ths of the fissure, the lava was flowing away. The southernmost section had lava flowing in the direction of the town apparently but the output there was low, and has died down. 

They’re very lucky! The bad news is that this is going to keep happening now for decades as the Reykjanes volcanic fields have awoken for the start of a new cycle of eruptions. The last Reykjanes cycle was in the Middle Ages, so this is pretty amazing to be alive during this. 

11 minutes ago, coastalplainsnowman said:

Thanks for these posts - these are great.   I read them every time I'm on here, and kind of take them for granted, just like I do for a lot of the great stuff that you, Don, and others post daily.  ( I'm sure I'm not the only one guilty of this.)  Thanks for all the time you put into these.

The amount of data, facts, recollection, and analyses posted here daily has continually blown my mind since the day I signed up. 

Probably why half my phone browser is AmericanWX tabs and I spend more time on here than I care to admit .

2 hours ago, cbmclean said:

Based on those pictures it does not seem very explosive.  In order to significantly impact weather/climate the ash/SO2/water vapor has to be propelled high into the atmosphere.

Correct. You’d need something Laki sized from the 1780’s, which had its own explosive component in there as well. 5x the total SO2 release of Pinatubo and caused significant climate disruption (though not all of that would’ve breached the tropopause).  

This won’t be that by any stretch (Laki was only one of three such enormous Icelandic fissure eruptions known in the entire Holocene), though it’s more intense than the three Fagradalsfjall eruptions so far since 2020.

To be clear (I tend to wax a bit on comparisons), this won’t have a climate impact whatsoever.  

Forgive the janky way I’m sharing this:

https://imgur.com/a/v2vL1fm

Edit: Same video, de-jankified:

@Stormlover74

Very bad news, that’s a massive and exceptionally powerful fissure. Much moreso than Fagradalsfjall. Those central jets are enormous and that looks like a very high effusion rate. Not good for Grindavik, Blue Lagoon, etc. 

Gave very little warning. A couple hours of swarming and a 4.2 quake, then boom. The dike formed a month ago and then activity waned. The main rock breaking / fracturing had completed and the dike was in a pre-eruptive position. The problem is they couldn’t tell if the supply from below had turned off or not. If it did, there wouldn’t be an eruption now and that magma would’ve stayed in a “loaded gun” position for a while longer. Instead, it seems the dike sat there and slowly, relatively silently continued to pressurize until the final swarm broke through the remaining section of crust. The powerful fountains are the end result. 

Not a tourist eruption, this is pretty bad for them. I’ve been to Grindavik several times and it was already extensively damaged by the seismic activity (graben formation) last month. 
 

https://www.volcanodiscovery.com/reykjanes/news/229037/Reykjanes-volcano-update-Eruption-seems-very-powerful-scientist-calls-it-worse-case.html

Edit: From RUV.is (official source)

Ármann Höskuldsson, volcanologist, has told RÚV that the crack currently seems to stretch to the north, and this means that the lava does not go down into Grindavík.

He says one fissure has already worn off and another fissure has opened a little further north.

He considers this to be three to four times bigger than the previous eruption on the peninsula.

Just now, Great Snow 1717 said:

..meaning the "results" not the specific pattern...

At that point, isn’t it just sort of ‘hedging against snow,’ and thus not actually a forecast? 

22 minutes ago, NittanyWx said:

2015 and 1982...wonder if those years have something in common with this one

8 minutes ago, MANDA said:

3.82" here as of 8am.  Winds nothing notable.  Maybe a few gusts to 20 mph earlier this morning.  The ground is saturated.

We had a couple big gusts that woke us up early AM, but that’s not surprising given location. Overall didn’t seem too bad here. Looks like the brunt of the winds was E LI into NE. 

Looks like about 2.4” here and sitting at 60. 

My tinsel snowman had a rough night 

22 minutes ago, donsutherland1 said:

Week ahead numbers:

 

 

Interesting to me how close in temperature the four major cities are. That’s a pretty minor spread (at least it seems to me). 

At the end of the day, at least we have memes and the friends we’ve weenied along the way. 

1 hour ago, 40/70 Benchmark said:

Yea, my goal isn't frozen pipes, its buried mailboxes.

6 minutes ago, Brian5671 said:

The lack of any decent cold air source(outside of a random day or two) going back to last winter is amazing....

It’s disconcerting, 100%. 

TBF people light Snowman up with weenie’s constantly too, many cases for posting his genuine thoughts. But because it’s ‘negative’ it gets seen as trolling. I don’t think that’s fair, personally.  

Look how you say things matters still in written format, and sometimes people come off a certain way when they post that goes beyond giving objective opinions / forecasts. But I do think some have been largely doing better with that. 

I will always give props to well reasoned posts, especially those with effort behind them / data etc. And that holds even if it’s not what I, personally as a ride or die cold & snow weenie, want to hear. I try to separate emotion from this, because I’m here to learn first and foremost. 

All just my thoughts / weighing in. I’m not the arbiter of what’s right and wrong for the forum. 

48 minutes ago, weatherbook said:

D.C. had a winter storm warning on Jan 3, 2022.  I measured about 8" at the Tidal Basin.  It was a classic D.C. snowstorm.

 

Beautiful shot! And a nice event, that one had a sharp cutoff just to my south where I only saw virga due to the very dry air on the north fringe, but it plastered ACY IIRC. I did better in the following event and then at the end of the month for my main snow that month. 

But 8 inches is a very nice event in an otherwise poor stretch. 

Really pulling for the megalopolis to have a good winter this year. 

1 hour ago, Allsnow said:

Latest OLR maps have the standing wave in p7 dissipating with most the convection in p8/1. If true, would think their is a cold risk in the east first two weeks of January 

Can you help me understand the “standing wave” in the context of the MJO? Does that simply mean a slowdown with forcing lingering in a specific phase from some sort of feedback loop?

15 minutes ago, 40/70 Benchmark said:

I know we have exchanged thoughts about this before, but my hope if that it also entails a more active N stream in addition to mild, Maritime interludes.

We may disagree on this, but I don't think its fair to say that it takes nothing away from the strength of el Nino. Perhaps not as much as implied, but when you lessen the Pacific dipole, it doesn't make sense to have every bit as pervasive an ENSO event. Is it as weak as the MEI would imply? Of course not.

How are you feeling about your megalopolis snow forecast at this point? Zero implication in me asking, I’m merely curious. If you could tweak any of the ranges, what adjustments would you make? Or would you stay locked in with the original forecast? 

Thanks Ray. 

1 hour ago, BoulderWX said:

Wait. 34 and not 33 or 31 - literally who the hell cares if there is no precip associated. I love weather and storms but the constant talk about low temps when it literally doesn’t matter at all without precip is fascinating to me.

I find it interesting, but I’m weird. 

Final cooldown before the parakeets fly in. 

I’m at 29 here currently, northern border of the NJ pine barrens down in Ocean Co.  

7 minutes ago, psv88 said:

I hit 21.9 on 11/26, doubt we beat that 

I was 22.3 on 11/25 which is also marginally my coldest temp so far this season. 22.5 this AM, coldest of the month. 

11 minutes ago, WarrenCtyWx said:

Do we have a term for the cold equivalent of torch?

Mirage?

(kidding)

Starting to look at the models more now, this is around the time my watch begins. Though as mentioned my emotional investment for the time being is staying low. 

I do like the continued activity though, I think that’s a good sign. Lots of juiced systems, I would think it’d be hard not to luck into something eventually even lacking a wholesale major pattern improvement. Obviously we need a better temp profile and at least some improvements, but I think that will happen in Jan even if only marginally enough to get us a trackable event. 

Certainly not disheartened, we’ll get there one way or another. 

4 minutes ago, North and West said:

I prefer inhospitable hellscape.


.

I always liked ‘infernal hellscape,’ but then I remembered that’s my nickname for Florida. 

40 minutes ago, bluewave said:

From all the historical accounts that I have read, the winter of 1779-1780 was probably the coldest on record going back to the colonial times. If this Philly account of the temperature only getting above freezing once in January 1780 is close, then the monthly average may have only been around 15°. The coldest month on record since 1874 was January 1977 at 20.0°.

 

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Philadelphia_Area_Weather_Book/mon_ivVXUY4C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=january+1780+cold+philadelphia+pa&pg=PA76&printsec=frontcover

 

Time Series Summary for Philadelphia Area, PA (ThreadEx) - Month of Jan
Click column heading to sort ascending, click again to sort descending.

Rank	Year	Mean Avg Temperature	Missing Count
1	1977	20.0	0
2	1893	24.0	0
3	1918	24.1	0
4	1970	24.5	0
5	1982	24.7	0

Simply unfathomable. I appreciate this post very much Bluewave, I have an intense fascination with the LIA both from a volcanism perspective and just the general extreme climo differences to now. 

I was born simply too late to experience the milder facsimiles of the harshest LIA winter months in the 70’s and 80’s. 

—

I generally believe the LIA was caused by a multitude of factors instead of any one singular thing, but I found a snippet of a paper suggesting volcanism as the principal driver, kicked off the by the enormous Samalas / Rinjani eruption of the 13th century (larger than Tambora, even greater climate impact). 
 

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017AGUFMPP43D..05Z/abstract

Seems to suggest the ability for the large scale volcanism of the LIA to tip a susceptible AMO into a prolonged cold configuration. It’s interesting because traditionally ‘volcanic winters’ are short lived phenomena.