Volcanic Winter

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.

Absolutely crazy storm. The entirety of the comma extending down past the Yucatán is just awe inspiring. Absolute beast. I mean just look at it:

I have allergic rhinitis and it’s one of the most unpleasant things I’ve ever experienced. Nasal passages swollen shut, feels like I’m breathing through cocktail straws. Thankfully Nasacort works very well for this. I actually have it all year round but of course it’s always worse in the spring.

The reality of the present situation is that those who still stand opposed and defiant to global warming will see their convictions tested by the sheer force of overwhelming reality. I suspect outright rejection will shift to the common “it’s just natural cycles, the earth’s always changing” fallacy that’s already increasing in prevalence as more people accept that the planet is warming. The problem with the latter argument is that there’s a kernel of truth to it, but proponents typically lack the knowledge to properly contextualize natural climate change with what’s been observed in the past hundred years. So I suspect that form of denialism will be the toughest to overcome, but it’ll eventually happen. The problem is simply that it needs to happen now, it’s already too late in the sense that massive warming is already “locked in.” I’ve never been an optimist about this, the reality for me has always been it’s going to get really bad before enough people globally are onboard that there’s any meaningful shift to carbon policy. Meaningful in the sense of substantive result. Gonna be interesting, to say the least.

I’m not well versed in African climatology but this seems a little extreme to me for March: https://watchers.news/2024/03/12/thousands-of-high-temperature-records-broken-across-africa/

Dew not want.

Yeah I can’t even imagine, that does appear to have been a close facsimile of a LIA winter. If a similar pattern regime were to happen today, how modified do you think the airmass would be? Would think it’d still be significantly colder than any recent winter just not to the level of 76-77. I do think we’re more than due for a winter with a colder pattern locking into the east, but perhaps the Pac temp regimes are unsupportive of such a thing happening, and who knows when that will change. I’’m at the bargaining stage. Just give me one extended, relative “cold” winter compared to this post 2016 hothouse phase and I’ll be satisfied.

Really fascinating paper on the winter of 76-77, the last time the Chesapeake froze. Has some maps from other cold 20th century winters. Good read: http://nwafiles.nwas.org/digest/papers/1977/Vol02No4/1977v002no04-Wagner.pdf

The minimums in particular are jarring. Even in the pines I haven’t been able to get below freezing since March 1st. March 8th I hit 33. Totally different regime in a totally different era, it’s just fascinating by comparison. 29 average for the month? That’s DFa climate criteria satisfied in March, lol. I would kill for temperature data like this during the Little Ice Age, especially the peak and heavily volcanic perturbed years. Some of those winters had to be damn near polar by comparison to today, regardless of how much snow fell (I would assume significantly more by way of increased frequency of small to moderate snowfalls but that’s just a guess. Maybe it was cold and dry more regularly, mimicked on a smaller scale in the 70’s and 80’s).

That is absolutely remarkable, like the Pac let loose an enormous heat burst in 2016 that has persisted since. I guess the oceans taking up the majority of warming eventually have to release that latent heat, perhaps it doesn’t happen linearly.

Wife just drove home from Metuchen in a deluge complete with typical NJ Parkway driver nonsense. She has bad eyesight and goes slow in the rain at night - in the right lane, always. People were still cutting her off and riding right up on her bumper. C’mon guys you have like 7 other lanes to choose from.

Nice! You beat me dude, 11 on the season down here, very lucky to have had accumulating snow on a few different days. Feels like a victory for how intensely warm and overarchingly mild this winter was though. Very happy that first Jan storm did a number on the northern Metro and that last Feb event deathbanded CNJ. Made an otherwise poor winter tolerable for many I’m sure.

My wife and I are planning our Iceland trip next year, we’re going to go the day after Xmas through New Years. Celebrating 15 years together (crazy, we met very young for this day and age). Gonna plan out a few awesome winter hikes and really make the most of it, and being in Reykjavik around the holidays is magical. If winter won’t come to you, go to winter. IB4 front loaded Niña Boxing Day redux hitting as our plane takes off from EWR

For sure, I was just thinking with respect to our region. I follow hurricane season pretty closely since I was a kid, and I have now elderly parents living on a barrier island so my sister and I help keep them safe. They were tremendously lucky in Sandy though they weren’t able to go back to their home for months.

We’re probably “due” for some landfalling tropical systems up here. We’ve really only had Isaias (which I remember as pretty wild given what it was at the time) and the remnants of Ida which of course spawned the great NJ EF3 and associated outbreak, along with crazy flooding in the northern metro. Perhaps this year we see more east coast / northeast landfall risk? Always thought it was pretty wild how we had Irene and Sandy back to back, the former a significant impact and the latter historic. Probably sooner or later we’ll see the next one. I do enjoy a good tropical system (hurricane parties are fun, we evacuate my parents out of Seaside and gather at my sister’s place inland). But I think the risks from a Cat 2 + are probably too great to really be exciting anymore, probably more when I was a kid. It’s been a while since we’ve had a stronger storm up here, you’d think it’s a matter of time with the warmer SST profiles in the Atlantic. Just need a relatively fast mover without too much prior surface churn. Think my oldest tropical system memory was when I was a little kid at my parent’s place in Seaside while Bob scraped by the immediate coast. Pretty sure that’s the one I remember though ofc it wasn’t a big deal here.

You do you man. I love the cool temps through March but could probably do without the rains that inevitably make my Parkway commute a disaster. Had a guy doing 45 in the left lane with their hazards on and people zooming around him at 80 - in downpour level rain. Brilliant! Oh and a few accidents of course, likely because of stuff like that. I just want climo cool days without the endless deluge, more normal rainfall patterns don’t bother me though.

My point was at least something fell on multiple occasions, for such an ugly warm winter I’d take that as a small victory. That’s all. Meant well. Been pulling for you guys to get crushed, it’s long overdue as we know acutely well. My nephew lives in Cockeysville MD now for grad school, and this was his first winter there.

Happy you guys saw the snow you did this year. A couple overperformers down / over there IIRC? At least a significant improvement to last year! I walked away with 11 on the season in my location in coastal NJ, which I consider a miracle given the warm character of the winter. Very lucky to get the brief wintry reprieves that we did. I know the assumed variables heading into next winter are looking unfavorable and am not challenging that, but lately I’m hoping a Niña can give the East coast a chance at slightly colder temperature profiles if we can snag a period of -EPO which still seems to work well enough for most of us. Expectations will be low, but hoping we can luck into a Jan 22 type period that hopefully is rewarding for most.

I honestly completely agree. We have warmth and humidity so much of the year anymore I want March to be seasonably cool to cold yet. We have the entire spring ahead of us post March and rest assured everyone will get their warmth and sun. I mean no disrespect to anyone but it is a little surprising to me how little all of the winter enthusiasts here seem to appreciate cool weather in general though. Our warm season outweighs the cool season significantly anymore, especially with summer increasingly lagging into Sep and Oct. And we’ve been having plenty of early heatwaves like last April. Idk, I appreciate the cool weather when we can get it (which unfortunately isn’t now). Cheering on unseasonable warmth, IMHO, feels like cheering on our worsening climate issues.

It’s a good question, I really don’t know. Laki managed it being almost ten times smaller, but we know Laki was pretty unique. With that said, Yellowstone is giga powerful and the thermal updrafts above the volcano during that eruption had to be insane with that kind of magma volume. A lot of gas was probably reaching fairly high up there. Really hard to describe how much magma 100 cubic kilometers is. Going back to Laki at 15km^3, were that eruption happening today it would be seen as apocalyptic (especially with the toxic gasses filling the troposphere probably down through Europe again).

Hansen’s “Gobal Warming in the Pipeline” from this fall is a must read, IMO: https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889

So I have a decent amount I could say about Yellowstone. It’s true that statistically it’s very slightly overdue for its next large caldera forming episode. It’s not true that there’s any major significance to that with respect to current US risk. First of all Yellowstone actually last erupted properly 70kya in a massive rhyolitic effusive eruption that was something like 100 cubic kilometers of thick rhyolite lava flows. Massive on a scale well beyond anything in historic times, Laki was 15 cubic kilometers remember of basaltic lava. Rhyolite is like volcanic peanut butter to basalt’s warmed up honey. So it had a pretty substantial eruption not too long ago that is not often mentioned or discussed in the context of it being overdue. I would imagine some of the magma that would be contributing toward the next supereruption was released in this event and may have delayed the next one by some degree, though this specifically is just logical speculation on my part. These types of massive volcanoes go off when they’re ready and not before, regardless of the statistics of their previous eruptions. Recent studies determined Yellowstone is not currently thought to possess a melt fraction (percent of magma body that is molten and in an eruptible state) that would support a supereruption right now. But that can change, right? The last Yellowstone supereruption is now known to have been triggered by two massive basaltic intrusions of hot, juvenile magma very deep underground. These two pulses took place across several decades, and should they occur to they would be imminently noticeable / detectable. There would be massive inflation within the caldera and a whole continuous swarm of deep volcanic quakes, along with periods of tremor represented magma on the move. The entire caldera would be very clearly alive, instead of its current very sleepy state. We would know. It would be unmistakably “awake.” That injection of hot basalt would remelt some of the magma chamber and creative an enormous instability that leads to a blowout. In earnest, Yellowstone is not even in the top tier of volcanoes I think are most likely or most capable of causing human harm in the near future. Ioto / Iwo Jima is an under the radar choice, a giant pimple in the ocean under Japan that is growing at an alarming rate, some of the fastest uplift known at a volcanic system - for centuries. Its last caldera eruption was very large and would’ve sent a catastrophic tsunami all over the Pacific. It’s very capable of doing that again and probably will in the not too distant future. You can actually see the striations in the island where the sea level line was mere decades ago, going all the way back for centuries. It doesn’t even have the same topography as when it was landed on during WWII. Way scarier than Yellowstone right now IMO. But Yellowstone captures the hearts of Americans and is guaranteed to get clicks, so it’s frequently pushed as a catastrophe waiting to happen. Could be 1,000 years, 10,000, or 500,000 before the next supereruption. All are way beyond immediate worry. It’s almost certainly not happening tomorrow, near 0% chance. When you start hearing about unprecedented uplift, an endless intense quake swarm at depth, and signs of unmistakable unrest that continue for years unabated, then we have something to worry about.

@LibertyBell(think you’ll like this) Apparently the Akahoya eruption in Japan is now regarded as the largest of the Holocene. This was always known as a VEI 7, but it was recently revised all the way up to potentially over 400 cubic kilometers of erupted volume. For reference that’s getting close to half the size of the last Yellowstone supereruption! Not too shabby for only several thousand years ago. More than double Tambora’s size, though it’s a different eruption style (recurrent caldera system vs large stratovolcano suffering a catastrophic drainout). These types of recurrent calderas are more prone to the massive VEI 7 - 8 eruptions, like Yellowstone, Valles Caldera, Clear Lake, & Campi Flegrei. Japan is also a hotbed of large scale and intense volcanism due to a unique geologic setting with oddly clashing plates. https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/volcanos/underwater-volcano-eruption-7300-years-ago-is-the-largest-in-recorded-history I just want to note in general that constraining tephra-fall isopachs accurately and actually computing a semi accurate total erupted volume for some of these eruptions is a monumentally difficult task. Lots of literature actually cites different sizes for many of the same eruptions, and the figures are often in flux. It wasn’t long ago Toba was estimated all the way up to as large as 5000 cubic kilometers which is frankly mind boggling. I have the opinion that many historic eruptions were actually a bit bigger than the figures we use to describe them today which tend to be more conservative. There are some absolute monsters in the semi recent past, events that would catastrophically rattle modern humanity were they to happen today. Once you get into the VEI 6 space, a couple times larger than Pinatubo (closer to Krakatau and Novarupta), you get into eruptions that are just unthinkably large and would be absolutely wild for us to experience in real time in the cell phone age.

@bluewave, seriously man - thank you for everything that you do here. You’re an absolute data guru and what you post is so fascinating, also the way you contextualize things. I’ve learned so much from you. @donsutherland1too! You guys rock!

What’s up with that dew point crash on the sounding? That represents super dry air there around 600mb? I comprehend the gist well enough (change of air dynamics with altitude) but generally aren’t great at reading these.