Volcanic Winter

Best thing about 1/29/22 was the temperatures! I was at 22f at the time of peak snowfall; pure powder. I spent hours outside in it getting up early, and I took my sweet time shoveling. No rush to be had.

4 minutes ago, Dark Star said:

What was your lowest temperature so far this season?

13.6 on 1/22.

My home is on the extreme northern edge of the pine barrens down here, and am about 10 miles inland from the ocean. 

Past couple nights I actually radiated down to near average lows, feels like a tremendous feat! 22 right now, average low is 21. Same as the night before. 

It’s really wild how much of a struggle it is for us to hit our average low temperatures anymore. It seems like it’s far easier for daytime highs to be NN/BN than low temperatures. 

This has something to do with excess moisture in the air / humidity blocking the ability to properly radiate heat at night? Just the sheer persistence of AN nightly lows is interesting to me. 

2 minutes ago, Allsnow said:

 

What sort of temp departures are you anticipating for this period? I haven’t combed over model output but my Accuweather app is showing a range of about -2 to +2, of course I’m taking that with an entire salt shaker. 

What are your thoughts solely WRT temperature during the peak of the block?

22 minutes ago, WX-PA said:

They were saying the same things in the 80s and the 90s.

My only point of contention is, respectfully, were winters as warm then on average, consecutively? That seems difficult to ignore, especially next to the stat that shows our snowiest winters as being colder on average.  Just IMO. 

Also asking because I don’t know the stats off the top of my head, but I don’t believe they were. 

17 minutes ago, bluewave said:

Absent some type of super volcanic eruption, NYC is going to have a hard time getting another 50”+ snowfall season with how warm the winters have become since 15-16. NYC has needed a winter average temperature closer to freezing or lower to pull off this feat.   Our average winter temperatures over the last 9 years have been too close to 40° to get the job done. The current average winter temperature in NYC last 9 years has been a record 38.5° average. 
 

Time Series Summary for NY CITY CENTRAL PARK, NY - Oct through Sep
Click column heading to sort ascending, click again to sort descending.

Rank	Season	Total Snowfall	Average Temperature DJF
1	1995-1996	75.6	32.2°
2	1947-1948	63.9	30.0°
3	2010-2011	61.9	32.8°
4	1922-1923	60.4	29.9°
5	1872-1873	60.2	27.7°
6	2013-2014	57.4	32.9°
7	1874-1875	56.4	27.7°
8	1898-1899	55.9	31.5°
9	1960-1961	54.7	31.7°
10	1993-1994	53.4	31.1°
11	1906-1907	53.2	31.6°
12	1933-1934	52.0	29.1°
13	1966-1967	51.5	34.1°
14	2009-2010	51.4	33.8°
15	1977-1978	50.7	30.3°
-	1916-1917	50.7	31.7°
-	1915-1916	50.7	32.4°
16	2014-2015	50.3	31.4°

 

Monthly Mean Avg Temperature for NY CITY CENTRAL PARK, NY
Click column heading to sort ascending, click again to sort descending.

Year	Dec	Jan	Feb	Season
Mean	41.0	35.7	38.9	38.5
2023-2024	44.6	37.0		40.8
2022-2023	38.5	43.5	41.1	41.0
2021-2022	43.8	30.3	37.3	37.1
2020-2021	39.2	34.8	34.2	36.1
2019-2020	38.3	39.1	40.1	39.2
2018-2019	40.1	32.5	36.2	36.3
2017-2018	35.0	31.7	42.0	36.1
2016-2017	38.3	38.0	41.6	39.3
2015-2016	50.8	34.5	37.7	41.0

Yeah, undeniably concerning. 

A true supervolcanic eruption won’t be in the cards for many millennia, but we could pull a VEI 6-7 at any time. Would probably help cool the oceans as has happened in the past, though that works best with an Aleutians high latitude eruption. Need Edgecumbe, Davidof, or some other wildcard to wake up and stir the pot for us. Novarupta was an eccentric event that isn’t famously known for its climate impact despite the size, but the years following were cold regardless IIRC. Iceland doesn’t normally do eruptions of this size and type, though there are exceptions (big blasts from Hekla, Katla, and Öræfajökull are capable of it). 

HTHH was an odd wildcard and is not well represented statistically in recurrence intervals for events of that size. Maybe we get one in the not too distant future to stir things up a bit for us, though I think the next may come from the Andes which is a bit trickier. Regardless, grain of salt because this is all tea leaves until something truly wakes up, and there’s only one that comes to mind atm (in the Andes).

(Know you were being tongue in cheek a bit, but figured I’d give my thoughts since they obviously can be a wildcard shakeup)

Short of that, it’s undeniable how our snowiest years tend to be colder and within or near DFa Humid Continental climate classification. 

Yikes. 

FWIW I’m coming around to being in agreement that background warming will worsen bad years with unfavorable decadal variability while still probably enhancing years with the reverse. I think we’ll see some big winters yet in the near future, but also an increase of years like the past two - with very little to show for it. I think this effect will continue to magnify until a breaking point where snowfall climo will begin degrading period even factoring the above (meaning even “good” years are less productive instead of amplified), but when that point precisely is would be impossible to speculate.

Perhaps the -PDO and PAC / MJO forcing is what nudged this year into the ‘bad’ column despite having other things going for it. Seems like we’ll increasingly need ‘everything going right’ to have those big years, but they’ll occasionally still happen.

And I still think we’ll get those months like Jan 22 where sub-regionally an area will excel even in an otherwise poor winter. Me having 16 inches at 22F in that 1/29 storm signifies it’s still possible, but everything has to go right. I do feel we want and need ‘the cold,’ with winter averages being what they are and the overall willingness to go wildly AN, we need sharp cold shots with some legs to ensure events are all frozen. Think of the early Jan storm this year for NYC if it was just a touch colder, still not the best track but they would’ve netted something at least IMO. Dry will always be a risk, but I’ll take the cold every time.

In full agreement this is a ‘boom or bust’ period, probably with more ‘bust’ than in the past overall.

Just IMHO. 

15 minutes ago, NEG NAO said:

when should we begin to see models catching on to this idea ?

 

IMO a larger event in that window with this much model agreement should start to appear within about a week. Seems like this would be the time a larger threat is identified early and relatively locked in, were one to happen. But still about a week before we cross into that threshold. 

My interest will perk up next weekend, assuming all else holds. 

I’m supposed to be heading to VT on Fri with my wife for a snowshoeing/hiking trip for a few days for my bday, been planning for months. Of course I select the exact dates of a massive thermal spike after VT has been subfreezing for over a week lol. A little dejected, was excited to get into some dry powder and not slosh around in melty muddy crap. It’s not even just going to be AN, it’s looking crazy warm up there. 

This was my relative fail safe if the rest of winter doesn’t pan out here, and of course I know there’s always the risk of uncooperative weather I’m just extra miffed because the conditions have been good leading in. 

12 hours ago, Cygnus X-1 said:

Yeah, and I live on a GIANT glacial moraine in NY called Long Island.

Was it Mammoth farts that melted the Laurentide Ice Sheet?

Hot dogs!!!

Changes in the Milankovitch cycle, a degree of ocean warming leading to Heinrich events, and other subtle feedback processes drove the disintegration of the ice sheet. About 8000 years ago solar insolation was higher than today, which helped polish off the remnants of the ice sheet. 

I’d be curious about the ‘mammoth fart hypothesis,’ though. They were pretty big and I’m sure their farts were rather vile .

https://www.futurity.org/laurentide-ice-age-sea-level-rise-1366092/

https://serc.carleton.edu/vignettes/collection/58451.html#:~:text=After 20%2C000 years ago%2C Earth,the modern Greenland Ice Sheet.

12 minutes ago, 40/70 Benchmark said:

Around a foot.

Sorry man, I knew it was somewhat spotty but I didn’t realize to that extent. I’m glad you scored so nicely in that early Jan event at least, for this year. 

Hoping things pick up as scheduled, and fingers crossed SNE to the coast joins in and gets some needed wintry love. 

Ray, what did you get in 1/29/22? I think you mentioned aside from this Jan, your best recent storm was back in March 2018. Didn’t 1/29 jackpot parts of E NE? I forget who really cashed in but I thought some areas had over 20.

That was great down here for me in coastal NJ, my biggest snowfall at 16 inches since Jan 18. 
 

@40/70 Benchmark

We aren’t well equipped as a species to deal with long term issues that aren’t an immediate threat in our immediate surroundings (think back to hunter gatherer times). A lot of people also operate on the assumption that all things being publicized and discussed today as issues are hyperbolic, there’s some truth to that of course and I don’t blame people for being skeptical. But skepticism is not obstinate contrarianism, which is what you end up getting in a lot of people who fight tooth and nail over it. I’m of the persuasion after reading papers from the last two years that the warnings haven’t been severe enough, but I understand why this is “off putting.” I disagree it’s like a religion though, it’s very bluntly a cause and effect. You can’t warn people of the consequences without discussing the consequences, lol. People aren’t innately aware of this stuff. With that said, there’s always poorly written and irresponsible journalism out there, but that’s not exclusive to the subject of climate change. I always recommend people try to digest climate info from academic sources, anyway - obviously most of the lay public won’t be doing that.

Unfortunately, this is a problem that will continue to grow and magnify whether or not individuals choose to “believe” in it or not. We have enough analogues from previous natural climate excursions to have a good idea what awaits us if we continue on the present course.

I take care to only post things I’m reasonably confident are factual or at least broadly correct. Most people love to just diarrhea their opinions all over and weigh them equally to actual observable truths. That’s never been helpful, and it’s a big constituent force of climate denialism. But we’re living through an era where some people suggest facts are malleable, so it’s sort of par for the course.

Try to get out and enjoy the cryosphere. Nothing in the world more beautiful than a glacier, IMHO.

(Glacial lagoon in Iceland under Vatnajökull from our trip this past November)

3 hours ago, Cygnus X-1 said:

The Siberian Traps eruption event was 2 million years of massive eruptions there.

The analog is insane.  

We’ve released about 2400 Gigatons of CO2 since 1850 and raised CO2 PPM from 280 to over 400 in a 150 years. During the Permian Mass Extinction 3,900 to 12,000 Gigatons of CO2 were released by the Siberian Traps bringing CO2 PPM from about 400 to over 2,000. This occurred over about a 60,000 year period. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian–Triassic_extinction_event
 

29 minutes ago, wishcast_hater said:

It’s true until it changes. So that’s not truth, that’s just groupthink. Sorry.
So many instances from the past demonstrating what was taught as truth is now revealed as “well, we got it wrong”. Science is a way of looking at things but it’s not infallible and I have seen too many times where $ affects the outcome.


.

The laws of physics aren’t influenced by money.

Also, you are nowhere close to being equipped or knowledgeable enough to be the arbiter of what is or isn’t groupthink with respect to the science of global warming. You don’t even appear to comprehend the difference between natural climate variation and human warming as a consequence of CO2 pollution. You think they’re somehow conflated as if one disproves the other. 

That’s just basic level misinformation and lack of comprehension. To the level it’s not even worth having a discussion with you. 

Honestly it’s growing increasingly frustrating having these threads clogged by takes that are astonishingly misguided and ignorant, so forgive my tone. The reason I get so irked over it is because in my experience people with your positions and temperament have no interest in learning or in the acquisition of knowledge to support a better argument. You’re looking to spread an agenda based on a preconceived notion. That, if anything, has no place within the realm of scientific discussion. 

Dropping this here, just came across this paper but haven’t had a chance to read it yet. I suspect some would find it interesting:

https://cp.copernicus.org/articles/13/1355/2017/cp-13-1355-2017.pdf

“Climate history of the northeastern US over the past 3000 years”

That’s the event I’m craving, a nice coastal northeast nuke. 6-10 would do nicely if something like that were in the cards. Doesn’t have to be a HECS. Let’s just get a nice broad untainted hit. Would be fun to track and then experience, and lift a lot of spirits. Hopefully something like that is plausibly in the pipeline for that mid - late month window. Would be yet another waste of a pattern and ultimately a waste of the Niño if not. 

4 hours ago, LongBeachSurfFreak said:

I have been following this Australian guy on YouTube who has some great research on some recent large impacts. One in the Indian Ocean that produced a huge tsunami that affected the topography of southern Australia and another possible one in the Mediterranean that affected the Sahara. So large impacts may be more common than previously thought. 

The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis is sobering because about 12kya we were probably close to an extinction level event (large comet airburst and fell as fragments instead of intact), but that theory is very contentious and isn’t necessary to explain the YD as a climate excursion. Still, it’s crazy to think about even just as a thought exercise. From the evidence I saw personally, I do think something fell around that timeframe, though it may not have been quite as large as the hypothesis puts forward and I don’t believe it caused the YD - perhaps was responsible for a wonky several year pulse within it if anything.

Tunguska was about 40m of diameter away from being a landfalling superbolide, supposedly they’re more likely to stay together at the 100m diameter mark. It also caused a monstrously powerful explosion that had some level of ignition in the immediate locale, along with a flash that was capable of blinding people who were unfortunate enough not to look away in time. Fortunately it fell in a very remote section of Siberia (actually fell on one of the main outcrops of Siberian Traps flood basalt).

I agree that impact events of small to moderate size are really not as rare as we tend to think they are, and many of the 1km+ events are likely hidden by ocean impacts (hypothetical Shiva crater comes to mind). 

Just not something we can expect on human timescales, yet we had Chelyabinsk in 2013 which was a substantial 20m airburst. And Tunguska close to merely one lifetime earlier at 60m. These are events that could cause major damage were they to occur over a city, especially at Tunguska size. Apparently they (Tunguska class) may recur roughly every 200-2000 years, difficult to know for sure. That’s certainly not that rare for a potential city catastrophe. 

Also the Eocene was notable for having many 1km+ impacts IIRC. Yeah idk, this stuff is fascinating. I too wonder how many impacts we simply are unaware of due to the location of impact. We only recently discovered the Chesapeake impact event 33mya, and that was a big one. Nobody on the east coast would’ve enjoyed that one. And the area today is shaped the way it is because of that impact. 

I have 7 inches on the season down here which thankfully makes it a meaningful improvement on last year (), but I’m

very much looking forward to a 4-5 day getaway to VT/NH with my wife for my bday in a couple weeks, get into some real snow and do some snowshoeing.

I haven’t been to NNE since I was a kid, so I’m very much looking forward to heading up that way. With that said, really hoping something comes together the latter half of Feb at least. 

Good luck guys  .

26 minutes ago, etudiant said:

The Fermi paradox is quite separate from the life emergence question.

Life on earth seems to have started at least 2 billion years ago, possibly as soon as the oceans cooled to less than bathtub temperature. Even if it then took a couple of billion years for life to evolve enough to get vertebrates such as fishes, reptiles and birds, that still left a half billion years of life getting periodically hit by stuff such as the Permian extinction, much more devastating than the more modest Chicxulub event. So life on earth was puttering along for ages with no indication whatever of any industrial intelligence emerging until now, and even here the drive was for stasis, as the Chinese and Roman empires showed. 

The cultural revolution that led to our current industrial society reflects the combination of the European religious upheavals and the brutal fighting that it produced so that industrial muscle and understanding became a critical national asset. Imho, that combination was essential to drive our world to where it is today, reaching out to the other planets and listening for other aliens with  intelligence. 

On that basis, the past 500 years of human development should be seen as a one in a million event in the past 500 million years of complex life on earth.

There are, at a guess,  maybe a thousand planets with earth like characteristics within a thousand light years of earth, so we have maybe one chance in a thousand that their time of having an intelligent industrial civilization overlaps with ours. Fermi's paradox really isn't one, it seems.

Good post, but just would offer the perspective that the Permian Great Dying happened across many millennia whereas Chicxulub happened on a single day (with respect to the primary forcing element). Two different processes, one acute and one chronic. Both were catastrophic though. 

Life is lucky to have survived the Permian though, earth was close to sterilized. 

@LibertyBell

This is a spectacular summary of the Chicxulub impact and what we know about it. I’ve read through this several times and still always come back to it. Keep clicking through to each page as you get to the bottom (the formatting is a little not obvious). 
 

https://www.lpi.usra.edu/science/kring/Chicxulub/regional-effects/

Btw, Chicxulub was believed to have caused magnitude 10+ earthquakes that persisted for months. Whatever dinosaurs survived the thermal radiation spreading through the troposphere immediately following the impact would’ve had a very bad time. 

Impact events of that size are mind breaking. Genuinely can’t even imagine what it would’ve been like be alive the day it hit. Likely, wouldn’t be alive for very long, but I’d still love to see the show for however long I could. 

38 minutes ago, LibertyBell said:

On the level of extinction level events, the fact that we are here today at all is a testimony to the resilience of life in recovering after such cataclysmic events!  Perhaps the true answer to the Fermi Paradox is that we were lucky enough to be born on a planet that is stable enough to allow evolution to progress far enough to allow us to be born.  Maybe most other habitable worlds just aren't this stable for this long and life doesn't get beyond a very simple, maybe even microbial level?

 

The more you learn about the earth, geological processes, and all of the extinction events throughout geologic time, the crazier and crazier it becomes that we’re here at all. 

We wouldn’t be if not for that single asteroid impact to end the Cretaceous; whatever life would look like today, it wouldn’t be “us” as we know it. Perhaps “we’d” be some bipedal, large brained offshoot of therapods, but in the same token dinosaurs ruled for over a hundred million years and there wasn’t exactly tremendous evolutionary pressure for them to evolve hyper intelligence. Who knows?

The fact that we owe our existence to an extremely low probability catastrophically large impact event (10-15km wide, insane) that just happened to hit during the Deccan Traps flood basalt eruption (the combination all but ensuring a global reset to the biosphere) is just an incomprehensible level of chance. And that’s only one component that paved the way for our existence…

The more I learn the more I agree that if life is common out there, it’s far more common within relatively stable planetary oceans like what exists on Europa, than on an open air rocky body with active plate tectonics. It seems easier for life to proliferate unharmed in that environment, though it would be very different to life on earth. Or would it resemble aquatic life as we know it, especially abyssal lifeforms? I sure as hell want to find out within my lifetime. 

1 hour ago, Allsnow said:

Even if the pac flips mid month where is the cold coming from? 

The… North Pole? 

1 hour ago, LibertyBell said:

Do you think humanity will eventually develop the power to stop volcanic eruptions and earthquakes of this magnitude and scale? Something I have wondered about.

I know we have already been testing methods of stopping extinction level asteroids.

Asteroids, yes. Comparatively little involved when you’re talking about crashing an expendable craft into an asteroid to slightly bump it off course. The whole reason it works is because even large asteroids need merely a slight adjustment to their course to no longer threaten an impact, the precision of orbital trajectories is so high for something to actually hit the earth comparatively little is required to make them miss.

But earthquakes and volcanism? Eh, not for a very, very long time IMHO. The sheer scale and forces involved suggests a task that’s well beyond our capabilities, and I’m not really sure what would move the needle there enough to ever really be a plausible thing we’re capable of. The earth is powerful, man.
 

Consider something like Yellowstone. It has a massive, stale rhyolitic magma chamber that exists as a sort of “crystal mush” with a low percentage of fluidized magma. What would then change that into an eruptable state is an injection of hot, fresh, basalt from deep below into the asthenosphere. That then begins the process of re-melting the rhyolitic  mush and can ultimately lead to a very quick, and very enormous instability that leads to an eruption. The forces involved here are almost beyond comprehension (heat, pressure, etc). I don’t have the foggiest idea how we would realistically halt or block that process. Perhaps in much smaller systems first, but I would suggest that’s a long way away, realistically - if it’s even plausible. 

The same applies to earthquakes. Take a subduction zone where the continental slab is riding over an oceanic plate, and is slowly being bent backward building up absurd levels of strain over time. That eventually has to snap and yield a megathrust quake, how would we even conceivably stop that without shutting down plate tectonics? Plates move a couple to a few centimeters a year, and the byproduct of that movement (force by way of strain) is probably not something we could ever circumvent IMHO.