skierinvermont

NAM looks tasty at 6hr

Euro at 48 is closing off over NC.. 

euro is west of GFS.. I can't compare to 6z or 00z with 24hr maps

3 minutes ago, Chrisrotary12 said:

I really want to pay a psychologist to read through the last 250 pages and to develop conclusions on you all.

If the GFS ends up being correct it will be a major score. But we've been saying that for 10 years and we all know how its gone.

I'm sorry that some of you won't get 2' out of this. There are always haves and have nots. Deal with it.

I don't think the GFS can end up being correct at this point.. it shifted 100 miles from 00z to 12z.. Taunton went from 2" to 12"

PV lifts out farther north each run from 00z to 06z to 12z gfs.. coming west as we knew already

960mb right on the BM

crushes

Just for fun and because I'm still up for some reason here in CO...

the 6z NAM looks better through 33hrs!!! PV heights much farther north!!!

weenies for everyone 

The 18z gefs were west in the upper levels its just a sharper precip cutoff. I doubt the cutoff is that tight. This is big ORH and east imo.

The sun's color has not changed. We have instruments that measure this fact. If you Google it you will see this is a popular conspiracy theory without evidence.

1 hour ago, rclab said:

Good morning skier. Reading it as you have would serve to reduce the misinterpretation/imagining. I do believe, for many of us, a brief, if possible, itemized cost list would also help. I’m, sad to admit, a cliff notes veteran from the required novel heavy reading battles. As always ….

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/10/28/us/biden-bill-plan#spending-plan-bill-biden

The key provisions of the proposal include:

• $555 billion to fight climate change, largely through tax incentives for low-emission sources of energy.

• $400 billion to provide universal prekindergarten to 3- and 4-year-olds, and to significantly reduce child care costs for working families earning up to $300,000 a year.

• $200 billion to extend an expanded tax credit for parents through 2022, and to permanently allow parents to benefit from the child tax credit even if they do not earn enough money to have income tax liability.

• $165 billion to reduce health care premiums for people who are covered through the Affordable Care Act, to provide insurance for an additional four million people through Medicaid and to offer hearing coverage through Medicare.

• $150 billion to reduce a waiting list for in-home care for seniors and disabled Americans, and to improve wages for home health care workers.

• $150 billion to build one million affordable housing units.

• $100 billion for immigration streamlining, in part to reduce a backlog of nine million visas. House Democrats proposed provisions last month to address the legal immigration system, including a plan to recapture hundreds of thousands of unused visas various administrations failed to use over several decades and allow green card applicants to pay higher fees to expedite their processing. The investment outlined on Thursday would also expand legal representation for migrants and streamline processing at the southwest border, officials said. Mr. Biden has faced criticism from both Republicans and Democrats for his handling of migration to the border.

• $40 billion for worker training and higher education, including increasing annual Pell grants by $550.

Offsetting that spending is an estimated $2 trillion in revenue increases, including:

• A 15 percent minimum tax on the reported profits of large corporations.

• Efforts to reduce profit-shifting by multinational companies, including a separate 15 percent minimum tax on profits earned by U.S. companies abroad — and tax penalties for companies that have their headquarters in global tax havens.

• A 1 percent tax on corporate stock buybacks.

• Increased enforcement for large corporations and the wealthy at the Internal Revenue Service.

• An additional 5 percent tax on incomes exceeding $10 million a year and another 3 percent tax on incomes above $25 million.

• Efforts to limit business losses for the very wealthy and to impose a 3.8 percent Medicare tax on certain people earning more than $400,000 a year who did not previously pay that tax.

5 minutes ago, etudiant said:

Not sure that name plate power rating gives a full story. Nuclear is pretty much what it says on the tin, apart from re-fueling breaks. 

Solar at peak should be derated by about a factor of 4 to 6 to account for the night time outage and the less than full sun seasonal and daytime intervals.

Wind is similarly intermittent, except that too strong also halts the turbines, so at least similar derating as solar.

In theory, those issues can be solved by very dispersed siting and massive interconnects, but those discussions are nowhere near the needed depth, much less close to getting political support.

 

Yes these considerations are all factored into the levelized cost of electricity. It's why power companies, in the free market, choose wind and solar more than any other type of new generation source today. If you're a power company trying to make money, wind and solar are already your top choice. We should be nudging them in the right direction to speed up the process and the reconciliation bill does exactly that.

9 hours ago, Silver Meteor said:

If you tally it up a little over $400B (less waste, fraud and abuse) goes to physical infrastructure. Where's the rest going? At 2,300+ pages you can wager a body part that bill (like so many others) is highway robbery of the taxpayer. But then we've reached the point where as far as the government is concerned the taxpayer is not much relevant to its massive spending; effectively we already have MMT. Apparently there are grownups who believe money grows on trees, and that China will provide us with a free lunch forever. Silly people.

I've read good chunks of the bill. I'd suggest reading it before throwing around such baseless accusations.

9 hours ago, Silver Meteor said:

As an avid reader with decades of experience in the stock and commodities markets I can comfortably say the typical citizen who touts wind and solar is economically illiterate. As I said here some time ago, nuclear is the future. This is obvious. So obvious I even recommended buying stock in uranium miners (advice that already would have earned you a hefty return with much more to come in the years ahead.)

The #1 article on Quillette for 2019 is from a brilliant science journalist about renewables. Get ready for some cognitive dissonance:

https://quillette.com/2019/02/27/why-renewables-cant-save-the-planet/

I don't know where you people even find this nonsense. Solar and wind are less than half the price of nuclear to produce the same amount of power. This is one guy on the internet that hasn't even appropriately sourced anything he's said.

9 minutes ago, etudiant said:

Well, AOC was pretty clear that she needed to hold the infrastructure bill to shield the larger reconciliation.

Think that is why she voted against it, because with it passed, she has no leverage. The bookies agree with her, they are not stupid either.

Yes unfortunately. 

Odds of the reconciliation bill dropped significantly in betting markets after they passed the infrastructure bill.

The compromise Biden has announced, which he claims he has support for although Manchin and Sinema have not committed publicly, invests $550 Billion in EVs and renewable electricity. This would be monumental if it passed. Contact your representatives. 

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/10/28/us/biden-spending-bill-deal

On 10/15/2021 at 6:37 PM, LibertyBell said:

 

 

 

This is a tragedy and discraceful, and could be the most significant policy failure of the Biden administration if a compromise is not reached, or significant executive action is not taken to make up for the lack of legislation. The optics of this are terrible and could signal to the coal and gas industries and their investors that it is game on, their interests in Washington are secure, and any major transition (beyond what has already occurred) could be decades away.

BOO!

3 minutes ago, HillsdaleMIWeather said:

https://twitter.com/k8roulette2/status/1432172862903832577?s=21

From my googling, this levee is not in New Orleans, hopefully separated by other levees/land

18 hours ago, etudiant said:

Was the Siberian heatwave last year not similarly beyond prior model estimates?

It covered a larger area, afaik and the deviations from the norm were at least as great.

Should that be seen as supporting evidence for a qualitative shift?

My understanding is that though much longer, the deviations were not as great in terms of standard deviations. Being a continental climate the variability is greater.

but, yes people have been making the argument for a qualitative shift in climate for some time now. The increase in extremes has been slightly larger than one might expect from a simple shift in the means. There’s the whole wavy jet hypothesis which has some empirical and theoretical  evidence.

21 minutes ago, raindancewx said:

The attribution science assumes that some link between the Earth warming an extreme event can be found. But...it does it after it happens. To me that's like saying I studied that a big steak filled me up more than two slices of bread. I don't think it has any use. I know I complain about the math, but it's really more the philosophy that bugs me. You can predict after every single unusual weather event than a scientist will say it is Global Warming that contributed to the event. The public doesn't care because the public already knows the scientists will say that. People have no use for knowing that a specific unusual regional weather outcome in the future is linked to the Earth warming if there is no specific timeline for when it will or won't happen. The weather has always been pretty terrible at times, and people have always had to adapt to it, it's just now the adaptations are all toward the warming changes rather than more erratic changes.

You can't do anything useful behaviorally from knowing that a rare event was linked to changes in the Earth's temperature. Are people in Portland going to give up their cars? You might think they'd buy air conditioning, but you had a pretty big heat wave in the Northwest in July 2009 and even that didn't happen to a large extent, and it's not like the population stopped growing out there in the 1800s when they had prior less intense heat waves before cooling systems and things like cold bottled water were available. I don't see the point of any of it. If you're talking about something like water in the West, most of the states have had 10 to 100x increased population compared to 100 or 200 years ago, so even in a colder or wetter climate you'd have water and other resource shortages with poor planning. You would have had to divert water resources anyway out here just from the order of magnitude in the population growth (New Mexico went from 327,000 in 1910 around statehood to 2,100,000 now as an example, and even in the 1800s Mark Twain was noting the rivers rain dry, and most of the West has seen far faster growth).

https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-how-climate-change-affects-extreme-weather-around-the-world

I mean I agree it's silly to care about these attribution studies simply because it's so obvious that global warming has contributed to every recent heat event. You're telling me that when the planet gets hotter it causes more heat waves? Obviously.

But you are way off base if you think knowing this very obvious fact is only useful if you can predict when and wear 10 years in the future an extreme heat wave will occur. That's kind of a silly and impossible standard, and even if you could predict weather 10 years from now down to the date, I'm not sure it would change much today at all. On the other hand knowing that the frequency of 95F days in Portland nearly doubled from 1950 to 2021 and will likely nearly double again by 2050 is useful information. It's useful for agriculture investors, energy investors, water planners, city planners, people considering where to move based on climate.

But it's probably most important to voters who might care about the overall environmental impact that will likely have on the pacific northwest rainforests, or how climate change will affect the economy and environment globally, and who might want to vote for representatives who will try to curb the ongoing and accelerating environmental catastrophe and accelerating human impacts via green energy subsidies and/or CO2 regulation.

If you were deciding where to move and wanted a nice climate, or were buying or investing in a farm (I know lots of small startup farmers), or were deciding where to invest in the electricity sector, would you care about knowing that Portland next hits 110F On July 9th 2032, or would you care that the frequency/probability of 95F and 100F days will increase 40% by 2035?

1 hour ago, tamarack said:

That 100+ for Toronto looks similar (in shape, not precise years) to the local long-term, 1893 on, co-op in the W. Maine foothills.  Farmington has reached 100 or more 14 times.  Seven came 1893-97 and based on 3 other stations 30-40 miles distant I think their siting may have been problematic.  The co-op reached triples 5 times in 1911 including 4 within 8 July days, the period in which all 3 NNE states set their current hottest temps.  Since 1911 only 2, 100 on 6/29/1944 as CAR set its all time high of 96 (on 6/28. Farmington's 7 AM obs included the previous afternoon) and 101 on Hot Saturday 1975 (recorded as 8/3: again, 7 AM obs.)  They've topped 95 only once since then, 98 on6/20/1995, and haven't reached even 95 since Sept. 2002.

Is it possible there was much less forestation back then? I know in CT basically 100% of the forest is new growth and you stumble along farming walls in the woods.

1 hour ago, raindancewx said:

I wasn't trying to argue that the specific +40 or +50 readings are not super rare. I think those are flukish and not normally distributed at all. In fact, I ran some of the figures for the NW and Canada in sites with 100+ years of records and they don't really pass some of the normality tests depending on what you're looking for. I can tell you locally, precipitation and snow are the same way, unless filtered by ENSO. So I'm not a big fan of that premise. My focus was more on the general +30 and +35 zone. I think with enough +30 events, you have to look at it as inevitable that some spot somewhere would greatly exceed the general trend. My math was my daily estimate for +35 odds, not +40 or +50. I do think it's well under 1 in 200,000 for a spot to hit +30 in a given day. It's not really that rare in the way we perceive time with so many days.

My assumption here is if the high was as strong, but 15 miles displaced in a parallel universe Earth but the same pattern existed, you'd have different sinking air through the valleys and then the sea breeze would behave differently too. You'd end up with a different collection of records by magnitude and space. That's why it's so dumb to me to attribute the +50 or the +40 to climate change. You should be trying to figure out if this setup exactly or with slightly different positioning is going to happen again, or if next time the high will be as strong, but with a sea breeze allowing Seattle to be 78 while Spokane is 110.  Most of the research I see is only about "proving" the Earth is warming to show the science is settled using poorly calculated probabilities, which is dumb, if you believe it is settled as the scientists surely do. I really don't have an issue with the general idea of warming, but the way the science is used in situations is borderline useless, since no one knows if this will happen later again this Summer or in 5,000 years, even if the odds favor it happening more.

I don't believe any of this is about "proving" climate change at all. The studies are specifically called attribution studies. They begin with the assumption that the earth has warmed x degrees, the Pacific NW has warmed y degrees, and that this warming is due to "climate change." You can never "prove" climate change because some rare event happened... yeah it would have been even less likely 50 years ago but it still *could* have happened. We don't need to prove "climate change." The climate *has* changed. The mean has shifted and the associated distribution of anomalies has shifted. Any graph of mean global temperatures, or record highs vs record lows will tell you this.

It's interesting to know that temperature distributions in the Pac NW are non-normal. However, even if the distribution is non-normal, it doesn't really matter in terms of attribution. Whatever the distribution is, when you shift it warmer by ~2F, any given extreme high temperature becomes ~10x more likely. You can't really say climate change "caused" this event, but you can say it made it roughly 10x more likely. 

I think you should read some of the attribution studies and get back to us with specific objections, I'd be happy to discuss them. I'm sure there are occasional statistical misinterpretations.

And as I said, if you assume normality this was a 1 in 200,000 summers event, not a 1 in 200,000 Portland June 28th event. I acknowledge the assumption of normality may be slightly incorrect. Maybe if you knew the true distribution it would be a 1 in 100,000 Portland summers event. Or 1 in 50,000 Portland summers. But it's not a 1 in 50,000 Portland June 28ths. It's much less common than that. Your point that there are lots of recording stations in the world besides Portland increases the global probability is completely valid. But your point that there are lots of days in the summer, or in the year, is not valid because the statistic already accounts for that. The probability that Portland would see a temperature on June 28th of 116 is likely less than 1 in a million (assuming the distribution is well-sampled after 100 years of data and is normal - assumptions which I agree may be somewhat erroneous).

Be careful not to confuse calcuations of attribution with calculations of recurrence. The assumption of normality matters a lot to calculating the recurrence probability (if the right tail is fat then it's going to be less than 1 in 200,000 recurrence). The assumption of normality matters a lot less to calculating the climate change attribution. No matter what the distribution is, shifting the distribution to the right by 2F will make any given point on the far right tail ~10x more likely. That's true regardless of whether the distribution is skewed or normal.

19 hours ago, raindancewx said:

I would say to add to this, that each climate region / zone is akin to a slot machine with specific odds for an extremely unlikely event. The odds of a jackpot in the Northwest are apparently much higher in Summer for record heat than where I live in the mountains of the Southwest as an example. How do I know that? In Albuquerque, the all-time record high is 107. The highs reach 72 in mid-April peak at 92 in late June to early August, then fall back to 72 in mid-October. That means you have a six month period, for 1892 to 2020, which is 128 complete years at 183 days per year, when 35 degrees above average is less than 1/23,000+ odds, just going by the observations. That's even including substantial warming in that time frame. That's what I mean when I say the bigger effects are from climates changing climate zone/type. Seattle and Portland are perfectly capable of warming up rapidly by drawing up hot desert air in the Summer that sinks from the East rather than cool Maritime air from the West or cold Arctic air from the North. New Mexico is hot regardless, because whether from the south or east or north or west, the surrounding is hot. NM won't see +35 because in that six month time frame since there is no source region of air hot enough to put 127 degrees at 5,300 feet above sea level in July, or 107 in April or October.

The issue with this type of math is that the odds reset each day. It's not 1/23,000+ for Albuquerque to hit +35 for the half year, or 1/10,000 for Portland to do it in the Summer. It's each day. I know some spots hit +50, but the general area was more like +35.

Given that we just had multiple days of record readings, all concentrated in the same area, it's pretty obvious that because of the exposure to cold in the Arctic/ very wet Pacific air/ very hot desert air from the Southwest, that the odds of a +35 day in the Northwest in the Summer are actually way better than the <1/23,000 per day floor here.

If you split the Earth into 200 pieces, I would bet the average frequency for extremes resemble what I have observed in my lifetime. I am going to be 34 in September. In my lifetime, living in Philadelphia, London, and Albuquerque, I have experienced something like 5-10 days that were more than 30 degrees above or below the long-term average high for the place. Philadelphia had a high of 6 in 1994, that's out by +30. Off the top of my head, I remember some mid 80s pool parties in March 1990 and 1998, a 95 in April 2002, 23 in March 1996 after the very cold winter. That's my guess for most extreme in Philadelphia. It snowed when I was in London in October 2008, but that's not 30 out, despite being part of that record wave (their earliest snow since 1934). In Albuquerque, there was a high of 9 (-42) and then 18 in February 2011, a high of 20 (-33) in February 2021. That's it -seven (ish) days, with a few others right probably pretty close. So based on my random sampling of Earth's climate, I've experienced 7/ ~12,400 days more than 30 degrees above or below the average high, roughly 1/1,800. I'd imagine that's closer to the figure for the extreme heat, with the recognition, that those odds are for each day. That's also why you see the extremes so often. Using my lifetime, it would be: 1 in 1,800 odds for a +/-30 high, every day, run every day for each climate, since each day has a different weather pattern globally.

The other simpler issue is if you scan old newspaper and magazine accounts, you do have a lot of accounts of pretty extreme temps even in the 1800s in the Northwest. Some of the records online are free, like the one, others are behind paywalls from things like the NYT.

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/march-1887-monthly-weather-review-final.pdfvia:

United States of America War Department, Monthly Weather Review for 1882, Washington D.C lists the data below

The following are the highest temperatures observed during July 1882 in the United States:

Fort Lapwai, Idaho (113° F, 45.0° C)

Umatilla, Oregon (105° F, 40.6° C) Alamota, Washington (105° F, 40.6° C)

One report says:

In August 1889, forest fires raged in California, Idaho, Washington, Michigan, Montana, Oregon and
Wyoming in the United States. At Seattle, Washington, for several weeks, this region was clouded by
smoke, caused by extensive forest fires in every direction. The entire eastern slope of the Cascade
Mountains, from Natchez Pass north to the boundary was in flames. At Helena, Montana, destructive
forest fires prevailed during the entire month of August. The fire consumed many million feet of lumber
and thousands of acres of timber.

Another report says Walla Walla hit 108 degrees in July 1891 as an example (pretty close still to the 114 record that stood from 1961 to a few days ago), with Portland at 102. I'm assuming with the current average July high of 89 or so in Walla, it was probably 85 or 86 back in the day, so just as now, you had +30 Summer days against the background of the climate state. I personally think the idea that the probability curve is what is changing for these events is sort of wrong. The events at the far end of the normal distribution are still very rare, they're just somewhat warmer when they do happen. If you change a spot from averaging 70 degrees to 72 degrees annually, and the physical limit of the spot is +/-35 v. the average, people can adapt to it. The issue would be if you changed from 70 to 72 and also shifted to a different climate zone, and suddenly +40 and -40 events became as routine as the +30 or -30 events against the 72 baseline. That's why that "record heat SW" thread has no real activity. It's great that you're concerned that we had a 600 decameter high. We'll have another one this week, and just like the last one, people here won't even notice.

One correction, it's not 1/10,000 to hit 116 on any given summer day, it's 1 in 200,000 to hit it for the entire summer. That's on a 1951-1980 baseline. Or 1 in 15,000 summers on a current baseline. But the statistic being floated around isn't just for a particular day.

That's assuming a normal distribution of maximum annual temperatures. I think you were saying that maybe the odds of this are a little higher than we might think because extreme events might be more common in a place like Seattle than in Tucson, because in Seattle, the "perfect" pattern could blow Tucson air onto Seattle and somehow in 100 years of data the "perfect" pattern just never happend (and nothing close to it either). I think I agree with this  but I hadn't mentioned it yet. I think the more technical way of saying it is that we only have ~100 years of maximum annual temperature observations. That's only ~100 datapoints. To assume the distribution is normal, or that the distribution is well-sampled with a sample size of 100 is a significant assumption. Usually, a random sample is still enough to estimate the standard deviation accurately because even if in 100 years of data we never saw "the perfect pattern" we would have seen a near perfect pattern a few times. But maybe this is just an especially unique pattern and "near perfect" behaves very different from "perfect." Again, in other words maybe the distribution is not "normal."

Another thing is this datapoint alone will dramatically shift the distribution. If you use a 1951-1980 baseline, the sample size is only 30 datapoints, which is probably a lot more accurate than most people think mathematically, but it is on the small size to form a representative sample. 

The other way of doing it that would get us more data is to use daily temperatures. From that distribution using random sampling you could generate a distribution of annual maximum temperatures. Or you could calculate the probability of seeing 116 on any given day. I'm pretty confident though that you'd still find it to be roughly a 4 sigma event (1 in 30,000 summers) if not the 4.37 sigma Don provided (1 in 200,000 summers). For a daily temperature anomaly it's likely 5 or 6 sigma (1 in 50 million). You still are assuming normality which is usually a pretty safe assumption, but maybe this is the rare exception. 

This is all speculation though. In general, assumptions of normality and small sample sizes work a lot better than most people think. It's not perfect, but usually it's very very close. But maybe this kind of error is the difference between 1 in 200,000 and 1 in 100,000.

Either way, I think it's important to recognize that this was not a 1 in 10,000 event for any given day in Portland. This was a 1 in 200,000 year event for any given summer in Portland. Major major difference. On a 21st century baseline it was more like a 1 in 15,000 summers event. In other words, the shifting of the distribution (due to climate change) made it ~10-15x more likely.

One last way of putting this, I believe it was calculated that this event was a 1 in 1,000 year event for the entire planet. In other words, the probability of seeing anomalies like this anywhere on earth in a given year is 1 in 1,000. In 100+ years of data that would mean there's some small but not tiny chance of this happening.