skierinvermont

9 minutes ago, LibertyBell said:

Making a separate post regarding your edit.  Right, because we want to find the likelihood of an all-time record high temperature.  So the variance should be much less than it would be for a daily high.

Yeah just skimming Portland annual max temperatures the mean seems to be around 99-100 until recently it's more like 101-102. And the standard deviation a bit under 4. All guessing of course.

13 minutes ago, Typhoon Tip said:

This won't sound altogether cogently scientific, admittedly .. but, I get the weird 'feeling' this is ...sort of an introduction ceremony into a new climate realm featuring this sort of occurrence with more ease than those staggering odds implicate in rareness. 

I have some analytic reasons for that, but I am trying to limit my verbosity in social media; in an increasingly patience reducing/aversion to spending that much time with it, it's wasting time.

In in short, there are regions of the planet that favor "synergistic" results. Those by convention ( being more than the sum of the contributing forces ...) will exceed the mean standard deviation models - by these exotic ranges, more readily so than regions that do not have feed-backs.  Those location will be able to get those +8 and +10 oddities over that base-line numerical/statistical layout.  The Pac NW is one of those regions.  I think the Pac NW and also San Francisco and L.A. can do this again sooner than we think. The shit with fires and heat last summer ?  that was no fluke and is related - whether the scalar values of the extremes match or not. 

 

I mean I think the short version of what you are saying is that both the mean and standard deviation are expected to increase more in the PAC NW than other areas. I think even if you factor that in, a 1 in 200,000 year event isn't becoming 1 in 10 anytime soon. 

Portland was 4.37 sigma... just skimming previous Portland annual max temperatures the mean seems to be around 100 and the SD would be around 3.7F. That region is expected to warm something like 6F by 2080 (vs 20th century) so the new mean is 106F and then say the SD grows from 3.7F to 4.5F... then a temperature of 116F would be a 2.22 sigma event ((116-106)/4.5).

That would still make it a 1 in 80 year event.

1 minute ago, LibertyBell said:

Yeah I remember doing this kind of work with bell curves lol.

You just need to know what each SD is and calculate the rest accordingly.

I always thought that normals should be calculated this way- anything outside +/- 1 SD should be deemed above or below normal, not the strictly linear methods we use now.

 

see my edit (4F not 7F) and note

9 minutes ago, skierinvermont said:

I think I guessed 1 in 50 years by 2080.

Under a BAU scenario

And they would see ~112 every few years

It's not hard stuff... you just shift the distribution upwards by the expected daytime summer warming in that region. Maybe broaden the distribution slightly if the wavy jet hypothesis is correct.

If you shift the distribution by 1 standard deviation* (~4F I'm guessing), then a 4.37 sigma event becomes a 3.37 sigma event. If you broaden the distribution slightly then it becomes a ~3.0 sigma event.

*NOTE this is the standard deviation of annual maximum temperature, not daily high temperature

Just now, LibertyBell said:

Yes exactly- I think thats what the NWS was talking about in the excerpt posted by Don.  Not for any specific location but globally it'll be a one in 10 year event soon.

But I also saw you say that by the end of your life (let's just use 2100), you think this could be a 1 in 10 year event even specifically for the PNW?

I think I guessed 1 in 50 years by 2080.

39 minutes ago, LibertyBell said:

So Mann may be right in what he said today.  And the chances of this occurring by the end of the century are more than 50% per year?  But it's already 50% twice in 30 years?  Hmmm, so my estimate of 50/50 once in a decade isn't far off....

 

No.. see above... Mann must be talking about beating 20th century records anywhere by 8F... not specifically Portland OR.

34 minutes ago, LibertyBell said:

I'd question that, Mann was on today and he said it was a once in a millenium event, that may now be a once in 10 year event due to climate change.  He also said using the "new normal" phrase wasn't accurate, because this is a moving target and still changing (that is, accelerated climate change is occurring.)

I'm guessing Mann is speaking of something different than you. My guess is he's saying breaking 20th century records by 8+ degrees anywhere on earth may become a 1 in 10 year event. 

But we were discussing the probability of specifically Portland OR hitting 116 again. 

Two very different things. On a global scale, for any location to beat their previous record by 8+ degrees, this was a 1 in 1000 year event and now I could see it being a 1 in 100 at present and soon to be 1 in 10. But for Portland specifically to break their 20th century recrod by 8 degrees was a 1 in 200,000 year event that may be a 1 in 15,000 at present and 1 in 50 or 1 in 100 by the time I die (~2080).

That's why Mann said 1 in 1000 soon to be 1 in 10 because he's talking about anywhere having these kinds of anomalies. For Portland specifically to have an anomaly like this was 1 in 200,000, now 1 in 15,000.

If that's not what Mann was saying then he's just wrong. This was way less likely than 1 in a millenium. And it's also not going to become 1 in 10 any time soon.

3 hours ago, TimB84 said:

Here’s the thing. The area affected by this heatwave is about 1/360 of the earth’s land area (I used the area of Washington and Oregon as an estimate - I know there were parts of Canada affected too, so that’s probably a lowball estimate). But for the sake of argument, let’s say this was a 50,000 year event on average. If you divide the earth into 360 equal parcels of land and OR/WA is one of them, you would expect one of these parcels to experience a 1-in-50,000 year event about once every 50,000/360 = 140 years. But I feel like I’ve read in this thread that the Siberia event last year was also of similar magnitude (and did someone say the March 2012 event in the Midwest?). So instead of once every 140 years, we’ve now had it happen to 3 of these 360 parcels of land in 9 years. That’s statistically significant and a strong indicator that the dice are loaded.

Your numbers are fairly consistent with my suggestion it's a 1 in 15,000 year event on a current baseline. I think it was more like a 1 in 200,000 year event on mid 20th century baseline. So it's even more of a loading (10x+).

As bad as the air gets with the CA OR ID fires... my fear is it will only get worse when WA and BC really start burning 20 or 30 years from now. At a certain point the trees up there which are adapted for cooler weather are just going to die enmasse.

On 6/30/2021 at 1:56 PM, psv88 said:

No. This was a once in a thousand year + event. My gut tells me Portland will not exceed this temp in our lifetimes.

This was a 1 in a 200,000 year event at Portland on a 1950-1981 century baseline if Don's numbers are right (z=4.37). On a 1991-2000 baseline it was a 1 in 50,000 year event. It's likely a 1 in 15,000 year event on a current baseline. By the time I die (~2080 life exp) I'd expect it to be roughly a 1 in 50 year event, with temperatures slightly below these values occurring every few years.

I'd agree it's very unlikely to recur in the next 10 years. I'd say 50/50 Portland exceeds in my lifetime. Don correct me if I have misunderstood your sigma values.

18 hours ago, raindancewx said:

Mann is primarily a statistician by background, I think it matters a lot that a proposed statistical explanation is not correct, especially since he went out of his way to insist on it from the prior "consensus" about volcanoes. None of these proposed 30-year oscillations like the AMO or PDO really behave in that manner if you look at the data or the maps with any level of detail, it shouldn't have escaped the eyes of a smart person. The AMO is a major indicator of snow patterns, drought, and heat waves, among others. So knowing it isn't really a 30-year cycle is not a big deal to me, as a guy with no power. But it makes the entire concept broadly useless to someone like Mann trying to advocate social policy change to help with climate change. What are you supposed to do if you are Biden, and Mann tells you all these indexes exist and can predict outcomes well, but the indexes themselves are slow and irregularly changing, and subject to constant revision by their inventors?

I don't have a problem with the Earth warming as an idea or the evidence for it. I had atmospheric physics, thermodynamics, hydrology and other pretty intensive math in college and high school. I just think as a field it is kind of useless. I can't imagine many scientists are attracted to something that is "settled", i.e. that the outcome will be changed weather and warmer temperatures, for decades. The settled science thing to me is classic double speak though. Things that are actually settled are not controversial or subject to hundreds of billions of dollars of research. The research and controversy exists because it is less clear what happens to the trends at a regional and seasonal level, which means it isn't settled, not really. People know the Earth is round. People know where babies come from. Surely these were state of the art scientific findings at some point. But they aren't now, so we don't argue about them or research them in meaningful ways.

To me science is about discovery. The truth is, the climate can only change in a hand full of ways. It can move toward more/less for moisture/heat in a given spot or overall, or more/less for entropy if the way heat is input into the system gets screwed up. So it's not actually that interesting.

You'll never see rain fall up or snow turn blue. It's not like quantum mechanics or something where you're looking for a grand unified theory of everything, which is actually interesting. Climate science is mostly about social policy. But the public has literally no use for knowing that the oceans are forecast to rise, given record populations in coastal areas. The public doesn't care about slow changes in hurricane activity or tracks, or about tornado activity or tracks since we just build better homes and issue better forecasts. I live in the West. It's undoubtedly somewhat warmer than even recent prior hot/dry periods like the 1950s, and water is scarce. But each time we need more water, another water source is found, whether it is a river or a lake that gets diverted. The same thing will inevitably happen in the future, even if it has to be through more extreme measures like cloud seeding, desalinization, or whatever the new method is. 

Lost you at “people have no use for knowing oceans will rise.” I’d say that’s pretty critical information for city planners, zoning commissions, levee projects, insurance companies, potential homeowners, and any coastal infrastructure. Real decisions have been based on this information and many more decisions will and should be made. 
 

“each time we need more water another source is found” ... tell that to the farmers and industries closing due to water restrictions. Future water scarcity has informed water planning decisions. Water boards, farmers, businesses and the Colorado river pact would likely have made very different decisions about how to share water, build infrastructure, etc if they thought the current dry spell was just temporary and brief.

your attitude seems to be “well people aren’t dying in the streets and even if they were there’s nothing we could do about it so it’s not worth knowing about even if it were true”

also I’d like a reference on the claim of 100s of billions on research. I could believe 10s but pretty skeptical of 100s. 
 

finally, the research money is on the finer details of future effects, figuring out exactly how much change has happened and will happen. What’s settled is the core theory that they earth has warmed around 1c in the last century mostly due to co2.

Climbed a 300’ hill in the neighborhood and there were still ten foot drift on top

1 hour ago, MidlothianWX said:

It's amazing how accurate the meso models were, particularly the HRRR (even though precip was off by a bit). Saturday night / Sunday morning I was seeing a hole/shadow over Boulder but higher totals to the south (JeffCo/Golden) and east (Louisville/Westminster), all of which verified. I even mentioned it to Seth on his FB page and he basically said proximity to the mountains can be both a blessing and a curse for Boulder.

It's sort of frustrating that areas ~20 minutes away from me received 2ft+ - I really wanted to break my all-time IMBY record of 25" - but what are you 'gonna do. I've witnessed two 20"+ IMBY events in 16 months after going 16 years without one, which is pretty neat. Plus, the record-breaking season last year and the September snow.

Yeah I remember you posting that and seeing it too. Could be the wind was a little too northerly for Boulder. The foothills north and south of Boulder bend east so they are a little surrounded and maybe need a little more east component to the wind in order to not downslope. Also when you bike 93 you can really feel the high terrain between golden and Boulder. Gets up over 6200 on the road. That’s probably the terrain the hrrr was catching onto with a north or nne surface wind.

12 hours ago, mayjawintastawm said:

I got 22" using the 6 hour board clearing method, and I'm nestled right in the I25-I225-E470 nook, near APA. Highlands Ranch, 8 miles southwest, got 19.5" (not sure how measured). Both are in the light purple, so it tracks. Pretty sure DIA was the only one >27" among reports in the immediate Metro area within the 470/NW parkway "beltway". The real interesting thing is when I went for a walk today in Cherry Creek State Park, I expected to find that the snow had drifted as it usually does, with wind from the N or NE. But actually it looks from the drifts like the wind was 340-350 most of yesterday, which is not usually conducive to high snow amounts here.

Saw this posted in Seth's weather group. Arvada 29" Golden 28" Aurora 27" Lakewood 27" Louisville 26" Westminster 26" Arvada 25" Centennial 24". I got 27" clearing once at 3pm Sunday, probably would have had close to 30" if I cleared Saturday night. Seemed to justify a little more >24" in the western and eastern suburbs. The low spots being SW Denver, downtown, and Boulder.

S

7 hours ago, smokeybandit said:

 

Looks low around the denver area? DIA reported 27" but map shows <24". Lots of reports around the metro of >24".

When these maps are created are they using spotters doing 6 hour clearing of a board? Or is it based on people sticking a yardstick in the ground after the storm? Seems more consistent with the latter.

24" on the ground final measurement. I also cleared my patio table and got 19.5" before and 8.5" after which would suggest 27". Quite a bit of compaction and melting near the ground so no doubt that clearing a board would give at least 27" probably more.

1 hour ago, MidlothianWX said:

Wolf Creek, Silverton, and Loveland top the list for annual snowfall. I want to say that even Wolf Creek saw 2ft+ from this event.

Eldora normally does well with the juicy Front Range storms.

Winter Park and Steamboat too. I've always been suspicious of Loveland's claim to 400". Winter Park often seems to get more.

2 minutes ago, finnster said:

Here at our place SW of Bellvue in the foothills, we measured 41” earlier this afternoon, and add another 4-6 “ since then.

We tend to really catch the snow from northern front range storms.  This storm was epic!

WOW so ~46" total (I can add)

5" in the last 2 hours bring the total to 24.5".. insane rates right now could be the best sustained rates I've ever seen

thinking 30 might be within reach

2.5" in the last 70min brings the total to 22"

2 minutes ago, Amped said:

Looking at the radar overnight,  it seems possible.   A band set up  from DIA-Ft Collins and missed the rest of the city and metro. 

yeah I saw that too

19.5" OTG, just cleared part of the patio table so I can avoid compaction on future measurements although I'm sure a lot has already occurred, it is dense.

will be going for a walk with some pics hopefully at 10pm after a deadline I'm working on

absolutely dumping right now

the surface low looks incredible on radar right over La Junta CO

16" OTG

Just now, AlaskaETC said:

Cheyenne with nearly 26" of snow. Jackpotville 

saw a report a few hours ago that FOCO had 24" also