bluewave

The four-part series was one of the best documentaries that I saw all year. It’s available on demand for anyone that missed it. The brief clip below was informative on how to motivate society to get more interested in climate change and the environment.

Updated for another unusually strong October Northeast severe thunderstorm outbreak producing the highest October wind gust on record in Albany. RECORD EVENT REPORT NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE ALBANY NY 312 AM EDT THU OCT 08 2020 ...HIGHEST WIND GUST SET AT ALBANY NEW YORK YESTERDAY... A HIGHEST OR PEAK WIND GUST OF 67 MPH FROM THE WEST OCCURRED YESTERDAY...WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 7...2020...AT THE ALBANY INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT IN THE THUNDERSTORMS. THIS BROKE THE OLD RECORD FOR THE DATE OF 54 MPH SET IN 2009. THIS IS ALSO THE HIGHEST WIND GUST FOR THE MONTH OF OCTOBER ON RECORD. WIND GUST RECORDS AT ALBANY GO BACK TO 1987.

It will be interesting to see if Delta slows down enough for both Monday and Tuesday to record at least an inch of rain in NYC. Most of our events in recent years had the heaviest precipitation focused into just 1 day. The last 2 consecutive NYC days with 1.00” plus of precipitation was 1-23/24-17. Getting 2 consecutive days of 2.00”+ has been even tougher. The last time for NYC was with Irene on 8-27/28-11. Number of Consecutive Days Precipitation >= 1.00 for NY CITY CENTRAL PARK, NY Click column heading to sort ascending, click again to sort descending. Rank Run Length Ending Date Last value also occurred in one or more previous years. Period of record: 2017-01-01 to 2020-10-07 1 2 2017-01-24 2 1 2020-09-30 - 1 2020-09-10 - 1 2020-08-12 - 1 2020-07-22 - 1 2020-07-10 - 1 2020-04-13 - 1 2020-03-23 - 1 2019-12-14 - 1 2019-12-09 Number of Consecutive Days Precipitation >= 2.00 for NY CITY CENTRAL PARK, NY Click column heading to sort ascending, click again to sort descending. Rank Run Length Ending Date Last value also occurred in one or more previous years. Period of record: 2011-01-01 to 2020-10-07 1 2 2011-08-28 2 1 2020-07-10 - 1 2018-08-11 - 1 2018-07-17 - 1 2018-04-16 - 1 2017-10-29 - 1 2017-05-05 - 1 2016-11-29 - 1 2016-01-23 - 1 2015-01-18

https://grist.org/climate/scientists-didnt-expect-wildfires-this-terrible-for-another-30-years/ Scientists didn’t predict fires of this scale until between 2040 and 2060, said Matthew Hurteau, an associate professor at the University of New Mexico who studies fire in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Climate scientists’ predictions tend to be pretty conservative, so the record-breaking fire season could force a reckoning. After all, if this is what fires look like now — thanks to the future showing up 30 years early — it’s time to rethink forecasts. The blazes are already changing some projections for California, Hurteau said. So why were the estimates so far off? One explanation is that scientists work with data that already exists, and the evidence simply didn’t support the prospect of such gigafires, until now. That’s not to say that scientists thought it was out of the question. “What comes out of the peer review process is reined in from what some of us think is going to happen,” Hurteau said. “Everybody I know who works on climate-related stuff has had conversations about how we think it’s worse than our research shows.” Contrary to claims that they are “alarmist,” scientists actually tend to underestimate the effects of the climate crisis. A 2012 paper, for instance, found that scientists’ projections downplayed the risks of the potential disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet. The authors suggested that this tendency to underestimate future changes comes out of pressure to appear balanced and objective. Wildfires are hard to predict, from the conditions that fan their flames to how and where they’ll ignite. Peering into the crystal ball is already hard enough without having to account for complicated factors like rainfall, wind speed, land cover, and local topography. Hurteau thinks there’s “a clear climate signal” in the destructive fires we’ve seen across the globe in recent years. When the atmosphere warms, he explained, it sucks moisture out of the land, drying out trees and shrubs and making them more flammable. Of course, forest management is also a factor. Before settlers took over the Western U.S. and started suppressing fires, indigenous peoples used small burns to prevent runaway fires. When you take that buildup of fuel and then you make it more available to burn by turning up the thermostat and drying it out more, that’s the recipe for big fires,” Hurteau said. What’s different, and what he finds especially worrying, is that some fires in California are burning through areas that just burned a couple of years ago, such as the LNU Lightning Complex, a series of fires that scorched much of Wine Country in northern California this fall. “Basically, fire having just occurred within the recent past may not be as much of an impediment to subsequent fires occurring as we thought it might,” Hurteau said. To make fires less destructive, Hurteau suggests that local governments need to change codes to make buildings less like fuel for flames. Mandating that roofs are made with flame-resistant materials can prevent homes from combusting when embers land on them. And especially in drought-ridden places like California, Hurteau said, “we’ve got to get managed fire back into these ecosystems.” Then, of course, there’s the matter of global greenhouse gas emissions. “I hope that people are starting to wake up to the fact that we’ve got a period of time when we need to act pretty quickly,” he said.

Scaling up fast enough and meeting expanding global energy demand is quite a challenge. https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/12/24/72/our-pathetically-slow-shift-to-clean-energy-in-five-charts/ By most measures that matter, clean energy had a stellar decade. The cost of large wind and solar farms dropped by 70% and nearly 90%, respectively. Meanwhile, renewable-power plants around the world are producing four times more electricity than they did 10 years ago. Similarly, electric vehicles were barely a blip at the outset of the 2010s. But automakers were on track to sell 1.8 million EVs this year, as range increased, prices fell, and companies introduced a variety of models. But the swift growth in these small sectors still hasn’t added up to major changes in the massive global energy system, or reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. So far, cleaner technologies have mostly met rising energy demands, not cut deeply into existing fossil-fuel infrastructure, as the charts that follow make clear. That’s a problem. Cutting emissions rapidly enough to combat the increasing threats of climate change will require complete overhauls of our power plants, factories, and vehicle fleets, all within a few decades.

Wind damage with the line racing through Southern CT.

One of the strongest wind gusts of the year at Albany.

The 12z Euro has a good soaking now that it came east with Delta.

It will be interesting to see if sites like Tropical Tidbits and Pivitol Weather add the extra maps. While the ECMWF has a ton of data now available on the site, the other sites have have a more intuitive interface and better looking maps.

We'll see if the Euro is going too far west with Delta like it did with Laura. It would be nice to see what the new 9km ensembles show.

Longer range, models have been struggling with the Pacific Jet. This has resulted in fast wavelength changes over PNA and EPO regions. So a continuation of the up and down temperature pattern for us. Also notice how the PDO is really getting pushed around by these quick changes. New run Old run

Main La Niña theme since 2000 has been a dominant SE Ridge. The years with over 20” in NYC had Alaska and Greenland blocking episodes mixed with the SE Ridge. 16-17 was a great example of a few well timed blocks in a warm SE Ridge pattern producing respectable seasonal snowfall totals.

Areas that saw an early freeze in late September will probably have to wait a while for their next freeze. Frost/Freeze Summary for Poughkeepsie Area, NY (ThreadEx) Each section contains date and year of occurrence, value on that date. Click column heading to sort ascending, click again to sort descending. Year Last Value First Value Season Length 1963 05-24 (1963) 27 09-15 (1963) 32 113 1964 05-03 (1964) 31 09-16 (1964) 30 135 1984 05-18 (1984) 32 09-16 (1984) 32 120 1986 05-10 (1986) 30 09-17 (1986) 30 129 1956 05-25 (1956) 27 09-21 (1956) 32 118 1962 05-12 (1962) 32 09-21 (1962) 30 131 2020 05-14 (2020) 31 09-21 (2020) 31 129

I noticed that the vendors calculate the teleconnections indices in a slightly different manner than the CPC. But it looks like the the EPO and WPO forecasts will only be available from the vendors going forward. We can still use the 500mb height anomalies to get an idea of the EPO and WPO values.

Tough to bet against the SE Ridge in recent years.

I just saw this... Note: As of 23 September 2020, the Global Ensemble Forecast System has been upgraded to a much improved version 12, and this page is now obsolete. New reforecasts are available via Amazon Web Services for free download, at https://noaa-gefs-retrospective.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html, and you are directed there for data access. It is straightforward to set up scripts to loop over days and members and download sequences of global fields using wget or curl. The experimental forecast product pages that we have developed based on the previous model version and reforecasts will not be updated; we have not received any resources for updating them, regrettably. If you have questions or comments about this dataset or the associated products, please contact: [email protected] Note: Updated daily forecasts of teleconnection indices produced at NCEP's Climate Prediction Center can be found here.

Winter 20-21 discussion for NYC Metro.

Looks like the all or nothing rainfall pattern since September 10th will continue. 3”+ deluges on September 10th and 30th with a dry pattern in the middle. So it may be a while before our next big rainfall event.

Much cooler pattern to start October than last year. RECORD EVENT REPORT NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NEW YORK NY 553 AM EDT THU OCT 3 2019 ...RECORD DAILY AND MONTHLY HIGH TEMPERATURE SET YESTERDAY AT NEWARK NJ... A RECORD DAILY AND MONTHLY HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 96 DEGREES WAS SET AT NEWARK NJ YESTERDAY. THIS BREAKS THE OLD DAILY RECORD OF 86 SET IN 2013...AND THE OLD MONTHLY RECORD OF 93 SET ON OCTOBER 5 1941. RECORD EVENT REPORT NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NEW YORK NY 549 AM EDT THU OCT 3 2019 ...RECORD DAILY AND MONTHLY HIGH TEMPERATURE SET YESTERDAY AT KENNEDY NY... A RECORD DAILY AND MONTHLY HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 95 DEGREES WAS SET AT KENNEDY NY YESTERDAY. THIS BREAKS THE OLD DAILY RECORD OF 85 SET IN 2013...AND THE OLD MONTHLY RECORD OF 90 SET ON OCTOBER 8 2007. RECORD EVENT REPORT NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NEW YORK NY 551 AM EDT THU OCT 3 2019 ...RECORD DAILY AND MONTHLY HIGH TEMPERATURE SET YESTERDAY AT LAGUARDIA NY... A RECORD DAILY AND MONTHLY HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 95 DEGREES WAS SET AT LAGUARDIA NY YESTERDAY. THIS BREAKS THE OLD DAILY RECORD OF 87 SET IN 2002...AND THE OLD MONTHLY RECORD OF 93 SET ON OCTOBER 5 1941.

We will need to see a significant increase in public-private partnerships in order to make an energy transition possible. https://www.ecowatch.com/high-powered-public-private-partnerships-essential-to-expediting-renew-1882132714.html Public-private partnerships have been around since the start of the U.S. and exist at all levels of government. Basic science and technology has historically been funded by the U.S. government and taken place in national and university laboratories. When the technologies matured, some were released for commercial use. Perhaps the best example is the personal computer, which has shrunk significantly in size since the 1970s and has dramatically increased in computing power. A product used by billions of people worldwide began as an investment by the U.S. federal government, in order to develop better missile guidance systems for the U.S. Department of Defense and smaller on-board computers for NASA's space program. At some point, technology will take over. Fossil fuels will eventually be driven from the marketplace by something better and cheaper, but we first need the investment in basic and applied research to make that happen. The transition from an economy based on the one-time use of finite resources to one that relies on renewable resources requires a sophisticated, high-powered public-private partnership. The commitments made by Gates and the White House are a good start and there are many other signs that the transition from fossil fuels has begun. The speed of that transition, however, will depend on creativity, consensus and cash to be completed.

The North Atlantic Jet is also making headlines.

Hopefully, the coming EPS upgrade makes a lasting improvement.

I wouldn’t mind if the modeling centers stopped posting the OP runs after120 hrs. We would probably be better off with just ensemble means after day 5. These longer range OP runs seem to be taken too literally and then we get the big disappointment posts. It also doesn’t help during the cold season when the longer range OP snowfall maps get posted on social media. That the kind of thing that lowers peoples confidence in weather forecasts. But it could be easily avoided with more of a reliance on ensemble means.