May 2021

[Intensewind002]

15 minutes ago, LibertyBell said:

we've repeatedly changed snowfall measurements after the fact, I dont get the hesitation here.

 

There is no reason not to really, me on the south shore of suffolk county should not be getting readings equal or higher than NYC (except maybe in winter)

[CIK62]

The last 8 days of May are averaging 65degs.(56/73), or -1.0.

Month to date is  63.3[+1.2].       May should end near 63.8[+0.6].

Only part of Holiday Weekend looks like it can be salvaged.[Latest GFS looks wet at anytime you pick during Holiday now.]      GFS continues with May 26th.  at 90 degrees.      Other models now under 90.

Next hot period should kick in June 04 and may last awhile.

Made it to 90 here by 4:30pm yesterday.     Was still 89 at 6pm.

{Was 73* at Midnight}     64*(51%RH), at 6am. scattered thin overcast .        62*/63* at 9am.            58* at 10pm.

[tek1972]

The last 8 days of May are averaging 65degs.(56/73), or -1.0.
Month to date is  63.3[+1.2].       May should end near 63.8[+0.6].
Only part of Holiday Weekend looks like it can be salvaged.      GFS continues with May 26th.  at 90 degrees.      Other models now under 90.
Made it to 90 here by 4:30pm yesterday.     Was still 89 at 6pm.
64*(51%RH), scattered thin overcast.

What part of the weekend?

Sent from my SM-N986U using Tapatalk

[bluewave]

17 minutes ago, tek1972 said:

What part of the weekend?

Sent from my SM-N986U using Tapatalk
 

The higher scoring Euro and CMC are dry for the Memorial Day weekend. They bring in the rain for Friday and Friday night. But it looks like a cool Sat to Mon with plenty of easterly flow. The big high east of New England is back again as we start June.

[donsutherland1]

Morning thoughts...

The morning will feature plenty of clouds. However, it will become partly sunny this afternoon. It will be noticeably cooler than yesterday. Temperatures will likely top out in the 60s and perhaps some lower 70s in most of the region. Likely high temperatures around the region include:

New York City (Central Park): 67°

Newark: 70°

Philadelphia: 71°

Tomorrow will be partly sunny and pleasant.

Yesterday saw some record high minimum temperatures tied or broken at: Islip: 65° (old record: 63°, 2013); New York City-JFK: 68° (old record: 63°, 1980 and 2010); and, Newark: 68° (tied record set in 2013).

[the_other_guy]

11 hours ago, psv88 said:

More accurately stated, the Central Park thermometer has not recorded a reading above 96 degrees since that date...

There is more a play here though. Our minimums have been increasingly warm,  but haven’t had the extreme upper 90s/low 100s that we used to have. The obvious answer is that moist air cools and heats slower.

 

People on here like to pick on the Central Park reading three months of the year for temps, 3 months a year for snow, and ignore the problems for the other 6 months...But I would be curious to know if a densely forested park in the middle of an urban heat Island is experiencing this phenomenon to a greater degree.

The airports are easy; particularly LaGuardia and Newark...They are slabs of cement in densely populated areas. JFK is much larger, has much more open space with grass, is in a national park, and is abeam the Atlantic Ocean.

But I wonder if there is more to this than ASOS placement. Has anyone actually visited the ASOS recently and seen the conditions around it?

 

 

 

 

[psv88]

29 minutes ago, jfklganyc said:

There is more a play here though. Our minimums have been increasingly warm,  but haven’t had the extreme upper 90s/low 100s that we used to have. The obvious answer is that moist air cools and heats slower.

 

People on here like to pick on the Central Park reading three months of the year for temps, 3 months a year for snow, and ignore the problems for the other 6 months...But I would be curious to know if a densely forested park in the middle of an urban heat Island is experiencing this phenomenon to a greater degree.

The airports are easy; particularly LaGuardia and Newark...They are slabs of cement in densely populated areas. JFK is much larger, has much more open space with grass, is in a national park, and is abeam the Atlantic Ocean.

But I wonder if there is more to this than ASOS placement. Has anyone actually visited the ASOS recently and seen the conditions around it?

 

 

 

 

Break it down...why would an already densely forested park get more moist at a faster rate than non forested areas? If anything the opposite should be true. For example, which area gets more humid (from a relative standpoint) from a moist flow, a tropical rain forest or a desert? The desert clearly, because it was already dry....so the park shouldn’t see moderating temps more than any other areas. Rather, because it is more moist already, the rate of change should be slower, not faster, in other areas...

[psv88]

I can’t remember the last time it rained 

[Brian5671]

4 minutes ago, psv88 said:

I can’t remember the last time it rained 

Mother's day here-15 days ago....

[SnoSki14]

1 hour ago, bluewave said:

The higher scoring Euro and CMC are dry for the Memorial Day weekend. They bring in the rain for Friday and Friday night. But it looks like a cool Sat to Mon with plenty of easterly flow. The big high east of New England is back again as we start June.

Yeah bad timing for the upcoming holiday. Monday itself could be salvaged but a good chunk of the weekend looks cool, damp. 

Even worse if you're heading down the shore.

[nycwinter]

what lovely day it is feels like fall nice cool breeze..

[nycwinter]

2 hours ago, psv88 said:

I can’t remember the last time it rained 

it feels like rain every time  i take a shower...

[Juliancolton]

49 minutes ago, nycwinter said:

it feels like rain every time  i take a shower...

So 15 days ago, same as @Brian5671

[bluewave]

3 hours ago, jfklganyc said:

There is more a play here though. Our minimums have been increasingly warm,  but haven’t had the extreme upper 90s/low 100s that we used to have. The obvious answer is that moist air cools and heats slower.

 

People on here like to pick on the Central Park reading three months of the year for temps, 3 months a year for snow, and ignore the problems for the other 6 months...But I would be curious to know if a densely forested park in the middle of an urban heat Island is experiencing this phenomenon to a greater degree.

The airports are easy; particularly LaGuardia and Newark...They are slabs of cement in densely populated areas. JFK is much larger, has much more open space with grass, is in a national park, and is abeam the Atlantic Ocean.

But I wonder if there is more to this than ASOS placement. Has anyone actually visited the ASOS recently and seen the conditions around it?

 

 

 

 

Central Park is a great place for weather observations provided that the ASOS is placed in an open area away from trees. The problem with the Central Park site is that it was no longer maintained after the early 90s. Since the early 90s, is has been tucked in the deep shade under the trees. So the lack of direct sunlight results in afternoon highs that are 2° to 3° cooler than they used to be prior to the 90s. So this created a break in continuity from earlier observations. As for the airports, the ASOS units are placed on grassy surfaces. While there is plenty of concrete at the airports, there really isn’t any more or less than the surrounding neighborhoods where the people live. But since the airports are located on the water, they are prone to sea breezes. So there are neighborhoods around NYC metro that can be hotter depending on wind direction. 
 

Central Park before the sensor was blocked by trees

 

Most recent photo as of 2013 under trees and violating the ASOS handbook sitting rules

 

[dWave]

4 hours ago, jfklganyc said:

There is more a play here though. Our minimums have been increasingly warm,  but haven’t had the extreme upper 90s/low 100s that we used to have. The obvious answer is that moist air cools and heats slower.

 

People on here like to pick on the Central Park reading three months of the year for temps, 3 months a year for snow, and ignore the problems for the other 6 months...But I would be curious to know if a densely forested park in the middle of an urban heat Island is experiencing this phenomenon to a greater degree.

The airports are easy; particularly LaGuardia and Newark...They are slabs of cement in densely populated areas. JFK is much larger, has much more open space with grass, is in a national park, and is abeam the Atlantic Ocean.

But I wonder if there is more to this than ASOS placement. Has anyone actually visited the ASOS recently and seen the conditions around it?

 

 

 

 

For a good chunk of spring CPK isnt fully leafed out yet, so the temp disparity doesn't show as much yet compared to nearby urban stations. Also in spring the Park is a little more protected from the frequent cool E/NE  flow, keeping LGA cooler on some days. As that influence gets weaker later on, back door fronts less common, and the vegetation gets lush the Park's cool bias starts on cue.

I wish I could find the article, but the NWS has already acknowledged this phenomenon is legitimate 10 yrs ago or so. They basically just accept it as is for a few reasons...

1. Technically KNYC is accurate for what it is, a dense semi forested park, and its readings accuratly reflect that. (Kinda putting the onus on the consumer to recognize a park for what it is vs an urbanized street and analyze accordingly.)

2. Its historical significance. Its one of the longest running climate stations, and in America's biggest city. They dont want to mess with it. So its just grandfathered in to the climate data despite falling short of their own offical standards.

3. There are plenty of offical weather stations around it to reflect the local urban climate. (Kind of putting it at the medias feet to use all available data to portray an accurate picture to the public.) In fact the closest offical reporting station for many/most NYC residents isnt KNYC, but LGA or JFK...all of Queens, the BX and portions of BK would fall into that.

The ASOS is not that far from Museum of Natural History. Its fenced in, surrounded by trees, last I saw some now hang over the top as well. In wetter patterns weeds and shrubs will be overgrown near-by too. The trees do help shield it from the public which the NWS probably likes.

[lee59]

As long as were on a discussion involving  the NWS,  does anyone know why the NHC now includes subtropical storms as named tropical storms?

[bluewave]

6 hours ago, SnoSki14 said:

Yeah bad timing for the upcoming holiday. Monday itself could be salvaged but a good chunk of the weekend looks cool, damp. 

Even worse if you're heading down the shore.

The bulk of the rain on the 12z Euro is Friday into Friday night. Some lingering showers on Saturday. But the weekend looks cool with plenty of easterly flow. This past weekend when we reached the mid 90s will turn out to have been the best beach weekend of May. 

 

 

 

 

[SnowGoose69]

9 minutes ago, bluewave said:

The bulk of the rain on the 12z Euro is Friday into Friday night. Some lingering showers on Saturday. But the weekend looks cool with plenty of easterly flow. This past weekend when we reached the mid 90s will turn out to have been the best beach weekend of May. 

 

 

 

 

Yeah I’m fairly confident at this stage that the 12Z Euro is close to the eventual evolution though I don’t buy the come back or secondary feature late Saturday.  The pattern screams suppressed and done to me after the first wave.  Some models also show the funky occlusion type feature like the GFS but again doesn’t make a ton of sense to me.   

[Brian5671]

6 hours ago, SnoSki14 said:

Yeah bad timing for the upcoming holiday. Monday itself could be salvaged but a good chunk of the weekend looks cool, damp. 

Even worse if you're heading down the shore.

yeah I would never pay good $$ to go away Memorial day in the northeast, still spring really (and subject to cloudy 60 degree weather or worse)

[LibertyBell]

6 hours ago, SnoSki14 said:

Yeah bad timing for the upcoming holiday. Monday itself could be salvaged but a good chunk of the weekend looks cool, damp. 

Even worse if you're heading down the shore.

they should've just moved Memorial Day weekend to the weekend we just had honestly.  Anyone who wanted to take off should have done it then and forget about next weekend.

 

[LibertyBell]

9 minutes ago, Brian5671 said:

yeah I would never pay good $$ to go away Memorial day in the northeast, still spring really (and subject to cloudy 60 degree weather or worse)

As far as I'm concerned Memorial Day weekend was the weekend we just had.  I took a vacation and it was awesome.  Next weekend means nothing to me

 

[LibertyBell]

3 hours ago, dWave said:

For a good chunk of spring CPK isnt fully leafed out yet, so the temp disparity doesn't show as much yet compared to nearby urban stations. Also in spring the Park is a little more protected from the frequent cool E/NE  flow, keeping LGA cooler on some days. As that influence gets weaker later on, back door fronts less common, and the vegetation gets lush the Park's cool bias starts on cue.

I wish I could find the article, but the NWS has already acknowledged this phenomenon is legitimate 10 yrs ago or so. They basically just accept it as is for a few reasons...

1. Technically KNYC is accurate for what it is, a dense semi forested park, and its readings accuratly reflect that. (Kinda putting the onus on the consumer to recognize a park for what it is vs an urbanized street and analyze accordingly.)

2. Its historical significance. Its one of the longest running climate stations, and in America's biggest city. They dont want to mess with it. So its just grandfathered in to the climate data despite falling short of their own offical standards.

3. There are plenty of offical weather stations around it to reflect the local urban climate. (Kind of putting it at the medias feet to use all available data to portray an accurate picture to the public.) In fact the closest offical reporting station for many/most NYC residents isnt KNYC, but LGA or JFK...all of Queens, the BX and portions of BK would fall into that.

The ASOS is not that far from Museum of Natural History. Its fenced in, surrounded by trees, last I saw some now hang over the top as well. In wetter patterns weeds and shrubs will be overgrown near-by too. The trees do help shield it from the public which the NWS probably likes.

It's why the media needs to be lobbied to stop using NYC as an observation site.  It should just be considered a second order station and be done with it.  All first order stations should only be airports.

NYC doesn't comply to the NWS own standards for siting, so as far as I'm concerned, no observations from there can be considered to be accurate or usable.  I'm perfectly fine with data only going back to 1950, that's when the modern era began anyway.

 

The former climate back in the 1800s matters about as much as the climate on Mars.

[Juliancolton]

3 hours ago, lee59 said:

As long as were on a discussion involving  the NWS,  does anyone know why the NHC now includes subtropical storms as named tropical storms?

The NHC has been naming subtropical systems for almost 20 years. I'm not sure of the exact rationale, but in theory, STCs can pose many of the same hazards as TCs.

[LibertyBell]

7 hours ago, psv88 said:

Break it down...why would an already densely forested park get more moist at a faster rate than non forested areas? If anything the opposite should be true. For example, which area gets more humid (from a relative standpoint) from a moist flow, a tropical rain forest or a desert? The desert clearly, because it was already dry....so the park shouldn’t see moderating temps more than any other areas. Rather, because it is more moist already, the rate of change should be slower, not faster, in other areas...

I'm curious as to how this compares to higher evapotranspiration rates in the midwest, where higher heat indices are being blamed on monocultural farming.

 

[LoboLeader1]

Need a good rain to knock down this damn pollen in the air, makes your life miserable. I hate this time of year.

[bluewave]

25 minutes ago, LibertyBell said:

I'm curious as to how this compares to higher evapotranspiration rates in the midwest, where higher heat indices are being blamed on monocultural farming.

 

It would be interesting to see how many more 100° days we would have had without the big increase in agriculture in those areas.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/02/america-s-corn-belt-making-its-own-weather

The United States’s Corn Belt is making its own weather

By Kimberly HickokFeb. 16, 2018 , 12:05 PM

The Great Plains of the central United States—the Corn Belt—is one of the most fertile regions on Earth, producing more than 10 billion bushels of corn each year. It’s also home to some mysterious weather: Whereas the rest of the world has warmed, the region’s summer temperatures have dropped as much as a full degree Celsius, and rainfall has increased up to 35%, the largest spike anywhere in the world. The culprit, according to a new study, isn’t greenhouse gas emissions or sea surface temperature—it’s the corn itself.

This is the first time anyone has examined regional climate change in the central United States by directly comparing the influence of greenhouse gas emissions to agriculture, says Nathan Mueller, an earth systems scientist at the University of California (UC), Irvine, who was not involved with this study. It’s important to understand how agricultural activity can have “surprisingly strong” impacts on climate change, he says.

The Corn Belt stretches from the panhandle of Texas up to North Dakota and east to Ohio. The amount of corn harvested in this region annually has increased by 400% since 1950, from 2 billion to 10 billion bushels. Iowa leads the country for the most corn produced per state.

 

Get more great content like this delivered right to you!To see whether this increase in crops has influenced the region’s unusual weather, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge used computers to model five different 30-year climate simulations, based on data from 1982 to 2011. First, they compared simulations with high levels of intense agriculture to control simulations with no agricultural influence. Unlike the real-life climate changes, the control simulations showed no change in temperature or rainfall. But 62% of the simulations with intense agriculture resulted in temperature and rainfall changes that mirror the observed changes, the team reports this week in Geophysical Research Letters.

Map of the central United States, showing changes in rainfall during the last third of the 20th century. Areas of increased rainfall are shown in green, with darker colors representing a greater increase.

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY 

The team then compared its results to historical global simulations from the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), an international program for the coordination of global climate research sponsored by the International Council for Science, the World Meteorological Organization, and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO. WCRP’s models take into account greenhouse gas emissions and other natural and humanmade influences, but do not consider agricultural land use. When researchers ran the numbers for the Corn Belt, the global models fell short of reality: They predicted both temperature and humidity to increase slightly, and rainfall to increase by up to 4%—none of which matches the observed changes.

Other climate simulations that use sea surface temperature variation didn’t match observed changes, either. Those simulations matched historical data until 1970; after that, the simulations predicted temperatures to keep increasing, rather than decreasing as they did in reality. This is a strong indication that agriculture, and not changing sea surface temperature, caused the regional changes in climate during the last third of the 20th century, the researchers say.

“The [influence] of agriculture intensification is really an independent problem from greenhouse gas emissions,” says Ross Alter, lead author of the study and now a meteorologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Hanover, New Hampshire. In fact, Alter says, heavy agriculture likely counteracted rising temperatures regionally that might have otherwise resulted from increasing greenhouse gas emissions. One other place that shows a similar drop in temperatures, he notes, is eastern China, where intensive agriculture is widespread.

But how does agriculture cause increased rainfall and decreased temperatures? The team suspects it has to do with photosynthesis, which leads to more water vapor in the air. When a plant’s pores, called stomata, open to allow carbon dioxide to enter, they simultaneously allow water to escape. This increases the amount of water going into the atmosphere and returning as rainfall. The cycle may continue as that rainwater eventually moves back into the atmosphere and causes more rainfall downwind from the original agricultural area.

Rong Fu, a climate scientist at UC Los Angeles, agrees with the team’s assessment. She also thinks that though human influence might be “greater than we realize,” this regional climate change is probably caused by many factors, including increased irrigation in the region.

“This squares with a lot of other evidence,” says Peter Huybers, a climate scientist at Harvard University, who calls the new study convincing. But he warns that such benefits may not last if greenhouse gas emissions eventually overpower the mitigating effect of agriculture.

Alter agrees, and says it’s unlikely that the large increases in U.S. crop production during the 20th century will continue. Other scientists have voiced concern that agricultural production could soon be reaching its limit in many parts of the world. 

“Food production is arguably what we’re more concerned about with climate change,” Mueller says. And understanding how agriculture and climate will continue to affect one another is crucial for developing projections for both climate and agricultural yields. “It’s not just greenhouse gasses that we need to be thinking about.” 

 

[doncat]

Only made it to 64° today during daylight hours...midnight high of 70°.

[lee59]

1 hour ago, Juliancolton said:

The NHC has been naming subtropical systems for almost 20 years. I'm not sure of the exact rationale, but in theory, STCs can pose many of the same hazards as TCs.

I don't remember them being named 20 years ago but I know for sure some of these storms they name now would never have been named years ago. It seems every year they are naming more and more storms that are not  even close to tropical. If they want to include non tropical systems in with tropical systems, fine, however they should not make comparisons with years ago records. The next thing you know they will be including Nor"easters. 

[lee59]

Lee Goldberg mentioned the plant growth around Central Park recording station and how there is to much difference between Newark and Central Park.

[Gravity Wave]

2 hours ago, Brian5671 said:

yeah I would never pay good $$ to go away Memorial day in the northeast, still spring really (and subject to cloudy 60 degree weather or worse)

Memorial Day usually manages to have good weather, even in years with bad springs (like most recent years).