Boring Weather

The media loves to highlight extreme and exciting weather, but they have missed a critical opportunity:  to describe perhaps the most important extreme of all-- extremely boring weather.

Where in the U.S. are folks experiencing the same, dull weather, day after day?  How dull can it get?

You won't find coverage of this topic on CNN or your local news channel, but this blog pushes the envelope on such important matters.

The first stop in our boring weather tour will be Los Angeles, where the high temperature of the PAST SEVEN DAYS has been either 70 or 71F!  And the peak winds have have hardly varied in speed and direction.  Dullsville.

Or San Diego the last week.  A real snooze, with highs of 72 or 73F each day, no rain, no nothing.

But if there was an Olympics of weather boredom, we need to look closer to home, where the gold medal of weather uneventfulness goes to North Bend, Oregon, where the average temperatures over the PAST MONTH have ranged from 58 to 62F, and the max temps from 63-68F.

This is pretty bad....but surely the forecast suggests some excitement for the good folks of North Bend!  Here is the latest prediction from the Weather Channel.  Yikes!  The highs range from 62 to 66, partly cloudy every day, with a 10-20% chance of drizzle!

You ask why is the weather so BORING over the West Coast during summer?

The answer is clear...we have a cool Pacific Ocean offshore that doesn't change temperature much.  Onshore flow of marine air at low levels.  The jet stream and weather disturbances are far to the north.  High pressure offshore and few thunderstorms.  A deadly period of meteorologists...

Boring satellite image...some low clouds over western WA (surprise!) and along the central and southern CA coast (another big surprise).  Sunny in eastern WA and the interior of CA (more surprises).  Low clouds offshore.

Climate Extremists

On March 11, 2011 a wall of water, reaching 130 ft high in places, struck the Japanese coast causing extraordinary devastation, including nd extensive damage to the Fukashima nuclear power plant.

Should we blame this disaster on global warming? 

Certainly, the warming of the earth, caused by both natural and greenhouse gas forcing, has caused sea level to rise, with increases of about 10 cm (4 inches) since 1970, roughly when human greenhouse gas forcing became significant.

The answer to the question above is clear: human-caused greenhouse warming may have added a few inches to the height of the water surface, but the great tsunami was caused by an extraordinary natural phenomenon (the Tohoku earthquake), and the impact of sea level rise was really in the noise level.

The reason I mention this example, is that a number of folks are twisting essentially the same situation, but in the atmosphere, to make the case that global warming is making the weather more extreme.  They cite the latest weather/climate disasters as proof:  the current heat wave/drought in the Midwest, the Russian Heat Wave of 2010, the Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the list is endless.  And headline-thirsty media are happy to amplify this message, to the detriment of their readership.


So what is causing the big weather events we are experiencing?   The most frequent reason is an amplification and locking of the upper level flow pattern that controls the weather.  Most of you know about the jet stream, the current of strong winds in the upper troposphere, a feature associated with storms in the midlatitudes.  The jet stream and upper level flow generally has undulations, with troughs  (when the jet stream moves south) associated with cool, wet weather and ridges (when the jet stream moves northward) associated with warm dry weather.  In fact, there are two jet streams:  one in the midlatitudes and one in the subtropics (see picture)

We often show the upper-level flow patterns by displaying the height of pressure surfaces in the atmosphere, often 500 hPa (see below).  You can see the troughs and ridges on this chart (trough lines indicated by dashes).  Now much of the time the troughs and ridges move through (generally from the west to the east) and we get "normal" weather... sunny days interuupted by cloudy, rainy ones (or snowy in winter).  The figure show such a situation.

But sometimes the atmosphere "locks up", with a ridges or troughs staying in one location and increasing in amplitude.  This  locking up is often termed blocking.  Blocking is not well understood, sometimes we can figure out why it is happening, but often we are clueless.  In fact, blocking can happen quite naturally as part of the non-linear, complex physics of the atmosphere.

Many of the extreme weather situations are associated with such locking of the atmosphere.  Why has the middle of the U.S. experienced apersistent heat/drought and the West Coast has been cool and wet?   You guessed it--the upper flow pattern has been locked in a configuration of a ridge over the central U.S. and troughs along the coasts. Here is a sample of the pattern from late June.

Take a look at the departure of the average temperatures from normal for June and the last two weeks when this configuration has been in place.  You see that some of the differences from normal (the anomalies) exceed 9F!.

These are very large anomalies, and FAR exceed that signal that  thescientific community believes might be associated with human-caused global warming over the past 50 years (perhaps 1 F).

You see how this is like the Japan tsunami?  Sure, global warming might be making things a bit warmer, but these major weather/climate events are clearly associated with natural variability.   Global warming...and particularly warming caused by humans...plays a VERY minor role.   This conclusion, for the current heat wve and other events like the Russian heat wave,  is supported by a number of scientific reports, including some very well known scientists at NOAA (an example here).

Now, some of you may ask, could global warming due to human greenhouse gas emission be increasing the amplitude and "locking"  of the upper waves?  There is absolutely no evidence of this.   Some climate model studies, suggest the opposite....that blocking and weather anomalies might DECLINE as the earth warms (see article here that discusses this issue).  So the weather might get LESS extreme.  Other models indicate a slight increase in blocking.  

There is little doubt the earth is warming from a combination of natural and human-induced effects and that the number of high temperature records are being broken as a result (and as result of urbanizaton and poor instrument siting).  But the evidence suggests that  the big weather/climate events have little to do with global warming.

Reading the media and scanning the press releases of environmental advocacy groups, you would not come to these conclusions.   Some organizations, like Climate Central and extremists like Bill McGibben,  hype every major weather anomaly as proof of the profound effects of human-induced global warming.  They ask you to "connect the dots"  but are playing a very unhealthy role in this issue by providing false information.  The trouble is that the media feeds upon this stuff...and my local paper..the Seattle Times....is one of the worst.  Even more embarrassing, national pundits with little climate or meteorological knowledge...like Paul Krugman...are parroting these unproven ideas.

I really appreciate Paul Krugman, but this is really embarrassing for him

The psychology of those hyping extremes is worthy of study and analysis...but I suspect the reasons are clear.  Many are convinced, as they should be, that mankind will have a large impact on the climate of the planet by the end of the century because of our enhancement of greenhouse gases.  Plus, acidification of the oceans.  They believe by hyping the relatively small impacts during the past few decades that they can motivate people to act.  A lie for a good cause.    And yes there is the human side--folks love attention and feeling important...and the media is happy to provide this for those telling tall tales of huge current impacts.
          
I know that a few will jump on me about not mentioning the deceptions of the "other side."  And they are legion.  There is whole climate change denial lobby... funded by energy firms, the Koch brothers, and others... and supported by large group of folks that believe that conservatism and conservation are not compatible, saying that greenhouse gas impacts are an unproven theory, and that natural variability is the only game in town.  They are wrong.   The science is clear: human-induced warming will be a profoundly serious issue for our civilisation by the end of the century.  And the polititicizaiton of this scientifc issue has become very unproductive.

If you believe in the seriousness of global warming in the future, it is essential to stick to the truth.  Over-the-top claims--which are easily provable to be false or which will fail to materialize in the near future-- simply undermine the credibility of the science. Mankind can only make the right decisions if they know the truth...and the uncertainties, and there are two groups in this conversation that are doing much to prevent the public from understanding the nature of this serious problem. 

Summer SuperFog

 Coal Train Update

     Last night (Thursday) Professor Dan Jaffe, myself, and some students took observations of particle levels at Richmond Beach Park in Shoreline on the bridge over the track.   The goal was to determine what was coming off the coal trains.  We sampled several freight trains and one coal trains.  A video showing this fun is found at: http://www.king5.com/video?id=163980306&sec=549122

Thanks so much for those providing information about coal train passage.  We are going to do this multiple times and will let you know what we find.  For those living near the tracks, how often are there trains in the morning?

..........

It is relatively unusual, but we have late July dense fog over the south Sound...dense enough that it delaying some flights at Sea-Tac.   Here are the latest observations at the airport. Quarter-mile visibility on the runway. 

Here is the latest Sea-Tac cam shots:

Says everything, right?  Or the view from the KING-5 tower cam on Queen Anne Hill.   Poetic.

Even the roadways are being affected...here is I5 near S 200th St.

You can see the low clouds and fog from the latest visible satellite image.   The clouds are covering the cost and much of the lowlands...head up and you are out of it....or just go north of Seattle.

The low clouds and fog will rapidly burn off this morning.

By the way, if you are really into low clouds, the National Weather Service has a marvelous new web page showing cams along the coast (http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/sew/bars_mover.php).  As you mouse-over locations you see the cams along the coast.
You can get you fill of low clouds from the comfort of your home.