Kit Stolz

New National Weather Service term for extreme weather

For example, from today, via Jeff Masters:

A dangerous day in Chicago
Most of Illinois, including Chicago, has been placed under a special "PDS" Tornado Watch: a "Particularly Dangerous Situation." Severe thunderstorms spawning tornado warnings have already erupted over Southern Wisconsin and Western Illinois as of 10:15 am CST. Severe thunderstorms are likely to sweep through Chicago in the early afternoon during today's Ravens – Bears game, which starts at noon CST. According to NBC 5 in Chicago, loose objects are being removed from the stadium in anticipation of high winds, and officials are prepared to evacuate fans, if necessary.

The Wikipedia entry suggests that this is a new phrase. The National Weather Service states:

PDS watches are issued, when in the opinion of the forecaster, the likelihood of significant events is boosted by very volatile atmospheric conditions. Usually this decision is based on a number of atmospheric clues and parameters, so the decision to issue a PDS watch is subjective. There is no hard threshold or criteria. In high risk outlooks PDS watches are issued most often.

Could use of this word serve as a metric for the extreme weather of this century?

Regardless, here's such a story from the NY Times today, which is a lot tougher to take than a new word:

Severe storms moved through the Midwest on Sunday, leveling towns, killing at least five people in Illinois and injuring dozens more, and causing thousands of power failures across the region.

Officials warned of a fast-moving, deadly storm system on Sunday morning and issued tornado watches throughout the day for wide areas of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio and Wisconsin. By the time the storm had passed on Sunday evening, tornadoes — scores of them, according to the National Weather Service — had left paths of destruction.

Kinda reminds me of another set of post-storm pictures recently.

“Sheepwrecked” in Yosemite, Santa Cruz I., and the UK

140 years ago sheep were devastating the slopes and meadows of the Sierras and John Muir launched an effort — which took decades — to remove them. He wrote:

It is impossible to conceive of a devastation more universal than is produced among the plants of the Sierra by sheep…The greass is eaten close and trodden until it resembles a corral… Where the soil is not preserved by a strong elastic sod, it is cut up and beaten to loose dust and every herbaceous plant is killed. Tees and bushes escape, but they appear to stand in a desert very different from the delicately planted forest floor which is gardneed with flowers arranged in open separated groups. Nine-tenths of the whole surface of the Sierra has been swept by the scourge. It demands legislative interference. [from his journals for September 19, 1873]

Recently the well-known environmental columnist for the Guardian, George Monbiot, has launched his own campaign against the destruction wrought by sheep on a landscape, bY opposing — in a contrarian fashion — the designation of England's famous Lake District as a World Heritage site. He writes:

The celebrated fells have been thoroughly sheepwrecked: the forests which once covered them have been reduced by the white plague to bare rock and bowling green. By eating the young trees that would otherwise have replaced their parents, the sheep wiped the hills clean. They keep them naked, mowing down every edible plant that raises its head, depriving animals of their habitats. You’ll see more wildlife in Birmingham. Their sharp hooves compact the soil, ensuring that rain flashes off, causing floods downstream. This is the state which the bid would help preserve in perpetuity, preventing the ecological restoration of England’s biggest national park.

This is part of Monbiot's rewilding campaign, as he states in a manifesto:

Through rewilding – the mass restoration of ecosystems – I see an opportunity to reverse the destruction of the natural world. Researching my book Feral, I came across rewilding programmes in several parts of Europe, including some (such as Trees for Life in Scotland and the Wales Wild Land Foundation) in the UK, which are beginning to show how swiftly nature responds when we stop trying to control it (18,19). Rewilding, in my view, should involve reintroducing missing animals and plants, taking down the fences, blocking the drainage ditches, culling a few particularly invasive exotic species but otherwise standing back. It’s about abandoning the Biblical doctrine of dominion which has governed our relationship with the natural world.

It's so difficult for us to imagine a landscape before the arrival of us and our domestic animals. Monbiot quotes a forester named Ritchie Tassell sarcascitally wondering: "How did nature cope before we came along?"

"Rewilding" is a concept introduced in this country by Dave Foreman, of Earth First! fame. I think it's best-known example in the U.S. is the idea of a route built over or under a highways to allows animals, especially migrating animals, to pass safely

But removing the sheep from the Lake District sounds like a start.

Anyone who has been to Santa Cruz Island, in a national park off the coast of Southern California, can can readily imagine how different and pleasant that island would be with hills of vineyard, producing tens of thousands of gallons of wine, instead of the unimaginably huge sheep farm that took over.

For many years, dating back to the Spanish era, Santa Cruz island produced wine for the entire state, until a rancher named Ed Stanton took control, idled the vineyard, and imported thousands of sheep. A sucessful sheep operation resulted, and produced revenue while devastating the island, but eventually was bought out by the parks service. The sheep were eradicated in recent years.

Point being: the Lake District too could benefit from a rewilding — and sheep removal.

[We have no pictures, apparenlty, of Ed Stanton having the wine casks emptied and 26,000 gallons of wine poured out on the ground, but we do have a history of his operation. ]

What the heck happened with Super Typhoon Haiyan?

After the strongest hurricane ever hits, it's natural to ask what happened.

What made this storm so strong?

Climatologists have ideas on the subject. Eli Rabbet looks at a graph from the NOAA Environmental Visulaization Lab. Darkness indicates warmth in the ocean, fuel for a potential hurricane.

Here's the commentary from the lab at the time:

The intensification of Super Typhoon Haiyan is being fueled by "ideal" environmental conditions – namely low wind shear and warm ocean temperatures. Maximum sustained winds are currently at 195 mph, well above the Category 5 classification used for Atlantic and East Pacific hurricanes. Plotted here is the average Tropical Cyclone Heat Potential product for October 28 – November 3, 2013, taken directly from NOAA View. This dataset, developed by NOAA/AOML, shows the total amount of heat energy available for the storm to absorb, not just on the surface, but integrated through the water column. Deeper, warmer pools of water are colored purple, though any region colored from pink to purple has sufficient energy to fuel storm intensification. The dotted line represents the best-track and forecast data as of 16:00 UTC on November 7, 2013.

Greg Laden, of Science Blogs, has a fine-grained description of the heat to energy transfer:

Warmer seas can make bigger or stronger storms, and as the storm passes over the ocean, the temperature of the sea surface has a strong influence on whether the storm increases or decreases in strength . As the storm moves over the sea, the interface between the windy storm and the roiling ocean becomes something of a mess, as though the surface of the ocean was in a blender, and there is a lot of exchange of heat across that interface. Also, deeper, cooler water is mixed with warmer surface water. A powerful storm moving across the ocean will leave in its wake a strip of cooler water.

Another way to look at heat content in the ocean is to look a chart for relative sea level, because, counter-intuitively, sea level is not exactly uniform the globe over.

Warmer regions tend to be elevated, and as a recent IPCC chart and discussion indicate, the waters near the Philippines are the warmest on the planet.

Jeff Masters describes what happened:

A remarkable warming of the sub-surface Pacific waters east of the Philippines in recent decades, due to a shift in atmospheric circulation patterns and ocean currents that began in the early 1990s, could be responsible for the rapid intensification of Super Typhoon Haiyan. Hurricanes are heat engines, which means they take heat energy out of the ocean, and convert it to kinetic energy in the form of wind. It's well-known that tropical cyclones need surface water temperatures of at least 26.5°C (80°F) to maintain themselves, and that the warmer the water, and the deeper the warm water is, the stronger the storm can get. Deep warm water is important, since as a tropical cyclone tracks over the ocean, it stirs up cooler water from the depths, potentially reducing the intensity of the storm. When both Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita exploded into Category 5 hurricanes as they crossed over a warm eddy in the Gulf of Mexico with a lot of deep, warm water, the concept of the total heat energy available to fuel a hurricane–the Tropical Cyclone Heat Potential (TCHP)–became one that gained wide recognition. The Pacific Ocean east of the Philippines has the largest area of deep, warm water of anywhere on Earth, and these waters have historically fueled the highest incidence of Category 5 storms of anywhere on the planet. Super Typhoon Haiyan tracked over surface waters that were of near-average warmth, 29.5 – 30.5°C (85 – 87°F.) However, the waters at a depth of 100 meters (328 feet) beneath Haiyan during its rapid intensification phase were a huge 4 – 5°C (7 – 9°F) above average, judging by an analysis of October average ocean temperatures from the Japan Meteorological Agency (Figure 1.) As the typhoon stirred this unusually warm water to the surface, the storm was able to feed off the heat, allowing Haiyan to intensify into one of the strongest tropical cyclones ever observed.

Masters then adds a phenomenal plot from a Japanese meteorological agency that shows how closely the monster storm lined up with the warmest waters. Click if you want it bigger and clearer.

Figure 1. Departure of temperature from average at a depth of 100 meters in the West Pacific Ocean during October 2013, compared to a 1986 – 2008 average. The track and intensity of Super Typhoon Haiyan are overlaid. Haiyan passed directly over large areas of sub-surface water that were 4 – 5°C above average in temperature, which likely contributed to the storm's explosive deepening. Image credit: Japan Meteorological Agency.

As Kerry Emmanuel, of M.I.T., the leading expert on these storms, put it this week in the NYTimes:

"As you warm the #climate, you basically raise the speed limit on #hurricanes," [Kerry Emmanuel, MIT] said. http://t.co/DpVX5viDFc #Haiyan

— Kit Stolz (@kitstolz) November 12, 2013

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How the poor go from food stamps to “food swamps”

All year the Washington Post has been running a series on food stamps that will drop your jaw, but probably the best of all has been this report from South Texas called Too Much of Too Little:

McAllen, Tex. — They were already running late for a doctor’s appointment, but first the Salas family hurried into their kitchen for another breakfast paid for by the federal government. The 4-year-old grabbed a bag of cheddar-flavored potato chips and a granola bar. The 9-year-old filled a bowl with sugary cereal and then gulped down chocolate milk. Their mother, Blanca, arrived at the refrigerator and reached into the drawer where she stored the insulin needed to treat her diabetes. She filled a needle with fluid and injected it into her stomach with a practiced jab.

“Let’s go,” she told the children, rushing them out of the kitchen and into the car. “We can stop for snacks on our way home.”

The family checkup had been scheduled at the insistence of a school nurse, who wanted the Salas family to address two concerns: They were suffering from both a shortage of nutritious food and a diet of excess — paradoxical problems that have become increasingly interconnected in the United States, and especially in South Texas.

For almost a decade, Blanca had supported her five children by stretching $430 in monthly food stamp benefits, adding lard to thicken her refried beans and buying instant soup by the case at a nearby dollar store. She shopped for “quantity over quality,” she said, aiming to fill a grocery cart for $100 or less.

But the cheap foods she could afford on the standard government allotment of about $1.50 per meal also tended to be among the least nutritious — heavy in preservatives, fats, salt and refined sugar. Now Clarissa, her 13-year-old daughter, had a darkening ring around her neck that suggested early-onset diabetes from too much sugar. Now Antonio, 9, was sharing dosages of his mother’s cholesterol medication. Now Blanca herself was too sick to work, receiving disability payments at age 40 and testing her blood-sugar level twice each day to guard against the stroke doctors warned was forthcoming as a result of her diet.

What I like about this installment is its heart: We feel deeply for Blanca Salas as she struggles to feed her family and herself only to fear sickness and see her kids sickened by the processed foods they love.

A researcher named William McCarthy, who has taken the time to talk to me about this issue in Ventura County, argues that these low-income neighborhoods of convenience stores with little access to fresh vegetables or fruits should not be called "food deserts" — because there's no shortage of food — but "food swamps," because the people there are sinking down under the weight of their high-caloric diets.

But Eli Suslow's work lets us feel Blanca's pain, showing her plight but not judging her:

Has to be one of the best newspaper stories/series this year.

Driest year in the state’s instrumental record: California

Versions of this story now appear every couple of weeks in newspapers in California. This one comes from the SF Chronicle:

Thirsty California may get a smidgen of rain this coming week, but it is not likely to change what, so far, has been the driest calendar year in recorded history.

No rain at all fell in San Francisco in October and only 3.95 inches has fallen since Jan. 1, the smallest amount of precipitation to date since record keeping began 164 years ago, according to the National Weather Service.

Things can still change, but the storm predicted to roll in Monday and Tuesday has already petered out, according to forecasters, who are expecting only sprinkles, if that.

"It's absolutely dry," said Bob Benjamin, a National Weather Service forecaster. "We just went through October where there was no measurable precipitation in downtown San Francisco. That's only happened seven times since records started."

In SoCal native plants — even sages and ceanothus — are withering. It's been going on two years since the local stream ran for any length. Well water looks murky, and appears increasingly chancy,

Brings to mind a wonderful passage about the arrival of rain in Chinua Achebe's classic Things Fall Apart. Of course this is Africa, not California, but perhaps we can relate:

[from the Desert Research Institute's California Climate Archive]

Achebe [from chapter fourteen of Things Fall Apart]:

At last the rain came. It was sudden and tremendous. For two or three moons the sun had been gathering strength till it seemed to breathe a breath of fire on the earth. All the grass had long been scorched brown, and the sands felt like live coals to the feet. Evergreen trees wrote a dusty coat of brown. The birds were silenced in the forests, and the world lay panting under the live, vibrating heat. And then came the clap of thunder. It was an angry, metallic and thirsty clap, unlike the deep and liquid rumbling of the rainy season. A mighty wind arose and filled the air with dust. Palm trees swayed as the wind combed their leaves into flying crests like strange and fantastic coiffure.

When the rain finally came, it was in large, solid drops of frozen water which the people called "the nuts of the water of heaven." they were hard nad painful on the body as they fell, yet young people ran happily picking up the cold nuts and throwing them into their mouths to melt.

The earth came quickly to life and the birds in teh forest flutterled around and chirped merrily. A vague scent of life nad green vegetation was diffused in the air. As the rain began to fall more soberly and in smaller liquid drops, children sought for shelter, and all were happy, refreshed and thankful.

My form of a rain prayer, I guess.

So many great Tenn Williams productions, so little time.

10 Williams still rules, sez the Los Angeles Times, writing of the new Broadway production of "The Glass Menagerie":

NEW YORK — The revival of "The Glass Menagerie" that has Broadway abuzz boasts two-time Tony winner Cherry Jones in the role of the Southern gothic matriarch Amanda Wingfield, among the greatest parts in the repertoire for a mature actress. But this isn't the only stellar attraction.

Zachary Quinto, the 21st century face of Spock and an actor of compelling interiority, plays Tom, the narrator and burgeoning writer burning to break free of his suffocating family responsibility. Equally noteworthy, John Tiffany, who won a Tony for his staging of the musical "Once," is collaborating again with choreographer-movement director Steven Hoggett in a dramatic application of their signature lyricism that's hauntingly accented with Nico Muhly's music.

But the real star of the production is possibly the oldest name in the playbill, Tennessee Williams, whose indelible memory play is heard in all its breath-catching delicacy.

Charles McNulty adds:

The narrator boasts that unlike the stage magician who gives illusion in the appearance of truth, he will give us truth in the appearance of illusion. This promise is kept by Quinto, who viscerally maps the central conflict facing Tom, who is of course the surrogate for Thomas ("Tennessee") Williams.

This deeply felt homage to an author who awakened the country's appetite for serious drama in the middle of the 20th century sparks the hope that he will start receiving the Broadway productions he deserves. His voice, nowhere more poignant than in this most autobiographical play, is still balm for weary, open-hearted souls.

So true, and so wish I could see that production! Perhaps it will travel.

Deniers scoff at Typhoon Yolanda (aka Haiyan)

From the New York Times:

CEBU, Philippines — One of the most powerful typhoons ever recorded now appears to have devastated cities, towns and fishing villages with heavy loss of life when it played a deadly form of hopscotch across the islands of the central Philippines on Friday.

The first and most vocal city to cry for help over the weekend was Tacloban on Leyte Island, which was also one of the first places hit by the typhoon, called Yolanda in the Philippines. In many other communities along the storm’s track, virtually all communications were cut off. […]

The typhoon left Tacloban in ruins, as a storm surge as high as 13 feet overwhelmed its streets, with reports from the scene saying that most of the houses had been damaged or destroyed in the city of 220,000. More than 300 bodies have already been recovered, said Tecson John S. Lim, the city administrator, adding that the toll could reach 10,000 in Tacloban alone.

From Jeff Masters:

Haiyan will become the deadest typhoon in Philippines history if the estimates today of 10,000 dead hold up. Bloomberg Industries is estimating insured damages of $2 billion and total economic damages of $14 billion, making Haiyan the most expensive natural disaster in Philippines history. This is the third time in the past 12 months the Philippines have set a new record for their most expensive natural disaster in history. The record was initially set by Typhoon Bopha of December 2012, with $1.7 billion in damage; that record was beaten by the $2.2 billion in damage done by the August 2013 floods on Luzon caused by moisture associated with Typhoon Trami.

From an eyewitness account (stormchasers iCyclone):

At the height of the storm, as the wind rose to a scream, as windows exploded and as our solid-concrete downtown hotel trembled from the impact of flying debris, as pictures blew off the walls and as children became hysterical, a tremendous storm surge swept the entire downtown. Waterfront blocks were reduced to heaps of rubble. In our hotel, trapped first-floor guests smashed the windows of their rooms to keep from drowning and screamed for help, and we had to drop our cameras and pull them out on mattresses and physically carry the elderly and disabled to the second floor. Mark's leg was ripped open by a piece of debris and he'll require surgery. The city has no communication with the outside world. The hospitals are overflowing with the critically injured. The surrounding communities are mowed down. After a bleak night in a hot, pitch-black, trashed hotel, James, Mark, and I managed to get out of the city on a military chopper and get to Cebu via a C-130– sitting next to corpses in body bags. Meteorologically, Super Typhoon HAIYAN was fascinating; from a human-interest standpoint, it was utterly ghastly. It's been difficult to process.

From the world's leading climate change denier site:

Super Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda – another overhyped storm that didn’t match early reports

Here's a pic. Ship in background beached by the storm.

Got credibility, Anthony Watts? Or a heart?

What Google and John Muir have in common: Connection

Much attention has been focused in recent weeks on a mysterious barge floating off Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. On Monday the LA Times ran on the top of the front page a remarkably thin story written in the first person about the mystery of this barge, a Google effort. By the time one reached the end of story one wondered if it had been written in first person to cover up how little fact it contained.

Yesterday, after filing a Freedom of Information Act request, the San Francisco Chronicle forced the truth out into the open. Apparently this four-story barge will become — if the permits are ever approved, which in San Francisco will always be a question — an art project.

Sounds cool, in truth. Here's an artist's conception of the finished work:

In a statement, the Googleplex declared that the idea is to draw people to the waterfront, at various spots around the bay. The designers, a still somewhat mysterious group known as By and Large, promised:

"We envisioned this space with community in mind," By and Large says, "a
surprising environment that is accessible to all and inspires
conversation about how everything is connected – shorebirds, me, you,
the sea, the fog and much more."

Which echoes John Muir's foundational — and often misquoted — statement of ecology:

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."

Google has done everything it can to connect us to our human universe and to the planet (via the still-astounding Google Earth). Good that it's now working to connect Bay denizens to their home habitat.

Toles: Did you see how bad the Chinese air is?

Another of Toles' thoughtful sketches:

All of us share the same air, live under one sky.

Could this climate ad have tipped the VA Gov race?

Tea Party/GOP candidate Ken Cuccinelli, as Attorney General, spent over $600k of state of Virginia funds on what the Washington Post called a "witch hunt" directed against Michael Mann, a highly reputable scientist. Mann's crime? He crunched global temperature numbers into a graph that shows soaring temperatures over the last hundred years that made clear that yes, climate change is happening. It's a graph detested for its effectiveness by climate change skeptics and deniers.

In the last couple of years, Mann has gone on the offensive against his critics, touring the world behind his book about his pillorying and suing the National Review for calling him a fraud — a suit that has been gaining momentum in court. He also narrated the ad below, which coolly and effectively makes a case against the extremism of Ken Cuccinelli.

Could it have tipped enough moderate voters against Cuccinelli and cost him last night's election against a not-very-popular Democrate? One wonders. Cuccinelli lost by only 50k votes.