Arctic Sea Ice or Siberian Snow best for winter forecasts?

At the AGU went looking for leading sea ice extent researcher Jen Francis at Rutgers, who has become known for arguing that the extent of sea ice/Arctic Amplification alters the jetstream (making it "wavier") and leads to extreme weather in places like the Northeast and northern Europe. 

Or, as she told the NYTimes this spring, during a heat wave: 

“This means that whatever weather you have today — be it wet, hot, dry or snowy — is more likely to last longer than it used to,” said Dr. Francis, who published a major paper on her theory a few weeks ago.

“If conditions hang around long enough, the chances increase for an extreme heat wave, drought or cold spell to occur,” she said, but the weather can change rapidly once the kink in the jet stream moves along.

Then along comes Superstorm Sandy, and she thinks that's related too: 

Blocking happens naturally, of course, but it’s very possible that this block may have been boosted in intensity and/or duration by the record-breaking ice loss this summer. Late-season hurricanes are not unheard of either, but Sandy just happened to come along during this anomalous jet-stream pattern, as well as during an autumn with record-breaking warm sea-surface temperatures off the US east coast. 

As the story by Justin Gillis mentions, not everyone in the field agrees. While visiting with Francis, and trying to understand what she might know about warming on the West Coast, I happened to see her being asked questions by another highly-respected winter forecaster Judah Cohen. 

These two agree that the warming of the Arctic impacts weather in the Northeast and Europe, but Francis is more focused on Arctic Amplification, Rossby waves, and sea ice extent, and Cohen is more focused on snow cover in Siberia. 

Cohen-schematic

That's his graphic, from his slides and from a first-rate profile and Q&A in the Washington Post. Amazing to stumble across two of the top researchers in the field chatting about their methods. 

AGU 2012: The Arctic turns towards the Dark Side

At a pre-conference mixer for this year's fall meeting of the AGU, I looked out at the teeming hordes and wondered — do I know anybody here? 

AGUmixer

But then I ran into Kelly Redmond, who helps direct the Desert Research Institute, and is one of the nicest and most thoughtful climatologists I know, and unfailingly helpful to reporters. When I first started reporting on climate, he took over an hour on the phone to explain some basic concepts to me, and he has a unique ability to describe climactic behavior in English, despite being a fully capable and accredited scientist. 

For instance, I asked him if (as I had heard rumored) it was true that in a warming planet, with about four percent more water vapor in the atmosphere, that we should expect bigger atmospheric rivers?

He said that the computer models do predict that, but not for many decades. However, he added, we should expect (and are experiencing) "juicier" atmospheric rivers. Love that phrase. 

A couple of other thoughts from Mr. Redmond: 

He had the highest of praise for the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, the NOAA office that forecast with uncanny accuracy Sandy's path, allowing for federal and state governments to make plans for specific hospitals, subways, and so on five and even six days before landfall. He admired Mayor Bloomberg's nerve, for issuing orders to shut down hospitals, etc., based on that analysis. Said this was a landmark event in the science of the field, not just for this country, but for the world. 

Although certainly a believer in global warming, Mr. Redmond has been scientifically very cautious about linking specific weather events to the overall warming signal.  In the case of Superstorm Sandy, however, he said that a plausible case can be made that the big icemelt in the Arctic led to a high pressure blocking system parked over New England, forcing the superstorm to take an almost unprecedented in history left turn due west into New Jersey. 

He concluded with a touch of ominous poetry:

"I don't think anyone expected the Arctic would join the Dark Side so soon." 

Atmospheric River press conference at AGU 2012

This press conference at the AGU (American Geophysical Union's fall meeting) this year is brilliantly timed, coming just two years after a series of big AR storms surprised Southern California, and a week or so after one hit Northern California. 

Improving forecasts of “Pineapple Expresses”
Monday, 3 December
1:30 p.m.

NOAA scientists and colleagues are installing the first of four permanent “atmospheric river
observatories” in coastal California this month, to better monitor and predict the impacts of landfalling atmospheric rivers. These powerful winter systems, sometimes called “pineapple express” storms, can cause destructive floods and debris flows, and can also fill the state’s reservoirs. The coastal observatories – custom arrays of instruments installed in collaboration with the California Department of Water Resources – will give weather forecasters, emergency managers and water resource experts detailed information about incoming storms. The move to install the observatories comes after several winters of testing, during which the scientists determined the most effective arrays of instruments for collecting information useful for decision makers.

Participants:
F. Martin (“Marty”) Ralph, research meteorologist and chief of the Water Cycle Branch,
Physical Sciences Division of NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory;
Mike Anderson, California State Climatologist, California Department of Water Resources;
Kevin Baker, Meteorologist-in-Charge (MIC) of the San Francisco Bay area National Weather
Service forecast office;
Michael Dettinger, research hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and a research
associate with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California.

Session: GC14B

350px-Atmospheric_River_GOES_WV_20101220.1200.goes11.vapor.x.pacus.x

I know just the question I'm going to ask, too…

Coffee is good for you: The Institute for Coffee Studies

It's okay! Even "a lot" of it, for those who like that sort of thing. That's according to a story in the Atlantic Wire, which has made quite a splash on the Web this year for its well-chosen topics and bright, chatty style.

The first expert quoted. Dr. Peter Martin, encourages the drinking of coffee all through the day. Turns out he works at the Institute for Coffee Studies.

At Vanderbilt University, but still – sounds like the Onion.

Can't be helped, apparently. 

Coffeeandspoon

No matter: This reporter will take any excuse to swill more coffee this upcoming week at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting, the largest earth sciences conference on the planet. With hundreds of presentations and thousands of posters, it's the biggest information overload I know. What mentor Andy Lipkis at TreePeople used to call simply "overwhelm." 

Happy to be attending again this year, starting Monday. Will try to post as much as possible. Any questions you might have, I might be able to ask. Here's the scientific program. 

Why can’t we think practically about sleep?

Researchers want to know: 

One finding that might be surprising, given how much time we spend in
our beds: Men and women don’t seem to give any consideration to sleep
patterns when choosing a mate. 

Random thought: Why do we say "sleep like a baby?" 

 Snoozing Dog

Sleep like a dog is more like it…

Marlon Brando ambles insolently onstage: Paglia

Camille Paglia describes a familiar scene, and makes it new:

Marlon Brando, carrying a “red-stained package” from the butcher and
sporting blue-denim work clothes as the lordly, proletarian Stanley
Kowalski, ambles insolently onstage at the opening of Tennessee
Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. “Bellowing” for his adoring
yet tart-tongued wife, Stanley is the strutting male animal in his
sexual prime. The setting is a seedy tenement in the multiracial French
Quarter of New Orleans, whose picturesque verandas open to the humid
air. Street sounds and sultry, insinuating jazz riffs float in and out. 

 

Sexystanley

The exotic location, boisterous energy, and eruptions of violence in A Streetcar Named Desire were a startling contrast to the tightly wound gentility of Williams’s prior hit play, The Glass Menagerie (1944), whose fractured family is cloistered in a stuffy St. Louis flat. Streetcar exploded into the theater world at a time when Broadway was dominated by musical comedies and revivals. At the end of its premiere, the audience sat numb and then went wild, applauding for thirty minutes.

From A New Literary History of America, ed. by Greil Marcus, among others.

NorCal preps for promised ARKstorm: 12 Inches?

CA has had no significant extreme weather since December 2010, when a series of atmospheric rivers took an unexpected tour fhrough Southern California.

Both the precipitation totals and the graphics for "ARKstorms" are jaw-dropping. In 2011, the USGS issued a massive report on an ARKstorm that left the entire Central Valley approximately six inches deep in water, forced the evacuation of Sacramento — including the government — for over a year, and would have destroyed the California economy, if the California in that era had a full-scale economy.

That was in 1862, when it poured buckets for twenty-eight days virtually without a stop. It could happen today; in fact, it happens every 180 years or so. Some suggest chances for these storms have improved as warming puts more water vapor in the atmosphere. Should that kind of "big one" return, the disaster experts say it would break up the California economy, send the US into a recession that could be major, and probably damage the world economy. 

Atmoriver

This time the ARKstorm, as the Weather Service wonkily terms them, has Sacramento in its sights.  and residents are being told to prepare for twelve inches of rain and power outages. 

But rain is also predicted for SoCal, so I can't be too upset about it…

Bear vs. people: How can we avoid killings?

Reporting in the Wall Street Journal implicitly challenges the endangered species narrative of wildlife* by bringing up the important fact that across vast regions in these United States, the forest has recovered from utter devastation at the hands of 19th-century Americans. With the forest has recovered a host of iconic species in vast numbers, including geese, deer, and beaver. 

The figures from the WSJ are jaw-dropping: 

Today, the eastern third of the country has the largest forest in the contiguous U.S., as well as two-thirds of its people. Since the 19th century, forests have grown back to cover 60% of the land within this area. In New England, an astonishing 86.7% of the land that was forested in 1630 had been reforested by 2007, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Not since the collapse of Mayan civilization 1,200 years ago has reforestation on this scale happened in the Americas, says David Foster, director of the Harvard Forest, an ecology research unit of Harvard University. In 2007, forests covered 63.2% of Massachusetts and 58% of Connecticut, the third and fourth most densely populated states in the country [cut] 

In the Ojai area, without question the most dramatic human-wildlife species conflict is bear vs. people, especially when as happened a few years ago, a wild bear was killed by Fish and Game, and this month a sow attacked a woman walking outside town, and Fish and Game promised to kill her if they found her. From the Los Angeles Times: 

If they are successful, the bear will be euthanized.

"Public safety is our No. 1 priority," said agency spokesman Andrew Hughan. "There is scientific evidence that when an animal attacks a person, there is a chance they will do it again."

This is very troubling to many many Ojai people, who do not want the state killing a local bear. I speculate that they would no more want the state to wantonly kill a local bear than they would want it to kill a local person, even if that local person turned aggressive.

The matter has been hotly debated on the Ojai Post, where former mayor Suza Franchina has challened the aggressive approach of both the press and Fish and Game towards the accused bear. Interesting that in the East, hunters are posited by the WSJ as the heroic answer to this wildlife problem, and out here in the blue West we will not accept hunting bears with guns — except by state authorities. 

Are we seeing more incidents between wild bears and people in and around Ojai? The consensus is yes, and the suggestion is that bears are coming down from the mountains for water and food.

A friend, Tim Teague, trained in ecology, working as a photographer, points to fascinating numbers, showing that bear populations in California were estimated at about 10,000 in the l980's, about 22,000 in l999, and about 31,000 in 2000.

What if we're seeing more bears because there are more bears to see? 

And what is the bear population now? Funny that our policy towards bears has changed so little officially since we drove the grizzly to extinction, even if times (and bears) have changed.

(Here's Monarch the bear, the last of the state's grizzlies, and the model for the CA flag). 

Monarch_the_bear

Lots of folks in Ojai eager to find an alternative to shooting bears. Could they work? Are we on that path already? Worth a few calls to find out…

[*the cliche narrative of across-the-board decline is, unsurprisingly, not the whole story, as most people know] 

Thought experiment: Imagine the end of NYC by drowning

Can't really do it, can you?

Don't worry, it's not you, it's us. 

If we can’t imagine our own deaths, as Freud insisted, how can we be expected to imagine the death of a city?

From a great op-ed/essay by James Atlas. In today's New York Times, of course. With an image to match…

Statueoflibertyunderwater