Our last hope for rain in early Feb; a thin blue line (a 552 decameter one)

Blue, as in the 5520 meter height contour line as produced by a single run of the many NOAA GFS model re-runs with those little “perturbations” of the starting data.    Below, our only hope for rain here in Catalina is if the model run with a 552 decameter height contour over eastern Pacific across southern California (see arrow) verifies.  Its an outlier, a rogue, a voice in the wilderness, etc.

Some background and diversionary writing in excess; skip if busy

Now that we have more powerful computers, we can run the same model over and over again with very slightly different starting data and then see how the results diverge from one another in the days ahead.  In the first few days to week of the model run, the various outputs are virtually the same because the starting conditions are tweaked so very slightly.    This is chaos in action!  And it makes sense because we measure everything  perfectly  in the atmosphere at the same instant.  So, little errors abound in our starting data anyway.

Think of E. N. Lorenz,  “Dr. Chaos”!  In fact, he thought our existing atmosphere could shift into a pattern resulting in an ice age without any external forcing (oh, like an interstellar dust cloud coming by for a few thousand years, the sun dimming, etc.)

Pretty amazing thought when you think about it,  which you just have.

Nobody really thinks that today,  but he threw it out on the table in his seminole (haha) paper, “The Intransitive Atmosphere” back in 1967.  He also wrote about that kind of thing in the 1968 American Meteorological Society Monograph, “The Causes of Climatic Change“,  papers by 22 of the leading climate authorities of that time.  (Based on a 1965 conference at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, located in “Potville”, CO (aka, Boulder-haha.  But, they really do love their marijuana in Boulder…).

Strangely believe it,  in a further diversion from current weather and a mea culpa downstream that maybe you won’t get to with a lot boring writing before it:  not one paper in that AMS Monograph was about the climate effects of CO₂!  Talk about being asleep at the wheel!  Wow.

Well, OK, you can’t blame them too much.

The earth’s temperature was slipping downward in those days, and while it was well-known that the effect of CO₂ was to cause warming, it didn’t seem to be having enough effect to counter the cooling, and we were only just getting obs of CO₂ from Mauna Loa.  Sure, its kind of an embarrassing chapter of science, so your not gonna hear much about it from scientists; the monograph above is almost never cited, or course.  We like to avoid mentioning embarrassing chapters.

I could name some others, in my specialty, like those cloud seeding experiments at Climax, CO, in the 1960s which looked so good, so complete, and fooled the National Academy of Sciences because it was really all “smoke and mirrors.”  Or those in Israel  in the 1960s and 1970s that fooled everyone for a long time, too, but, upon further review, were also “smoke and mirrors.”  Yes, that’s right, there was a “consensus” of scientific opinion about the results of each of those cloud seeding experiments that for a time  was wrong, as, to beat a dead horse,  happened in the early 1970s concerning the prospect of “global cooling;”  the preponderance of scientific thought was that an ice age was ahead (as indicated by a climate change conference at Brown University in 1972, the results  of which were summarized in Weather and Climate Modification, 1974, Wiley-Interscience publishers, W. N. Hess, Ed.   Hell, the earth was cooling, so it made sense at that time!

Pretty amazing when you think about it, which you just have.

We know better now.  CMP, like most everybody else, is predicting warming dead ahead, only how much is in question.

Here, we address embarrassing chapters head on, if anyone is still reading, which I hope they are not.   Check it out.

About 13 days ago, the NOAA spaghetti ensemble factory showed a result that strongly “IMI” (in my interpretation) indicated a vast weather change beginning at the end of January.  Sure, it was WAY out beyond what we consider to be a reliable forecast window, and unprofessional to make a forecast that far in advance, that is, much beyond a week, but the signal, the bunching of lines was so great, I went for it anyway.   I got excited and brought to your attention that a likely drought-interrupting weather change was to occur in 12-15 days from then, troughs would occupy the entire Southwest beginning at the end of January into the first week of February.

Its not gonna happen.

Cloud maven person was too confident in his interpretation of spaghetti back then, that a trough positioned in the SW  was virtually in cement;  it had to happen.   I was so excited and so wrong, got carried away, like I did with Sharon so many decades ago, thinking we were surely going to be a couple.   I was rongno then, too.  Arthur Rongno….  Oh, well, we learn and sort of move on.

Oh, there could still be a major trough toward the 5-6th of February, but as the title imputes, we’re down to a single blue, a rogue contour produced by one of the many model runs repeating forecasts  last evening with those little errors in starting conditions. the Lorenz model runs.  🙁 🙁  :{

The End, finally!