Small Cumulus to distant north this afternoon!

On going theme here: excessive excitement over not much. Might need binoculars to see them, but they’ll be up there over the higher terrain I am pretty sure, maybe even a 2-minute Cumulus fractus over Ms. Lemmon.

Today will be one of those days you write home about, if your home is not here, and you haven’t gone back to Wisconsin yet. The sky should be so blue today as it dries out aloft and the Cirrus goes away, with the temperature “just fine” as a weak trough passes by over the next day taking the temperature down some.

No rain in the “Big Trough”, the one that sits on Catalina in about a week (April 8th and 9th), sorry to say. It crashes down on us a little too far to the east, so there’ll just be real cold air for April here, and a sky dotted with a few clouds, ones likely to sport virga. This will be a good time to tell your eastern and northern friends, or ones in Europe¹, the latter place where they are having one of the coldest springs ever, that it will be brutally cold here, so cold that the high temperature might only get to 73 F (21 C) during the afternoon of the coldest day, Monday or Tuesday of next week). (OK, its a cruel joke…but kind of fun anyway. I tell my brother in NC things like that all the time.)

Still pretty green in isolated spots in the desert, though most everything looks stressed now. Here are some examples of how green it is in those isolated spots. When you’re walking around in places like this, there’s hardly any sunlight that gets through the canopy, and in some area, the purple flowers are the size of helicopters at the top of it (view from hot air balloon). Amazing.

Jungle vegetation seen on a recent hike/ride — Jungle-like vegetation seen on a recent hike/ride near the back gate of Catalina State Park.

For comparison, a photo by the author of the jungle in the northern state of Rondonia, Brazil, 1995, taken while skimming tree tops in U of WA research aircraft collecting data on biomass burning. Of course, the jungle’s likely gone now, but… (and what a sad thought):

Near Porto Velho, Rondonia, Brazil, 1995. No flowers at top of canopy here, just bugs, birds and smoke.

Yesterday’s clouds

Cirrus!

Our desert, even in drought, showing its tinge of spring green, followed by a nice sunset.

: 6:12 PM.

The End.

———————————–

¹Unintended consequences, described here when we’re planning for later warmth, much later, when brutally cold weather is still going to occur from time to time, and always will, as in Europe now. I thought it was a pretty fair read so am passing it along (this from Mark Albright, climate folk hero from the U of WA). Some models predict that while the Arctic warms over the decades, the land masses nearby will still see extreme cold (as the Chinese scientists recently asserted concerning THEIR extreme winter cold); we don’t want to forget those susceptible to cold. What a mess this planet is in! Dammitall! End of editorial content.

Likes to be troughy but isn’t

Lotta high temperature records falling in Arizona lately, info courtesy of U of WA Husky researcher, Mark Albright’s web page here.

Arizona daily record temperatures and precipitation

SXUS75 KPSR 150830
RERPSR
RECORD EVENT REPORT 
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE PHOENIX AZ
130 AM MST FRI MAR 15 2013
...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURES SET AT PHOENIX AND YUMA...
 A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 95 DEGREES WAS SET AT PHOENIX AZ 
YESTERDAY. THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 91 SET IN 2007.
 A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 96 DEGREES WAS SET AT YUMA AZ 
YESTERDAY. THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 95 SET IN 1934.
$$

SXUS75 KTWC 150104
RERTWC
RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE TUCSON AZ
535 PM MST THU MAR 14 2013 
...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURES SET FOR THURSDAY MAR 14...
LOCATION                  RECORD  OLD RECORD
TUCSON INTL AIRPORT         92    87/2007
BISBEE-DOUGLAS AIRPORT      85    83/2007
KITT PEAK                   71    71/1972
PICACHO PEAK                90    90/2007
$$

SXUS75 KPSR 150013
RERPSR
RECORD EVENT REPORT...UPDATED 
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE PHOENIX AZ
0511 PM MST THU MAR 14 2013
...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURES SET AT PHOENIX AND YUMA...
 A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 95 DEGREES WAS SET AT PHOENIX AZ TODAY. 
THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 91 SET IN 2007.
 A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 96 DEGREES WAS SET AT YUMA AZ TODAY. 
THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 95 SET IN 1934.
$$

SXUS75 KFGZ 150057
RERFGZ
RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE FLAGSTAFF, AZ
556 PM MST THU MAR 14 2013
...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURES FOR NORTHERN ARIZONA ON MAR 14 2013...
CITY (PERIOD OF RECORD)            NEW HIGH      PREVIOUS RECORD/YEAR
PAYSON (1949 - 2013)                   78          78 (TIED)  IN  2007
PRESCOTT (1899 - 2013)                 77          77 (TIED)  IN  2007
PRESCOTT AIRPORT (1948 - 2013)         79          78         IN  2007
SELIGMAN (1905 - 2013)                 81          81 (TIED)  IN  2007
THESE RECORDS ARE PRELIMINARY PENDING OFFICIAL REPORTS.
$$
CO

SXUS75 KPSR 142314
RERPSR
RECORD EVENT REPORT 
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE PHOENIX AZ
0414 PM MST THU MAR 14 2013
...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURES SET AT PHOENIX AND YUMA...
 A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 93 DEGREES WAS SET AT PHOENIX AZ TODAY. 
THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 91 SET IN 2007.
 A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 96 DEGREES WAS SET AT YUMA AZ TODAY. 
THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 95 SET IN 1934.
$$

SXUS75 KTWC 140034
RERTWC
RECORD EVENT REPORT 
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE TUCSON AZ
534 PM MST WED MAR 13 2013
...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE BROKEN AT THE TUCSON INTL AIRPORT THIS 
AFTERNOON... 
 A RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE OF 89 DEGREES WAS SET AT THE TUCSON 
INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TODAY. THE OLD RECORD OF 88 DEGS WAS SET IN 
1989.
$$

Here's what a giant blob of anomaly over the West looks like;
not sure I've seen one this big before, kind of a "planet out of control" map:

The height anomaly pattern at 500 millibars for 5 PM AST yesterday. They don't get bigger than this. — The height anomaly pattern at 500 millibars for 5 PM AST yesterday. They don’t get bigger than this. To reach the height of the 500 millibar pressure level you have to go up in a hot air balloon higher than usual because the pressure doesn’t change so rapidly when you go up in a hot air balloon and its hot (air has lower density). But, its cold in New Hampshire, too cold for late March so perhaps we can take some solace in that as part of another “warm in the West, cold in the East” pattern. (See low height anomaly off New England coast.)

The green line is "climatology" at 500 millibars. Note how that green line bulges southward in the Southwest indicating a prevalence of troughs at this time of year. We have the opposite now, but its fading fast. — The green line is “climatology” at 500 millibars. Note how that green line bulges southward in the Southwest indicating a prevalence of troughs at this time of year. We have the opposite now, but its fading fast. Look at how the yellow and green lines are out of phase.

The weather ahead

LOTS of troughs in our future once this bag of hot air over us dissipates, but not one of those troughs is far enough south or strong enough to bring rain over the next two weeks. Ugh. Our best chance for anything still remains around the 21st–a trough in the area guaranteed, but only the thermometer will get a workout from it, cooling off from the warmth of the previous day, likely some noticeable wind, as per usual in the spring with trough passages.

So, that’s about it for weather, thermometer getting some work, the anemometer some, too, but not your rain gauge. Oh, me.

However, with approaching troughs, there’ll be some nice Cirrus clouds and with them, occasional nice sunsets and sunrises in the days ahead.

The End.

A little water running in the Sutherland Wash; remembering the CDO in 2010

With no rain in sight now, and its looking more and more like a third late winter and spring in a row with precip below normal (there’s only been one other “three in a row” in our 36 years of Catalina records), I thought would pay homage to the Great 2010 13 Day Run of the CDO at East Wilds Road (farther below).

In the meantime, yesterday I came across a nice gurgling creek, making the kind of gurgle that characterizes New Age relaxation CDs. It was coming down the Big Rock Creek wash-tributary that empties into the Sutherland Wash at the Cottonwoods, a local name given to an area of the Sutherland Wash were illicit beer parties often take place. There was no water in the Sutherland above this point.

3:55 PM yesterday. — 3:55 PM yesterday at Big Rock Creek by the Sutherland Wash cottonwoods. Horse Jake forages.

DSCN4225 — 2:54 PM. The Sutherland Wash downstream of the Big Rock Creek tributary. Horse Jake; his little mind wonders why I am taking another photo of not that much.

The Great CDO Run of 2010

I had forgotten that the Canada del Oro wash (river?) at East Wilds Road had run for as many as 13 consecutive days beginning on February 28th and likely ending three years ago today¹. Here are a few of those shots with the date. That run, and the “Road Closed” sign on E. Wilds at the CDO began to feel like a permanent feature of life here in Catalina. You wondered if catfish were in there. It was such a special time then. And it had already run several times beginning after January 20th.

What was surprising to Mr. Cloud Maven person, a cloud maven not a drought maven, was that after two consecutive bountiful months of rain and snow, the State of Arizona, and our local region of Arizona were still considered to be in drought, “abnormally dry”, according to the Drought Monitor folks. Here is there map for March 16, 2010.

The US Drought Monitor map for March 16, 2010.

At the end of March, and after three consecutive months of above normal rain and snow in our area (8.02 inches in Catalina, or nearly twice the normal amount), with one of the best wildflower displays in many, many years in progress, 200 inches of snow and one the best all time ski winters at Mount Lemmon, articles in the AZ Star about all the water that was flowing in the washes, we were STILL classified by the Drought Monitor folks as “abnormally dry” (see below).

I began to have the depressing thought that it was impossible to exit a drought classification after those three fabulous months.

The western US Drought Monitor map for April 6, 2010. Go figure.

The End

————————-

¹The Pima County stream gage at the bridge over the CDO wash at Golder Ranch Drive wasn’t working during that time (flow data here), and I don’t have photo evidence for two days, the 5th and 6th. Dang. Also, the run likely continued a little beyond the 12th, but don’t have photo evidence for the 13th, either. Dang#2.

Climate kerfluffle reprised in southern hemisphere

With no rain in sight, and only modest temperature fluctuations ahead, some reading material is presented to you today with commentary today, a “soapbox day.”

Cloud photos from yesterday are at the bottom if you want to skip to that and avoid thinking about things because its too early in the morning to get riled up.

I will start with an opinion piece concerning climate change and climate science from Australia. It also mentions a recent event in the climo community concerning a Southern Hemisphere temperature reconstruction and the apparent rejection of what would have been an important paper by the peer-reviewed journal it was submitted to after crucial errors were found by an outsider/reviewer. The author of this opinion article also mentions “climategate” a chapter of science that had a profound effect on this writer. Now there are polemical aspects, not all of which this writer would agree with, still, its worth reading:

Speak Loudy and Carry a Busted Hockey Stick

The link to this article was circulated to our Atmos Sci Dept by one of my best friends, and really a science hero to me, Mark Albright, the former Washington State climatologist. Mark was a mild-mannered researcher lurking in the background at the U of WA for many years until he got upset over what he (later joined by two allies there) was to show were vastly exaggerated journal-published and media accounts of snowpack losses due to GW in his own backyard, in the Cascade Mountains of Washington and Oregon. Mark felt science had been corrupted by dogma, perhaps the pursuit of funding; he has not been the same since. Believe me, I know what he has been through.

A retired distinguished professor at the U of WA Atmospheric Sciences Department circulated a counter articleto the one that Mark circulated, also worth reading for the “other side.” It appears below, along with that professor’s note about the article Mark circulated. I felt this note by the professor should be included, too:

“Worth reading is this article by a Reagan/Bush Science board appointee. It demonstrates objective science versus the Australian article which is full of vituperation, accusations without substance, slander, and very little science.”
.
http://www.desmogblog.com/2012/11/15/why-climate-deniers-have-no-credibility-science-one-pie-chart

In the headline of this second article, the word “denier” is used in its title as a pejorative, mass label for those who question some of the global warming publicity stunts (assigning particular storms like Sandy to GW) down to results published in peer-reviewed journals, such as reports of exaggerated snowpack losses. Not good, and that headline tells you where that article is headed: criticism is not to be tolerated. But it also shows that the majority of science being published on climate change supports the finding that a warmer earth is ahead. But there is a reason for that; its being pushed by the monumental amounts of money being poured into that climate research domain.

There are many of us out there that do believe that funding is pushing the research on global warming in one direction in this job-poor era we’re now in, just as it did, and still does, in the cloud seeding domain: no one ever got a job saying cloud seeding doesn’t work. In my own career–yes, Mr. Cloud Maven person had a professional research one, and one spiced with controversy¹ over several decades–the opinion article from Australia rings true in many aspects about how science works and what influences a preponderance of “conclusions” that get published in journals.

In the climate funding domain, don’t look for more funds if you conclude a million dollar study by indicating that you didn’t find any sign of warming over the past 30 years, as is the actual case in the Pacific Northwest. NO ONE is going to touch that hot potato and serve a finding like that up to a climate journal. Its not gonna fly. It makes explaining global warming difficult. And as Homer Simpson advises, “If something’s hard to do, its not worth doing.”

But at the same time, a counter finding to global warming presents to those of us who try to be truly ideal, disinterested scientists, a fabulous opportunity to look into something that is not immediately explicable. As scientists, we should live for opportunities like this!

But will it happen, will some brave soul at the University of Washington or elsewhere delve into this counter trend and try to explain why its happened in a journal article? Its hoped so.

But those of us, still on the GW bandwagon, if grudgingly so due to the actions of some of our peers, know that regional effects of GW are dicey. Some areas will warm up more than others; cooling is possible if the jet stream ridges and troughs like to hang out in different positions than they do today. And of course, if we smog up the planet too much, all bets on warming up much are off since clouds act to cool the planet, and pollution makes clouds last longer, especially over the oceans where pollution can interfere with drizzle production, which helps dissolve shallow clouds, and pollution causes more sunlight to be reflected back into space. The cloud effects are being more carefully, precisely evaluated in our better computer models.

——————-

It is ironic, too, that the second article, the one passed along by the professor, ends with the mention of plate tectonics “as the ruling paradigm of science” as it is.

But, some word about how that paradigm came about; it was a “long and winding road.”

Alfred Wegener, a meteorologist, first proposed the theory of continental drift/plate tectonics around the turn of the century. A nice account of this science chapter about origin of the theory of plate tectonics is found in the book, Betrayers of the Truth, by then NYT science writers, Nicholas Wade and William J. Broad.

Because Alfred Wegener was a meteorologist, however, and NOT a geographer, namely was an outsider to the official science community studying the continents and how they got that way, his ideas were laughed at, not taken seriously for more than 40 years! Only in the 1960s was the idea of plate tectonics accepted.

I mention this tectonic chapter of science because there is a similar chapter that reappears constantly now in the climate debates. Several of the strongest critics of GW results, critics that have delved deeply behind the scenes into published findings of climate change in a scientific manner, much as this writer did concerning cloud seeding experiments in the 1970s-1990s, are criticized for being “outside of the group”, just Alfred Wegner was in his day rather than those “in the group” considering and acting on whether the findings of outsiders are valid.

Fortunately, this is beginning to change because, guess what? Outsiders have found some pretty important stuff that HAD to be addressed in spite of the desires of some idealogues out there pretending to be objective, disinterested scientists. Science as a whole, still works.

A cloud note: Alfred Wegner is also known for proposing the idea that ice crystals in the presence of supercoooled water (a common event in the atmosphere) grow and fallout, leading to precipitation at the ground, known as the Wegner-Bergeron-Findeisen mechanism. Every 101 meteorology textbook points this out.

The last photo below is a demonstration of that effect; those sunset supercooled Altocumulus shedding a few ice crystals that grew within them.

Yesterday’s clouds

SONY DSC — 7:33 AM Cirrus fibratus radiatus. Sometimes perspective makes banding look like its converging or radiating. I estimated that this was not the case here.

——————————————————————————-

¹Some examples of the controversy the writer has been involved with:

“We don’t hate you but we don’t love you, either.”

This quote from a leading US cloud seeding scientist to the writer at an American Meteorological Society conference on cloud seeding and statistics after his cloud seeding experiments had been reanalyzed by the writer.

“I want you to leave my office and don’t come back. Just do your own thing.”

This quote from THE leading cloud seeding scientist of the day when I went to his country to see for myself the clouds he was describing in peer-reviewed journal articles, descriptions that I had doubts about. His descriptions were later shown to be far from reality.

And, from an outside observer, and well-known cloud researcher at the National Center for Atmos. Research in Boulder, a comment to the writer when he visited the University of Washington:

“I think the (cloud seeding) community sees you as a ‘gadfly’.”

From the Oxford Concise Dictionary, “gadfly”:

“A cattle-biting fly; an irritating, harassing person.”

Q. E. D.

Massing bases, smiling faces

Yesterday’s surprise thunderstorm, rolling off the Catalinas, provided relief with 0.22 inches here. More rain tables/maps here and here. This sight in the first shot, showing it in the formation stage yesterday, was cause for joy:

Due to global warming-induced extra heat over the past few days here, as all extra heat must be automatically assigned (go here to a critical commentary on recent claims like mine above by a still-employed University of Washington Atmo Sci. prof.–wonder how long he’ll last?) combined with a break in the summer rains, our grasses, amaranth, pig weed and such were looking pretty stressed out; wilted, turning yellow due to global warming. One felt helpless to see the green of summer fading so fast due to global warming. (Want to make sure I am on the RIGHT side of this issue, you can’t be too careful these days about what you say in this domain; who might be watching.)

Then, after a near miss to the north yesterday around noon, an initially small thunderstorm that dumped on Saddlebrooke, moved off to the NW, multiplied, and became a real giant on the north side of the Tortolita Mountains, this new, large cloud base (at left) began forming over the Catalinas upwind of us. Time for hope.

Rain was already falling out of the downwind leaning upper portions of the cloud (arrow), shown in the second shot. You might recall that rain that falls out like this is not going to be what it could be, all that it could be.

Imagine dropping a cup of water out of that cloud where the bottom is (arrow), to drift away from the main discussion for a second. What will happen? Since the humidity must be less than 100 % all the way to the ground after it leaves the cloud, a lot of that water from that cup will evaporate. If you could capture the water that originally came out of that cup, it might be 10% of what came out.

How high was that “base” that’s not really a base but an overhang (above arrow in second shot)? Probably at the freezing level, or about 12,000 feet above us. So, if you’re storm chasing, and want to collect the most rain, avoid rain from overhangs!

The next shot shows where you want to be to get the most rain, and in a hurry. Those dark bases managed to hold together and keep reforming as rain fell on the Catalinas. A new strand of rain has overcome the updraft associated with new dark bases, and is beginning to fall out this side of Samaniego Ridge. An arrow has been added to point out this new rain streamer. It reaches near the ground beyond the dead yucca stalk in the foreground. This is where you want to be to collect the most rain, should you be trying to do so.

This time, pouring out a cup of water at the same height as in overhang rain, but inside the cloud, several thousand feet above the bottom, means that there will be no evaporation, and MORE IMPORTANTLY, the cup of water will grow in volume until near the very bottom because the falling drops will bump into and collect floating cloud drops that got in the way. So, if you could collect that water somehow, there would be more of it than what you dropped originally. So, those rain streamers, forming high in the cloud, are doing the same thing, pulling water out of the cloud on the way down, growing in amount.

This was a heartening sight since this new shaft, and the movement rate of the storm as a whole, meant that it would reach ME and Catalina in general) before it dissipated. As it turned out, probably another such shaft dropped right on top of us, judging by the low visibility in the intense rain. Air, rudely pushed out of the way by all that water, created winds to estimated 50-60 mph for a brief time, followed by an almost instantaneous reversal to 5-10 mph. That reversal was really something, as was as the lightning strike back behind me about 100 yards.

Today?

Expected to be dry. End of story. I really don’t enjoy talking much about dry air.

What about Hector-Ernesto, that schizophrenic tropical storm that has come all the way into the eastern Pacific from a birth place in the West Indies, home of calypso music, some weeks ago?

The Canadians think Hector-Ernesto is going to end up as a big rain producer southern Cal, with some rain enhancement here as well. The USA! models think its going to drift north and die before getting much past Baja, where it drifts off to the west. Due to a rain bias, I am only showing the Canadian model result with a tropical storm approaching San Diego and a huge crescent of rain over the Southwest, including over ME (oops, I mean us).

Official climatologist blasts “educated fools” for mischaracterizing “Arizony”

This just in! Well….I didn’t see it until just now, so its kind of “just in”, the input domain smaller than one usually thinks of when you hear the phrase, “this just in!”

Please begin reading at the second paragraph, which discusses prejudice. It seems some people were carelessly calling Arizona a desert!

Checking your cloud log book for yesterday

My attention began to drift toward a fattening Cumulus cloud beyond Charoleau Gap. After days of Cumulus humilis and mediocris, I was buoyed by the sight of a real congestus cloud there. Would it, could it, GLACIATE, get cold enough on top to form ice crystals and snow?

As you know, and I think the Beatles said it best (a boy group from Britain in the 1960s), in their famous anthem, ” All You Need is Ice”:

“All you need is ice, dah-ta-dah-ta-dah, all you need is ice, dah-ta-dah-ta-dah, all you need is ice, ice, , all you need is ice, etc, etc., etc. (it was a very repetitive song) Furthermore they claimed, “it’s easy.”

It was going to be a great song, scientifically speaking, in many ways, though we know that rain can form without ice at times. However, and I think the boys realized later, that its not always THAT easy (to make ice) when the freezing level is at 15,000 friggin’ feet, and the tops have to reach -10 to -15 C, or about 24,000 feet, as we had here yesterday.

Later, the “Beatles” (BTW, the British spelling of “beetles”, which I doubt many of the Ancient Ones out there knew before I posted that information here) realized, having long been interested in precipitation in their homeland, that the original lyrics were misleading. They decided to update the lyrics to something more accessible and commercially viable, changing “ice” to “love” soon after the first production. You can hear the revised song here.

However, If you replace “love” with the origiinal word, “ice”, it will help you understand the precipitation process here in “Arizony” better.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah, I began to see a ruffle in a Cumulus congestus cloud top that looked like it might be converting from supercooled water (water at below freezing temperatures that aircraft like to avoid) that MIGHT be converting to ice. Then after a few more minutes, much of the time having to talk with another human and missing the important transitional photo stage, it was completely iced-out, this meaning rain was falling out the bottom! Somebody got wet!

Now this was NOT a large Cumulonimbus cloud, but rather, for us, a “mediocris” but here it is. I wondered, in view of its small size and brief lifetime, how many of you logged this cloud? It could have easily been missed.

I am posting photos to help you fill in the correct and complete cloud observations for yesterday in your log books. There were also several forms of Cirrus above the small Cumulus clouds that were prevalent. I figure you were “all over” the Cirrus, but likely missed our little, and brief, Cb.

Here are a couple of cloud photos from yesterday, to check against your log of cloud observations, to help you make sure you got them all. I’ve added some “excitement captions” as well, ones with exclamation marks to kind of get you going.

More flaming Cirrus; Dark Ages of climate science upon us?

More flaming cirrus this morning, perhaps reminding us of the ascension of the temperature later this morning. In some photographic razzle dazzle, two photos have BOTH clouds and THE MOON! The IR sat image loop makes it appear that we may have these kinds of clouds for at least a couple of days. Below, I also am having a climate issues tantrum due to an unfolding story at Oregon State University.

Below some of the interesting patterns seen in yesterday’s Altocumulus/Cirrocumulus clouds. Most of the Cirrus had long departed by this time.

Dark Ages of science?

Here are two links below to a disturbing science story that is just unfolding in Oregon:

Watts up with That?

Ice Cap

A senior chemistry instructor was fired without notice APPARENTLY because he did not follow the global warming line. He was a skeptic, posted stuff about his views, and spoke on talk shows in the Oregon area. The exact details of this firing are not yet known.

Unfortunately the average temperature in the Pacific Northwest has been falling over the past 10-30 years, particularly very lately (see dip at the end of the record), and this has given rise to some skepticism about the effects of global warming since the temperatures are supposed to be INCREASING, not DECREASING. And ESPECIALLY “lately” with all that extra CO2 that’s been pumped into the air in the past 10 years.

Here is a sample temperature plot posted by J. D’Aleo at Ice Cap yesterday.

Now, the ORDINARY person might understand why some skeptics might pop up in view of these data. What is going on? But instead of reacting in the ideal way, “Wow, this is interesting data! I will have some of my grad students look into this for their Masters or Ph. D. dissertations”, it is ignored, it is pretended as though it doesn’t exist, but riles people when it is brought up by those outside their organization/discipline, as has happened here.

Those social scientists who study science and how it works will yawn at such “non-idealistic” science behavior. They have been telling us for decades that we are a bastion of White Male Culture, and that no science worker can really be objective in his or her work, be disinterested, only care about “truth” and not where the chips fall, but will always be intrinsically influenced, biased by that culture, even those female workers.

Of course, we folk who actually practice science get mad about those kinds of allegations, conclusions; I do anyway. Those of you who follow this page know that I parody that inability to be “disinterested” by only showing those model runs with the most rain in southern Arizona, because that’s what I want to have happen.

But here again, in the case of Oregon State University, those sociologists who study sceince have been proved correct. Dissenting opinion is not really allowed, particularly by an “outsider” to the climate science social-science cult, even when it is based on contrary evidence that clearly needs explaining.

OK, the Oregon State guy that was fired was not a meteorologist/climatologist. Maybe we should muzzle anyone who speaks outside of his/her trained domain, like Linus Pauling the Nobel Laureate in chemistry who then thought he could cure cancer with vitamin C.

Or Alfred Wegner, the METEOROLOGIST who first proposed the theory of continental drift around the turn of the 20th century but was laughed at by the geologists/geographers of his day. He would have had the last laugh, had he still been alive when they finally accepted his tenet.

The OSU “firee” wasn’t a tenured faculty member, either, and so he wasn’t protected by the golden shield of academia, that shield that once attained allows lifetime employment far beyond productive years. Perhaps when these lesser persons (research staff, instructors) at a university speak out on something that causes us some discomfort, provide a dissenting opinion on something, they SHOULD be fired immediately!

Yes, that’s it! No dissent!

Think how great things would be if there was no dissent on anything in the scientific realm! Whatever the majority thought, that would be the end of the story. No reporters asking difficult questions, kind of like things are now, , no reporting of any digression in opinions; there would only be the official line.

Think how happy we’d be not having to THINK or be disturbed by contrary thoughts!

Of course, not thinking is appealing, but, its not right.

Dissenting opinions/findings, if they are WRONG, have a way of disappearing quietly. Remember the NPR story back in the 1980s about the Newman Motor, the motor that produced more energy than it consumed? NPR gave it a lot of credibility back then, but, of course (!), it was bogus.

That’s OK. Mr. Newman tried real hard to get something for nothing, and failed.

Remember, too, “Cold Fusion”, the promise of endless power generation at room temperature, as reported by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleishmann of the University of Utah? Hey, they gave it a good shot, but that, like the Newman Motor, its gone, too.

Crackpot ideas have a way of disappearing. Let the dissenters have their say. IF the earth’s temperature rockets upward in the immediate future, they, like Henry Newman, Pons and Fleishmann, will quickly disappear. But don’t fire them!

So, to take action as the Oregon State University did, in my mind is shameful, and is the worst kind of anti-science I have seen lately. Shame on you, Oregon State!

The End

Trendless summer rains, and a look at what June has to offer

OK, cooling off now after yesterday’s rant (which somehow I just now notice has the wrong published date!), emotions now pretty much drained….

After noting that our cool season rains have oscillated into a drier spell from a very wet one over the past 35 years, it seemed like looking at what has happened to our summer rains would be appropriate today. So, on to the next chapter of Catalina climo, a look at our summer rain season, and a look specifically at June.

Have to harden myself, and you, too, for the tough 2 week transitional season that begins right now, one that occurs between the end of rain chances here from cold troughs in the westerlies, and those rain chances associated with onset of the summer rains, sometimes called our “monsoon” season. As you will see below, its not until June 20th that the chances of summer showers really shows up at all.

Thus, the next two weeks are the driest, and often the warmest of the year. Almost no chance of rain (see second graph). Steel yourself, my friends.

What kind of a trend do we have in our 35 year summer rain records for Catalina? None, which is great.

This graph is reprised from an earlier climate issues (rant?) blog. It includes last year’s June through September rains.

Let’s look at June. Not much explanation required, so will quit here.

Here’s where the original “dusty coolsnap”, so well timed by the models some two weeks ago, ended up yesterday, mostly off to the north of us. Take a look at these 24 h temperature differences for yesterday afternoon, courtesy of The Weather Channel. Stunning!

The End.

Catalina winter rainfall to end by 2035!

^{I was working on updating our Catalina October through May historical rainfall data with this past season’s total, when a friend brought this Scientific American article to my attention. Today’s blog title is inspired by the May 25th, 2012, issue of Scientific American, one in which it was pronounced :}

“Climate Armageddon: How the World’s Weather Could Quickly Run Amok [Excerpt]

Climate scientists think a perfect storm of climate “flips” could cause massive upheavals in a matter of years.”

The full, scary article is here. Sci Am, in this article, created the “perfect storm” of sensationalism….alluding here to their sub-title. Worst case climate conjectures are piled to dizzying heights. It has inspired many commentaries like the one I am going to make below. Be sure to read the many comments at the end of the Sci Am article.

The key word in the title and sub-title is, “could.” For credibility, the Sci. Am. also used the phrase, “climate scientists” which technically could mean just two of thousands or all of them. They quote a couple of climate scientists, but few climate scientists believe that the horrendous things conjectured in this article will happen “quickly”, in a “matter of years”; that there are “tipping points” that will lead to temperatures here that will melt lead (as in metal)!

———————————–

Now for today’s blog…

I realized as soon as I saw the Sci Am headine that what I was going to write about concerning Catalina’s updated rainfall from this past winter would be pretty lame; not sensational enough. So I thought I would rework our Catalina rainfall update from this past cool season to better reflect today’s climate reporting modus operandi; kind of “go with the flow”, grab some headlines, and that MO is reflected in today’s title.

By the way, the majority of the data I am going to show, originate with the folks at Our Garden, a place you should patronize royally for the great local climate records they have kept for us.

What I saw, thinking in the “excitement” vein after the Sci Am article, is that by projecting the trendline (best fit) of our 35 year decline in rainfall we have now just a couple of decades into the future, is that the trendline would reach the zero rainfall point, the x-axis, before long. With that intercept at zero comes the unassailable (or is it?) conclusion that it will no longer rain between October 1st and May 31st in Catalina by 2035!

Fantastic! A show-stopper! Finally, I will be popular. But in reporting this I will have to look very sad, upset, but at the same time be glad inside that I have something great that people will want to hear.

Moreover, these results I am reporting can be expanded beyond Catalina; more excitement! Catalina is MUCH wetter than surrounding lowland areas in the cool season, about 10 inches vs. 5-6 inches, lower areas that include Tucson, Marana, etc. Therefore, this conclusion can be confidently applied to those lower elevation locations as well, ones that have huge populations: No more cool season rain by 2035 in Tucson!

But, why stop even there with our local scene?

Why not assert, since no precipitation station “…is an island, entire of itself”, to paraphrase John Donne, that this trend MAY apply to the entire State of Arizona and adjacent states as well! Now we’re talkin’ some real excitement, 10s of millions of people getting worked up.

Now for the totality of evidence for my end-of-rainfall claim, this graph¹:

Call a news conference now!

———————————–

OK, “truth-in packaging”: its not going to happen, relax.

Here is a long term, quite soothing record of Arizona rainfall over the years, courtesy of NOAA via Roger Cohen, who was commenting on a NM wildfire story in the New York Times with his graph:

In our own Catalina rainfall graph, I don’t have enough data to draw any real conclusions about trends, and that’s clear from this long term graph going back into the late 1890s.

Of course, it is also known by the climate mavens out there, and is also shown in the long term graph, that “Mr. and Mrs. Our Garden” began taking records during one of the wettest periods in Arizona history and in the Southwest as a matter of fact, over the past 100 and more years! Take a look at the NOAA graph above and observe those rainfall values in the late 1970s into the early 1990s. So, if you moved here then, and think the climate was much wetter back then than it is now, you’re right, but it wouldn’t have been our normal climate, either! Get over it, as The Eagles have told us to do; after all, we live in desert where most years are drier than normal.

So, a downward trend after the first ten years or so of the Our Garden rainfall record was inevitable. You need at least 50 years to establish climate normals and trends, particularly around mountainous regions, according to the World Meteorological Organizations statements on climate records.

Note, too, that it was consistently DRIER than here during the past 10 years of “drought” in the late 1940s through into the early 1970s, and also at the turn of the century! Amazing. Man, those were awful times in AZ!

You can stop reading here since most of the points I wanted to make have been made.

The End1

_________________________________________________________

OK, now to be serious for awhile; soapbox time, rant time, what-scientists-are-supposed-to-do time, “ideals of science”, etc. Furrowing brow now…usually people start moving away, etc.

Scientific American is a magazine that tries to be “scientific”, that is, report recent findings in science in an objective manner, and make them understandable for the general public. Great.

Unfortunately, the temptation for a general audience magazine is always one of trying to get the most readers for each issue (“bang” for the “buck”), and the temptation to phrase article titles in sensational terms to gain readership is always present, as I have done in the title of this blog, trying to expand readership beyond the two I have. Its understandable. Even in our best peer-reviewed journals, the hardest ones to get into, Science and Nature, have this temptation to some degree, but mostly avoid it with staid covers and “headlines.”

But going the sensational route has a way of backfiring, like the claims made in the late 1960s into the 1970s about an imminent ice age; that our warm “Interglacial” period between Ice Ages (the Holocene) was about to end, and “global cooling” was going to wreak havoc with just about everything.

Or, more recently, that snowpacks in the Pacific Northwest were going to disappear soon, in just decades like my claim above about Catalina rainfall. Those claims were made by scientists who got carried away by using only some of the data, not all of it, beginning with an era of high snowpacks, as I have done with our Catalina rainfall, starting with an era of high rainfall.

Those snowpack claims, too, were ones that were ripe for a hungry media primed for global warming (or earlier, global cooling) disaster stories which, of course, sell newspapers and magazines and appeared in such media giants as Time, and numerous media outlets. The greater the catastrophic outlooks, the greater the sales.

Snowpacks in the Pacific NW have been increasing since those claims were made, 5-10 years ago. Nor could researchers find any evidence that the temperatures over the past few decades at mountain top level were increasing, something that had to happen to support claims of earlier melting off of snowpacks and less deep ones. If real estate has the mantra, location, location, location, science is supposed to have the mantra, caution, caution, caution.

Now it MAY be that EVENTUALLY snowpacks in the Pacific Northwest WILL decline. But the scientists who made the original sensational claims were incautious. They should have pointed out that it will be a very gradual process and many things might come to bear on such an overall gradual decrease that might make it appear that nothing is happening for years at a time due to changes in weather regimes, like the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, Arctic Oscillation, etc.. Those of us who know weather know that there are tipping points in which weather regimes go into a new modes, where low centers like to be changes, and those changes can persist for many years. Why they happen is not known but being investigated.

These kinds of regime tips from one state to another was anticipated by the “Father of Chaos Theory”, E. N. Lorenz, some 40 years ago (e.g., “Climate Change as a Mathematical Problem” when he pointed out the charateristics of atmospheres that are “transitive” (ones that don’t flip-flop into new modes) and “intransitive” ones that do flip-flop into new modes without much “forcing”. Flip-floping is just an inherent property that an “intransitive” atmosphere has and is likely represented by the oscillations mentioned in the previous paragraph.

Interestingly, looking back at all the climate flip-flops that had occurred over the eons of the earth’s history, Lorenz ventured that “human (climate) forcings” can likely be ignored since they had not caused the remarkable climate changes in the past.

Those of us who know anything about the global warming future projected know that REGIONAL effects of GW are dicey; not well known. Some places could really warm up, while some places could even cool off due to, for example, stronger summer sea breezes flowing toward warmer continents, something that may already be under way according to some researchers.

Or, the storm track-jet stream positions might shift and bring cooler weather to a relatively small regions while the globe overall warms up. We know, for example, that troughs aloft (with their cold air) tend to shift inland to the western US as the northern hemisphere warms up in the spring. As that happens, storms with cold fronts tend to move more from the northwest to the southeast, delaying the onset of higher spring temperatures in the West that otherwise might happen.

These regional effects are just beginning to be explored with higher resolution models that can capture regional effects better.

Now we’re ALL concerned today about where the climate MAY be heading.

We, the people, are really wrecking things royally with our air pollution and trace gas emissions. The sky is awful-looking on a regular basis due to smog in huge parts of the world now. What’s interesting is how accustomed, and non-chalant we have become to the “white sky” so prevalent in the eastern US on humid days.

The climate system of this planet is extremely complicated and even now it is not known why the earth’s temperature has stopped increasing over the past 10-15 years while there have been huge increases in CO2 and methane, those gases that are mainly responsible for the projected and past global warmings that have occurred.

We, as scientists, should always pause, take a deep breath of “humility”, when something major like this happens, the recent leveling of the earth’s temperature, when we can’t explain it and start to rethink our hypotheses. No climate model expected this leveling in temperature to happen back when it started.

Here in Catalina we have a “problem” with our climate rainfall data. Its been drying out for awhile, years, really, in the cooler part of the year (October through May), and last winter’s precip did nothing to alter this downward trend even though it was wetter than the previous cool season of Oct 2010-May 2011. That latter one was so dry that there were no spring wildflowers at the end of that awful winter.

Global warming (GW) is the most easily, readily accepted explanation for everything these days, including that big dust devil that went through Catalina a few days ago around 3:30 PM. In the 1950s, it was “atomic testing” that caused all manner of strange weather inthe popular lexicon, 1960s and 1970s, it was global cooling (with scientists on board), and in the 1980s and 1990s, El Ninos caused EVERYTHING strange, beyond what we know El Ninos really do.

Those were fun times for real meteorologists, familiar with the year to year vagaries of weather, ones that lead to extremes of all kinds.

The End2.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

¹Since sarcasm is the refuge of a small mind its been said, I have added some more sarcasm to the legends in this graph as well. I am exulting in the small mind! Why pretend to be something you’re not?

“Los Angeles” Catalina

Got a little homesick yesterday looking at the white sky, the barely visible mountains in the distance, like Twin Peaks, eyes a little teary, not from sadness so much, but from smog and smoke. Grew up in the San Fernando Valley you know, Reseda. Lots of smog there at times, though not as much as in Burbank, thank heavens, where it banked up against the San Gabriel Mountains.

Reseda, as you know is quite famous from the Karate Kid movie and was even mentioned by Frank Zappa in his Tinsel Town Rebellion album so I like to tell people that I grew up there, went to Reseda High School, played some sports. Maybe I should add a sports highlight to convince you that I went to such a famous high school, and maybe, too, mention that overpowering, incapacitating crush I had on Rozzi R. when I was 15 years old, since a story like that would titillate your interests more than a sports story, or maybe even stuff about weather. I think I know the people who read this blog pretty darn well.

Below is that “nostalgic” LA sky we had yesterday, thanks to fires in New Mexico, the second one of the yellowish-orange sun typically associated with smoke particles. Of course, the “white sky” is common on humid days back East, and in the global warming domain, is our friend.

Yes, that’s right, smog is our “friend”, because, as was likely yesterday, in spite of record heat, the temperature would have even been a tad HIGHER without that smoke layer!

In fact, one of the conundrums in foretelling climate in the coming decades, is how much smoke, our “friend”, will offset the warming due to trace gases like CO2. Imagine, a world of never-blue-but-always-white skies and no more worries about global warming!

As the cliché goes, “Beam me up, Scotty” if such a world came to pass! So, lets knock off the fires, all smog, in fact, and untoward gases!

More clouds, less smog today

In case you missed it, some sunrise Cirrus today! Finally a cloud. Who cares if its at 45,000 feet above the ground! It shows there can still be humidity in the air.

Probably had some….OK, your guess… on the ice crystal type up there in those Cirrus clouds.

Yes, that’s right, bullet rosettes, would be an excellent guess, crystals with a solid “germ” center from which columns radiate outward like these ones below captured in Cirrus clouds over Barrow, AK, some years ago.

Update on “dusty coolsnap”, foretold many days ago for around June 5th.

Here, from the NWS Tucson, you will see that “dusty coolsnap”, foretold by the models many days ago, has been evolving into “breezynotashotsnap”, if you can call that a “snap”, a word that implies more suddeness that what will likely happen. Still, a trough brushes by to the north, just doesn’t have the amplitude it once did in the models; we’ll see only some moderation in temps. How can they not “moderate” after record highs, so that was an easy thing for me to say.

Still no rain in mods for hereabouts, but some close calls from afternoon thunderstorms in New Mexico every now and then.

The awful indications is, just beyond a week from now, more record HIGH temperatures lasting for a few days! Yikes.

The End