Science stories – Page 2

Not blogcastin’ today; but an old science story “filler” from the Middle East!

Lettin’ the past few weather blogcasts about a good chance of snow here in Catalina during the Christmas season ride the old stagecoach into town. Doesn’t seem to be any need to change it… In the meantime this.

A science story for you, while we kill time waiting for some snow

You’ve probably read about snow in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Middle East. I saw it snow in Jerusalem when I there for 11 winter weeks, January through the middle of March, 1986, on a self-funded cloud investigation. Its not terribly uncommon to see snow in Jerusalem, believe it or not.

I was single in 1986, so I could do stuff like that, quit my job at the University of Washington for awhile (2 years), with no need to ask a spouse, “Honey, do you mind if I quit my job today and spend the equivalent of $40,000 going to Israel to look at clouds for a couple of months, and then spend a year without income working on a publication about ’em?”

Not gonna happen.

I had just sold a house in Durango, Colorado, so had some money to waste; I could be a “gentleman scientist” as in the old days of science before WWII and Vanevar Bush and the onset of big government funding for science, and maybe what some would call the beginning of “careerist” science, that followed WWII and the beginning of the Cold War to propel us forward.

So off I went in early January 1986 to see the clouds of Israel.

Jerusalem was often a city in the clouds during storms; it was so COLD and windy during them, unbelievably so considering what we think of there from Bible stories. I was outside a lot, experiencing the weather and rain, and on one occasion I remember I couldn’t pull the shutter on my old Rolleicord medium format camera, my fingers were so cold.

The three wisemen/magi came in the winter, didn’t they? They don’t seem to have enough clothes on in the Nativity scenes that I have seen, given what the weather can do in the winter there. Below, Jerusalem in the clouds, with 20-30 mph wind, at about 40 F:

I_TALK_001 — Part of the new construction of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Might have been a hospital wing. Note leaning cypress or juniper trees.

January 12, 1986. Looking down King David Blvd, Jerusalem, during a storm.

January 21st, sunset over the Med, from the beach fronting Tel Aviv. — January 21st, 1986: sunset over the Med, from the beach fronting Tel Aviv.

I really loved it in Israel. The Israel national weather service (IMS, Y. L. Tokatly, Director) was great to me, letting me have a little research area in their offices after I just showed up on their doorstep, unannounced. Later, in a display of incredible scientific idealism, when the Director learned that the key scientist and I had a falling out about the clouds of Israel after my second week there, he allowed me to continue to use their historical records and my little space in their offices, terming what happened between that researcher and myself, as “merely a scientific dispute.”

Oh, my; where has that pure idealism fled to in the global warming wars?

But I loved the clouds there in Israel the most as they rolled in off the Mediterranean, borne on the cold winds of continental Europe, then boiled upward from flat little guys that they started out as by the warm waters of the Mediterranean into big Cumulus and Cumulonimbus clouds, the latter often spewing lightning, by the time those clouds and cold air got to Israel. It is a gigantic lake-effect situation there in the Mediterranean, the kind that is produced by the warmer waters of the Great Lakes as Arctic air traverses it, such as the storm buried folks in New York recently. Over over the Mediterranean, the air has a chance to really warm up after leaving Europe due to its low to mid 60s late fall and wintertime water temperature.

January 15, 1986. Cumulonimbus marches ashore north of Tel Aviv. — January 15, 1986. Cumulonimbus calvus marches ashore north of Tel Aviv.

February 9, 1986. Skies open up near Nahariyya, in extreme northern Israel. — February 9, 1986. Skies open up near Nahariya, along the extreme northern Israeli coast near the Lebonese border.

January 12, 1986. An epiphany moment as the first storm in daylight hours occurred during my visit. — January 12, 1986. A moment of “cloud ice” epiphany as the first storm in daylight hours occurred during my visit. I knew with the first two hours of this storm that my hunch about those clouds was right. BTW, showers like these can roll into Israel, and into Lebanon for that matter, for days on end, termed “rainy spells” in that region. Cold air troughs aloft like to “nest” in that region in the wintertime, enhancing the clouds there, and stimulating the “Cypress Low” pressure area at the surface in the eastern Med.

The short of this is, and I COULD write a book, “go long”, was that I questioned, from afar mind you, after I plotted balloon sounding of temperature and moisture from Lebanon and Israel when it was raining, whether the clouds being described by a leading scientist in Israel were correct. In fact, from these plots, I was rather sure they weren’t. But it would, as I knew, be real heresy to conclude that in those days.

Of course, questioning findings goes on all the time in science. Its what makes it better.

A short paper was submitted to the J. of Applied Meteorology in 1983 reporting this discrepancy, and some other problems. It was rejected by three of four reviewers, one being the leading scientist mentioned above. I really was of the opinion I would “get in.” so was disappointed, but not undaunted in the least! Should have taken more than ONE day, July 4th, 1983, to write it, coming into the University of Washington at 6:30 AM, I was so excited to get it off!

I knew what those balloon soundings were telling me, and so after the paper was rejected, it began to occur to me to GO to Israel and see the clouds for myself. After all, by this time (1983) I had been punching clouds with cloud measuring instruments at the University of Washington for about seven years, and had a good idea of what was in them just from their visual (external) appearances. And I was starting to build a list of papers on reanalyzing and commenting on cloud seeding experiments, getting some notice.

So I reasoned that even if I just looked at the clouds of Israel, I would know whether the many journal and conference reports about those Israeli clouds were in error.

Error? What would that be, you ask? Some background, if anyone is still reading.

The clouds being described in Israel by researchers there, ones operating a cloud seeding program, were supposed to get real thick and cold before they rained. That meant the clouds weren’t very efficient and could to be seeded with a substance called silver iodide (AgI) to make it rain sooner, before they got so thick and cold. The AgI would introduce ice, needed to start the rain process going, at higher temperatures than the natural clouds rained at, thus seeded clouds would rain before having to be so thick and cold.

This meant that more would rain when seeded compared to not seeded clouds because not just the taller ones in Israel would rain. More clouds raining would, of course, add hours of rain to storms on seeded days, it was posited, and the researchers evaluating their second randomized experiment reported those very results: seeding, on randomly drawn days, had increased the hours of rain compared to randomly drawn control days. And these increases in rain on the seeded days were statistically significant, as they had been in a first randomized experiment.

So, in not ONE but two randomized cloud seeding experiments in Israel, statistically significant results had been obtained on seeded days, and the scientists reporting these results also had what appeared to be a solid cloud foundation for having obtained more rain by seeding; the natural clouds just had to be too thick to rain, but they fixed that by seeding with AgI. It all made sense.

It doesn’t get better than this for scientific proof, the so-called “gold standard” of science; statistically significant results in two randomized experiments and a solid physical reason why it happened. Due to these attributes, these experiments in Israel were accepted as “proof” of seeding effects by our highest scientific panels, such as the National Academy of Sciences, and every expert in the cloud seeding domain. For a time…..

Representative of this status is a 1982 article in Science magazine; “Cloud seeding: One success in 35 years” That success was the two Israeli experiments en toto.

From the outside, my trip to Israel in 1986 to investigate the clouds would have seemed ludicrous. Why bother; too many peer-reviewed publications documenting the attributes of those clouds, and also in a number of conference papers as well.

Could they all be wrong?

Yep¹.

The End, more or less.

Below, an “action shot”:

Yours truly atop the Riviera Hotel, Tel Aviv. — Yours truly atop the Riviera Hotel, Tel Aviv, January 1986, readying for clouds and storms to blow in from the Med.

——————————————-some final commentary that sort got out of hand after more coffee———–

¹The short ending. That answer is not in question anymore. Did that leading researcher allow me to go to either of his two radars to see how thick the clouds were when they were raining?

Nope.

So my publication on those clouds (1988, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Met. Society) had to make inferences about cloud top temperatures based on primitive balloon sounding data. But the results in that paper, that shallow clouds were raining and had MUCH higher cloud top temperatures than had been reported to that time, were confirmed by independent researchers, the best kind, using aircraft and modern instrumentation a few years later.

Spiking fubball now! (Can’t seem to lose that sense of irreverence, even when serious.)

Some final, “human” notes about this chapter of science:

This same leading researcher, in 1972 (published in 1974 in Weather and Climate Modification, Wilmot Hess, Ed, Wiley-Interscience) wrote what may be the BEST, most circumspect review of his experiments, as his second experiment was underway! It is recommended reading for anyone in this field.

So, “something” happened later on when he got his radars to monitor cloud tops and likely learned there was a problem. And you can imagine, I was his nightmare, a smart-ass with a building publication record critical of cloud seeding coming to Israel to question his cloud reports. Ideally, no problem. As scientists “ideally” we want to be the first to know that our results are in error. We care only about truth. (Right.) Ufortunately, our humanity sometimes gets in the way.

The leader of the Israeli experiments died only a year after my visit at the age of 54, aware at that time (1987) that the paper on clouds of Israel was going to be published in the QJ (Prof. Peter Hobbs, the Director of my group, had communicated this news to him after we got word from the QJ that year.) So….we can speculate.

But our meetings were cordial at all times; he was a great story teller, and there was no shouting, even when he firmly asked me to leave his office and never come back (2nd visit when I was telling him about my “findings”, which included a mention of drizzle, something his clouds were never supposed to do).

In fact, I felt bad for him, and still do, knowing the position I was putting him in, how this might end when other researchers began asking more questions about his cloud reports and eventually they would have to be overturned. At one point, on top of the old Hebrew University of Jerusalem, during our first very cordial meeting, I said, “Maybe we can co-author something if I find anything.” Coming from a “newby” like me, I am sure, as cordial as he was, he would have liked to have pushed me off the roof.

Some day I will post the whole technical thing on this experiment, and another one that was its mirror image in the Colorado Rockies. That future post (Cloud Seeding and the Journal Barriers to Faulty Claims: Closing the Gaps) will be piled high with references But this is already too much for now.

Creepy Stratus fractus

Well, that cloud WAS “creeping” toward us after suddenly appearing on Pusch Ridge at dawn… Looky here:

7:14 AM. It thinks we're not looking. — 7:14 AM. It thinks we’re not looking.

7:25 AM. In only three minutes, a spurt toward Cartalina, hugging the mountains where its safe.

7:44 AM. I wasn't watching for awhile, and suddenly, there it was across from me! — 7:44 AM. I wasn’t watching for awhile, and suddenly, there it was across from me!

8:00 AM. By this time it was just sitting, pretending it was something innocuous, but I knew better.

1:44 PM. By afternoon, it was gone... Or was it? You see, creepy Stratus fractus is afraid of the sun, writhes and evaporates when sunlight hits it, or it just warms up a little. It is truly cold blooded. — 1:44 PM. By afternoon, it was gone… Or is it? You see, creepy Stratus fractus is afraid of the sun, twist and writhes in a death throe, evaporating right before your eyes when the sun comes out, or the weak light from the sun, as yesterday, warms the air up a little. Stratus fractus is truly cold blooded and only strong light will make it go away! The end. Below, some apropos music and commentary…

———–

With Halloween only 10 and half months away, I thought I would “get in the mood” and make up a little creepy-ness for the little kids who read this blog. Hi, kids! Hope you didn’t get too scared reading this. “Uncle Artie” is sorry if you did get scared.

What you saw in that sequence of Stratus fractus movement is also demonstrative of what often happens to smog layers funneling out of the Tucson area toward Mark Albright’s house in Continental Ranch, Marana. Here’s an example of creepy morning smog (smoke and other aerosol junk), partitioned to the lowest layers near the ground by a radiation inversion, a temperature reversal that develops at night that results in a temperature rise as you go up. In the afternoons, after the sun has done its work for awhile, the temperature DECLINES as you go up and the smog molecules are dispersed over greater and greater depths. Got it?

7:32 AM, December 2, 2013. Maybe you remember this morning. Smog stays down there until the sun comes up, and then slowly creepy-creeps toward Catalina and our foothills as the wind changes direction and comes toward us in the late morning and afternoon. Happens during stagnant weather patterns, not much going on. Fortunately, the heating by the sun disperses this goop into a greater depth so the smog seems less obtrusive, less visible, though its still there. BTW, the second arrow pretty much point’s to Mark’s winter home in Continental Ranch. Mark is a research meteorologist/climatologist at the University of Washington who got his feelings hurt when he corrected exaggerations of snowpack losses in the Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest and people in his own department got mad at him for correcting those claims; happened back in 2005 or so. But, of course, it still goes on. Mark and his colleagues were proved right in the ensuing years of mountainous snows in the Cascades. Of course, a hundred years from now, well, that might be another story. Tune in later, maybe around 2050 to 2100. It is interesting that when me and Peter Hobbs was correcting cloud seeding claims found in the peer-reviewed literature, ones made by people in OTHER universities, the people in MY department loved me for doing so!

Now, where was I after that big caption….?

Oh, yeah, the weather on deck

Sunday marathoners, achtung!

Looking more like a dry day now on Marathon Day, Sunday, though a cold front will have gone by just before it starts. Looks like measurable precip will be partitioned to the north of Oracle on Sunday, but it will likely be cloudy with Stratocumulus clouds as the day starts, but those should gradually disperse into scattered to broken Cumulus clouds with virga by mid-day, some of those deeper Cu could produce a cold one; i. e., a sprinkle.

Jet core (at 500 mb, 18,000 feet or so) is well north of TUS as Sunday starts, and its really hard to get precip here until the core passes, which on Sunday will be later in the day. But then, the cold front has long gone, and the tendency for precip with the jet core has diminished (subsiding air behind the front is moving in then) to just scattered deeper Cumulus clouds having some ice-forming potential. Deeper clouds are stymied on the right side of the jet (looking downwind) overall in the Southwest in the wintertime by warmer air aloft and stable layers, the kind that produce lenticular clouds.

Below, what”m trying to say in words, is shown in this 500 mb forecast from IPS Meteostar with the wind velocities on it:

Winds at about 18,000 feet above sea level forecast for Sunday morning at 5 AM AST. No rain is also predicted by this latest WRF-GFS model run on Sunday in the TUS area.

Since this is an analysis from a model output, one inherently containing error, there is that inherent bit of uncertainty. So, you, as a weatherfolkperson, imagine what can go the best (the most rainful error), and the worst, and make outlier predictions. Potential rain here in Catalina on Sunday: max, a tenth (everything goes right); bottom, zero (or trace), in this case, as predicted by this model.

Way ahead

I will leave you with this. I think its looking more promising for storms later in the month. I think you’ll see what I mean:

The End

PS: Lots of low temperature records falling in the West these days.

Yesterday’s drizzle

Some rare drizzle precip¹ fell yesterday. Suggests clouds were pretty “clean”, that is, didn’t have much aerosol loading and the concentrations of droplets in them was low (likely less than 100 cm^-3) Also likely, in view of the recent strong winds, some of the aerosols in those clouds might have been large dust particles² rather than those due to just “smog” and other tiny natural aerosols. Large dust particles can not only influence the development of ice at higher temperatures than normal (above -10 C), but is also known to aid the formation of rain due to cloud drops bumping into each other and sticking together; collisions and coalescence because large dust particles can accelerate this process by forming large initial drops at the bottom of the cloud where drops first condense. Here, drops are nearly always too small to bump together and join up unless clouds are deep, like our summer ones, and ice is going to form anyway.

So, yesterday, was a bit of a novelty. Some photos and story telling:

SONY DSC — 1:34 PM. Drizzling from Stratocumulus!

The late Jack Russell, engineer, listening to Art tell another cloud investigation story. — The late Jack Russell, flight engineer, listening to Art tell another cloud investigation story.

2:43 PM. Cumulus humilis field over Saddlebrooke.

3:06 PM. Drizzle precip just a memory. These clouds too shallow to rain. — 3:06 PM. Drizzle precip just a memory. These clouds too shallow to rain via collisions, and too warm to form ice.

Looking ahead….

Mods paint dry weather for the next 15 days, and so yesterday’s disappointing “trace” (don’t recall here that Mr. Cloud Maven person had predicted at least 0.02 inches!) may be it for October. Phooey.

———————-

¹Drizzle: Fine (size range, 200-500 microns in diameter drops) close together, that nearly float in the air. Very difficult to bicycle in drizzle even with a cap or big hat. Fallspeeds, just a few mph. Smaller sizes can’t make it out of the cloud, or evaporate within a few feet almost if they do. Even true drizzle occurrences, you can’t be too far below the base of the clouds or those tiny drops won’t make it down to you.

²What is a “large” dust particle in a cloud? Oh, 1-10 microns in diameter, real rocks compared with the other stuff normally in them. So’s you get a drop that’s already pretty large as soon as condensation takes places. And, if the updrafts are weak at the bottom, then only them big ones might be activated, keeping the whole cloud’s droplet concentrations low! Happens even in places in the middle of huge land masses where in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, we saw this happen on a dusty, moist day in shallow Stratocumulus clouds. They developed some drizzle drops. I was with the National Center for Atmos. Research on a field project then.

³1988: Rain from Clouds with Tops Warmer than -10 C in Israel (Quart. J. Roy. Meteor. Soc.)

Cirrus at 40,000; a science story about a death prediction

Here they are:

6:44 PM. Some Cirrus spissatus floated over late yesterday. When its unusually warm, Cirrus are often unusually high such as yesterday's. — 6:44 PM. Some Cirrus spissatus (thicker blobs) floated over late yesterday. When its unusually warm, Cirrus are often unusually high altitude such as yesterday’s.

Still no rain in the two week model “headlights”…and believe me I look for it.

A science story

While we’re waiting for “weather”, I thought I would partially bore you with another science story.

I am supposed to be dead by now, well, within 5-10 years after 2003 due to the development of a rare disease called pseudomyxoma peritonei, resulting from a tumor called, mucinous cystadenoma. Actually, I feel so good today at 71 years of age, doing more weight at the gymnasium than I ever have in the past 16 years on some machines, I tell friends that it must be a pre-death “bloom.”

But back in August of 2003, I left work with an incredible gut pain and ended up in the ER at the University of Washington’s hospital, never having finished that afternoon cup of coffee. After a day or so of monitoring, the doc there, Mika Sinanen, “went in” with his team. It wasn’t presenting as a classic appendicitis. He found a tumor exiting the appendix. He had never seen this before, and didn’t know what it was.

Later, while in his office, the pathologist came back with the report on it. It was a “mucinous cystadenoma”, not cancerous. But SInanen wasn’t as excited as I thought he should be that it wasn’t cancer. He told me to meet with the University Hospital’s surgical oncologist.

A few days later I was informed by that oncologist that I would likely experience a series of abdominal operations over the coming years due to the development of the disease called, pseudomyxoma peritonei, in which a mucinous jelly like growth attaches to organs in the gut. There is no cure I was told; portions of the gut are removed, the doc said, until no more can be removed and you die of “blockage.” It didn’t sound good.

Keep in mind the date of this event, August 2003.

Now the science part.

In September of 2002 a farmer from west Texas was upset over a cloud seeding program his county was going to undertake and had decided to write to all of the universities having atmospheric science programs about the status of cloud seeding. Was it proven? And would it work in the summer clouds of west Texas?

He eventually reached me at the University of Washington. I had published critiques and reanalyses of cloud seeding experiments in peer-reviewed journals, usually with the Director of our Cloud and Aerosol Group, Peter V. Hobbs, as a co-author, over the preceeding 25 years. In the farmer’s note, he said that he had contacted over 130 universities, and that my name had come up often. I cherish that e-mail even today, an indication that your peers had noticed your work.

I should mention that all of this reananlysis work was self-initiated, and except for one paper, they were done off and on on my own time with no funding whatsoever over a period of about 25 years. I sometimes partially joke about this aspect in introductions of talks on this subject by describing all this self-funded work as a “crackpot alert”. But I was trying to be a good crackpot.

I sent this farmer the fairest objective one-page note on cloud seeding I could, one that I thought my peers would also agree with. Its our job as scientists, even if with think they are still faulty reports out there, we have to cite them until they are officially overturned. I wrote to the this farmer that cloud seeding had not been proven in those types of clouds (summer Cumulonimbus ones) in ways that we in the science community would find convincing. That is, proven through randomized experiments, double blind ones, and in which the results had been replicated. That’s the gold standard for all science. I did point out, as I must as a scientist, that there were “promising results” using hygroscopic methods of seeding of such clouds. That was about it.

Implementing a commercial cloud seeding project creates jobs (don’t forget, the author has participated in these), and it looks good for sponsoring organizations, like state and county governments, to try to do something about droughts. Makes constituents happy even if most academic scientists question such a practice absent proper evidence.

Within 24 h of sending that note, I received this e-mail from Texas:

“You will die in 11 months from a fast-growing tumor, you f…… rascal.”

It was pretty odd since it had a timeline, and that 11 months was odd, and I thought use of the word “rascal” didn’t fit the preceding expletive. Another expletive would have fit better. There was no way to connect this e-mail to the note I sent that farmer, but the timing made it clear it had something to do with it.

Well, EXACTLY 11 months after that note I was on my way to the hospital leaving a half a cup of coffee on my desk at the U of WA due to an odd tumor exiting my appendix. And, by golly, I WAS going to die, but in 5-10 years!

I will never forget that day the surgical oncologist at the U of Washington hospital told me that. The disease never showed.

I always wanted to write to that e-mail address from where the threat originated (a phony one) and say,
“Hah-hah (emulating “Nelson” on The Simpsons); it was a SLOW growing tumor!”

——————————–

One final note.

Scientists don’t like it when you’re reanalyzing their work, naturally. The very first review I saw of my first paper reanalyzing a randomized cloud seeding experiment was so bad, and had a personal attack that I did not have the credentials to reanalyze that experiment¹ it made a fellow, cartoon-drawing graduate student in our group, Tom Matejka, laugh. He then came up with the image below of how that reviewer must have seen me. His drawing was so perfect a depiction, I loved it. The paper, “A reanalysis of the Wolf Creek Pass cloud seeding experiment”, was the lead article in the May 1979 issue of the Journal of Applied Meteorology.

I have also included a photo of Tom, one of my favorite grad students passing through our Cloud and Aerosol Group at Washington. You can see the playfulness in his face.

—————–

¹True, actually; I had no credentials in that domain at that time.

Miriam’s sunset

At least former hurricane Miriam gave us a nice sunset of mostly layer ice clouds (Cirrostratus; Altostratus (where thicker). Note portion of halo, upper center, above pointy-top cedar tree on the horizon. Looks a broken streak of droplet clouds (Cirrocumulus) just below that bit of halo.

Today’s overcast of Altocumulus and Stratocumulus, also associated with Miriam, develops some light rain to the south of us now. Wasn’t supposed to get here (from U of AZ model yesterday), but, there it is, SLOWLY heading this way. Will it make it? Don’t think so. If it does, it won’t be much, a trace? Dang.

Next rain here, sometime in October…. None now shown for the next 15 days. Maybe summer stats later today or tomorrow. (Correction, updated at 1:05 PM local based on the US WRF-GFS model run at 5 AM:

the almost “usual” rain has shown up, 324 h from now, that is, Thursday afternoon, October 11th. Below is the precip for the 12 h ending at 5 PM that day. Also, as “usual”, don’t count on it, but its not impossible either. There a tiny heavier rain blob over Catalina or so.

Didn’t get to a rain stat presentation yet due to being absorbed by former company team’s activities in SEA last evening where, at the conclusion of the match, there was a display of sport’s anarchy. The attendees of this event, in some kind of euphoric riot, lost control of themselves, climbed out of their seats and advanced onto the floor of the stadium where only the athletes and their entourages are supposed to be.

Two curious friends were at that game, my friend Nate, who got a big check (250 K$!) from Al Gore at the Whitehouse a few years ago due to being a science star, and my other friend Keith, who made a LOT of money photographing the explosion of Mt. St. Helen’s in 1980 because he was where he shouldn’t have been went it went off. Keith then quit the Ph. D. program in the geophysics grad school at the U of WA and started a company, Remote Measurements, due to all the money he made from that poster of the explosion.

Nate and Keith now share season tickets now to the Husky football games, as Nate and I once did, which I think proves something about fans of college fubball.

What does it prove?

Maybe its that you can like college fubball and still get a big check from Al Gore (who later went on from being Vice-president to a star in the movies).

Or, it just proves that you don’t have to be THAT bright to be a success in science (hahahahah-its just long, hard hours, not brillance, that counts).

And, it may prove that college fubball fans are sometimes not be who we think they are. Feeling defensive here about being so absorbed last evening, so let us not forget that the writer was thanked by the People of Earth with a small monetary prize, a “scroll”, AND…a trophy (!) for his and Peter Hobbs’ body of work in the domain of weather modification, all these goodies being presented in Capetown, SA, in 2006. So, there, IQ feels better now.

As a joke on that that latter thought, my friend and grad school officemate, Ricky, from Harvard U. no less, and I used to throw a football around at lunchtime on the lawn in front of the 7-story department of Atmos. Sci. Building at the U of WA. Before we went out the door to play catch, I warned Ricky that his perceived IQ would drop by 30 points when people look down and see him tossing a football, and, forget dating any of the women in the Department… :} Just kidding!

The End.

Not expected, but it missed anyway

Woke up to Cumulonimbus clouds NW-N of Catalina. Hmmm. Here’s the unexpected, pretty sight just after sunrise:

Well, the end of the story (told in the captions) is that a windshift producing this line of heavy Cu and a Cb or two and it “struck” Catalina about 11 AM; the wind turned from the SW to the N, but the heavy line of clouds riding it were nowhere to be seen at that time; the last Cumulonimbus cloud disappearing beyond the Charoleau Gap. Tough to take after hopes up.

Only in the early afternoon did a gift of a few drops from a towering Cumulus directly overhead produce the final surprise. The drops fell from 1:22 PM to 1:23 PM. I rushed outside to see what the heck was doing it and here that cloud is (last two photos) from the bottom up.

Mods see afternoon isolated Cumulonimbus today.

The End.

On a clear day you can see Flagstaff

Of course, you can’t see the TOWN of Flagstaff, you silly person, the title was just a hook to get you here to read about clouds! The earth curves too much for you to see Flagstaff, for Pete’s Sake. How could you even imagine that such a title could be true?

But, you CAN see the tops of Cumulonimbus clouds boiling upward OVER Flagstaff, maybe there is someone you know there and you could call them about it, find out how much it has rained. Those Cumulonimbus tops stick up above the horizon in that direction about a quarter of an inch if you were to take a ruler out and hold it out in front of you. Thought you’d like to know this.

Here’s the scene I am describing from yesterday afternoon. In case you wouldn’t know what to say to your Flagstaff friend, I’ve tried to help you out in the caption for the second photo. Maybe its your mom you haven’t called in a while…. Who knows who it might be that you know up there?

Finishing off today’s lesson: The tops you see are ALMOST always completely composed of ICE crystals and snowflakes because they too damn cold at 40,000 feet or so (temperature less than -40 C, less than -40 F; they are the same numeric at that temperature, yet another piece of knowledge for you) for anything but ice we think.

Some embarrassed people have reported liquid water at temperatures below -50 C such as Robert H. Simpson, former head of the National Hurricane Center and also husband of the late Joanne Simpson, famed Cumulus researcher and FIRST WOMAN TO EVER RECEIVE A PH. D. in meteorology¹. Must’ve have been an especially great marriage because they both loved weather and clouds and hurricanes and probably talked about ’em all day.

Continuing with something relevant, once when Bob (Simpson) was in Seattle giving a talk, after the talk I said to him, smiling, “You must be pretty embarrassed about reporting liquid water at -62 C”, as he did in 1962 in a conference paper, and again in 1963 in the peer-reviewed journal, the Monthly Weather Review.

He smiled and said, “The theoreticians don’t think its there, but its there.”

Hmmmph.

The weather today and the next few days into August?

Scattered rains, lightning thunder EVERY day into August! I am so happy. More rain is on the doorstep. Take a look below at what this extra rain we’ve had so far in July has already done to our desert as of three days ago, July 25th. Its incredible, isn’t it? I call it, the “re-jungle-ation” of Arizona accompanied by the appearance of new life forms; see last photo.

____________________________________________
¹Joanne Simpson, after reviewing my grades, advised me to give up meteorology. She was a professor at UCLA then (1963), and I wanted to “walk on” as a met student in their program. In effect, though I didn’t realize it then, she saved me from myself since UCLA was WAY too theoretical for me in the approach to weather. Later I attended San Jose State², a program much more suited to me with my weak math skills. (Can you put a footnote in a footnote?)”

²While at SJS in the later 1960s, I was forecasting weather for the college paper, forecasts that devolved into silly, juvenile, lame topical humor, much like the “humor” here. To drop another name in this blog, I loved what KRLA-AM, a top 40 station in Los Angeles, where I grew up, was doing in those turbulent days of the late 1960s. They had dared to start a news parody program, recreating news events that they would first report in a serious manner. It was bold and courageous for a mainstream media station; they dared to offend. I wanted to be a part of it, and went down to apply for summer work there in 1968.

My interviewer? A young Harry Shearer. The “Credibility Gap“, the KRLA news parody team in those days, consisted mainly of Harry, Richard Beebe, and David L. Lander. An example of their work, “Dawn of New Era for Man”, KRLA’s 1969 Apollo 11 counter coverage to the major networks; its 8 min long, Arizona’s Papago Indians mentioned. You can’t find this on the internet!

Back to the interview: Harry briefly examined my topical forecasts for the SJS paper, ones I presented to him pasted on a blank sheet of paper. After just a minute or two, he said, “I don’t think they’re that funny.” It was painful to hear, but upon later reflection, oh, so true! I left immediately.

I had some low moments in the 1960s, but here I am!

Lemmon bloom

Thunderstorms in the distance crept toward the Catalinas late in the day, and after sunset, an approaching, but thinning anvil of a dead Cumulonimbus cloud (no updrafts remaining to feed the anvil) produced this beauty. With the death of this prospect, any hope of rain moving in here later in the evening went six feet under as well.

The anvil below looks fairly close, but if you go to the U of A time lapse, this anvil comes onto the field of view at about 7:40 PM, and you can get an idea of how much farther the anvil below had to go to be above the Cat Mountains.

For the second day in a row there were virtually no Cumulus clouds over our Catalina mountains, a real disappointment. But, undaunted, Mr. Cloud Maven person will anticipate Cumulus clouds over the Catalinas once again today, following in the same wrong footsteps of the past two days, and will again foretell that these will be ones that will rise high enough to “glaciate”, that is, have their tops convert from liquid droplets to ice crystals.

The result of this “glaciation” process is something coming out the bottom of the cloud, a dense shaft of precip, as a Cumulus cloud transforms itself into a Cumulonimbus one.

————-

Science Story: This is always an exciting sight and a process that Mr. Cloud Maven person (MCMP) spent some 25 odd years studying with a highly instrumented aircraft at the University of Washington but couldn’t quite figure out how it happened. In fact, MCMP (with his lab chief co-author) were criticized royally (i.e., Blyth and Latham 1998) for what they did report over the years (“royally”; they were two British guys, but working in the US). We “Reply” to their comments in quite substantial fashion in the same issue (Reply to Blyth and Latham)!

BTW, real scientists, like Alan Blyth, are still working on this problem; how clouds glaciate. Its pretty amazing when you think of it. These days the Japanese (asteroid dust Science-2011) can send a spacescraft to an asteroid named, Itokawa, land on it, pick up some dust grains, and bring them back, a process taking more than 10 years, but we really don’t know completely how ice forms in a cloud!

————-

Back to the local scene:

once again we have our high surface dewpoints, in the upper 50s (58 F here in Catalina) and even 62 F now at Douglas. So the bottom of our atmosphere is OK for Cumulus. And once again, we have an overcast of mid-level Altocumulus clouds. A problem yesterday was the extreme dryness above that surface moist layer, and below the Altocumulus one, a shallow moist layer that was completely obliterated after the sun came up and the dry one and razor-thin moist one mixed together. Its not so dry today above the low humid layer today, and so Cumulonimbus clouds should be able to develop in the area.

Besides the models told me so. Have been a little sloppy and a little, well, arrogant, about reading the early morning sky absent more information.

Here’s today’s TUS sounding, from the Wyoming Cowboys, so you can see for yourself.

The End, unless I find out I am going to be wrong again when more data comes in a couple of hours.

Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion, p269: climate change meets cloud seeding

“McIntyre’s first step in trying to replicate a paper was to collate the data. While data might be cited correctly and accurately in the papers, it was always possible that what had been used was different in some way to the official versions, whether due to an error in the archive or one made by the authors.”

Almost at every turn in this monumental exposé by A. W. Montford, I see parallels in the many cloud seeding reanalyses I did at the University of Washington with Peter Hobbs. The two sentences quoted above from Montford’s book, so fundamental a step in checking results, literally leapt off the page since that is exactly where the most basic replication starts, and where we always began in our cloud seeding (CS) reanalyses.

In our re-evaluation of perhaps the most important randomized wintertime cloud seeding experiments ever conducted, those at Climax, Colorado, 1961-1970, we started with the raw data that the experimenters said they had used. This was precipitation measurements at the cloud seeding target gage that were taken by an independent organization and archived by NOAA, thus making it publicly available. The experimenters high lighted this independence in their publications.

But when those values from NOAA were used in the re-evaluation of those Climax experiments, discrepancies were found, just as Montford reports that Steve McIntyre found so often in his proxy raw data examinations. In our case, the seeded days generally had more snow in the experimenters’ data at the NOAA target gage, and control days less than was actually the case according to the NOAA data. Furthermore, these discrepancies were only observed in the second “confirmatory” experiment (1966-1970) on the days that were supposed to respond the most to seeding. In our re-evaluation of the second experiment (aka, Climax II) the use of the NOAA precipitation values, along with other data corrections, degraded the results so badly that they did not confirm the first five season experiment after all. The experimenters had previously reported that Climax II had been a confirmation of the first (aka, Climax I) experiment.

As one might imagine, the initial reports of a the “confirmation” of the earlier “exploratory” CS experiment gave those two experiments together a great deal of caché as strong evidence that snow could be increased on a determinant basis through wintertime cloud seeding. And they were cited as having done so by the prestigious National Academy of Sciences Panel on Climate and Weather Modification in 1974. (As an interesting aside, the NAS Panel was also concerned at that time about the “…recent equatorward shift in ice boundaries.”)

Further work “de-constructing” those experiments at Climax, that is, the discovery of more discrepancies, can be found here.

Eventually the experimenters acknowledged the source of their errors in precipitation at the target gage in a journal exchange in 1995.

Epilogue

However, unlike the situation that McIntyre repeatedly encounters in Montford’s HSI account, where climate researchers refuse to honor requests for raw data, in our re-analysis of cloud seeding experiments in Colorado, the experimenters at Colorado State University were totally cooperative in supplying data that was occasionally requested by the present writer. They did this even though they KNEW that the requestor was a critic/skeptic, might challenge their earlier results. To their great credit, the ideals of science were given a higher priority than their egos by those at CSU and that finding problems and discrepancies were recognized as a way of advancing science, not hindering it.

The FAA and the Ideals of Science

Today, its not unusual to see researchers publishing seemingly important findings in journals accompanied by a global news release at the time the article appears. At this point, such research has perhaps been reviewed prior to journal publication by only several individuals.

However, it has become fairly common for researchers asscociated with globally impactful findings to withhold methodologies that led to them. The natural result, particularly in the climate change domain, is a firestorm since critics in that research domain are SURE that there are misdeeds or errors due to “confirmation bias.”

An example in point is the important “Hockey Stick” paper by Mann et al. 1998 (Nature), one that was to have tremendous influence before it could be checked by outsiders on how exactly it came about. This paper showed a sharp rise in global temperatures during the past 30-40 years, one commensurate with the thought that rising CO2 concentrations were already having a noticeable effect on global temperatures. Eventually, a number of errors were found in this paper, and the Hockey Stick, as presented, was thrown in doubt. It should be kept in mind, however, that just because the original paper was flawed, that there is not going to be such a rise–the author tends to agree with this proposition that global temperatures will gradually rise in the future.

This long, tortured chapter involving the “Hockey Stick” should not have happened. It was clearly due to the original researchers believing that their results were too important for others to learn how they got them. Sadly, in this writer’s opinion, it is a position of the National Science Foundation well that researchers can hide their methodologies and the exact data they used under a “proprietary” umbrella. A scientific horror story in concerning the Hockey Stick has been laid out in detail by A. W. Montford, in “The Hockey Stick Illusion”, a book I highly recommend.

Withholding methodologies and data suggests that something is wrong with the outcome of the research, and, furthermore, is anti-science. Imagine, a lab announces that it has cured cancer, but can’t tell us exactly how they did it, and so no one can replicate their results! In the domain of medicine, this would be a ludicrous, surreal example; it wouldn’t happen. It should not happen in the important climate change domain, either.

On the other hand, the view that opening the door to skeptics of your work can lead to a lessening of conflict in research domains, and even more likely, an improvement in the robustness of the orignal work, is one that is shared by numerous scientists.

Who among us as science workers, is so arrogant that we think our work cannot be improved upon?

While we depend on peer-review to catch errors, it has been this writer’s experience that hundreds of pages of peer-reviewed literature in the domain of cloud seeding research can reach the journals and stand untouched, uncritiqued for years at a time. This is because peer-review in conflictive environments can easily fail with soft reviews by advocates of the conclusions being reached in a manuscript. No scientist reading this doubts this.

The Federal Aviation Administration is fully aware of the hazards of “soft reviews”. The attached statement at left concerning work on the writer’s former research aircraft at the University of Washington might well be a metaphor for our science environment. “….there will be a paper trail.” “…there will be an inspection by someone other than the person doing the work.”

We all know that these kinds of rules established by the FAA is to protect us from plane crashes. But imagine, that there is no “paper trail”, no documentation of what’s in and what’s off the aircraft! That’s how we get journal “plane crashes.”

It is the same with journal articles on scientific results. How our results were arrived at is mandatory for purposes of replication, of which the first, most basic step is to use exactly the methodologies and data that the original researcher (s) claimed they used and see if you get the same result.