A short rant about another “hide the decline” incident in the climate domain with a short rebuttal

Advisory

If you are queasy, don’t like reading about what the author perceives as “broken science”, hit the back button now.

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Background:

1)  The “Hide the decline” phrase alluded to in the title above came out of the “climategate” e-mails.  Specifically, “hiding the decline” was about  climate scientists deliberately hiding a recent divergence between tree ring widths, ones that they were using as temperature proxies for a record of the past climate over many hundreds of years,  and measured temperatures over the past 50 years or so.  Those miscreant scientists wanted to hide a divergence in those two parameters;  namely, the tree ring widths were not responding in the same way in modern times as those scientists had assumed they did over in their past temperature reconstruction.  This divergence, or as they called it, a “decline” in the quality of the relationship between those two parameters was embarassing because if it was pointed out, it would have raised the need for tricky discussions about the use of tree rings to reconstruct the past several hundred years of temperature.  (Please read The Hockey Stick Illusion by A. W. Montford and Climategate–The Crutape Letters by Steven Mosher and Thomas W. Fuller,  for the awful details about what these climate scientists were doing.)

2)  Point of view of the writer:  Still on the GW bandwagon, if grudgingly, due to the erosion of ideals of science in that domain.  What are those ideals?  Go to the NAS and their pub, “On Being a Scientist“, a primer for those considering a science career.  There are some senior scientists in the climate domain who need to go back and read this.

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Complaint Department

Another apparent “hide the decline” chapter in addition to the one described above has just been encountered by the author when a friend sent a link to the University of Alaska’s website on climate change.

What “decline” was hidden you ask?  The temperature one since the 1920s and 1930s in AK.

http://www.atmos.washington.edu/marka/tmean.alaska.annual.1925-1976.gif

Now the plot for the period of supposed fast runnup of temperatures due to CO2, the “blade” of the infamous “Hockey Stick” for AK after 1976:

http://www.atmos.washington.edu/marka/tmean.alaska.annual.1977-2010.gif

See anything going on there with the temperature?  Where’s the “blade”, the sharp runnup in temperatures at these sites?

Nope, you don’t see anything going on except for three very warm years in the early 2000s followed by cooler years up to the present.

So why would the University of Alaska edit their temperature record on the web to show only a rise in temperature that begins with the cold-in-the-Arctic spell of the late 1940s and 1950s, and omit the earlier warm spell in Alaska?  Perhaps they want the public to think that no one had a thermometer before 1950 in Alaska.  It would seem like it.

But, in reality, of course, just as the “hide the decline” climate scientists tried to avoid tricky discussions about tree rings and temperatures, ones that would inevitably lead to unsatisfactory conclusions, the folks at the U of AK apparently decided that they did not want the public who visit their web site to know that it was quite warm in Alaska prior to the late 1940s, indeed warmth that rivals the warmth of the 1990s into the early 2000s.

How would they explain that warmth?  Not very easily because then natural variations in temperature, ones that are not explicable today, would have to be addressed head on.  This would raise havoc with their “straw man” simple rise in temperature graph that begins in the 1950s in an apparent attempt to demonstrate the monolithic effect of global warming in Alaska.

To reprise a comment I left weeks ago on Judy Curry’s Climate Etc web site, this except from the Federal Trade Commission on deception in the consumer realm.  It should be applied to science reporting, and I am fervently hoping that the American Meteorological Society will adopt this in the Code of Ethics (aka, “Guidelines for Professiosnal Conduct”).  The  FTC statement below, re-written for science,  is being considered by the AMS for inclusion in their Guidelines:

“Certain elements undergird all deception cases. First, there must be a representation, omission or practice that is likely to mislead the consumer.”

When I see a graph like the one shown on the U of AK climate website it makes me think that today we are better protected as consumers of goods than we are as “consumers” of science.

The U of AK temperature graph is clearly meant to “mislead” those ignorant of the AK climate prior to 1949.  Good, conscientious science MANDATES that all of the data be shown on an educational site like that at the U of AK.  After that, they can show any graph they want, including the edited temperature graph that begins in 1949.  Then, if they can, explain why the edited one is so much better than showing ALL OF THE TEMPERATURE DATA THEY HAVE.  No one would have a problem with that.

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Acknowledgements:  The graphs of Arctic temperatures that are contrasted with that shown on the U of AK website are due to Mark Albright who has unceasingly worked to “clarify” so many dubious/exaggerated climate claims out there.  Mark is something of a hero to me for this work.  As are other scrutinizers of climate claims and data like McIntrye, Montford, Watts, Michaels, Ballinger, Judy Curry, Lindzen, Pielke, Sr., Jr. and so many more for their courage in taking on dubious “fire in the theatre” climate science claims in the first place.  We are all the better off for it, even those of us like me who still think that we have a gradually “global warming” future ahead with natural meanderings along the way.

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Comment received at Word Press by someone not selling me something about this “rant”.  This expert says that I went too far re U of AK and GW.  Must be posted since it makes some astute observations that I missed in my “heat”, so here it is.

“if you read the text on the university of Alaska’s web-site on “temperature change in Alaska” you’ll see that they emphasize the step-like change in the late 1970s and the PDO — and contrast this with what you might expect as a consequence of increasing trends in CO2 concentrations:

“Considering just a linear trend can mask some important variability characteristics in the time series. The figure at right shows clearly that this trend is non-linear: a linear trend might have been expected from the fairly steady observed increase of CO2 during this time period. The figure shows the temperature departure from the long-term mean (1949-2009) for all stations. It can be seen that there are large variations from year to year and the 5-year moving average demonstrates large increase in 1976. The period 1949 to 1975 was substantially colder than the period from 1977 to 2009, however since 1977 little additional warming has occurred in Alaska with the exception of Barrow and a few other locations. The stepwise shift appearing in the temperature data in 1976 corresponds to a phase shift of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation from a negative phase to a positive phase. Synoptic conditions with the positive phase tend to consist of increased southerly flow and warm air advection into Alaska during the winter, resulting in positive temperature anomalies.“

Doesn’t sound like they are trying to sell the idea of anthropogenic climate change to me, but maybe that’s just me.
There are some locations with Alaska station data that begin prior to the 1940s,  you can access some of these from the Alaska Climate Research Center’s web-site at:

Climate change: what they were saying, 1974

An early anticipation of a possible climate castastrophy

One of the great books of our time on weather modification and climate change came out in 1974:  Weather and Climate Modification by Wiley-Interscience Press. It was edited by Wilmot N. Hess, Director of the Environmental Research Labs under NOAA.   Hess oversaw 11 ERL programs.   The contributors to this book read like a who’s who of those fields back then.   The discussion of climate and climate change in this volume involves Joseph Smagorinsky on Global Atmospheric Modeling and the Numerical Simulation of Climate, Les Machta and  K. Telegadas on Inadvertent Large Scale Weather Modification, and Helmut Landsberg on Inadvertent Atmospheric Modification through Urbanization–the heat island phenomena.  The book was reviewed by numerous equally outstanding scientists of that era, some of whom are still active today.  In re-reading this volume, meant to bring a sophisticated lay audience up to date on progress in these fields in 1974, I came across this introduction to Section F on global climate, likely written by Hess,  p631-632.  Please pay particular attention to the phrase below, “..the majority of participants…” at the end of the first paragraph.

I only point this out because there has been a bit of an attempt to “re-write history” regarding what our best scientists were thinking in those days when the earth’s temperature was in decline, one that began around 1940 or so, a decline that continued into the 1970s with no explanation and counter to increases in CO2 concentrations of those days.  Much WAS published concerning CO2 and about its global warming affect, but it wasn’t being observed.  Mostly, it was just EASY to perturb the atmosphere in the crude models with something like CO2 with its well-known radiative attributes, hence, maybe get a publication.   However, not much else was known about what perturbed the exceedingly complex global climate system and caused the modest temperature meanderings, such as those shown in the third insert.

Yes, its true.   Back then (late 60s into the 70s) we were starting to think about global cooling in a visceral way based on obs.

When I say, “we”,  I am not referring to myself; I was merely a forecaster-meteorologist with in a large randomized cloud seeding experiment in those days in Durango, Colorado.  Weather and Climate Modification was important to me in the years after 1974 because of the sections on cloud seeding, not because of the climate change discussion here which I have re-discovered.  (Please excuse the highlighting, done decades ago.)

Below (third insert) is the northern and southern hemisphere’s mean temperature record as deduced by NOAA’s J. Murray Mitchell in those days; these charts appear on  p719 of this volume, and were well known at the time.  Its easy to see from these graphs why there was so much concern about global cooling in those days when you look at the decline in both hemispheric temperatures after 1940.

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Another bit of interest today is the essay by Machta and Telegadas (Chapter 19, p687) in this book.  Their essay concludes with a summary by H. H. Lamb  (a well-known East Anglia University climate researcher) that contains predictions of NATURAL (emphasized by the present writer)  climatic changes and a brief evaluation of those predictions.

What was particularly remarkable was the evaluation, apparently by Lamb, in the section, “Actual Forecasts“.   In this section, seven attempts to forecast the future climate from periodicities deduced in past data are briefly evaluated.   In today’s lingo, some of these efforts might be called early detections of pressure “oscillations”, that is,  shifts in modes of circulation patterns, where high and low pressures like to reside (footnote).  These “actual forecasts”, ones that appeared in the journal literature, were based on such parameters as changes in circulation patterns deduced over decades, patterns in oxygen and hydrogen isotope ratios in ice cores that were then subject to Fourier analysis,  climate forecasts based on projected sunspot activity, another on particle radiation from expected solar flares, patterns of “meridionality” or, north and south components in the wind, and “local” circulation patterns over Europe, and that latter in a paper published in 1939!  And, of course, the old standby,  tree ring patterns, again looking for harmonics or cycles in those data.   Most of this kind work, deducing cycles in past data in the way that it was done in these papers would be taken with a grain of salt, or not taken seriously at all.

SO, WHY even mention these studies?

Lamb finds most of the predictions were CORRECT in anticipating the colder weather ahead over coming decades after these studies were published!  Its really stupefying to read this section today and see an assessment of “correct” assigned to these forecasts based on no real underlying physical mechanism, such as why did the wind, the pressure pattern change, or on sunspots?  (It was interesting to note that the sunspot based forecast was deemed “correct” for weather, but totally wrong on sunspot activity!)

Well, it does make one wonder how these forecasts could have been correct.  Were a few researchers on to something that we have missed, or have also “re-discovered”, framing our findings today in more sophisticated terms such as “oscillations” instead of “cycles”?

Or were these forecasts “correct” because they were the only ones of hundreds of such forecasts (in which it would be expected that a few would be “correct” just by chance)?   The authors of this Chapter 19 do not divulge how many forecasts were examined.

However, those early forecasts based on circulation pattern changes over decades, should grab the attention of today’s “oscillators” if they haven’t already.

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Footnote:  It sometimes seems as though almost every climate researcher today has his own personal “oscillation”, from the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, North Atlantic Oscillation, Arctic Oscillation, Southern Oscillation, on and on.  More will be reported.  (Maybe I should have one!)  ((Actually, I do have my own climate oscillation, but its not been published, probably never will be.))

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yet another nice sunset

This shot, yesterday just after 7 PM.  Light snow (virga) is falling from relatively thick Altocumulus (opacus) clouds.  Just above the horizon you can see some little turrets poking up from a row of cloud bases making those  clouds Altocumulus castellanus.

Bases of these clouds, according to the balloon data obtained from Tucson Int AP indicated that the bases of these clouds were at about 13,000 feet above us here in Catalina, and the temperature was about 15 degrees F (about -10 C).  The tops of the clouds were about 18,000 feet above us, or at a chilly -5 F (-20 C), hence the thin, red-orange curtains of light snow illuminated by the setting sun below these clouds.

The clearing on the horizon marked the last of this “mid-level” moisture that streamed over us here in Catalina yesterday as an upper level bend in the winds, called a “trough” was passing by.

Below is a weather map of the winds (blowing along the green lines) at around 30,000 feet (300 “millibars” of pressure) and the clouds as shown on the satellite imagery.   If you look closely where the TUS data is, you can see a little fluff of cloud that made our sunset. A loop of the whole sequence can be found here from our friends at the University of Washington Huskies’ Department of Atmospheric Sciences.

Speaking of the Huskies, here’s what it was like today in Seattle, my former home.

The end.

 

“Pretty in Pink”

Well, “tending” toward pink, anyway…  But who remembers the Psychedelic Furs and what their song title alluded  anyway?  Of course, no one.  But I liked its dark sound.   Oh, well.

But here it is, that “pretty in pink” sky (2 shots) from yesterday evening in case you missed it.  Again these are Cirrus and Altostratus ice clouds with an isolated exception of Altocumulus lenticularis (just above horizon in the second shot), which is composed of droplets.  The second photo is a zoomed shot of the stack (several pancakes on top of one another) of a lenticular cloud off to the NW of Catalina.

Those lenticular clouds should always bring some excitement that things are changing, maybe heading toward a rain situation.   Rain did fall in the northern third of AZ when these Ac len clouds were present yesterday evening.

Why the excitement?

While these clouds don’t rain themselves, they are usually precursors of rain situations in the region because they illustrate that the winds aloft are relatively strong, the air in the “mid-levels” (roughly 10 to 20 thousand feet above the ground) has some moisture, and they indicate the kind of “stable” conditions in the mid-levels in their flatness, “pancaked-ness”, that precedes fronts.  Of course, we also had those moderate SW winds yesterday that also indicates that “something is going on”.

And something was going on as a cold front traversed the Great Basin yesterday.  Even this morning there is still precip in NW New Mexico as of 6:30 AM LST this morning.

And how do we know a new air mass came by?

The temperature change over the last 24 hours, from yesterday at this time to today at this time is one of the best ways of keeping track of fronts and changes in air masses.   Here is a plot of that 24 h change.  As you can see, the drop in temperature, while it has occurred at my gravel driveway (-5 F) is not quite here in Catalina (though it really is) according to the venerable The Weather Channel’s data which does not have my data (or pressure trace which has the usual sharp rise following a cold front–that heavier, denser, cold air is pushing down on all of us this morning and on my aneroid (not a body part, but a name for a barometer, BTW.)

The last shot here is what the clouds looked like before sunset.  Lots of gray indicating they are quite thick and fall into the Altostratus category even though they are very high.  Cirrus, by definition, cannot have this much grayness.  But, when you see this kind of  late afternoon sky, you can almost always count on a great evening scene, that sky especially “pretty in pink.”

Don’t see too many misspelled words, bad sentence structure and other grammatical lapses so will post this now…

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In case you missed it…yesterday morning’s sunrise

A belated post, to be sure

Yesterday morning’s sounding when the Altocumulus clouds were overhead.  Bases about -18 C, tops -27 C.  Lots of ice visible along with widespread virga.  Whenever you see this much ice in small Altocumulus clouds like these, you should automatically assume that the temperature at the top is less than -20 C.

Usefulness of this information in everyday conversation, a module I call,  “Conversational Meteorology.”

The scene:  you’re walking/hiking with a friend on a warm morning when sunrise occurs.  You see these clouds.  The conversation has died off since you’ve been walking for several hours. You’re looking for something to say to re-energize the conversation.  Suddenly, you look up and see this scene below and blurt out, “Man, those clouds are cold!”  The volume of your blurtation has surprised even you, and startles your friend who was thinking about that tortoise on the trail ahead of you.  You rattle on about how cold the clouds with a followup, “Man, they must be at least colder than -20 C!”  Your friend seems puzzled at your excitement, but listens politely’ after all he is your friend.  You quickly add, “Almost every cloud has some snow coming out of it, no matter how small it is! Wow!”  Your friend, now saturated with your exuberances, asks if you saw the last episode of NCIS last night?

The end.

 

Altocumulus overhead; sunrise photo op coming

An upper level disturbance is going to pass over us today (see map with bend in the winds at 30,000 feet coming toward us here), but the only thing we’ll notice is some nice Altocumulus clouds floating over followed by a clearing later on today.  Those clouds are overhead now in the pre-dawn hours, we’ll likely have another one of those gaudy, too-colorful-to-be-believed-like-one-of-those-velvet-art-pieces-sold-on-street-corners-sunrises that we are known for here in AZ.  Might even have a little virga with them.   Lucky us!  So you should have your camera battery charged up in case this one’s really good!  You’ll want to add to your collection of 78,000 or so fabulous sunrises and sunsets in Catalina, AZ…like I will.

Note, too, that in this depiction of winds (the wind is flowing along the lines) that where the wind has a “U” shape, there are clouds to the east of those bends for the most part, that is, ahead of where that “U” shape in the winds is headed, and not much to its rearward, or in most cases, immediately to the west of the “U” bends in the winds.  We will see the “ahead” portion of a “U” in the winds above us, and the clearing that comes afterward, all today!

The end (for now).

 

How Cirrus clouds grow up to be “uncinus” ones

What a glorious day yesterday was, if about 20 degrees F below normal!  So much new snow on the Catalinas down to such low elevations for almost mid-April.   Some sites in the Catalina Mountains reported over an inch of water content in that snow!  Yay!  Here in Catalina we had a bountiful 0.69 inches, more just to the north and west.  Choose April 9th, and “Tucson” in drop down menu on this U of AZCats rain page to see the amounts around here.  Truly a remarkable storm for April.

About those Cirrus “uncinus” clouds

How many saw those fabulous Cirrus clouds in the morning?  Once in awhile, during the passage of Cirrus clouds you get to see how those long, delicate strands you often see by themselves, get that way, from their initial appearance to the end point;  the long strands.  Usually you can’t because Cirrus clouds are traveling so rapidly up there at 30,000 feet or so that they have gone over the horizon before much happens.   Yesterday, an example of that “life cycle” passed overhead, moving from the W to the E at about 70-80 mph or so.   In all of the photos below, the subject Cirrus cloud is in the upper right part of the photo.

Here then is most of the life cycle of a Cirrus cloud as it happened over Catalina.  The starting point is that whitist cluster of little cloudlets, upper right.   Those strands of Cirrus below that and that appear in rows to the lower left, are old dying cirrus clouds at the end of their life cycle.   That top cluster in 1) has just appeared, probably only about 10 min old, and now the larger ice crystals are JUST beginning to leave the origin zone, much like a hiker reeling out rope to a friend stuck on a rock below.  Those strands are like that rope having been let go of, then caught by the wind on its way down and stretched to full length while falling through the air.   The remaining photos 3)-overhead view and 4)–leaving the scene, show that process continuing as the top cluster fades with longer and longer filaments of ice.  In 4), you can see one strand in a side view as it speeds away revealing the lack of wind shear (changes in wind direction and speed) in the layer in which the cloudlets first formed.  How do I and you know that?  That one tiny filament that is straight up and down pretty much reveals that

You can now see how and why these delicate strands are there.  Each long “rope” of ice represents one of the initial tufts that appeared within the cluster; each one has a contribution to make, a “rope” of ice to send downward.  Almost always, except in deep storms, the strand of ice encounters drier and drier air and the crystals fall at lower and lower speeds until its negligible.   The bottom, or lowest part of these strands then, have the tiniest of ice crystals, and the tail of the strand at this lowest point may appear almost horizontal if you could be up there.

The end.

1)


“Stuck Inside of Tucson with the Seattle Blues Again”

Paraphrasing Bob Dylan’s song title, one that had the line, “Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again”, that great, driving song he did in the 1960s.  See photos of Seattle-like conditions of low-based Nimbostratus below with a temperature of only  37 F (!) right now in Catalina!  Egad.   As you can also see, after 0.39 inches of rain up until about 11:30 AM this morning, there is also some flooding going on.

(Of course, me and most Arizonans really LOVE rain; it’s to be treasured at all times!  In Seattle, where I just spent three weeks, not so much.)

Local weather for Catalina here.

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Some iridescence with your clouds? And a photo comparison of our current droughty conditions compared to last April’s green

Yes, we had some yesterday evening in those Altocumulus lenticularis clouds or just “clouds” for most of you.  This delicate “rainbow” coloring in last evening’s clouds is due to the diffraction of light around really small cloud droplets, ones that have just formed, a few microns to 1o microns or so in diameter.  Because the droplets have to be “really small” to produce this effect, iridescence is almost always located at the upwind edge of clouds that thicken downwind, as these do.  It was more colorful than I could photograph, but here are a couple of shots of that phenomenon we call cloud iridescence, or irisation:

By the way, the winds at cloud level here (around 2o -22 kft above the ground and at -30 C or so) were just about 100 mph (85 knots) at this time as that huge trough over southern California edges closer to us.  Unfortunately, it is “ejected” to the northeast out of southern Cal this morning and that means that this whole upper level system will be moving faster and faster as it moves toward Arizona and then into the Plains States.  That means that the band of rain generated with this system will be moving through at a faster pace and for that reason won’t produce as much rain as it might have if the system was not speeding up.  Still, looks like we should get, here in Catalinaland, around a quarter to half an inch.  Very exciting, since it will do what vegetation we have some good.

Free range grazing land now down to about just dirt, as little of the spring grasses have poked up before being ravaged by hungry cattle and native wildlife.  Kinda depressing after last spring’s bountiful display of grasses and wildflowers.  I have contrasting photos below as well.  You won’t like what you see in this comparison because it brings our droughty winter into sharp focus.   What is nice about our desert is that the mesquite and acacia bushes/ trees don’t seem to care how dry it is and are still are intensely green this time of the year, some consolation for the lack of green elsewhere.

You also may be struck by how tall I am, perhaps I played basketball in college you wonder.   In the first photo illustrating the dry conditions, I am apparently several feet taller than my wife, Judy, who walks ahead of me with Zuma, one of our dogs.  I guess I could have been on stilts, but I am actually on our horse, Jake, and am not that tall FYI.

The end.

 

 

Cirrus uncinus display; the tops of storms made visible

First, some instructional material:  You should be looking for your camera now, as seen in the first shot! Those Cirrus clouds to the SW are moving at you rapidly (95 kts, 115 mph at 30-35 Kft ASL!), and so there’s not much time!  In this first shot you can already detect some Cirrus uncinus, Cirrus clouds with hooked, or tufted tops in the center, with long icy strands trailing to the left. At this point perspective makes them bunch together so that they may not appear that “photogenic.”  However, just wait!  And, it was worth waiting just a few minutes for.

Take a lot at which they looked like passing overhead in the second and third shots, only about 7 minutes later. Just magnificent, some of the best Cirrus uncinus examples I have seen.

What is interesting about these clouds is that you are getting a glimpse of the structure of “stratiform”–that is, steady rain and snow storms that happen every day around the world, except that here in these photos,  you are only seeing examples of the very tops of them. Those widespread rainy/snowy storms are usually packed with thousands of these kinds of clouds in a solid overcast up there, each “cell” shedding tiny ice crystals which then waft their way down, growing, perhaps merging into “aggregates” of ice crystals we call snowflakes, and, that most of the time except in Wisconsin in the winter, melt into raindrops as they fall below the melting level.  Chances are, our little snowstorm of a few days ago had tops just like this.

Sometimes, clouds like these, and returns from vertically-pointed radars that can detect clouds like these, are referred to as “generating cells”, for obvious reasons.  The trails you see here are clearly visible on very sensitive “cloud sensing” radars–they are not visible on “First Alert” Doppler style radars and such used by the NWS because the ice crystals are too small at this point to produce a return on “normal” radars.  These cells form in a relatively shallow layer that usually lacks wind shear, likely mixed out by the little up and downdrafts in it.  Its only after the crystals fallout that they encounter wind shear and end up being stretched out into “tails” as here.

Falling from heights of 30,000 feet takes a long time, for an ice crystal falling at only around 0.5 meters per second or around 1.5  ft a second or even less.  It will take  LONG time for anything to reach the ground, perhaps 2-3 hours to reach the melting level.  So the little generating cell that produced a ice crystals at the top of major storms that grow and merge into snowflakes is likely over Alamosa, CO, and points northeastward by the time that flake landed on you at the ground with upper level winds such as we had yesterday.

I think its kind of interesting, but I may be the only one!

The end.