Weather Chat Megathread

[Green Baron]

3 minutes ago, tater said:

it's hazy in ABQ today, there must be a fire someplace (forest fire).

 

Oops, the helicopters where flying yesterday here. Now it is partly cloudy and the sky above is deep blue. Might mount the telescope tonight :-)

[tater]

What kinda helos? We have blackhawks, and some company (for filming?) uses a huey. Also, the training squadron for Ospreys is here as well.

[tater]

34 minutes ago, Ten Key said:

Sandy had sustained winds of about 80 mph at landfall-- the change in the color of the track on that map you linked denotes a transition to an extratropical cyclone, not a downgrade to a tropical depression. 

The problem with Sandy was its large wind field and high rate of speed leading up to landfall. The position markers on the image below are at six hour intervals.

You can see how the storm picked up speed in the 24 hours prior to landfall. This, combined with landfall coming near high tide, produced significant storm surge across a wide area of coast line.  

Office of the NJ State Climatologist:

http://climate.rutgers.edu/stateclim/?target=sandy

Only shows max gusts, not sustained. Some were in the 80s (gusts) one gust exceeded 90. Hard to imaging sustained hurricane winds, and gusts are mostly all below that speed. Note the title: "Post Tropical Storm Sandy Event Overview" Tropical storm, not hurricane---according to the State where it hit.

 

[Green Baron]

20 minutes ago, tater said:

What kinda helos? We have blackhawks, and some company (for filming?) uses a huey. Also, the training squadron for Ospreys is here as well.

For fire fighting and environmental things (BRIF brigade de incendios forestales). A Kamov (crashed last year while in several days long service, nobody hurt), was replaced but i don't know with what ... i must admit i don't know the other types.

But typing "helicopteros la palma" shows a few videos on youtube.

Ah: i found this: Sokol, sounds Russian, Bell 212, 412 ...

... i think they can't afford sexy Airbus industries curls ... :-)

[cubinator]

1 hour ago, tater said:

Perhaps we should consider "green" cities---actually green because of more plants per unit area than our current concrete, steel, and pavement cities. 

This would not only be healthy for the city, but it would also make it a lot prettier. I would love to see this happen on a wide scale.

[LordFerret]

2 hours ago, tater said:

- snip -

Perhaps we should consider "green" cities---actually green because of more plants per unit area than our current concrete, steel, and pavement cities. 

Note that such a building (high-rise) in low-lying areas would mitigate flooding damage as well---the bottom floors would be easy to clean/repair public spaces.

Interesting point. One of the new investments we're considering here is an indoor 'garden' center, which grows everything inside. The entire plant, several floors, is completely controlled in every aspect - light, humidity, temperature, water, you name it. The roof could (or would, or should) be covered in foliage as well. Google "Aerofarms".

 

2 hours ago, Ten Key said:

- snip -

You can see how the storm picked up speed in the 24 hours prior to landfall. This, combined with landfall coming near high tide, produced significant storm surge across a wide area of coast line.  

Precisely. In fact, the tide table for the day of landfall (if I recall correctly) was calling for a higher than typical high tide... the moon and all that. Some around here question the state of the beach itself being part of the reason certain conditions for damage existed. Our beaches have been rebuilt and reinforced so many times over the decades, man replacing what nature has stripped away by natural process... as if they know what they're doing.

 

2 hours ago, DarkOwl57 said:

When you start a war over global warming on accident 

You didn't start this. Trust me.

 

 

 

1 hour ago, tater said:

climate.rutgers.edu

Personally, I question anything that comes out of Rutgers.

[Cydonian Monk]

3 hours ago, LordFerret said:

And on that note, back to the weather in TX:

Just now heard on the news the first reports of receding waters; In one area anyway, other areas the problems are only now just starting.

As of an hour ago (when I drove through), Navasota was still flooded near the river (looked to be mostly farmland that was affected up there), and Cypress still had beaucoup standing water. Lots of wet bales of hay that are likely to catch fire in a couple weeks.

Can't even tell it rained where I am. The broom I left on my patio is a bit wet, but still standing right where I put it 27 days ago.

I got really lucky with this storm. Before I left Waco I bought a bunch of cleaning supplies, which I'll just go donate to someplace up here in Cypress since I'm not going to need them. 

Edited August 30, 2017 by Cydonian Monk

[RoadRunnerAerospace]

Watching tropical storm irma veeery closly

[LordFerret]

1 hour ago, Cydonian Monk said:

- snip -

I'm still waiting on an update from Austin. I'm not worried though; As the saying goes: No news is good news.

 

And for things unrelated.....

Climate models; None of them work backwards. That is to say, none of them can be run in reverse, taking present conditions, and been able to accurately show what's occurred.

Antarctic melting; When has the temperature anywhere in the Antarctic risen above freezing? Do you think maybe the ice is breaking off because the caps are getting so big, spreading out so far over open ocean?

Greenland had the coldest recorded temperature ever anywhere in the northern hemisphere this past July.

Those poor drowning Polar Bears; Canada will not put Polar Bears on the endangered species list because it turns out there's twice as many of them hanging around as were predicted by the "scientists".

 

It's stuff like this that gets me *Sadly shaking the head*

[ProtoJeb21]

5 hours ago, RoadRunnerAerospace said:

Watching tropical storm irma veeery closly

Same here. From what the models are showing right now, Irma has the potential to be like Irene (the name it replaced) or Katia of 2011. One way or another, it'll be an interesting storm to track.

[SaturnianBlue]

44 minutes ago, ProtoJeb21 said:

Same here. From what the models are showing right now, Irma has the potential to be like Irene (the name it replaced) or Katia of 2011. One way or another, it'll be an interesting storm to track.

Yikes! The new advisory is already predicting it to be the second major hurricane in a row, and it's shaping up to be a classic Cape Verde-type hurricane.

In the East Pacific...

That's a really big storm...

 

[tater]

What I was talking about up the thread:

The yellow blob in the gulf has a chance of forming into a TD.

[Green Baron]

9 hours ago, LordFerret said:

Climate models; None of them work backwards. That is to say, none of them can be run in reverse, taking present conditions, and been able to accurately show what's occurred.

That is weak argument and has nothing to do with the modeling of a possible future development. Nobody says the models are correct, but everybody is working hard to get data that suits for evaluation. And if i browse through the papers i see a constant development over the past 20 years that science is getting better, even emancipating from former influence at least in Europe and China. There is consensus and controversy and the people that discuss actually know what they are doing. I mean, you seem interested but also seem to have a pre-fabricated opinion. Maybe you should actually dive into publications on the subject, not from the news magazines but from AGU, EGU, USGS and other national services, Science, Nature, Nature Geoscience, Elsevier-Journals. There's where actual science takes place and is published.

Quote

Antarctic melting; When has the temperature anywhere in the Antarctic risen above freezing? Do you think maybe the ice is breaking off because the caps are getting so big, spreading out so far over open ocean?

You don't need +grades for melting. Dust on ice lowers albedo enabling the sun to melt the surface, local weather effects like foehn rise surface temperatures locally by 10-15 degrees C and the very dry air leads to sublimation (solid to gaseous without liquid in between). Increased movement of masses melts ground ice .... etc. Some of these effects are actually self-amplifying, positive feedbacks. Ground melting leads to higher movement speeds, surface thawing to higher environmental temp. as more soil is exposed, moisture and temp. differences drives local pressure and winds, could amplify the foehn. The water is carried in streams that quickly erode the ice surface ... and so on.

Quote

Greenland had the coldest recorded temperature ever anywhere in the northern hemisphere this past July.

Yeah, such thing make climate change deniers rejoice. But it was simply a local anomaly. Overall Greenland this year is as warm as never before and melting is accelerating, due to retreat in sea ice, surface melting, accelerated ice movement and insolation.

Quote

Those poor drowning Polar Bears; Canada will not put Polar Bears on the endangered species list because it turns out there's twice as many of them hanging around as were predicted by the "scientists".

Ursus maritimus. Endangered independently from Canada's politics.  Won't make it long the (sub-)species because it's niche, the habitat is dwindling. Say goodbye. I said Subspecies because they interbreed with the great brown bear.

Question: why do you scoff at scientists that way ? Are you a biologist that does related research ? Just a question so i know whom i'm battling with :-) From controversy can come new insight ...

 

Cheers, and no offense meant, only trying to reason.

 

Edited August 31, 2017 by Green Baron

[ProtoJeb21]

9 hours ago, SaturnianBlue said:

Yikes! The new advisory is already predicting it to be the second major hurricane in a row, and it's shaping up to be a classic Cape Verde-type hurricane.

In the East Pacific...

That's a really big storm...

 

Many of Irma's "spaghetti models" take it in the direction of the U.S. east coast and Atlantic Canada. A landfall anywhere from South Carolina to Nova Scotia is possible.

Lidia is actually as big as it looks. Tropical storm force winds extend a whopping 115 miles from the center, which is unusually large for an EPac cyclone.

[tater]

@Green Baron, it was not aimed at me, but I would perhaps use "scientists" in quotes for climate science, because it's a soft science, IMO. It;s not as soft as the social "sciences" (note the pattern in English of putting "science" after things that aren't, like political science, computer science, etc). I'm the first to admit that astronomy (my training) was pretty much a zeroith-order science until quite recently. It started as a sort of stellar zoology, and only became a harder science with the advent of the modern physics of stellar interiors, the sub-atomic physics required in peri-big bang cosmology, etc.

I see climate science as being in a similar position. The systems are incredibly complex, and the models are pretty bad currently. I think they don't seem to really grok accuracy and precision, and their proxy models for paleo temp seem to need huge uncertainties, and they never seem to propagate those properly in calculations.

You will see new and old historical temp data presented at absurd precisions (NASA GISS database uses 0.01 C) when the current requirement for precision is 0.5 C for instruments. We then see talk of fractional degree variance from running averages of temp. In short, they seem to use more significant figures than they should. 

I think that the modern satellite record at least provides continuous data that is comparable, and can do global averaging better than the discrete past measurements that must be turned into a global average only with many computational assumptions---and no good way to verify them, since "average temp" and "global average temp" have no physical reality, and cannot be directly measured. 

A precision model should be able to predict temperatures within it's stated precision at discrete points that map to their cell (they divide the earth into small areas to create global averages) scale size.

[DarkOwl57]

So I got a status update from my dad yesterday

My granddad (Who lives in the Beaumont area) is an island. Water is surrounding his house, but fortunately no water has gotten in.

My aunt (Who lives in Houston) Is just fine, but the roads around her neighborhood are swamped.

My second aunt (also in Houston) had to be boat rescued after 4 feet of water got in. 

[Green Baron]

In principle i aim at nobody :-)

It was a reply on the claim that polar bear population has doubled in the past, it has indeed halved since the 1980s and predictions are that the population will be down to a few refuges by the 2080 and extinct in Canada earlier. Canada wants to please the Inuit because they hunt polar bears, so it is mere politics by the country not to put the endangered species on "endangered" status. There was an USGS (your own countries geological survey) study, if you're interested you can find it. The wikipedia article doesn't seem to be that bad ... i don't trust wikipedia too much, you know :-).

I don not want to discuss the role of climate research and what is a "soft" and what is a "hard" science, that'll quickly lead on forbidden ground here and is in itself "soft" enough to leave room for too much personal interpretation, including sorting out "unconvenient" stuff as being "too soft". That doesn't bring us forward and keeps us turning in circles :-)

I would like to stick to publications and keep personal feelings aside. That includes documentation of current stati (statuses ?), development over the past, and also predictions for the future. The latter has shown to be extremely difficult but possible. Also it is becoming clearer that past predictions indeed were too conservative. 20 years ago, it was not assumed that Greenland or the Arctic could be completely free of ice in a foreseeable future, now it indeed seems as exactly this may happen rather sooner than later.

Satellites do fail as well, for example due to calibration errors, as has been the case with tracing sea level rise and the Antarctic ice shield growth. For sea level rise the models indeed had been better than satellite observations that were masked by volcanic ash and calibration errors. I can't find the papers now, but if you search you may be lucky. It is now clear that sea level rise, in unison with ice melting, is indeed faster than predicted and accelerating. NOAA has popular science excerpts on it.

As to precision: well, single measurements may have higher tolerances, but over time and many measurements the tolerances correct themselves out. If you have many measurements A and many B then the difference between the median of A and B will be very exact, much more than a single A and B where the one could be biased to lower and the other to higher values.

To the weather: it is not the rise by 10-20 inches, it is the occurrence of events that carry much more energy than the past average (hurricanes, taifuns, monsoons, ...) that endanger property and lives and Harvey fits right in. That is not a new insight. The curve is shiftet to the right, with extremes reaching farer out of the bell shape.

More.

It is not a joke, denialism (that called so ?) is futile :-/

Edit: you guys cost time, i hope you value that !

Have a nice one :-)

Edited August 31, 2017 by Green Baron

[DarkOwl57]

GODDANGIT I STARTED GLOBAL WAR-MING

[tater]

@Green Baron, I don't like the word/concept of "denialism." It is inherently derogatory, when I think that reasonable people can hold views within a space that aggressive proponents might call denial or accepting, depending on what side they are on. I'm in that gray area.

Feynman said, "When a scientist does not know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty damn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress, we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty— some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.”

The failure of climate science is claiming certainty, which immediately sets off my alarm bells. This is why the subject is rightfully a problem here, because certainty is often politics or religion, not science.

[SaturnianBlue]

Hurricane Irma has skipped category one status and gone right to a category 2 with 100 mph winds and 979 millibars. Just a day ago, Irma's winds were half that—definitely undergoing rapid intensification, and I expect to see a major hurricane by the day's end. The NHC's predicting a category 4 in 5 days.

Edited August 31, 2017 by SaturnianBlue

[ProtoJeb21]

Irma has just rapidly intensified into a Category 2 hurricane. Without any more rapid intensification, it will become a Cat 4 by Monday. However, if this RI trend continues, it has a shot of becoming a Cat 5!

Edit: Ninja'd by @SaturnianBlue

Edited August 31, 2017 by ProtoJeb21

[DarkOwl57]

IALDSHGDAI;LSHFJLKSAHDJLSAKH;LFHKSAHDGPANIC

[tater]

Wow, I hope none of you guys live in the affected region...

[ProtoJeb21]

5 minutes ago, tater said:

Wow, I hope none of you guys live in the affected region...

There's a chance I may get hit by Hurricane Irma. It looks like it may turn out like Hurricane Irene or Hurricane Isabel. That's not good news, since we just HAD a multi-billion dollar major hurricane in the United States. The good news is that any American landfall won't be until late next week or the week after. 

[Green Baron]

22 minutes ago, tater said:

The failure of climate science is claiming certainty, which immediately sets off my alarm bells. This is why the subject is rightfully a problem here, because certainty is often politics or religion, not science.

Climate science does not do such a thing. If a scientist does then he/she deserves the above quotation marks. Any serious publication names uncertainties and makes clear where it hypothesises, how data was collected and processed and cites correctly knowledge it is based upon. Maybe not always right in the abstract cause these are meant to be the core statements and nothing more.

Journals, and that is besides the peer review process their greatest advantage, have strict specifications and rules on the form of a submission, how to cite, etc. pp..

This latest paper i read in ice sheets even mentions the hypothesis in the abstract: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v547/n7661/full/nature22996.html?foxtrotcallback=true

Edit: black sheep are existent, but rare.

Edited August 31, 2017 by Green Baron