LOCAL VIEW –How Humid Was It?–

Certain comedians train their audiences  to respond to a statement such as, “Lord, was it ever hot!” with a chorus of voices that all chime in with, “How hot was it?” Then they say something very funny.

But this is serious, man, serious! I have never seen humidity like this, up here in New Hampshire. And, Oh yes, folk down south will call me a wimp. I did live in South Carolina for a summer. But up here we are not accustomed to dew points over 70°. We hardly bother with air conditioners. Usually a dew point of 70º at sunset results in a heavy fog or even drenching drizzle by dawn, as our nighttime temperatures attempt to sink past the dew point to our typical, comfortable 60º. But this year?

I never saw this coming, because the summer began bone dry. Every drop of rain was wrung from clouds by mountains to our west. I was a bit snidely pleased, for even though stuff in the garden was stunted, so were the weeds. (I have no time for weeding.)

But then the pattern shifted, and rather than moisture being wrung out by higher hills to our west, we ourselves are the higher hills, wringing moisture  from the flatlands to our south. The forecast would be for scattered clouds, but we’d see this:

And then see this:

The lightning flickering about in the clouds makes these raindrops rich in nitrogen, which is a royal pain. For every inch it makes my vegetables grow it makes the weeds grow a foot. And I have no time for weeding, for all the rain means I have to mow the grass. I also have to attend to the pool, which the nitrogen-rich rain turns a vivid green.

How humid is it? It’s so humid it’s stupid,  for it seems stupid to me that it is more important to add algeacide to a pool than to weed my own garden. But our Childcare needs the pool to cool the kids, in hot, muggy weather. And it is the Childcare, not the farm, that brings home the bacon.

The irony burns a bit. The USA was initially a nation of farmers, but now nobody can afford to farm. (Not that many want to.) Something other than the garden provides the food.

As a man who is basically a survivalist, and has very little confidence in the government’s ability to handle finances, who foresees a day when there will be no way for taxpayers to pay all the welfare dependents and pensioners the government has  promised to pay, (whereupon there will either be no checks issued or rampant inflation), I suspect a day will come when food might be in short supply.

My view of history suggests there tends to be a breakdown of the infrastructure that mass-produces food on mega-farms and delivers it to cities, when a crisis occurs. Even if bread is available no one can afford it when hyper inflation makes it cost $100,000,000.00 a loaf.  Then the government tends to step in, thinking it can organize, and history demonstrates what occurs is a loss of initiative: The Soviet Union’s “collective” farms saw potatoes rotting in piles as shortages existed in cities, but also saw a tiny segment of the population that was allowed to have small, “private” gardens produce a disproportionate amount of the food; as I recall the figures were something like 5% of the farmland, in small lots, was producing 25% of the food. I also heard an old Hungarian tell me that during the bad times of Hitler and Stalin “the cows wore golden chains”. Zimbabwe was the breadbasket of Africa until the government stepped in to make farms “fair”, whereupon there was famine.  Venezuela was well-fed before the government sought equity for all. And in these cases tiny farms step forward to do what the giants bungle.

Maybe I just have a puffed-up sense of my own importance, but I have decided I have to keep my tiny farm going even though I’m physically incapable of the labor.  My plan is to commercialize my writing so I can hire two hands next summer.  This year will be written off as “the year the weeds won.”

In any case, I’m trying to focus on writing more (and also a possible redesign of this website), and the last thing I want is rain making the grass grow fast, so I have to cut it more. Then I also faced quite a job trying to find bits of sunshine, so I could dry all the tarps and tents and canvas folding-chairs and sleeping bags from our deluge-camping. (I was paying for the vacation after it was over.)

All I really want is to sit back and nibble an eraser contemplatively,  but after camping my wife hits the ground running. She feels a vacation has involved far too much sitting-around, and has a whirlwind of social activity planned, and then I hear a shriek from the dining room. I stopped nibbling my eraser. Why?  Well, this you have just got to see:

How humid is it? It’s so humid the chairs get moldy. And rather than writing a great article, I find myself wiping down all the wooden furniture with a cloth dampened with vinegar, before the company arrives. I tell you, it’s rough, being a writer.

How humid is it? Well, we typically get a thundering downpour or two in the summer, with perhaps an inch or two of rain falling in a hurry, and the gutters are all full for an hour or so afterwards.  But usually that is that. However downpour has followed downpour, and a few places in the hills are approaching 24 inches of rain in just a couple of weeks.

Of course, this gets certain cats yowling about Global Warming, because everything, no matter what, is caused by that, in their world view. California mudslides? Global Warming. California wildfires? Global warming.

What I do is just try to look at the maps and see what actually occurring, avoiding the bias you get sucked into taking if you take a “side”. There are always places warmer than normal, and places colder than normal, and if you “take a side” you’ll focus on one and not the other. But let’s try to avoid that, and look at both. As most of the planet’s heat is locked up in the oceans, let’s start with the SST (Sea Surface Temperatures), and see whether they are above, or below, normal.

You may notice a red area off San Diego. The media has made a great deal about “record warm Pacific waters” there. But just south of it is a blue blob off Baja California. Any headlines about “record cold Pacific waters?” Or just crickets? Do you see how foolish this bias can appear?

Also notice the tropical Atlantic between Cuba and West Africa is all light yellow. Just a few weeks ago it was all light blue. Does this represent dramatic warming? No. In some cases it can represent a tiny change from .01 below normal to .01 above normal. But what caused the warming? Was it trace amounts of CO2? No, it was enormous amounts of Saharan dust, swept by the Azores High off Africa, and all the way to Texas, and even from there north and then east to Ohio and then to here in New Hampshire (in trace amounts.) This dust, combined with slightly cooler SST, suppressed the formation of hurricanes and tropical storms. And what does that mean? More sunshine, warming the water and raising the SST as little as .01 degree, and changing the map’s hue from chilly blue to warm yellow. (I can understand that, but don’t understand what engineered the cooling of those waters, earlier.)

What is most important to our humid summer is the warm water off Cape Cod and Nova Scotia. I’m surprised the media hasn’t gone nuts about it yet, but perhaps they are distracted by the fact mild waters (and tasty seals) have lured Great White Sharks north to Cape Cod Beaches. (The media lately has seemed easily distracted by anything involving the word “white”.) I doubt they will be focused enough to see warm water off New England is actually a sign of “cold”, when it is surrounded by a horseshoe of colder water, called the “cold AMO” (Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.) The AMO cycle is not due to turn “cold” for another five years, but is hovering close to that change already.

Though they didn’t have the word “AMO” (which appeared around 1990) New England fishermen have long known dramatic swings in Atlantic conditions could cause populations of fish (and gulls) to shift dramatically north or south, once or twice in an average lifetime.  In order to be aware of it you needed to respect and heed grandfathers who respected and heeded their grandfathers. The modern media, which has an attention span of around four minutes, is likely unaware of the AMO and will be taken totally by surprise by the switch, and will likely become apoplectic.

Not that we don’t all become careless, when things only happen every thirty years, or every sixty years.  Humans have the tendency to farm the rich soil on the side of a volcano, and then be astonished when they blow.

Here in New England the best route up a steep hill is the route taken by a little brook, which has an uncanny way of finding the shallowest incline.  Road-building is assisted by the fact these little brooks have far more cobblestones than they could possibly need. The brook is moved to the side, and the cobblestones are used as the foundation for the road up the hill. And for thirty years everything is fine. Perhaps even for sixty years everything is hunky-dory.  Even the torrential rains of a summer thunderstorm stay in the brook at the side. But then….(ominous drum-roll, please)….there comes the summer that is so humid. How humid is it?  Thunderstorm follows thunderstorm, and the road winds up looking like this:

You see, the little brook didn’t have far more cobblestones than it could possibly need. It needed those cobblestones, once every sixty years.

I’m telling you this because I have a suspicion young whippersnappers in the media will look at the above picture and blame Global Warming. They will subscribe to the idea the solution to the above problem is to ban things and raise taxes to fund other things that do everything you can imagine, except fix the road.

Around these parts old-timers puff out their cheeks and shake their heads, for they know their taxes will have to go up, but it’s to fix the road, for another sixty years.

ARCTIC SEA ICE —Awaiting La Nina Del Norte—

There is always a lag between the time an event occurs in the tropics and the time the effects of that event reach the Pole. But there is no lag, when it comes to the effect of the sunshine actually striking the Pole. Therefore the effects of the “Quiet Sun” at the Pole are immediate, in terms of sunshine, but lagged, in terms of the complex manner the Quiet Sun effects the temperature of the oceans at the equator.

I think we have seen this in the temperatures at the Pole. From the moment the sun started to get high and bright in arctic skies in May, the temperatures were below normal. Then, from the moment winter darkness begins to spread south from the Pole in September (and the sun can have very little effect at the Pole because it doesn’t shine) temperatures have been above normal.

It is common sense that the sun only effects the Pole directly when it is shining, (though certain people will make it more complex than it needs to be.) It is also common sense that as soon as the sun sets at the Pole something besides the sun must be involved, when it comes to transporting heat to the Pole.

The transport occurs via air masses.  The planet is constantly attempting to achieve a balance, though arriving at a point where the entire planet is the same temperature is impossible. Just as we will always have our poor, we will always have our Poles. As the planet attempts to move all the equator’s heat to the Pole, it is attempting the impossible, and is in some ways like a socialist attempting to move the wealth of the rich to the poor. It even gets nasty, with hurricanes and gales, like socialists do with taxes. Unlike socialists, the result is a beautiful planet.

(In case you are wondering, I’m currently doing my taxes.)

The transport also occurs via ocean currents, but much more slowly. The heat we currently notice at the Pole largely comes from a meridional flow, where the jet stream develops loops that hurry the mixing of arctic air with tropical air. When the difference between the Pole and the Tropics is less pronounced there seems to be less need of mixing, and the jet stream gets less loopy, and that flow is called “zonal.”

I have been working on the idea, the past year, that there is a third flow, that creates an area of low pressure at the Pole which, for my amusement, I have dubbed “Ralph.” I suppose this third flow is actually an “extremely meridional” flow, but I’ve decided to call it a “Ralphal” flow, because I’ve always wanted to contribute something to science, and coining words is fun.

My assumption was that the Ralphal flow was prompted by a larger-than-nornal difference between the tropics and Pole, brought about by the very big El Nino in 2015. I further assumed that the sway in the direction of El Nino conditions would be followed by an equal-and-opposite sway in the direction of a La Nina, as that usually happens. But it didn’t. We had a feeble La Nina, not equal-and-opposite at all, and then the Pacific looked like it was heading right back to El Nino conditions.  So all forecasts could get thrown right into the dumpster.

But then, even as I busily wiped the egg off my face and adjusted all my forecasts to expectations of an El Nino, that fickle Pacific flipped right back towards La Nina conditions. This is why so many quit attempting to forecast the weather. They don’t like having their sanity messed with. (Fortunately sanity is never anything I’ve had to worry about losing, being blessed with madness to begin with).

The long term effect of this La Nina will likely be to generate cooler air masses, which in a lagged way will make their way up to the Pole, but likely this change will take its sweet time to manifest. When we check to see if sea temperatures are below normal, we notice the southern hemisphere may be surprisingly cool but the northern hemisphere remains surprisingly warm.

With all that extra heat to the north, the planet had the urge to lose, and that tends to encourage the development of hurricanes  and typhoons. The set up was one which made the Atlantic the place for them to develop this year, and the above map actually shows their effect on the Atlantic’s waters. The heat was sucked out of the water off the east coast of the USA. (To the north the water is warmer because the hurricanes prevented the up-welling of cold water south of Labrador and Nova Scotia.)

On a whole all the heat coming from the northern ocean made the planet milder, but that mildness was hurried to the Pole, to be lost to the growing dark of winter night. The favorite route was up through the North Atlantic past Norway, over Svalbard, which was well above normal in September, as Roy Spencer’s September air temperature map demonstrates.

The above map averages out some of the loopy shifting of the jet. For example, at the start of September it was very cold in the east of the USA, with unusually early snows on peaks not far north of where I live, and even a few spots of late August frost, but by the end of September we were midst a heat wave, and the unusually early snows had shifted to the west of the USA. Result? The map averages the extremes out, and most of the USA looks “normal”.

However Svalbard, at the top of the map, was the most “above-average” place on earth. (Not that anyone went swimming in the icewater.) This is a definate sign of a Ralphal flow, and we did see Ralph incarnating up over the Pole, even as a decent gale for a time. (September 21 map below)

This flow continues to fascinate me, but I continue to think it must be at its end. Eventually the effects of the new La Nina will work north, and we’ll see what I imagine will be an abrupt shift to a more zonal flow. When?  (Wait while I flip a coin.) My guess is February 13 at 6:00 PM, EST.

I’ve been saving maps since late August, and hope to go through what we’ve been seeing the past month in more detail. But first I have to face my blasted taxes. (I got an “extension” back when they were due on April 15, but it runs out on October 15. Even a great procrastinator like myself must someday face the music.)

For people interested in the sea-ice itself, it is growing back swiftly now.

As an interesting side-note, the mild air pushing north past Svalbard has pushed the ice away from its north coast, but this may actually be also preventing ice from being flushed south through Fram Strait and the east coast of Greenland. Though this reduces the sea-ice in the short term, in the long-term it keeps the ice up in the Arctic Sea, and increases “volume” if not “area” and “extent”.

Here’s a comparison with last year. (2016 to left; 2017 to right.)

One topic I hope to talk about in the future is the interesting way the sea-ice was jammed south last summer into the channels in the Canadian Archipelago. Some thick, multi-year ice flowed south to the east of Melville Island and across Parry Channel. This may enter the calculations of people attempting the Northwest Passage  next summer. We can only cross our fingers and hope our poor, odd, battered O-buoy 14 camera survives another winter, in that area. 

Stay tuned.

ARCTIC SEA ICE –El Norte Nina–

Bob Tisdale posted this animation over at WUWT., at this post:

Something to Keep an Eye On – The Large Blue Ribbon of Below-Normal Sea Surface Temperatures in the North Pacific

The animation shows how the cold air draining off the Pole into Siberia didn’t only move west to Europe, but also spilled east into the North Pacific, dramatically cooling the waters over the past month.

You can see the modest La Nina extending off the west coast of South America, and also the “Warm Blob” shrinking and being pressed up against the coast of Alaska. However the cold water hasn’t been named, so I’ll call it the La Nina of the North, or “El Norte Nina”.

It will be interesting to see how long El Norte Nina lasts. I imagine it is a wrench in the works of long term winter forecasts, likely based upon the “Warm Blob”. If it persists it will likely represent an end to the “warm spike” in the PDO, and a return to a cold PDO, just as I forecast.  I forecast it two years ago, and it didn’t happen, and I forecast it last year, and it didn’t happen, but now, at long last, the blind squirrel finds the nut.

(Actually there was a warm spike in the cold PDO of the 1950’s, and I was imagining the current warm spike would behave the same way, and last the same length of time. Fail. The current situation is unique, and the warm spike was far more powerful and lasted longer.)

The El Norte Nina fits nicely into my idea that we can’t have all the mild air rushing north to fuel the low pressure “Ralph” at the Pole, without having an exit route for all that air, bringing cold down to sub-polar regions. This year Eurasia has experienced a bitterly cold autumn, “unprecedented” in some places. I’ve been waiting for this autumnal pattern to flip into a winter pattern, but so far it is hanging tough. The map below shows the cold over Eurasia, with the cold pouring east into the Pacific over Japan. Of interest is the slot of warmth in the upper left. It is due to the latest incarnation of Ralph, which formed off the northeast tip of Greenland and crossed the Pole on the Atlantic side, finally crashing down into Eastern Russia. It’s odd when the “mild” air comes from the Pole, but that is how topsy-turvy  the pattern is.

Looking ahead to next Tuesday, Mongolia gets a respite, but the cold  gets incredible over central Russia, with temperatures forecast to be 35 degrees below normal. It looks like cold air is continuing to spill east over Japan, which likely would continue to fuel El Norte Nina.

To me this suggests another surge of mildness should be heading up to the Pole. So we first look at the current GFS anomaly map (produced by Dr. Ryan Maue over at the Weatherbell site [week free trial offered]).

Things indeed are mild up there, but not as mild as they are forecast to be next Tuesday.

Indeed, just as temperatures are 35 degrees below normal down in Siberia and Kazakhstan, they are 35 above at the Pole. In a few cases they may even be a bit above freezing, and I expect that will generate the usual hoop-la from the usual suspects. The DMI temperature-north-of-80°-latitude map will likely show yet another up-spike, perhaps even higher than the last one.

There will be further hoop-la about such a spike, and I feel there should be, but not because I feel the planet is warming. I feel it demonstrates our planet is spending heat like a drunken sailor, and will face one heck of a hangover in the morning, (the “morning” being midwinter.)

The next surge of warmth will come from the Atlantic and in some ways will be a repeat of where we left off last time I posted. Back then (November 7) an Atlantic-to-Pacific cross-polar-flow was bringing a spike of milder temperatures north of Greenland. (Ralph’s “signature”)

Besides creating a wrong-way-flow in Fram Strait, the rising mild air fueled yet another incarnation of Ralph himself.

Rather than heading up to the Pole, Ralph headed over to the Kara Sea, and I was thinking maybe the pattern was changing a little, and Ralph was merely a North Atlantic storm that happened to be displaced way, way, way to the North. I watched for high pressure to build at the Pole.

The high pressure did build, but the flow in Fram Strait remained a wrong-way flow, and that can lead to the reappearance of Ralph’s “signature.” And indeed today’s map shows a weak signature north of Greenland, and a weak Atlantic-to-Pacific cross-polar-flow starting, right where I was thinking high pressure might build. And….what is that dent of low pressure over the Pole? No! Not the ghost of Ralph, haunting me!

This really is a remarkable pattern, and a lot of fun to watch. I was expecting a pattern flip, and I guess El Norte Nina fits the bill. Not that I was expecting it to happen so quickly, (though I did say it would happen quickly, back in 2014), but I’ll call it a correct forecast, because I’m not able to say I’m right all that often, and even a blind squirrel wants a pat on the back every once in a while.

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 98 years ago, the guns stopped shooting and silence descended over Flanders Field. People really did believe men had fought the war to end all wars, and mankind would never be so foolish ever again. Alas, Hitlers arise, and some men must leave warm homes to defend us. May God bless them, and may God save us from ourselves.