Weather

[RonH]

This morning we had -23.5c with very dry air which I understand is the lowest temperature in this location since 1941. My daughter in Queensland had +32c and high humidity.

That's a 55°c difference ...

[DocAElstein]

I spent the holiday and new year period in a room with a few news channels in different languages running on screens in the background. It was noticeable that a few new records have been recorded recently. Continues to be ever increasingly worrying.
Alan

[ChrisGreaves]

That's a 55°c difference ...

Agreed, Ron!
But then you and I have known since we were teenagers that parents are really really stupid, right?
Cheers, Chris

[ChrisGreaves]

... a few new records have been recorded recently. Continues to be ever increasingly worrying.

But, Alan, that's the whole point about records. They will be broken.
As soon as a colony is established on The Moon or on Mars, a flurry of new records will be set for "Long Jump on The Moon", "Pole vault on Mars" etc.

On the first anniversary of my birth I had already broken sixteen "personal best" records:-
1) Hottest Summer I had ever known
2) Driest Autumn I had ever known
3) Driest Spring I had ever known
4) Driest Winter I had ever known
5) Hottest Autumn I had ever known
6) Hottest Spring I had ever known
7) Wettest Spring I had ever known
8) Hottest Winter I had ever known
9) Wettest Winter I had ever known
10) Wettest Autumn I had ever known
11) Coldest Winter I had ever known
12) Coldest Spring I had ever known
13) Coldest Summer I had ever known
14) Wettest Summer I had ever known
15) Driest Summer I had ever known
16) Coldest Autumn I had ever known

Cheers, Chris

[DocAElstein]

You got off to a good start, Chris, and further striving for experiencing personal new heights is a worthy, useful and healthy thing, IMO
With the weather I think new records should be few and far in between, since survival of us depends on a very careful balance. The over extremes in weather are a sign, (in the meantime a fact doubted by few), this sign being an indication that the thing is getting dangerously out of wack, such that next generations won’t have a chance of getting far enough to experience half what most of us have already, :(

Still, not all gloom. The extreme flooding we are having here just now in some fields near where I often hang out, has helped me to come up with a new idea, already well in development, to re adjust the local stream flows…. , , ... resulting in a new 100m long, 2meter deep, pond to feed a small forest / row of pretty trees which had been dying out partly due to new record drought periods in recent years….

[RonH]

That's a 55°c difference ...

Agreed, Ron!
But then you and I have known since we were teenagers that parents are really really stupid, right?
Cheers, Chris

Yep, Chris, we trot off to new lands leaving our kids to enjoy sun, sea and surf and without the need to spend hours fighting with layers of clothing

[ChrisGreaves]

You got off to a good start, Chris, and further striving for experiencing personal new heights is a worthy, useful and healthy thing, IMO

There was a bit of a slump until my tenth birthday, when I broke some of those early records, mainly because my parents dragged me from the Lancashire pennines to the red- and yellow-sand plains of Western Australia ...

With the weather I think new records should be few and far in between,

Ahhah! Now you're talking about the RATE at which records are being broken, and, to take a simple example, while rainfall records are being broken, chances are that aridity records remain unchanged. Likewise for "Hottest" and "Coldest" Summers.

Still, not all gloom. The extreme flooding we are having here just now

This is a question asked of me here in Bonavista: If Australia is so dry, why are there so many floods?
There are not ,many floods in Newfoundland, despite the rotten weather, mainly because the island is (a) so hilly and (b) basically rock. I would expect cities to break records for flooding as the population grows and new housing estates are built, with more paving etc.

Australia is basically a flat-land, with wind-blown clay particles. I suspect that the clay particles effect sealing of the surface with the few drops of rain. If the rain does not soak well into the ground, then it is free to spread as a sheet over a large area, but perhaps only an inch or so deep. I am generalizing here.
Cheers, Chris

[BobH]

Whilst on the subject of weather, and with 82 years of acquired ignorance on display, I have a question for all you physicists and other scientists to include wannabes.

I seem to recall that there is a natural law regarding the preservation of matter that says something like you cannot create or destroy but only change it. Whose law that is, I know not but I don't think I made it up.

As to rainfall, it is the release of water (in the form of rain) from the clouds above Earth. That water is made up of Hydrogen (2 parts) and Oxygen (1 part). Hydrogen and Oxygen are naturally occurring elements, IIRC.

If the aforementioned law applies to naturally occurring elements, my first question is, "Is it possible to create those elements without taking them from other compounds?"

My next question is, "Do amounts (or ratios, for that matter) of Hydrogen and Oxygen naturally occurring in our environment (including the atmosphere) change drastically over time?" One supposes that mankind chooses to divert those elements to other uses (where they are transformed to other elements and compounds in those uses), which leads to my next question, "Is it possible, practically or theoretically, that mankind's activities could so divert the supply of Hydrogen and Oxygen to the extent that the amount of water - and consequently, rainfall - available to mankind is significantly deplenished?" (And, why doesn't the spell-checker accept deplenished?)

It seems to me that if mankind's activities in creating carbon dioxide can cause the Earth's atmosphere to warm, that other activities might lead to destruction of a compound that is essential to life of many plants and animals.

Now you know why they call a little education a dangerous thing.

[HansV]

Hydrogen is the primal element of the cosmos. Other elements, such as oxygen, are created in the interior of stars. In principle, it might be possible to create oxygen from simpler elements in a fusion reactor, but we still haven't mastered fusing hydrogen to helium on an industrial scale - the long-promised fusion reactor always seems to be 50 years or so away...

The amount of water on planet Earth is so tremendously large that it is extremely improbable that human activity would cause a shortage of it.

The percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere has changed over time - it started to be formed about 2.5 billion years ago by photosynthesizing bacteria. Initially, the oxygen was absorbed as fast as it was produced, but the amount gradually increased. It reached a peak of about 30% some 280 million years ago, and decreased to about 21% nowadays.

A suoer-meteorite such as the one that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs might change everything, of course.

[ChrisGreaves]

... and without the need to spend hours fighting with layers of clothing

Now Ron, why not move a little bit to the west (I think).
The Faroe Islands at 2m 50s
January average 4c
July average 10c.

[RonH]

... and without the need to spend hours fighting with layers of clothing

Now Ron, why not move a little bit to the west (I think).
The Faroe Islands at 2m 50s
January average 4c
July average 10c.

The terrain is rugged, and the subpolar oceanic climate is windy, wet, cloudy, and cool. What's new ... think I prefer snow, though our current temperatures are cause for possible rethink.

[ChrisGreaves]

... The over extremes in weather are a sign, (in the meantime a fact doubted by few), ...

Another aspect of the argument is that technology brings us more and cheaper recording devices.

Imagine a world with just one weather station (unlikely, I know ), and suppose it were in, say, Bonavista. Every twenty years or so another weather record would be broken. Now imagine a world with one weather station for each continental land-mass, then one per country/nation. Then one for every major city. As the number of weather stations goes up, so will the rate at which weather records will be broken.

Now imagine (the day has already come) when smart-phones detect and transmit the weather where the phone-owner is. We have the computing power to amass and process that data, no doubt about that.

I could break a wind-speed weather record by climbing up the trunk of my forty-foot fir tree in the back yard; after all, that's why I should mount my 12vDC wind turbine on a 40-foot mast, right?


I suspect that weather stations are so cheap and so robust that they could be dropped by aeroplane every kilometre or so across barren waste land. Little parachute, little solar panel, ...

Back in the 1950s/1960s the Perth (Western Australia) weather forecast was dependent on the chance that a cargo ship was traveling around the Cape of Good Hope towards Australia, 9,000 km leg, and had the courtesy to radio air pressure, wind speed, humidity and so on. Very shaky foundations for a weather forecast for 90% of the state's population. Today Perth can predict that a weather record WILL be broken the next day ...

Cheers, Chris

[ChrisGreaves]

The terrain is rugged, and the subpolar oceanic climate is windy, wet, cloudy, and cool. What's new ...

Sounds just like Home. And the language is a mix of Danish and Irish, I believe; I'd have lots of fun with inter-language puns.

Waveheight3.png

But you left out wave height , and it is my belief that the Faero Islands are surrounded by sea.
Becoming cloudy this morning with 60 percent chance of flurries late this morning and this afternoon. Wind northwest 70 km/h gusting to 100. High minus 4. Wind chill minus 23 this morning and minus 14 this afternoon
I have decided NOT to go out fishing today.

Cheers, Chris

[Graeme]

Imagine a world with just one weather station (unlikely, I know ), and suppose it were in, say, Bonavista. Every twenty years or so another weather record would be broken. Now imagine a world with one weather station for each continental land-mass, then one per country/nation. Then one for every major city. As the number of weather stations goes up, so will the rate at which weather records will be broken.

Surely the total number of weather stations is irrelevant. The fact is that every twenty years or so the average temperature is measured and every twenty years or so the average temperature is higher. It doesn't matter how many weather stations there are and it doesn't matter where they are, the measured average temperature is going up. When the average global temperature rises as rapidly as it is doing now then the weather goes nuts, we have record temperatures, record rain, record wind, record wild fires and forums have regular threads to discuss the observed and measured phenomena. Climate change is happening and if we don't do anything to stop it the average temperature rise will accelerate, tipping points will be tipped and the rise will become self perpetuating.

[RonH]

It's a serious worry about our grandkids++ futures, Graeme. In spite of some major environmental actions, the rate of population growth and understandable desires of many to improve their lot ...

Oh and Charles. Thanks for the weather study of Faroes. Ain't on my list of 'things to do'

[ChrisGreaves]

Surely the total number of weather stations is irrelevant. The fact is that every twenty years or so the average temperature is measured and every twenty years or so the average temperature is higher. It doesn't matter how many weather stations there are and it doesn't matter where they are, ...

Hi Graeme. I admire your thinking.
I think that there are TWO points here.
(1) In the limit, if there are zero weather stations then weather records can't be broken. The more data -collection points there are, the more likely we are to catch that Maximum or Minimum sampling point. This applies to heights of humans, diameter of trees as well.
(2) Averages are based on discrete points (the sum of values divided by the number of data points), and so the record for the average will go up when any one of the data points goes up. But still and all we are dependent on the number of data points sampled; a greater number of data points increases the probability that one of them will happen to be the Hottest, Driest etc.

Now, to bring back a pleasant memory, about 24 miles downstream on the Ohio river that forms in Pittsburgh is a small town called East Liverpool, Ohio.

A small park lies between the road and the river; there is a park bench.
Sit on the park bench with the railway lines and river just fifty feet in front of you, the highway fifty feet behind you, and about a hundred yards past that a rather steep and large hill.

The hill is formed from Morraine, the snout of a glacial tongue from The Great Wisconsin Ice Sheet.

To sit on the park bench (I've done it three times) is to sit on the spot when, say 14,000 years ago, the latest Ice Age began to end. The glacier is long gone. What more proof does one need that the climate has been warming over a period of 14,000 years.

Untitled.png

The map shows how the Ohio River was diverted from its course to The Arctic Ocean, shrugged, and turned south to join the Mississippi at Cairo.

There should be no doubt at all about Climate Change; the question is when did it start to get out of hand.

I am quite militant about this, and get annoyed at people who say "They should do something about it" but drive the SUV to the supermarket because they are all out of ice-cream.

Not you!

Cheers, Chris

[ChrisGreaves]

... the rate of population growth ...

Hi Ron, just out of interest, what is the average rate of global population growth over our lifetimes? I think that China's rate has dropped to the extent that in China there are now concerns that the rate in China is too low.
Cheers, Chris

[BobH]

IMO, climatic changes are caused by a force majeure and that efforts by man to alter them are futile.

A couple of centuries, measured against the age of the Earth, is almost immeasurable; therefore events and changes over a couple of centuries are almost meaningless unless you happen to be at the crucial point of that event or change. It is not so long ago - (only 30 of those 20-year intervals Graeme posits - since the last Maunder Minimum. Given that particular climatic catastrophe, perhaps it's a good thing that mankind's activities have increased global temperatures. No one can know or even meaningfully predict whether global temperatures will continue to rise or if some set of circumstances, such as sunspot inactivity, will return.

I think that trying to affect atmospheric carbon dioxide by human effort is no more likely to have a desired effect than human effort to change sunspot activity. We delude ourselves to presume we have the power, meanwhile charlatans and politicians enrich themselves using scare tactics. I never believed chicken little any more than I believe that climatic change is something mankind can do anything about. Earth's atmosphere gets warmer and it gets colder; I doubt mankind can do anything about it. When shows me a model that can be independently replicated by any qualified person showing that human activity has a direct effect on atmospheric temperatures, I'll join the rush to ban all CO₂ generation. Until then, I think the hoopla is tantamount to another chicken little.

I'm old enough to remember predictions of the arrival of a new Ice Age - by the same or similar moffins - that was supposed to be upon us at this moment. I'm still waiting for it to come.

[ChrisGreaves]

... meanwhile charlatans and politicians enrich themselves using scare tactics.
...

Don't forget the Mayan Calendar Crisis.
Also all those grizzled farmers who are interviewed and say "I'm 65 years old and i can't remember a (Winter|Spring|Summer|Fall} {Colder|Wetter|Drier|Warmer} than this one, which I always interpret to mean that their memory isn't as good as it used to be.
Cheers, Chris
P.S. Actually, now that I think about it, and you can quote me on this: "I'm 77 years old, and winters today are much colder than I remember them when I was in my teens" C

[RonH]

... the rate of population growth ...

Hi Ron, just out of interest, what is the average rate of global population growth over our lifetimes? I think that China's rate has dropped to the extent that in China there are now concerns that the rate in China is too low.
Cheers, Chris

-19c so I will just say (good) morning Chris.

Population has gone up from approx 2.5 - 8 billion during my life time. Yes, China has 'stabilised' but others have significantly increased their population, though some say we will peak at around 10 billion.

I loved your comment about SUV's and icecream ... it's also 'Toorak Truck's all around here. Sometimes wish I had one