No climate scientist has been subject to more attacks on their science and character than Penn State’s Michael Mann, originator of the famed “hockey stick” graph of Earth’s temperature history. Dr. Mann has an excellent new book called “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines”

For those unfamiliar with the “hockey stick”, the shape of the graph showing Earth’s temperature has a long, relatively flat portion representing the period 1000 AD – 1800 AD–the shaft of the hockey stick–followed by a sharp upward rise that began in the late 1800s and continues to this day–the blade of the hockey stick. When Dr. Mann first published the hockey stick graph in papers he wrote in 1998 and 1999, it quickly became a central icon in the climate change debate. As he writes in “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars,” the hockey stick graph “told an easily understood story with a simple picture: that a sharp and highly unusual rise in atmospheric warming was occurring on Earth.” Contrarians bent on discrediting the science of climate change have fiercely attacked the hockey stick, attempting to portray it as the key piece of evidence upon which all of climate change science depends (which is not correct, since many different data sets unrelated to the tree ring studies under attack show a hockey stick-like shape.) The contrarians have adopted “the Serengeti strategy” towards Dr. Mann–“a tried-and-true tactic of the climate change denial campaign…isolate individual scientists just as predators on the Serengeti Plain of Africa hunt their prey: picking off vulnerable individuals from the rest of the herd.”

The history of the hockey stick
The book starts with some interesting background on Dr. Mann’s career. He got into climate science by accident–while working on his Ph.D. in physics at Yale, funding got tight, and he elected to switch to the Department of Geology and Geophysics, where funding to perform research on natural climate cycles was available. In the mid-1990s, while working on his Ph.D., he helped discover the decades-long natural cycle of alternating warm and cool ocean temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean thought to be responsible for the active hurricane period that began in 1995. He gave the phenomenon the now widely-used name, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), during an impromptu interview with science writer Dick Kerr. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1996, Dr. Mann moved on into using statistical methods to study past climate, as gleaned from tree ring studies. He takes the reader on a 5-page college-level discussion of the main technique used, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and shows how his famed “hockey stick” graph came about. It’s one of the best descriptions I’ve seen on how PCA works (though it will be too technical for some.) His inaugural PCA work showing that the 1990s were likely the warmest decade in at least the past 600 years was published in 1998. Since the paper coincidentally happened to be published on Earth Day during the warmest year in Earth’s history, the paper received a huge amount of media attention. His follow-up 1999 paper went further, suggesting that the 1990s were the warmest decade in the past 1,000 years, and 1998 was the warmest year. Dr. Mann was appointed as one of the lead authors of the 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, the massive United Nations summary of climate change science that comes out every six years. We learn some interesting details about the approval process for the 2001 IPCC report, like the fact for two days, the scientists haggled with the Saudi Arabian delegation about one word in the Summary for Policy Makers. The IPCC report’s summary requires unanimous approval by all nations, and the Saudis objected to the language that said, “the balance of evidence suggests an appreciable human influence on climate.” They debated 30 different alternatives before finally settling on the language, “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on climate.”

Figure 1. The hockey stick graph as it appeared in the IPCC Third Assessment Report WG1 (2001) summary, Figure 2.20, Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstruction. Tree rings, corals, ice cores, and historical records are shown in blue, and instrumental data in red, from AD 1000 to 1999. The grey shaded region indicates the uncertainty in the annual temperature estimates (there is a 95% certainty that the temperature for any given year lies in the gray shaded region.) The thick black line is a smoothed version which highlights the long-term variations. A similar version of this graph appeared in Dr. Mann’s original 1999 paper. Climate scientist Dr. Jerry Mahlman was responsible for giving this graph the nickname, the “hockey stick”.

The battle begins
The majority of the book focuses on the battles over the hockey stick that ensued in 1998, as soon as Dr. Mann published his research. He writes: For more than a decade, the scientific community, in its effort to communicate the threat of climate change, has had to fight against the headwind of this industry-funded disinformation effort. The collective battles are what I term the “Climate wars”. The battle raged furiously through 2006, when an extensive review of the hockey stick was performed by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS)–an organization founded in 1863 by Abraham Lincoln to “investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science” for the purpose of informing government policy. The NAS reaffirmed the validity of the hockey stick, concluding: “based on the analyses presented in the original papers by Mann et al. and this new supporting evidence, the committee finds it plausible that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period over the preceding millennium.” Dr. Mann writes, “One might think that this would have put an end to the accusations once and for all. But one would be wrong.”

In November 2009, a few weeks before the December international climate summit in Copenhagen, the RealClimate.org website that Dr. Mann contributes to was hacked into, and a file with emails stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was posted. Dr. Mann explains in detail how these “climategate” emails were taken out context and distorted to appear scandalous by “a massive public relations campaign conducted by major players in the climate change denial movement.” To illustrate, he gives the example of Isaac Newton’s writings, which can easily be taken out context and distorted to give the impression that he was guilty of “conspiring to avoid public scrutiny,” “insulting dissenting scientists,” “manipulation of evidence,” “knowingly publishing scientific fraud,” “suppression of evidence,” “abusing the peer review system,” and “insulting critics.” In the end, no evidence of scientific misconduct was found by any of the five independent reviews of the affair, conducted by the UK Parliament, a CRU commission led by eminent geoscientist Lord Oxburgh, Penn State University, the National Science Foundation Office of the Inspector General, and the University of East Anglia. As a result of “climategate”, nothing at all changed in the peer-reviewed scientific literature on climate change. It was a phony scandal.

A fierce advocate of good science
As I read the book, I was impressed by Dr. Mann’s tremendous passion for science and knowledge that comes through. He loves figuring out how things work, and stands in fierce opposition to shoddy science and anti-science political attacks. I had the opportunity to sit down over a beer and talk with him at a recent conference, and he had little interest in talking politics. He’d much rather talk about science, and we had a great discussion about hurricanes–he’s published several papers that use statistical techniques to estimate how many tropical storms we missed counting in the Atlantic before the advent of satellites. He frequently talks about how science works and the importance of following the scientific method in his book: “The scientific process–left to operate freely–is inherently self-correcting, even if the gears may at times turn more slowly than we would like…Scientists must be allowed to follow the path along which their intellectual inquiries take them, even if their findings and views might appear inconvenient to outside special interests.” In the end, Dr. Mann is “cautiously optimistic” that humanity can meet the challenge of climate change, but acknowledges that climate scientists are in a “street fight” against well-funded climate change disinformers bent on obscuring the science.

Conclusion: five stars out of five
The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines is a must-read for every serious student of climate change science, and gets my highest rating: five stars out of five. The book is $17.78 at Amazon.com. True to its title, the book has spawned its own mini-war in the ratings section of Amazon, where readers either loved it or hated it–75% of the reviews were 4 or 5 stars, while 21% were 1 star reviews. Only 4% of the readers gave it a mediocre 2 or 3 star rating. Some of the 1 star reviews are no doubt there because “Watt’s Up With That,” one of the most prominent climate science confusion sites, put up a post calling on readers to attack Mann’s book and to attack positive reviews.

Links
Besieged by Climate Deniers, A Scientist Decides to Fight Back, an opinion piece by Dr. Mann that appeared on the Yale Environment 360 site on April 12.

Much-vindicated Michael Mann and Hockey Stick get final exoneration from Penn State — time for some major media apologies and retractions. Climateprogress.org blog post by Joe Romm.

An interview with Dr. Mann about his book, “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars”, appeared on Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth blog in the New York Times on May 3.

My favorite climate science blog is realclimate.org, which Dr. Mann co-founded. You can see one of the latest challenges to the hockey stick answered in a May 11 post discussing tree ring records from Siberia.

I’ll have a new post by Friday at the latest.

Jeff Masters

In some past blogs I talked about the unfortunate lack of computer resources available to the National Weather Service (NWS), resulting in the U.S. trailing behind many international numerical weather prediction centers.  This lack of computer resources undermines the ability of the NWS to run high-resolution weather models, to move effectively into probabilistic weather prediction, to enhance hurricane prediction, and much, much more.  Far smaller nations, with much more benign weather, such as England and South Korea possess weather supercomputer facilities that dwarf ours.
The cost to the American people  of  inferior weather computer resources is substantial, both economically and in saving lives. 

While  U.S. operational weather prediction is provided inadequate computer resources, climate prediction, including studies of potential human-forced global warming, is enjoying the availability of huge supercomputers, with capacities hundreds of times larger than that available for weather prediction.

It is not a little ironic that great emphasis is placed on acquiring state-of-the-art petaflop supercomputers for climate change, while in a year of a dozen billion-dollar weather disasters, the NWS is not given critical tools needed to protect the American people.   Someone has their priorities wrong.

Let me give you a few examples.    As noted in an earlier blog, the National Weather Service operational computer system has 4992 processors for a total computational capacity of .07 petaflops (a petaflop is one quadrillion floating point operations per second).   Keep this .07 petaflop number in mind.

The new 1.1 petaflop GAIA computer just acquired by NOAA

Now consider a few of the climate computers purchased by the U.S. government and associated agencies.

Lets begin with the 1.1 petaflop GAIA computer recently acquired by NOAA, a machine sixteen times more capable than the NWS weather prediction computer.  This machine will be dedicated to climate research (see an article here on this machine).

The National Center for Atmospheric Research, an entity mainly funded by the National Science Foundation, is now completing a 70 million dollar facility that includes the new Yellowstone computer, capable of 1.5 petaflops.    This machine will be used mainly for climate research (article here).  A great irony is that this machine uses HUGE amounts of power, power that will come from coal-fired power plants that emit lots of CO2.

NASA Pleiades supercomputer

Or consider the new “Discover” supercomputer acquired by NASA’s Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) that has .32 petaflop capacity, nearly 5 times that of the NWS forecast machine.  The Discover machine is dwarfed by NASA’s new “Pleiades” supercomputer (1.3 petaflops) that is being used for climate simulations and other NASA needs.

I could go on and on naming other supercomputers owned by the U.S. Department of Energy and others that are used for climate research–it would be a very long list.  The bottom line is that the computational power available for climate simulations, for understanding and predicting climate change over the next few decades to a century, absolutely dwarfs what is available for predicting the weather and for understanding how weather systems work.  

Imagine if one of the petaflop machines was made available for weather prediction.  The forecast skill of the U.S. global weather models could be substantially increased–providing skillful forecasts further out in time.  We could run models with enough resolution to get the fine scale structures of hurricanes and other storms.   A new age of probabilistic weather prediction could begin, with high-resolution ensembles providing uncertainty information for local weather features.  The impact would be huge, saving hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in economic impacts from severe weather, protecting lives, and improving the functioning of our air traffic control and highway systems.   Real and profound benefits.

Now don’t get me wrong.  Understanding and modeling climate change is important.  But there are dozens of supercomputers in the U.S. that are quite capable of this task–and remember  that climate simulations don’t have to be done within a set schedule like weather predictions.    And there are many groups around the world doing the same type of global climate simulations–and quite frankly all the better models get essentially the same results.  There is a vast overkill in pushing computer resources for climate prediction, while weather prediction is a very poor cousin.

Why is this gross imbalance happening?   That is something I will leave to the comment section of this blog.  But it is clear that leadership in NOAA, the Department of Commerce, and in other Federal agencies have let this go on too long, to the detriment of the American people. Our congressional representatives and others need to intervene.

And don’t forget that improved weather prediction is critical for dealing with climate change.  Mankind is doing very little to stop anthropogenic global warming–we are going to do the experiment.   Thus, adaptation will be critical and what is more important for adaptation than improved weather forecasts?  If climate extremes will increase under global warming we need to be able to predict them in the short-term to protect people and property.   Furthermore, there is no better way to improve climate models than to improve weather models, since essentially they are the same.  You learn about model weaknesses from daily forecast errors.

Climate Computer Support

Weather Computer Support

PS:  Probcast, the UW high-tech probabilistic prediction system (www.probcast.com), is back up!  The software is now on my department servers, so it should be far more dependable.

Figure 1. Morning satellite photo of Tropical Storm Aletta.

Earth’s longest tropical storm-free period in at least 70 years
The formation of Aletta ends a 41-day streak without a tropical storm anywhere in the world. According to the UK Met Office, the 41-day period storm-less period is the longest span Earth has gone without a tropical storm in at least 70 years. The last time there were as many as 38 consecutive storm-less days was in 1944. Prior to Aletta, the last tropical storm on the planet was Tropical Storm Daphne in the South Pacific, which dissipated 06 UTC April 3, 2012. April is usually is the quietest month globally for tropical cyclones. The long storm-less period comes in the midst of a very quiet two-year period of global tropical cyclone activity. According to Dr. Ryan Maue, who specializes in tracking global tropical cyclone activity, 2010 and 2011 saw a total of 146 global tropical cyclones–the lowest two-year total since satellite observations began in 1970. The 24-month period April 2010 – March 2012 had 141 global tropical storms, which is also a record low. That’s quite a turnaround from 2004 – 2005, which saw near-record high levels of global tropical cyclone activity.

The Atlantic is quiet
The disturbance near the Azores that developed on Saturday, Invest 92L, has weakened and is no longer being tracked by NHC. The models have backed off on their predictions of a potential subtropical storm developing over the Western Caribbean or waters near Florida this weekend, and none of the computer models is predicting tropical cyclone development in the Atlantic over the next seven days. If something did develop, the most likely location would be along an old frontal boundary between the Bahamas and Bermuda, early next week.

Jeff Masters

Figure 1. Morning satellite photo of Invest 92L.

Eastern Pacific hurricane season beginning to heat up
In the Eastern Pacific, we have a more serious candidate for tropical development, Invest 90E, located about 580 miles south of Manzanillo Mexico. This is the year’s first “invest” in the Eastern Pacific, and it comes one day before the official May 15 start of the Eastern Pacific hurricane season. Wind shear is a low 5 – 10 knots over 90E, ocean temperatures are a warm 29°C, and 90E is showing an impressive amount of spin and organization. NHC is giving the system an 80% chance of developing into a tropical depression by Wednesday. It is unusual to get a tropical storm forming this early in the year in the Eastern Pacific; since record keeping began in 1949, there have only been two that have formed by May 15–Hurricane Alma of 1990, and an unnamed 1991 storm. If 90E does develop, it may not live for long–the storm is headed northwest towards a region with high wind shear and cooler waters.

Only weak potential for an Atlantic system developing over the next week
The models have backed off on their predictions of a potential subtropical storm developing over the Western Caribbean or waters near Florida this weekend, though it is possible we might see something develop along an old cold frontal boundary between the Bahamas and Bermuda. If such a storm did develop, it would likely move northeast out to sea.

Jeff Masters

To see what was going on, take a look at the vertical sounding at Spokane, WA for 5 AM on Saturday morning.  With high pressure we had clear skies (good infrared cooling) and light winds (less turbulent mixing of warm air from above).  Thus, air near the surface cools efficiently at night.  The air temperatures aloft have warmed considerably the past few days, much of it due to compressional heating from sinking air in the high.  Thus, we have had surface-based temperature inversions (temps INCREASING with height). During the day, the surface is heating from the sun and the warm air is getting mixed down to the surface, thus temperatures soar.

The combination of cold air at the surface in the morning, and warm air aloft that mixed down during the day, was a huge diurnal range between the high and low temperatures—concrete-cracking range.  Consider a few examples.  Pasco went from 32 to 79:  47 F change!

 While Olympia, went from 34 to 79.  45F increase.  A few stations exceed 50F.

I don’t much about plant physiology, but I wonder how plants tolerate such temperature swings.

And happy mothers day….Moms may need a sweater in the morning, but a short-sleeve shirt will be mandatory this afternoon, as many enjoy highs reaching into the upper 70s and 80s.

Figure 1. Afternoon satellite photo of Invest 92L, taken at 16 UTC May 12, 2012, by NASA’s Aqua satellite. Image credit: NASA.

NHC is giving 92L a 40% chance of developing into a named storm by Monday. They will be reluctant to name it Alberto unless the storm can maintain it’s current level of heavy thunderstorm activity for at least 6 – 12 hours. The storm’s heavy thunderstorms have weakened some during the afternoon, making it less likely NHC will be inclined to name it; the fact that 92L is over waters of 66°F (19°C) hurts its chances. The coldest waters I’ve seen a tropical storm form in were 19°C, during Tropical Storm Grace of 2009. Grace holds the record for being the farthest northeast forming tropical cyclone in the Atlantic basin. Like 92L, Grace also formed near the Azores Islands, but in early October. The coldest waters I’ve seen a hurricane form in were 22°C, for Hurricane Epsilon of 2005. Latest guidance from the computer models show 92L meandering to the south of the Azores through Monday, then beginning a slow motion towards the northeast by Tuesday.

Jeff Masters

The interesting thing is that for the last few days we have had fairly cold air over us, and with relatively clear skies and good radiational cooling to space, temperatures have fallen well below freezing in the cooler spots.  For example, it got down to 19F in Redmond, Oregon early Thursday morning—here are the minimum temps that morning…plenty of 20s and sever teens!

The was so cold aloft that considerable instability was produced as the surface was heated by the strong May sun….producing some impressive cumulus development.  Take a look at the UW cam image at around 7:30 AM and three hours later…you can see the destabilization due to surface heating:

During the next few days you will see progressive warming…lets look at the predictions by the UW WRF model for 5 PM on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.  The light pinks and whites are in the 70s and higher.  You don’t need to be much of a meteorologist to understand what this means….

White hot!   Clearly, the mothers in the NW are particularly deserving this year.  And Monday will be warm as well.  Even your tomato plants will be happy.

Final reminder for those near Portland…I will be talking at OMSI Science Center in Portland at 10 AM, looking into the future of weather prediction.   The lecture is free, although the Oregon Chapter of the American Meteorological Society will be raffling off a fancy weather station and one of my books.   This chapter is one of the biggest and most active in the U.S. and recently they had some highly controversial sessions with both sides of the global warming debate. 

Strange Vertical Sunset Clouds in Pittsburgh

May 10, 2012; 12:37 PM ET

WPXI and WTAE both had photo galleries this morning of strange clouds sighted last night at sunset in Pittsburgh. The clouds looked like tornadoes.

I believe they were examples of what I call “vertical” clouds and we’ve collected quite a gallery of them over at the AccuWeather.com Photo Gallery. The clouds are benign. Here’s a photo I took of one in 2009:

In that case, it was simply a vertically-growing non-tornadic cloud. Things can get a little “cloudier” (if you will) when the vertical structures are associated with thunderstorms, as in the video I took below in 2011. Although impressive in the time-lapse video, the clouds themselves were just what are called “scud” clouds and are associated with the edges of thunderstorms, where moisture rises upwards.

Another type of “vertical” cloud is a trick of illusion. Near the edge of a shelf cloud (as depicted here at the beach in a photo I took in 2007), the cloud can appear to go straight up, as in the photo below, even though your eye is being fooled by the curve of the cloud and the Earth.

This is what happened in the photo below, taken by Photo Gallery user “wrh1593″ in 2007:

The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of AccuWeather, Inc. or AccuWeather.com

It is the coastal zone stretching from southern Oregon into northern California, and out a hundred miles or so into the ocean.

Here is the sustained wind forecast of the UW WRF model for 5 PM this afternoon.  Notice the greenish area along the West Coast, with sustained winds of 30 kts or more?

Now examine the closer view from the 12-km domain.  Strong northerly winds stretch from just north of Brookings, Oregon (on the southern OR coast) to just north of San Francisco. You will also note a large change in sea level pressure over than area (solid lines), which has a lot to do about why we have strong winds there. 

So why the strong winds in this area during the warm season?  In the spring the East Pacific High strengthens and moves northward.   At the same time, the desert southwest of the U.S., warms and pressure falls.   So with rising pressure over the NE Pacific and falling pressure over the U.S. Southwest, an area of very strong pressure difference develops between them….over northern CA and southern Oregon.   Large pressure differences result in strong winds.

But as the infomercials always say, WAIT, THERE’S MORE!  The area of large pressure difference produces northerly winds over the coastal ocean, which in turns leads to upwelling…water coming up from below in the coastal ocean.  Those upwelling waters are COLD.  So we have very cold water offshore, and the land gets warm during the day.   The result is a large temperature gradient (peaking during the warmest time of the day), which enhances the pressure gradient even more, producing a super sea breeze.     So the morning is windy, but the afternoons are savage.

Lets take a look at the coastal winds for the past few days.  Here are the peak gusts at Buoy 46027…just offshore of the CA/OR border.  Wow…winds right now are gusting to NEARLY 45 knots (52 mph).

Or how about Cape Arago, Oregon (not far from North Bend)?  Almost 35 knots over land.  Can you imagine what that would be like on beach?   Similar winds are also found at Crescent City, CA (see below).

The northerly summer winds are so strong along the southern Oregon coast that a lot of trees are bent southward.  Want proof?  Check out this picture taken at Brookings:

I better stop before I get into trouble with the Brookings, Oregon Chamber of Commerce.  You might think this would be a good area for wind turbines, but the lack of transmission facilities and excessive strength of the winds might make it a poor choice.  But the cold water does help produce lots of coastal fog and that gives us the magnificent redwoods, which depend on fog drip for summertime water.

A reminder for those near Portland, Oregon…I will be giving a free public lecture on the Future of Weather Forecasting at the OMSI science center (more info to the right or here), at 10 AM on Saturday.

LRR and Tornado Eye: Interesting Weather Radar Images

May 8, 2012; 2:41 PM ET

Researchers from the VORTEX2 project (which used real-time radars that were not “operational” – meaning that it doesn’t transmit 24/7) have noted a new component to a supercell thunderstorm called a “low reflectivity ribbon (LRR).” The LRR, although recently noted by the VORTEX2 project in a 2009 radar image, was associated with radar data [PDF] as early as 2008 (examples shown below).

It is what it looks like — a weaker (lesser/smaller raindrops) area of the storm, in the middle of the heavy rain. Researchers are unsure what relationship, if any, it has to tornado formation, but it’s neat that we are discovering more about thunderstorms with this newer technology. I believe that I may have spied an LRR on the Vance Airforce Base NEXRAD radar in Oklahoma on May 1st (image below):

But here’s what’s even more interesting: Brett Kreais, a meteorology student at Central Michigan University, posted a radar image from the same radar, and same storm, which appears to show the “eye” of a tornado — something that I believe I have seen on high-resolution non-operational radars (although I can’t find a link at the moment). More typically you would look to confirm a tornado by observing a debris ball on NEXRAD.

I pulled some more data from the storm and took a couple of 3D screen shots. Not surprisingly, it is co-located with the Doppler velocity “couplet” (winds moving fast towards, and fast away from, the radar). Is this really the “eye” of a tornado? It looks like it at first glance. Perhaps readers (who are more experts at interpreting radar than I) will comment on my story, but I believe it could simply be drier air entrained as the mesocyclone began to rotate itself out of existence (see radar loops – reflectivity & velocity).

Below are 2-D and 3-D shots of the same data that Brett showed:

The 2-D cross section does look like a cross-section of a tornado…

And when you look down the reflectivity “hole” from above, it seems plausible you’re looking down the eye of the tornado:

http://vortex.accuweather.com/adc2004/pub/includes/columns/community/2012/590x376_05081724_3drad503bs.png”>

But perhaps the most important thing to remember is that, on the velocity data, there is no “calm” area. I’d like to show the image below with a lot of caution, because maps like these often get misinterpreted. What you’re looking at here is rotation towards and away from the radar (red vs. green), but you’re only looking at speeds lower than a certain amount, so you can’t look at the space between green and red and say “there’s the tornado” because we arbitrarily “blanked out” the higher wind speeds with the GRLevel Analyst software. You also can’t point to the red or green tubes and call them tornadoes, because the wind is only going one direction in those areas.

What you are looking at is a massive, strong circulation that reaches the ground (or confirmed by spectrum width and rotation), but the radar doesn’t have the resolution to show the tornado; you’re probably seeing the mesocyclone. So why does the middle of the mesocyclone appear empty? It’s not completely empty, or the velocity data wouldn’t show up there. As I said above, it may just be drier air that was wrapped into the storm.

The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of AccuWeather, Inc. or AccuWeather.com

Figure 1. The ten warmest 12-month periods in the contiguous U.S. since record keeping began in 1895. Image credit: NOAA/NCDC.

Figure 2. The average temperature of 45.4°F during January – April 2012 was the warmest on record: 5.4°F above the 20th century average for the period, and was 1.6°F above the previous record set in 2006. January – April temperatures have been rising at about 1.9°F per century since 1895. Image credit: NOAA/NCDC.

April 2012: 3rd warmest on record
April 2012 was the third warmest April in the contiguous U.S. since record keeping began in 1895. Ten states had a top-ten warmest April, and no states were cooler than average. But what’s really remarkable about April was that eight states–Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia–had average April temperatures cooler than their March temperatures, even though their April temperatures were still above the long-term average for the month. These statistics show just how remarkably warm March 2012 was. Most extreme was Illinois, where April 2012 temperatures ranked in the top 20% for warmest Aprils, yet were cooler than March 2012 temperatures.

Figure 3. Temperature rankings for April 2012 in the Contiguous U.S. Ten states had a top-ten warmest April, and no states were cooler than average. Image credit: NOAA/NCDC.

Figure 4. NOAA’s U.S. Climate Extremes Index (CEI) for January – April shows that 2012 had the most extreme weather on record.

Most extreme January – April on record
NOAA’s U.S. Climate Extremes Index (CEI), an index that tracks the highest 10 percent and lowest 10 percent of extremes in temperature, precipitation, and drought, was 42% during the January-April period, over twice the average value, and the greatest on record. Remarkably, 82% of the contiguous U.S. had maximum temperatures that were in the warmest 10% historically, and 68% had warm minimum temperatures in the top 10%, with records going back to 1910. The previous records were 56% (2000) and 57% (1992) for maximum and minimum temperature, respectively. The percentage area of the U.S. experiencing top-10% drought conditions during January – April was 19%, which was the 17th greatest since 1910. Extremes in precipitation as computed by the CEI were near average for the January – April period.

Jeff Masters

Why are my seeds not germinating and rotting in the soil?
When will the soil be warm enough to sow my seeds or transplant my plants?

Well, I don’t pretend to be an expert in this, but I suspect it has something to do so with the temperature of the soil.

You can purchase or adapt a thermometer for taking soil temperature measurements

Lets talk about soil temperatures and how this compare to air temperatures, which is interesting beyond gardening.

The first thing to keep in mind is that the temperatures you hear on TV or read about in the news paper are for the air temperature, in shade, at a height of roughly 2 meters (6 feet).   So when meteorologists talk about surface air temperatures…that is what we mean.  And such temperatures SHOULD be taken above native vegetation, which is increasingly rare.

Now the temperature of the ground surface is often quite different than the air temperature.  During sunny days, ground temperatures can be much warmer than the air temperature (10-40F is not unusual), and on a cold, clear winter night, when the ground radiates heat to space, the ground temperature can be 1-8F cooler than air temperature.  After relatively warm periods, heat conduction from the warmed soil below can keep the surface temperature warmer than the air temperature. 

Several of these characteristics are evident in this plot of surface and ground temperatures at the WSDOT road weather site at Silica Road (near Quincy in eastern Washington, along I90).  Time advances to the left in this figure.   The road temperature zoomed up to roughly 105F, while the air temperature was in the low to mid 60s!  Wow.  And last night the air temperature was cooler than ground temperature as the former dropped in the upper 30s.

Now what about the soil temperatures?  The deeper you go the weaker the daily temperature variation becomes, with the soil temperature reflecting the average temperatures of the weeks and months before.  Here an example of the soil temperatures at roughly 1 inch (2.4 cm), 6 inches (15 cm), and 12 inches (30 cm).  Lots of daily variation in the top inch (in this case a range of 30F), but only a 2F range at 12 inches.  And you can it takes a while for the warming to propagate down into the soil.

So what are the current soil temperatures around the State?   Lets look at soil temps at 8 inches down from the highly useful Washington State University AgweatherNet network.  Here are the values today…mid 50s over western Washington and the mid to upper 60s over the western portion of eastern Washington.

 

Now lets look at  the 8-inch deep soil temperatures in Seattle (see graph) since January 1.  A steady rise until the cold spell this week, and now it is rising again with the warmer days. Roughly upper 50s F.

 Ok, so what does this have to do with the germination of vegetable seeds….and particularly why my bean seeds just rotting in the soil?

Take a look at the typical soil temperature required for germination of various seeds (see below).  Big variations.   Here is western Washington we are good to go for corn, spinach, carrots, and peas (not shown, but ok at 50F).  But beans need soil temps in the 60s.  Boy did I make a mistake!   Next time I will check the soil temperatures before I sow.

Vegetables or not, soil and ground temperatures are fascinating, and during the winter knowledge about them can save your life when roadway icing is threatening.

Figure 1. Volunteers in the city of Salvador, Brazil, have connected the dots have and drawn people’s attention to sea level rise and what it impacts in our life.

Figure 2. Madaba, Jordan. “Drops (of water) are dots of hope”. A beautiful message from King’s Academy in drought-prone Jordan.

Figure 3. Activists hold a banner in front of a damaged coral reef in the vulnerable Marshall Islands. Rising temperatures and increased CO2 uptake are raising the acidity of the ocean, which bleaches and ultimately kills fragile coral reefs.

Figure 4. One thousand students in Bekaa, Lebanon make their dots into the wheels of a giant bicycle to raise awareness about the threat of air pollution, and to advocate for bike lanes.

Figure 5. In 2009, at 17,785 feet in Bolivia’s Cordillera Oriental was the Chacaltaya Glacier. Before its unexpected melting, it was home to Bolivia’s only ski resort and the first tow-rope ever to be built in South America. Today all that remains is a rocky mountain-top that only receives seasonal snowfall. Photo by Lauren Farnsworth.

Figure 6. Ausable Valley, NY, USA: Young people in New York understand the first-hand impacts of climate change. Hurricane Irene, the third five-hundred-year climate event in the last twelve months, devastated communities in the region and pummeled the beachfront with debris.

Jeff Masters

 The reason?  A persistent trough over the Northwest, as shown by this upper level map (500 mb).   You will notice that while we have a trough, the central/eastern U.S. has had ridging, and yes, their temperatures have been well above normal, a pattern we have

seen a lot of this spring. Here is the mean and anomaly (difference from normal) temperatures for the first three days of May.  We are cold and purple–that seems appropriate, purple for cold, and that is the UW Husky color.  The eastern U.S. is brown, with warm anomalies approaching 8F.

But this will change as ridging is now occurring aloft, as illustrated by the latest European Center upper air prediction for Sunday at 5 PM.   This ridging will hold at least through Monday, so expect lots of sun and much warmer temperatures on Sunday and Monday–in fact, many of you will be in the 70s Monday afternoon.

Here are the latest UW WRF model forecasts for surface air temperatures (remember these are for 2-m above the surface).   On Sunday, mid-60s on BOTH sides of the Cascades (except for NW WA and coastal residents near the water, sorry).

And 70s in that Willamette Valley, a natural hot box due to its isolation from the ocean influence.

But as good as Sunday will be Monday will be spectacular, with seventies extending to Seattle and the torrid Willamette Valley getting near 80F. 

Finally, let me end by noting that we have had strong Puget Sound convergence zones over the past few days, with some being unusually broad.   A few samples from the Camano Island radar for your amusement.   The nice thing about such situations is that you know where to go to escape the rain.

Let me end with a reminder that I will be giving a talk in Portland (OMSI Science Museum) at 10 AM on Saturday on the future of NW weather prediction.  More info to the right.  I will bring a few books to sign as well.

Figure 1. Women who work on a tea farm in Assam, India hold up a dot in honor of Climate Impacts Day (May 5, 2012), to urge people to connect the dots between climate change and the threat to their livelihood. Chai is one of the most consumed beverages in India, but a prolonged dry spell and extreme heat has affected tea plantations in Assam and Bengal with production dropping by 60% as compared to the same period in 2011. Image credit: 350.org.

May 5: Climate Impacts Day
On Saturday, May 5 (Cinco de Mayo!), the activist group 350.org, founded by Bill McKibben, is launching a new effort to “connect the dots between climate change and extreme weather.” They’ve declared May 5 Climate Impacts Day, and have coordinated an impressive global effort of nearly 1,000 events in 100 countries to draw attention to the links between climate change and extreme weather. Their new climatedots.org website aims to get people involved to “protest, educate, document and volunteer along with thousands of people around the world to support the communities on the front lines of the climate crisis.” Some of the events planned for Saturday: firefighters in New Mexico will hold posters with dots in a forest ravaged by wildfires; divers in the Marshall Islands take a dot underwater to their dying coral reefs; climbers on glaciers in the Alps, Andes, and Sierras will unfurl dots on melting glaciers with the simple message: “Melting”; villagers in Northeastern Kenya will create dots to show how ongoing drought is killing their crops; in San Francisco, California, aerial artist Daniel Dancer and the Center for Biological Diversity will work with hundreds of people to form a giant, moving blue dot to represent the threat of sea level rise and ocean acidification; and city-dwellers in Rio de Janeiro hold dots where mudslides from unusually heavy rains wiped out part of their neighborhood. I think its a great way to draw attention to the links between climate change and extreme weather, since the mainstream media coverage of climate change has been almost nil the past few years. A report by Media Matters for America found out that nightly news coverage about climate change on the major networks decreased 72% between 2009 and 2011. On the Sunday shows, 97% of the stories mentioning climate change were about politics in Washington D.C. or on the campaign trail, not about extreme weather or recent scientific reports. You can check out what Climate Impacts Day events may be happening in your area at the climatedots.org website.

Figure 2. Front Street Bridge on the Susquehanna River in Vestal, NY, immediately following the flood of September 8, 2011. Image credit: USGS, New York. In my post, Tropical Storm Lee’s flood in Binghamton: was global warming the final straw? I argue that during September 8, 2011 flood, the Susquehanna River rose twenty feet in 24 hours and topped the flood walls in Binghamton by 8.5 inches, so just a 6% reduction in the flood height would have led to no overtopping of the flood walls and a huge decrease in damage. Extra moisture in the air due to global warming could have easily contributed this 6% of extra flood height.

Jeff Masters

500,000 Lightning Strikes Provide Awesome Photos

May 3, 2012; 12:59 PM ET

Nearly 75% of the nation is under the government (SPC) thunderstorm risk for the next two days (at least). Already this week, over half a million (>500,000) lightning strikes have hit the Earth over the United States.*

This has made, and will make, for incredible lightning photographs across the nation. (Disclaimer: lightning is dangerous; if your camera’s outside the car, YOU need to stay inside. A hard-top car will protect you from lightning.)

Shane Rucker snapped this beautiful shot of lightning behind a paper mill in Wisconsin Tuesday night:

While the Associated Press got lucky Tuesday in Hamilton, Ohio (AP Photo Used With Permission; by Steve Vaughn):

Here in Pennsylvania, over 41,000 of those lightning strikes have hit the ground. Ron Shawley captured these incredible lightning pictures last night:

Look at that one up close. You can actually see the lightning lighting up the trees at and near the strike, and you can even see it going down the tree (the dot of light below the bottom of the strike)!

All in all, last night was a good night for the Pennsylvania Storm Chasers, with storms touching most of the state (and more are coming today and Friday). However, most of the action is after midnight, which is why you didn’t see a lot of chasers out besides Ron.

*75% statistic determined by eyeballing SPC forecasts screen-captured below.

*Vaisala reported 556,3664 lighting strikes between midnight on May 1 and noon today. The map above shows a plot of each strike.

The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of AccuWeather, Inc. or AccuWeather.com

Figure 1. True-color MODIS image of Hurricane Irene over North Carolina taken at 11:35 am EDT August 27, 2011. At the time, Irene was a Category 1 hurricane with 85 mph winds. Image credit: NASA.

At last month’s 30th Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology of the American Meteorological Society, Paul Ruscher of Florida State University explained how Irene’s storm surge came within 8 inches of flooding New York City’s subway system, which would have caused devastating damage. At the current global rate of sea level rise of 3.1 mm/year, a repeat of Irene 65 years from now would be capable of flooding the subway system, if no action is taken. To read more about New York City’s vulnerability, see Andrew Freedman’s analysis at Climate Central, Climate Change Could Cripple New York’s Transportation, or my November 2011 blog post, Hurricane Irene: New York City dodges a potential storm surge mega-disaster.

Jeff Masters

One can not be considered a Northwesterner if you don’t grouse about our endless cool, showery weather during Spring.  And it turns out that our pioneer ancestors—more than 150 years ago–were doing the same thing.

Let’s go back to 1855 and the town of Steilacoom on Puget Sound’s waters.  In a hard-hitting commentary in the Puget Sound Courier published at the end of May,  Honest John Tompkins chastised his fellow citizens for their “growling” about the weather.

He noted that Spring 1855 started out well:

“Throughout the almost entire month of March last, the people everywhere in the Territory, were rejoicing at the beautiful summer-like weather … Every one seemed to be perfectly happy and contented, and there was not a countenance to be met with between the Columbia River and the Straits of Fuca, that was not the index of a joyous heart.”

But then the weather shifted:

“Well, March went out, April came in, and with it, cold, wet, disagreeable weather, and a universal spirit of discontent, and a disposition to “growl”"

“Throughout the entire month, and even up to this, the last day of May, it has been precisely the same, and some amongst us profess to be so thoroughly disgusted with the weather …. that they threaten to leave the Territory altogether.”

Well, I have heard that one before….people threatening to move to California or some other warmer clime! 

By the end of May the weather had improved and Honest John made the false claim I have heard so often….the idea of balance…if the weather is bad for a while, it will surely be good later (and vice versa).  That some kind of omnipotent weather god is ensuring that the yin and yang of weather will be in rough equilibrium.   Sounds profound and true.  It isn’t.  And I must admit I have heard some TV weathercaster types saying the same kind of thing.

“Is it not fair to presume or reasonable to expect, that there will be a large number of wet disagreeable days in the Spring, if there be but few in the Winter, the season in which it was natural to expect them? Most assuredly. And again, now that really fine weather has broke upon us—may we not reasonably anticipate, for a series of months, the same clear and bracing atmosphere, the same un-cloudy days, and deliciously cool nights for which the summers of Washington Territory are so justly and widely celebrated?”

Then Honest John takes on God’s work in putting the complainers in their place.  The kind of work I try to model in my blog.

“Men from New England… You have “growled” a good deal at the weather this Spring, have you not?  … a few short years since, among the bleak hills of your native States, you shivered beneath the fierce Northern blasts that swept from their summits, for five long winter months in each, and then that for three more you were almost constantly subjected to those damp, unwholesome, and consumptive-engendering fogs which are driven by the raw East winds, from “Newfoundland’s Banks” into every “nook and corner of the Northeastern section?” 

I wish I could write like that.  “Damp, unwholesome, consumptive-engendering fogs”!!

And then he took out the heavy guns for those from the warm, tropical southeast:

“Men from the “sunny South!”…  for you are … no freer from blame. Has not the truth many times occurred to your minds … that the enervating influence upon both mind and body of your own tropical climate, and the sluggish vapors arising from your extensive swampy lands, impregnating the entire atmosphere with contagious diseases, are more to be feared and deprecated, than the rains and comparatively cold weather of Washington Territory”

Early Steilacoom

 He ends his reproach to complainers by noting:

“let us have no more of your foolish and wicked repinings at the season.” 

Wise words for all of you to remember.

But some of you insist on complaining.  Surely, the spring of 2011 was worse than any of ancient memory.   Fine, let’s check the numbers, with the assistance of Mark Albright, past State Climatologist.

The average temperature in 1855 for April/May was 51.6 F at Steilacoom which lies between SeaTac and Olympia. The April/May 2011 mean temperature averaged over SeaTac/Olympia was 48.0 F, considerably cooler than Steilacoom experienced 157 years ago in 1855. The coldest April at Steilacoom over the 19 years between 1850 and 1868 was 45.2 F in 1859. This is warmer than the 44.6 F recorded in April 2011 at SeaTac/Olympia.  (Please…no global warming skeptic comments!)

So complainers among you take heart…last spring’s cool/dampness was far worse than the weather that unsettled our tough, stout pioneer ancestors.  

This spring is a pussycat in comparison.

 Nice mini wall cloud with the funnel (the wider part hanging from the cloud base).

Today, I received an impressive picture of two funnels caught over the tulip fields on Sunday at around 12 PM.  This photo was taken by Chris Evans.

http://spindriftphoto.photoshelter.com/image/I0000L1WR_zt.Y50

To be honest with you, I as a little surprised by these funnels.  Yesterday was not very unstable and there was very little precipitation or convection.  Here is the NWS radar at that 12:29 PM. UNIMPRESSIVE.

And here is a blown up view over the area of interest 10 minutes later…a developing cell near Mt. Vernon (green color)…but nothing significant.

And take a look at the high-resolution satellite imagery at 12:30 PM..the arrow is pointing to the convective cell (white spot)…..you would not write home to your mother about this.

So the only explanation of this is that there was enough horizontal shear (change of winds in the horizontal) to produce some rotation (we call it vorticity in the business).  A weak updraft spun this weak rotation up, like an ice skater rotating faster as she pulls her arms in.  In my NW weather book I go into this mechanism in some depth.

As an aside…quite a blustery April day today as a fairly strong low pressure passed to our north, setting up a large north-south pressure difference (see map).

Some folks got gusts to 30-40 mph, particularly near the water–branches and leaves were all over the ground as I biked home today from the UW.  Take a look at the winds on the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge…bet there was some serious spray on the eastbound roadway!

Incredible Photos, Videos of a Tornado in France

Apr 30, 2012; 10:00 AM ET

UPDATE: A news article by AccuWeather and also this article (in French) has meteorological details. Incredible photos of a tornado (shown below) were captured near Seysses (southwest France) and Toulouse (the capital of the Midi-Pyrenees region, the largest region in metropolitan France) Sunday evening. The MapSpace radar showed a strong storm moving northeast between 7 and 8 PM local time:

Below is a Storify story which I wrote, that captures the storm on video and in photos:

[View the story "Beautiful Photos of a Tornado in France 4/29/2012" on Storify]

More information including a radar image, on my blog at http://weathermatrix.accuweather.com

Storified by Jesse Ferrell · Mon, Apr 30 2012 09:59:48

An amazing picture of the storm:

@reedtimmerTVN Tornado in France at 1900 (loc time). It was near Toulouse : pics : Julie Avetta http://pic.twitter.com/CfOwnex1Maxime Huguet

A couple videos…

Tornade � Toulouse | Tornado in France | 29/04/12 | HDtheeadrienn

Tornade toulouse . My first Tornado in france 29-04-2012krees31jeuxvideo

This link shows a great collection of MANY photos from the storm:

Tornade dans le sud Toulousain vue des coteaux | Photolive, toutes les photos m�t�o en temps r�el – InfoclimatGoyrans (31), Francele dimanche 29 avril 2012 � 19h17 La base de la tornade prise au t�l�objectif. J’ ai eu beaucoup de chance de me trou…

Here is more information via a story:

RT @earthskyscience: What is being reported as an F1 tornado touched down near Toulouse, France today. Only minor damage. Great photos. http://bit.ly/IMPuoaTim McGill

The big photo on this page (not the thumbnail) is the best photo:

Tornado Touches Down Near Toulouse, France : Big PicApril 30, 2012 — Several French websites – including Meteorologic.net – reported a tornado formed near the city of Toulouse in southwest…

The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of AccuWeather, Inc. or AccuWeather.com

Figure 1. Hurricane Wilma’s pinhole eye as seen at 8:22 a.m. CDT Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2005, by the crew aboard NASA’s international space station as the complex flew 222 miles above the storm. At the time, Wilma was the strongest Atlantic hurricane in history, with a central pressure of 882 mb and sustained surface winds estimated at 185 mph. The storm was located in the Caribbean Sea, 340 miles southeast of Cozumel, Mexico. Image source: NASA’s Space Photo Gallery.

Figure 2. Damage in Joplin, Missouri after the EF-5 tornado of May 22, 2011. Image credit: wunderphotographer thebige.

Official all-time strongest winds in an Atlantic hurricane: 190 mph
The official record for strongest winds in an Atlantic hurricane were for Hurricane Camille of 1969, which was estimated to have 190 mph winds when it made landfall in Pass Christian, Mississippi. In Dr. Bob Sheets’ and Jack Williams’ book, Hurricane Watch, they recount: On Sunday afternoon, August 17, and Air Force C-130 piloted by Marvin Little penetrated Camille’s eye and measured a pressure of 26.62 inches of mercury. “Just as we were nearing the eyewall cloud we suddenly broke into a clear area and could see the sea surface below,” the copilot, Robert Lee Clark, wrote in 1982. “What a sight! Although everyone on the crew was experienced except me, no one had seen the wind whip the sea like that before…Instead of the green and white splotches normally found in a storm, the sea surface was in deep furrows running along the wind direction….The velocity was beyond the descriptions used in our training and far beyond anything we had ever seen.” So, the 190 mph winds of Camille were an estimate that was off the scale from anything that had ever been observed in the past. The books that the Hurricane Hunters carried, filled with photos of the sea state at various wind speeds, only goes up to 150 mph (Figure 2). I still used this book to estimate surface winds when I flew with the Hurricane Hunters in the late 1980s, and the books are still carried on the planes today. In the two Category 5 hurricanes I flew into, Hugo and Gilbert, I never observed the furrowing effect referred to above. Gilbert had surface winds estimated at 175 mph based on what we measured at flight level, so I believe the 190 mph wind estimate in Camille may be reasonable.

Figure 3. Appearance of the sea surface in winds of 130 knots (150 mph). Image credit: Wind Estimations from Aerial Observations of Sea Conditions (1954), by Charlie Neumann.

Figure 4. Radar image of Hurricane Camille taken at 22:15 UTC August 17, 1969, a few hours before landfall in Mississippi. At the time, Camille had the highest sustained winds of any Atlantic hurricane in history–190 mph.

The infamous hurricane hunter flight into Wilma during its rapid intensification
While I was at last week’s conference, I had a conversation with Rich Henning, a flight meteorologist for NOAA’s Hurricane Hunters, who served for many years as a Air Reconnaissance Weather Officer (ARWO) for the Air Force Hurricane Hunters. Rich told me the story of the Air Force Hurricane Hunter mission into Hurricane Wilma in the early morning hours of October 19, 2005, as Wilma entered its explosive deepening phase. The previous airplane, which had departed Category 1 Wilma six hours previously, flew through Wilma at an altitude of 5,000 feet. They measured a central pressure of 954 mb when they departed the eye at 23:10 UTC. The crew of the new plane assumed that the hurricane, though intensifying, was probably not a major hurricane, and decided that they would also go in at 5,000 feet. Winds outside the eyewall were less than hurricane force, so this seemed like a reasonable assumption. Once the airplane hit the eyewall, they realized their mistake. Flight level winds quickly rose to 186 mph, far in excess of Category 5 strength, and severe turbulence rocked the aircraft. The aircraft was keeping a constant pressure altitude to maintain their height above the ocean during the penetration, but the area of low pressure at Wilma’s center was so intense that the airplane descended at over 1,000 feet per minute during the penetration in order to maintain a constant pressure altitude. By they time they punched into the incredibly tiny 4-mile wide eye, which had a central pressure of just 901 mb at 04:32 UTC, the plane was at a dangerously low altitude of 1,500 feet–not a good idea in a Category 5 hurricane. The pilot ordered an immediate climb, and the plane exited the other side of Wilma’s eyewall at an altitude of 10,000 feet. They maintained this altitude for the remainder of the flight. During their next pass through the eye at 06:11 UTC, the diameter of the eye had shrunk to an incredibly tiny two miles–the smallest hurricane eye ever measured. During their third and final pass through the eye at 0801 UTC, a dropsonde found a central pressure of 882 mb–the lowest pressure ever observed in an Atlantic hurricane. In the span of just 24 hours, Wilma had intensified from a 70 mph tropical storm to a 175 mph category 5 hurricane–an unprecedented event for an Atlantic hurricane. Since the pressure was still falling, it is likely that Wilma became even stronger after the mission departed.

I’ll have a new post by Tuesday at the latest.

Jeff Masters

Maps: Tennessee MCS Shoves on Through

Apr 26, 2012; 11:55 AM ET

AccuWeather.com MapSpace depicted a terrifying-looking MCS (Mesoscale Convective System) moving through Tennessee and into North Carolina this morning. Click on the images below for larger, more detailed versions.

In fact, one roof was ripped off a house in Kentucky overnight, with trees and powerlines downed along the storm’s bow-echo track, which also dropped hail to 1.75″ in diameter:

Counting storms to the Northeast which formed overnight, over 45,000 lightning strikes hit the ground between midnight and 11 AM today:

The storm also looked decent on IR satellite, although I’m sure Scott @ CIMSS will have some more incredible images.

And finally, a couple of radar loops – wide angle (download hi-res) and zoomed in (download hi-res):

The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of AccuWeather, Inc. or AccuWeather.com

Amarillo, TX: 99° (old April record 98° on 4/22/1989 and 4/22/1965)
Lubbock, TX: 101° (old April record 100° on 4/16/1925 and /22/1989)
Dalhart, TX: 96° (old April record 94° on 4/22/1989)
Borger, TX: 99° (tied April record set on 4/22/1965)
Midland, TX: 104° (old April record 101° on 4/21/1989)
Abilene, TX: 104° (old April record 102° on 4/16/1925)
Childress, TX: 106° (old April record 102° on three occasions, most recently on 4/3/2011)

According to wunderground’s weather historian Christopher C. Burt, both Texas and Oklahoma came within 2°F of their all-time April state high temperature record yesterday. Altus, Oklahoma hit 104°, falling 2° short of the April state record of 106° set at the Magnum Research Station in 1972. In the Texas Mesonet, it hit 111° at Knox City 3NW, which is just 2° short of the Texas April state record of 113° set at Catarina in 1984. According to Mr. Burt, What is amazing is that Knox City is in the north-central part of the state, not down in the Rio Grande region like Catarina. The 111° would probably be pretty close to whatever the all-time hottest temp for ANY month might be in that location (probably around 115°). On Sunday this week, Nevada just missed setting their April state high temperature record, when the mercury hit 105° in Laughlin (April state record: 106° in 1989.)

Figure 1. At least 36 of the roughly 400 major U.S. cities that maintain automated weather sensors at their local airports (8%) have set or tied all-time April high temperature records so far this month. The records set yesterday in Texas are not yet in the database, and are not included on this map. Image taken from our new Record Extremes page.

Earlier this week, all-time record April heat hit large portions of Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming. At least 36 of the roughly 400 major U.S. cities that maintain automated weather sensors at their local airports (8%) have set or tied all-time April high temperature records so far this month; no all-time April cold records have been set. The U.S. has been on an extraordinary pace of setting high temperature records so far in 2012. During March 2012, an astonishing 32% of all the major airports in the U.S. set all-time March high temperature records. For the year-to-date, there have been 184 new all-time monthly high temperature records set at the major airports, and 6 all-time monthly low temperature records. Not surprisingly, the period January – March this year has been the warmest such period in the U.S. since record keeping began in 1895.

Figure 2. Total precipitable water (in mm) for this morning shows a surge of moisture moving westwards though the Caribbean. Precipitable water values in excess of 51 mm (2 inches, orange colors) are capable of generating heavy flooding rains. Image credit: University of Wisconsin CIMSS.

Heavy rains kill nine in Haiti
The rainy season has begun on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, where heavy rains that began on Monday have triggered mudslides and floods that killed nine people. Nearly 500,000 people are still homeless in Haiti from the January 2010 earthquake, making the country highly vulnerable to flooding disasters. Heavy flooding was also a problem this week in the neighboring Dominican Republic, where 11,000 people were evacuated; no deaths were reported there, however. Precipitation forecasts from the GFS model suggest that the worst is over for Hispaniola, with the axis of greatest moisture expected to move west of the island today. This surge of moisture will bring heavy rains to Jamaica, Cuba, the Bahamas, Cayman Islands, and South Florida during the remainder of the week.

Jeff Masters

Which Storm Took Down Myer-Womble Observatory?

Apr 25, 2012; 12:41 PM ET

High winds at 14,000 feet took out the U.S.’s highest observatory this winter, the Myer-Womble observatory atop Mount Evans, Colo., (west of Denver). According to WIRED magazine, “Sometime after October, no one knows exactly when, violent winds over Colorado’s Front Range blew the 15-year-old observatory’s dome to pieces.”

I had blogged about two wind storms in particular, one of which probably did the damage:

- 123-MPH Winds at Steamboat Springs, CO Dec. 1, 2011

- Pinecliff, CO Gusts Over 100 MPH Dec. 30, 2011

Pulling the data for the nearest weather station (Loveland Pass – upper right-hand corner of map at bottom; there aren’t many stations transmitting wind data nearby):

Loveland Pass didn’t appear to be affected by the storm at the beginning of the month, but suffered six days with gusts over 30 mph, culminating in a 78.5 mph gust on the morning of Dec. 29. Given that the observatory was 3,000 feet higher, winds there could have easily been over 100 mph, and it may have been the week of unrelenting gusts that eventually crushed the dome.

A meteorologist at the University Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder was quoted in the article saying a storm in “early January” when winds “gusted over 80 mph in the city” probably did it — this is the same storm that I suspected, and here’s a map of nearby wind gusts on Dec. 31:

There is another possibility — an event with 115-mph wind gusts in the state on Nov. 15, 2011, which I did not blog about, but Scott at CIMSS did.

Loveland Pass gusted to 84 mph with this event, and nearby gusts were higher than the end-of-year event, so I think this could have been the one that did the initial damage — and maybe that late December storm caused more.

The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of AccuWeather, Inc. or AccuWeather.com