A Record Early Hurricane Season?

May 23, 2012; 10:39 AM ET

UPDATE 5/23/2012: Although one model continues to predict that Bud will spike to a Cat 3 Hurricane, nearly all other models say he is destined to remain a Tropical Storm.

ORIGINAL REPORT 5/22/2012: Tropical Storm Bud in the Eastern Pacific is predicted, at least by one model, to reach Category-3 hurricane strength by 8 PM, or 00Z time, Thursday May 24th.

The NHC however, puts that probability at less than 5%. If he does, he will be one of only 3 storms in history to reach that major hurricane status in the month of May (or earlier).

If he does it that early on Thursday, he’ll be the earliest major storm ever for that basin (the previous record, Hurricane Adolph, turned to Cat 3 at 18Z on May 24th, 1983).

Tropical Storm Aletta started out the East Pacific season early, forming as a depression on May 14th, but not being named until the beginning of the season at 00 “Z TIME” on May 15th. And of course Tropical Storm Alberto jumped the Atlantic gun by half a month, forming on May 15th.

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

Figure 1. Morning satellite image of Invest 94L.

Tropical Storm Bud continues as a minimal-strength 40 mph storm this morning in the Eastern Pacific, ignoring seemingly favorable conditions for strengthening. However, recent satellite loops show a more organized appearance to the storm, with increased low-level spiral banding, so Bud may finally be responding to the favorable conditions for intensification–low wind shear of 5 – 10 knots and SSTs of 28 – 29°C. On Thursday and Friday, wind shear will rise to the moderate level, SSTs will cool, and total heat content of the waters will decline, which may limit Bud’s potential to reach hurricane strength. Almost all of our reliable models are now forecasting that the trough of low pressure pulling Bud towards the coast of Mexico will not be strong enough to bring Bud ashore, and the storm could linger near the coast for several days. The potentially still exists for Bud to deluge the coast near Manzanillo with very heavy rains capable of triggering dangerous flash floods and mudslides on Friday and Saturday, but the delayed intensification of Bud is making this prospect look less likely.

Figure 2. Morning satellite image of Bud.

Jeff Masters

According to the State of California, total water content in the Sierra snow pack was measured at 40 percent of normal. It was 190 percent of normal this time last year.
And that is why California will get by this year…they had such a huge snow pack last year they were able store enough water for a second year in the reservoirs. 

Spring snow melt brings up the levels of Northwest rivers, particularly east of the Cascade crest, and this sometimes causes flooding.  Here is the latest river level information from the Northwest River Forecast Center in Portland.

No floods right now, but several eastern Washington and northern Idaho rivers are at or above bankfull (orange colors)–this is from snowmelt.  Many of these rivers were even higher a week ago when we had the warm weather that caused intense melting.  To illustrate, take a look at the flow on the Okanogan River near Tonasket (see below)–they even reached flood stage (red line)

Our future?   Well, the next 48-h should bring more showers (see 48h precipitation forecast below), but we should dry out on Friday and for the weekend.  The jet stream moves south of us, taking the wet stuff south to those poor dry devils in California.  They need the water to fill their hot tubs and water their illicit crops in the hills.

In fact, the drought in California has gotten so bad, their marijuana “farmers” are draining creeks and rivers on a massive scale. You think I am kidding don’t you?   See below:

Figure 1. Morning satellite image of Bud.

Record earliest date for formation of the season’s second named storm
Bud is the second named storm to form in the Eastern Pacific in 2012–Tropical Storm Aletta, which formed on May 15, was the first. Bud’s appearance on May 21 marks the earliest date since record keeping began in 1949 for formation of the season’s second named storm. The previous record was set in 1984, when the second named storm formed on May 29. Only two other years have had two named storms in May in the Eastern Pacific–2007 and 1956, which both had the second named storm of the year form on May 30. If Bud ends up making landfall in Mexico as a hurricane, it would be only the second Eastern Pacific May hurricane on record to hit Mexico. The other was Hurricane Agatha of May 24,1971, which hit the same stretch of coast that Bud is threatening. Agatha made landfall as a Category 2 hurricane about 45 mi (75 km) from Zihuatanejo, Mexico. The village of Playa Azul was hard hit by the storm, with up to half of the village’s homes destroyed. Ocean temperatures this year in the region where Aletta and Bud formed are only slightly above average, so the large scale atmospheric patterns are probably more to blame for this year’s exceptionally early start to hurricane season in the Eastern Pacific.

Figure 2. True-color visible satellite image of Alberto taken by the Aqua satellite at 2 pm EDT Monday May 21, 2012. Image credit: NASA.

Alberto headed out to sea
Tropical Depression Alberto is racing northeastwards out to sea, and has been substantially weakened by very high wind shear of 50 knots and passage over cool ocean waters of 24°C (75°F). Alberto will not trouble any land areas, and does not have long to live before being completely dismantled by the high wind shear.

Figure 3. Aerial view of damage from the May 22, 2011 Joplin, Missouri tornado. Image credit: Wikipedia.

One-year anniversary of the Joplin, Missouri EF-5 tornado
May 22 marks the 1-year year anniversary of the deadly Joplin Missouri tornado. The massive EF-5 tornado with winds in excess of 200 mph mowed a 14-mile path of destruction up to one mile wide across the southern portion of the city. The tornado killed 161 people–the highest death toll from a U.S. tornado since 1947, and the seventh deadliest tornado in U.S. history. The tornado did $3 billion in damage, making it the most expensive tornado in world history. The death toll from the tornado undoubtedly would have been higher had the National Weather Service not issued a tornado warning a full 24 minutes in advance of the tornado. This is nearly double the average tornado warning lead time of thirteen minutes.

Links
The most remarkable audio I’ve ever heard of people surviving a direct hit by a violent tornado was posted to Youtube by someone who took shelter in the walk-in storage refrigerator at a gas station during the Joplin tornado. There isn’t much video.

Video of the Joplin, Missouri tornado of May 22, 2011, entering the southwest side of town. Filmed by TornadoVideos.net Basehunters team Colt Forney, Isaac Pato, Kevin Rolfs, and Scott Peake.

Figure 1. True-color visible satellite image of Alberto taken by the Aqua satellite at 2:30 pm EDT Sunday May 20, 2012. At the time, Alberto had maximum sustained winds of 45 mph. Image credit: NASA.

Eastern Pacific TD 2-E may become a dangerous hurricane for Mexico
A more significant storm is newly-formed Tropical Depression 2-E in the Eastern Pacific, off the coast of Mexico. The depression is taking its time getting organized today due to its large size, as seen on satellite loops. But with favorable SSTs of 29 – 30°C and light to moderate wind shear in the 5 – 15 knot range expected along its path, TD 2-E should steadily organize on Tuesday and Wednesday, and become Hurricane Bud by Thursday. A trough of low pressure is expected to swing north of the storm late this week, turning TD 2-E to the north to a landfall between Manzanillo and Acapulco, Mexico on Friday. This storm has the potential to be a dangerous hurricane for the Mexican coast.

Figure 2. Sunday’s annular eclipse of the sun as seen by wunderphotographer mcgino in Polverada, NM.

Spectacular annular eclipse of the sun on Sunday
On Sunday, sky-watchers along the U.S. West Coast and in Asia were treated to a rare annular eclipse of the sun, where the moon blocked out all but a thin ring of light around the sun. Our wunderphotos gallery has fantastic collection of some great eclipse photos people took. Dr. Cliff Mass’ blog has a nice satellite sequence showing the shadow of the eclipse affecting the U.S.

Jeff Masters

It was cloudy over most of the Northwest and thus we were unable to see the annular solar eclipse from the ground…disappointing!   But if you can’t see it from the ground, why not enjoy the view from space?

Can you see the eclipse from one of the National Weather Service (NWS) weather satellites?  You bet you can.

Let me show you a sequence of visible satellite images from the NWS GOES-West geostationary satellite, orbiting approximately 35,000 km above the planet. Below you will see a series of these images, starting 3 PM (2200 Z–zulu time or GMT)– before any lunar shadow was evident.  Note the area of darkness that moves in starting 4 PM (2300 Z).  The dark splotch approaches and crosses the West Coast. By the last image (7:30 PM), most of the darkness has cleared the western U.S.  Scroll down quickly to get the effect.

Pretty neat.   If you want to see it from the ground there a number of video on youtube already.   A sample: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFcwAPFMM-k

Figure 1. Late morning visible satellite image of Alberto.

Forecast for Alberto
Sporadic rain showers from Alberto are likely to affect the Georgia and South Carolina coasts today, and the coasts of North Carolina and South Carolina on Monday. The heaviest rains and tropical storm-force winds should remain offshore, but even if Alberto did make landfall, the storm is too small to cause major flooding problems, particularly since the coast is under moderate to severe drought. Alberto’s rains will be generally less than an inch over land areas, which will not be plentiful enough to cause significant drought relief. Wind shear is expected to increase to the high range, 30 – 40 knots, tonight through Monday, which should be able to rapidly disrupt a storm as small as Alberto. Steering currents are weak, and Alberto will wander off the coast of South Carolina through Monday morning, before getting caught up by a trough of low pressure on Monday night which should lift the storm out to the northeast. NHC is giving Alberto a less than 5% chance of reaching hurricane strength. Alberto should cause little or no damage to the coast, except perhaps for some coastal erosion due to high waves.

Figure 2. Late morning total rainfall image of Alberto from the Charleston, SC radar. Alberto’s rains have been less than one inch along the coast, and most of the rain has fallen offshore.

Figure 3. Late morning radar image of Alberto from the Charleston, SC radar.

Alberto in historical context
Alberto is earliest-forming tropical storm in the Atlantic Basin since Ana in 2003, which formed on April 21. Alberto is one of only three Atlantic tropical storms to form in May in the past 31 years. The others were Tropical Storm Arthur of 2008, and Tropical Storm Arlene of 1981. There was also a subtropical storm, Andrea, that formed in May of 2007. Formation of an early season tropical storm from an old frontal boundary, like occurred with Alberto, is not a harbinger of an active hurricane season–it’s more of a random occurrence. Early season storms that form in the Caribbean, though, often signal that a busy hurricane season may occur.

I’ll have an update Monday morning.

Jeff Masters

Figure 1. True color satellite photo of Alberto taken at 1:50 pm EDT Saturday May 19, 2012. Image credit: NASA.

Forecast for Alberto
Rain showers from Alberto are likely to move onshore between Charleston and Wilmington Saturday night and Sunday, bringing 1 – 3 inches of rain to portions of the coast. The storm is too small to cause major flooding problems, particularly since the coast is under moderate to severe drought. Alberto’s rains will not be plentiful enough to cause significant drought relief, except perhaps over a small region near the coast, where (and if) the storm makes landfall. Wind shear is expected to remain in the moderate range, 15 – 20 knots, through Monday, which is low enough to allow some slow development. Since the storm is very small, it is highly vulnerable to even a modest increase in wind shear or dry air, which could rapidly disrupt it. Steering currents are weak, and Alberto will wander off the coast of South Carolina through Sunday, before getting caught up by a trough of low pressure on Monday which should lift it out to the northeast. The moderate wind shear and dry air are likely to keep Alberto below hurricane strength. NHC is giving Alberto a 5 – 10% chance of reaching hurricane strength before dissipating on Thursday as it scoots northeast out to sea.

Figure 2. Late afternoon radar image of Alberto from the Wilmington radar.

I’ll have an update Sunday morning.

Jeff Masters

An annular eclipse–the sun is not completely covered by the moon

Tomorrow (Sunday) between roughly 5:30 and 7:30 PM PDT an annual eclipse of the sun will be occurring over the U.S. West Coast.  Even if it were clear, we (Washington State and northern Oregon) would only get a partial, off-center eclipse since the prime viewing swath will be south of us (see map).

 You can go to a wonderful eclipse calculator created by NASA (found here) to see what proportion of the sun is covered and when.  For Seattle, the answer was about 83% starting around 6:44 PM (time is in UTC/GMT).

Will you see it?  I don’t have particularly good news, but I can offer a slight bit of hope.

Here is the official National Weather Service sky cover forecast for 5 PM Sunday:

If this is correct, then most northwesterners are in trouble…need to head down to far SE Oregon, CA, or Nevada.  But the NWS forecasts tend to be a bit broad brushed and smoothed.  That is why you come to this blog!

What about our latest WRF weather model runs?   Here is the predicted cloud liquid water integrated from the surface to the top of the atmosphere at 5 PM and 8 PM Sunday..  Bright white would be thick clouds, gray–thin clouds.  If you believe this, there is a CHANCE for a thinning of the approaching clouds along a swatch over the southern and eastern portions of Washington. 

We can also produce a simulation of what an infrared satellite image would see if the model solution was correct.  Here it is for 5 and 8 PM.  Lots of clouds, but there some gaps and thin spots.  Forget the coast.

Finally, we have our ensemble prediction system that gives cloud probabilities.  Here are the probabilities of low clouds (surface to 3000 ft)–there still could be higher clouds above.  Clearly, the message is don’t go to the coast or north.  Head south and east to improve your chances.

Bottom line:  a system is approaching tomorrow and there will be considerable cloudiness.   But there is a chance that some of you over the southern and eastern portions of the region might get lucky.   Or fly to Reno if you want to be sure!  Tomorrow afternoon go to the visible satellite animation (found here) and you will know the story.  

Disturbance 93L off South Carolina coast could become a tropical storm

Disturbance 93L off South Carolina coast could become a tropical storm

8 Days and Weak: Blogitis, Silent Sirens, Other News

May 18, 2012; 12:50 PM ET

So I’m ashamed to say that it’s been more than a week since I did my last blog. This is super-embarrassing because I used to promise to blog every day. As I would say in those “blogitis” entries:

“Bless me readers, for I have not blogged. It has been 8 days since my last blog.”

And so it is today, on the infamous day when Facebook goes public, that I return to the blogosphere. As I have said in the past, my reason for not blogging as frequently has to do with our talented news writers covering what I used to, in the AccuWeather.com News section, and the fact that I have taken to putting out shorter notes about weather-related items on my Facebook Page and Twitter account. For example, if you haven’t been following me on Social Media, you missed “rain gauge innards,” “turn around don’t drown law,” “Canary Island heat wave,” and more, just in the last day or so.

I’ve also been unusually busy training my new Social Media intern, working with our new SM consultants, and writing my WeatherWise magazine article on Social Media (that’s right, I’m a published author now, look for it in the July-August 2012 issue, download my local NWS PowerPoint for a preview). And finally (lest you think I’m slacking), I read a pre-release copy of Mike Smith’s new book during my Spring yard sale last weekend (as I did for his prior book “Warnings” two years ago).

Mike heads up our Enterprise division in Wichita. This new book, entitled “When the Sirens Were Silent,” gives his opinions on why so many people were killed during the Joplin tornado in 2011 (did you know: the sirens were not even sounded for the Tornado Warning that night!), and what we can do to prevent such a tragedy again. His blog has interviews, and the latest status on the availability of the book and e-book, which were released Tuesday, but are temporarily out of stock as of this writing. From Amazon.com:

“What if the warning system failed to provide a clear, timely notice of a major storm? Tragically, that scenario played out in Joplin, Missouri, on May 22, 2011. As a wedding, a high school graduation, and shopping trips were in progress, an invisible monster storm was developing west of the city. When it arrived, many were caught unaware. One hundred sixty-one perished and one thousand were injured. “When the Sirens Were Silent” is the gripping story of the Joplin tornado. It recounts that horrible day with a goal of insuring this does not happen again. The book gives you the tools you need to keep yourself and your family safe. Included are clever lift-out copies of the latest tornado safety rules for homes, schools, and offices.”

Let’s read that last sentence again. Included are clever lift-out copies of the latest tornado safety rules for homes, schools, and offices. Tell me the last weather book that gave you that! This is a great way to battle what Mike has described as “Warning Fatigue” that some residents in the Plains have because there is so much severe weather there. If only there were enough postage in the world to get those safety rules to everyone!

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

Figure 1. Departure of temperature from average for April 2012. The most notable extremes were the warmth observed across Russia, the United States, Alaska, and parts of the Middle East and eastern Europe. There were no land areas with large-scale cold conditions of note. Image credit: National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) .

La Niña officially ends
According to NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center (CPC), La Niña conditions are no longer present in the equatorial Pacific, where sea surface temperatures were approximately average as of May 13. The threshold for a La Niña is for these temperatures to be 0.5°C below average or cooler. CPC forecasts that neutral conditions will persist though the summer, with a 41% chance of an El Niño event developing in time for the August – September – October peak of hurricane season. El Niño conditions tend to decrease Atlantic hurricane activity, by increasing wind shear over the tropical Atlantic.

Figure 2. Arctic sea ice extent in 2012 (blue line) compared to the average (thick grey line.) The record low year of 2007 (dashed green line) is also shown. Arctic sea ice was near average during April, but has fallen well below average during the first half of May. Image credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

April Arctic sea ice extent near average
Arctic sea ice extent was near average in April 2012, the 17th lowest (18th greatest) extent in the 35-year satellite record, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). This was the largest April Arctic sea ice extent since 2001. However, ice in the Arctic is increasingly young, thin ice, which will make it easy for this year’s ice to melt away to near-record low levels this summer, if warmer than average weather occurs in the Arctic.

Figure 2. Mt. St. Helens in Washington State erupting on May 18, 1980. Image credit: USGS.

Anniversary of the eruption of Mt. St. Helens
Today is the 32nd anniversary of the May 18th, 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens in Washington State. To mark the occasion, NASA has put together a cool Landsat satellite time lapse of 32 years of regrowth of surrounding forest. The USGS has an extensive informational site on the eruption.

In Grand Isle, Louisiana last week, a large waterspout came ashore as an EF-1 tornado. The tornado ripped the roof off of the house across the street from this videographer, who should have taken shelter instead of filming the destruction. There’s one 4-letter word in the video. Thanks go to

for posting this.

Have a great weekend, everyone! I’ll be back Sunday or Monday with a new post.

For a number of days, starting on Friday, the new Langley Hill coastal radar has been showing lots of precipitation offshore, some if it heavy.  Yet the skies have been clear or nearly so.  Then on Wednesday the rain disappeared.  What is going on?   And let me warn you now…these mystery showers are going to come back!

First, let me show you what I am talking about…here are two radar images for 8:38 PM on Friday and 6:49 PM on Tuesday.  Lots of apparent rain offshore, but very little over land…very strange!

And lets compare these radar images to the visible satellite imagery at nearly the same time:

All that rain is not coming from clouds!  So if this is not some sort of alien intervention, there must be another explanation!  And there is.

Last weekend and early this week the land surface temperatures have been relatively warm, and most importantly the lower atmospheric temperatures have been warm.  But the surface temperatures of the eastern Pacific have remained quite cool–roughly 50F.   With warm temperatures aloft and cool sea surface temperatures, a low-level inversion (temperature warming with height) formed over the ocean.    We don’t have a balloon-launched radiosonde over the ocean, but I can show you the simulated conditions from the UW WRF modeling system there.  The red line is temperature and you can see a shallow, cool marine layer surmounted by an inversion.

So why is this important?  It turns out that such low-level inversions can bend the radar beam downward towards the surface…we call this superrefraction (see figure).   Radar beams are generally bent a bit (refracted) by the normal atmosphere, but inversions greatly enhance this refraction, enough so that the bean is bent back to the earth.  In fact, under inversion conditions (like this weekend), the refraction is so complete the radar beam is trapped near the surface (this is called ducting).

Annual Solar Eclipse Forecast

The event will be centered south of us, but the event will occur around 6 PM on Sunday.   Unfortunately, it looks like most of our region will be clouded over at that time.  Sorry.  Will update on Sunday AM. 

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.