Warm World Continued In October

Yearly global October temperatures from the
1880s to now. See a trend?

A strong cold front is sweeping past my house in northwestern Vermont this Sunday morning as I write this, and rain will soon change to snow showers.

It's going to be another chilly day, which has been the trend around here for the past couple of weeks.

However, the worldwide warmth seems to be continuing, at least as far as NOAA data from October is concerned.

NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information put out their monthly report late last week and said October on a global scale was the fourth warmest on record.

What makes coming in at Number 4 rather than Number 1 is that we are settling into a La Nina pattern in the Pacific, which tends to cool the world a little bit. The opposite, El Nino, warms the eastern Pacific and tends to make the entire globe a bit warmer. The record hot years of 2015 and 2016 were generally El Nino, or at least neutral years.

So far, 2017 is the third warmest year on record, with only 2015 and 2016 being hotter.

Here in Vermont, we contributed our tiny bit to make October the third hottest global one on record. Vermont had, by far, its hottest October on record.

So far here in Vermont, November is running a little cooler than normal, but that obiously won't have much of an effect on the overall global temperature readings for the month.

Because of global warming, we are permanently having warmer than normal months on a global basis. The only question about November is how much warmer than average will it be, and will it be another top 10 warmest November?

We'll watch that report when it comes out in another month.

Two Bad Storms: One In Peru, One In Australia

Devastating mudslides and floods have been htting Peru
in recent weeks. Photo by Ernesto Benavides/Getty Images

Every once in awhile, I like to take you on a tour of weather elsewhere in the world, so here we go.

Last week, Peru was hit by one of the worst storms on record to hit that South American nation.

According to the always reliable and informative Weather Underground blog by Bob Hanson and Jeff Masters, the world's costliest disaster so far in 2017 has been going on or the past several days in Peru.

Torrential rain has fallen on normally dry terrain in Peru in recent weeks, causing flooding that has killed at least 80 people and displaced about 110,000 others.

Reuters reports large swaths of Peru, including the capital cit of Lima, schools have suspended classes and running water has been restricted because treatment plants are all screwed up by mudslides. Food shortages are developing in some towns because roads are so damaged by floods and mudslides that trucks can't move goods around.

The trouble in Lima, Henson and Masters say, developed despite the fact that little rain has fallen in most  of the lower elevation parts of the city.

The climate there is normally such that the city gets high humidity and fog fairly frequently, but the cool Pacific Ocean water just off the coast of South America helps prevent the kinds of updrafts that can trigger storms and heavy rain.

The flooding this year is in elevations above Lima, but even there, it is normally very dry, so what happened in the past couple of months to change that?

It's complicated and a bit weird, climatologically, but here we go. El Nino, that periodic warming of eastern Pacific waters, messes up weather patterns all around the world. It can really cause problems in Peru, which of course is right next to the eastern Pacific.

The water in the eastern Pacific gets warm, so you get more of those updrafts and storms that can cause heavy rain in Peru. That situation caused severe flooding in Peru in 1997 and 1998.

There was another very strong El Nino in 2014 through early 2016, but oddly, there wasn't all that much flooding in Peru then.  That puzzled scientists.

Now, El Nino is gone, so you'd think Peru would be safe from any big floods caused by this oceanic and atmospheric phenomenon. However, for some reason, the water temperature just off the coast of Peru skyrocketed in the past few months.

Scientists are even more puzzled by that.

This warm patch off the coast of Peru could lead to a more widepread El Nino, but so far that hasn't happened.

But the warm water lingers in the waters off Peru, so more flooding is a threat.

DEBBIE DOWN UNDER

Meanwhile, in Australia, Cyclone Debbie has hit the northeast part of the nation with devastating force.

Cyclones in that part of the world are another name for hurricanes.

Satellite view of Cyclone Debbie in northeastern Australia.

And Debbie is a biggie. It just hit land overnight our time on the U.S. East Coast, which is during the day Tuesday in Australia.  Winds were reported as high as 165 mph.

Since the storm was ongoing as I write this, details from the disaster zone are sketchy.

Early reports and video emerging from near where the cyclone made landfall indicate major damage, with roofs blown from homes, storm surges and other damage. We don't know yet if there have been any deaths, but injuries have been reported, according to The Guardian. 

Debbie made landfall at a series of very nice islands and coastal locations popular with tourists.

One tourist stuck there during the cyclone said the streets are littered with metal roofing and golf carts that have been flung around by the winds. In hotels, people stayed away from windows as the panes flexed in and out amid the destructive winds, The Guardian said. 

The tourist, named Peter Langtree, said the noise from Debbie was incredibly loud and scary. "The noise is like nothing I've ever heard before I guess if you had to explain it, it would be similar to standing next to a 747 at take off."

Cyclones hit Australia from time to time, almost always on the northern coasts of the nation, but this one was much stronger than usual. It was the worst cycline since at least 2007. It might turn out to be one of the worst cyclones in Australian history.

Some videos:

This video shows damage and strong winds from Debbie in Airlie, Australia:



This rather loud video shows Debbie at peak force. Looks scary to me!

Record Hot Times For Planet Earth For 12th Month In A Row

A red world: Global temperaturs were way abov
normal almost everywhere in April.  

NOAA confirmed yesterday that last month was the hottest April on record for Planet Earth.

Incredibly, it was the 12th consecutive month that the world has seen a hottest month, and 2016 is likely to go down as the warmest year on record for the globe.

Blame climate change, with an assist from El Nino for this literal hot mess.

Climate change is continuing to exert upward pressure on global temperatures and will continue to do so for the forseeable future.

El Nino, the periodic warming of the eastern Pacific, puts a lot of extra heat into the air. The most added heat in the air lags the peak of El Nino by a few months, which explains why it's so hot. And why temperatures in the last year or so have spiked up way above the somewhat slower long term upward trend.

Each of the last seven months in NOAA's database, going back to the late 1800s, are the only ones that were a degree or more warmer than the long term average.

When you're looking at the globe as a whole, a few tenths of a degree above or below normal is remarkable. A full degree is incredible.

By the way, we haven't had a month that was even a smidge cooler than normal, if you take the Earth as  whole, since February, 1985. So if you're 31 years old or younger, you've never experienced a cooler than average month on the Globe.

Many of not most scientists are expecting global temperatures to cool slightly in the upcoming months and year or two as El Nino wanes.

So don't expect to keep hearing "warmest ever" phrases every month. But with underlying global warming continuing on, don't expect to ever harken back to the 1980s or before. I don't think we'll ever see a cooler than average month again, unless there's massive global volcanoes, huge asteroid hits or nuclear war or some other terrible thing.

The warmth in April was once again concentrated up in the Arctic.

Ice extent continues way below normal up there, which might set the stage for a record low ice extent come Septemeber. Whether or not that actually happens depends on summertime weather patterns at the top of the globe.

But the trend is there. It's also not helping that massive early season wildfires in Canada and Siberia are dropping bits of soot on some of the existing ice, which would hasten melting under summertime sun. (Dark objects like soot absorb the sun's heat. White ice reflects the heat more.)

Young people are always admonished to change the world. But we shouldn't be changing the world this way. Watch for more weather disasters, big climate disruptions and other expensive consequences of global warming coming to a planet near you.

Southeast Asia Gripped By Brutal, Long Heat Wave

A woman in India stays as close to a fan as possible
during the country's intense and long lasting heat wave  

Weird heat waves have been gripping different parts of the world quite often over the past year, that's for sure

(Shout out to tropical Greenland!)

Over the last few weeks, the Earth's first truly deadly heat wave of 2016 is grinding on in southeast Asia.

In India, 330 million people have been affected by the worst of the heat wave and drought, which has brought temperatures there to as high as 119 degrees, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

At least 87 people died from the  heat in India and March, and likely far more than that in April, though the government hasn't compiled that information yet. At least 250,000 villages in India are facing severe water shortages.

In Thailand,the heat wave is being described as the longest lasting in at least 65 years. It's gotten as hot as 112 degrees there in late April, according to Bangkok Coconuts. 

More than 130 children have drowned in Thailand in the past month as the kids flee to waterways to escape the heat.

The heat and accompanying drought have destroyed crops in India, Thailand, and Vietnam, whose coffee crop is wilting in the dry heat.

The famous bugaboo El Nino gets lots of the blame for this heat wave and drought. El Nino tends to accentuate droughts and heat waves in southeast Asia.

Underlying global warming contributes a bit to make the situation even worse.

Monsoons will hopefully ease the drought and heat wave but that will take time. Normally, the wet monsoon season starts to creep into southern India in June and slowly spreads northward across much of the region.

Much like California hoping for a lot of El Nino driven winter storms a few months back, people in Southeast Asia hope a rapidly waning El Nino will encourage a robust monsoon.

Record Heat And Drought Bring Apocalyptic Fire To Canadian City.

A massive wildfire sweeps into Fort McMurray,
Alberta, Canada on Tuesday.  

You might have seen this on the news, but while you were watching election returns out of Indiana last night, a Canadian city burned up.

Fort McMurray, population about 83,000, was evacuated as a massive wildfire pummeled the city.

After a very, warm, dry winter, strong, very dry winds swept Alberta and surrounding areas amid record heat. Fort McMurray had a record high temperature of 90 degrees, but that was the least of the concern.

This was one of the largest evacuations in Canadian history.

It was certainly the largest evacuation in Alberta history. Whole neighborhoods went up in flames.

Videos are at the bottom of this post.

Highway 63, the main highway in and out of Fort McMurray, was a scene of chaos as traffic came to a standstill amid the panicked evacuations, and flames swept over the road.

The Edmonton Journal reported no fatalities in the fires yet, but the situation is still unfolding, and I fear some people didn't get out in time, based on how scary the scenes looked.

The Edmonton Journal did report people going in and out of homes and fleeing in one mobile home park as a wall of flames swept in, so that doesn't sound good.

Whole neighborhoods are known to be on fire, but firefighters also saved many other neighborhoods. Fires extended to near or even downtown Fort McMurray. News video showed a Super 8 Hotel on fire in the downtown area.

Fire along busy Highway 63, on which people were
evacuating from the blaze, Tuesday in
Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. 

A large area of southwestern Canada remains under very high fire danger today amid the high temperatures, strong winds and dry air.

The wildfire season in North America is off to a terrible start, thanks to a warm, dry winter in many regions.

Huge wildfires swept parts of Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas earlier this spring, causing widespread damage.

What little snow there was melted early in northern areas. The earliest wildfires on record were reported last month in Alaska.

Even here where I am in New England, there were many relatively small brush fires in April because of dry conditions and a premature snow melt. (Rain arrived this week in the Northeast, which is definitely helping.)

El Nino is largely to blame for this situation, since it tends to cause warm dry winters in the northern half of North America.

While I can't specifically tie climate change to the Fort McMurray fire, or any of the wildfires this spring for that matter, the fires are consistent with what climatologists say is a likely consequence of the warming now under way.

By the way, I saw some internet meanness already concerning the Fort McMurray fire. It's in the tar sands area of Alberta, and critics say the oil extraction there is environmentally damaging and contributes to global warming.

Though almost everybody is correctly sympathetic to the people in the fire zone, a few jerks said they deserve it because they're supposedly seeing the consequences of global warming.

By that logic, I guess people deserved to be in car wrecks because they used fossil fuels while driving to work.

Idiotic hostility helps nobody. Let's just hope Fort McMurray recovers well, and I encourage everyone to help them.  Click on this link to the Red Cross to help the city and its fire victims.

California had some drought relief this winter, so it's a question whether the wildfire season there will be as bad as recent years.

But a vast stretch of northern forest from Alaska through much of Canada is dry, so that region is primed for more disasters like the one in Fort McMurray on Tuesday.

This video shows a Global News reporter near the fire as it approaches heavy traffic along Highway 63 in Fort McMurray:



This CBC report with some scary, and sad video is also an eye-opener

California Drought: Things Are Better, But Not That Great

Last April 1, water managers tried to measure snow
in a high Sierra field, but came up empty. There should
be several feet of snow on the ground there
this time of year.  

Around the first of April last year, Frank Gehrke, chief of the California Cooperative Snow Surveys Program, strolled out into an alpine meadow in the Sierra Nevada mountains to measure the snowpack.

There was no snow to measure. Just green grass and dust. The moment encapsulated the dire water shortages California was facing in a record drought. The Sierra snowpack was just 5 percent of normal about a year ago.

This week, Gehrke strolled out into that same Sierra alpine meadow. This time he happily trudged through deep snow.

He poked a measuring stick into the slush and powder, and discovered the snow was 58 inches deep, says the Los Angeles Times.

The snow was packed down tight in that field. It held the equivalent of 26 inches of rain. That's just a wee bit below normal, 97 percent of normal to be exact.

The same Sierra meadow as above on March 30 this
year had a welcome snow cover of 58 inches.  

Which means, in terms of drought, things have vastly improved in California, but the state has a long way to go to recover to normal levels of moisture in the snow, in the ground, in the reservoirs, in the aquifers.

Thanks to El Nino, that periodic warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean, a number of wet storms slammed into California over the winter.

But compared to other big El Nino years the amount of precipitation in California over the past several months was "Meh." The state was counting on El Nino to deliver epic rains and snows.

El Nino only delivered something close to average for a winter. Not enough to get California out of the hole.

In fact, southern California in particular missed out on the storms. San Diego had the least amount of winter precipitation of any El Nino year on record. As noted, El Nino years in California are normally quite wet.

Last year, when Gehrke had no snow to measure, California Gov. Jerry Brown declared there would have to be a 25 percent reduction in California water use for the year, a goal the state largely met.

With this year's good but not spectacular snow and rain, the governor left the restrictions in place.

Here's how Gehrke describes the current situation, as reported in the Los Angeles Times:

"We're barely average. It stops the downward slide.....Now we're clearly looking at next year, and there are no reliable indicators of what next year will bring."

There's the rub. El Nino is fading, and we don't know what the weather patterns will be like next winter in California.

The Golden State gets next to no rain from late spring, through summer into the autumn. That's normal.

The question is, will the dry times return to California next winter? Will they get more welcome storms, or will the pattern flip back to dry?

Moreover, will temperatures continue to run well above normal, as they have in California for the past few years. High temperatures prematurely melt the Sierra snowpack and increase evaporation, hastening water losses.

These trends can have long term consequences. Farmers in California, especially in the south, are scaling back, because we are possibly in a "new normal" that features a drier California, notes Yale Climate Connection.

Maybe farms will just move north, and farming will be a thing of the past in southern California. Time will tell.

Global Warming News Roundup: Missing Ice, Hot Satellites, New England Winters

Click on this graph to make it bigger and
easier to see. Arctic sea ice extent (light blue
line) has been mostly running at record
low levels so far this year.  

If you want global warming to reverse itself and things to start cooling off, this isn't going to be a blog post you want to read.

Things are still heating up dramatically, as the following roundup of climate news suggests.

Hot Arctic And Not Much Ice

As I reported earlier, the Arctic is having an incredibly warm winter.

New data released in the past week show that February continued the warm trend, with parts of the high Arctic as much as 29 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal, something that's not been seen before.

Not surprisingly, Arctic sea ice was at record low levels during most of February, says the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

A bit of colder air in parts of the Arctic froze up some northern seas, so now the ice is about tied with a record low extent, rather than well below the previous record as it had been for most of February.

This winter continues - and at least temporarily accelerates - the decline in the amount of sea ice up there in recent decades.

As I've noted previously, record or near record low ice extent in February and March doesn't necessarily portend record low sea ice up there in the summer, when it matters the most, but it does make that more likely.

Weirder Winters Where We Live

Related to the lack of ice up in the Arctic is a new study on New England winters that bolsters the evidence that the declining ice up by the North Pole is changing weather patterns im the mid-latitudes where most of us live.

We in New England have noticed the winters have gotten pretty crazy. We've had warm, nearly snow-free ones like this year, and bitterly cold, horribly snowbound ones like last year.

According to the Alaska Dispatch News:

"Scientists studied isotopes in precipitation samples collected since 1968 at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire. The water isotopes -- the varying atomic structure of the hydrogen and oxygen that make up water -- identifies the precipitation that falls there durig all and winter as originating from the warming Arctic."

Over time, there has been an increase in the proportion of the precipitation that originate from water molecules in the Arctic.  

A loss of Arctic sea ice might be affecting the
jet stream, which in turn seems to be
making New England winters more extreme,
either cold and snowy or warm and dry.

This suggests that as the ice in the Arctic melts, it influences the jet stream, giving it bigger bulges to the north and bigger dips to the south.

That means there's more likely to be unusual bursts of record warm air heading north toward the Arctic under the bulges, and a greater likelihood of blasts of air coming direct from the North Pole southward to places like New Hampshire.

The fact that more isotopes are coming from the Arctic means there's bigger gyrations in the jet stream, making it easier for Arctic air to plunge south, and presumably, warm air return north to the Arctic.  

The bigger the bulges and dips in the jet stream, the more extreme the temperatures, and the stronger the storm systems get. No wonder winters have been getting so weird.

This water isotope study does not prove that the jet stream is getting wavier and weirder, but it builds on previous studies that suggest the same thing, says the Alaska Dispatch News.  

Even The Satellites Are Saying It's Warm

Climatologists still largely regard surface-based temperature measurements as the best way to measure climate trends. Satellite measurements have been around for decades, but many scientists suggest these readings from satellites underestimate the amount the Earth has warmed.

However, the latest readings for February, as derived from satellites, are off-the-charts warm.

According to Slate, satellite measurements suggested that February set new heights in atmospheric warmth, only to be outdone by the opening couple of days in March.

The satellite readings showed the northern hemisphere, at least, was a full 2 degrees Celcius above normal. That level is a somewhat arbitrary threshhold in which scientists say the world is in deep trouble from global warming.

Of course, that 2 degrees Celcius danger level would have to be sustained over time. People unanimously believe this level of warmth in the northern hemisphere will end very soon. At least for now.

It's remarkable in that it's the first time such a departure above normal has been observed. It's probably the first time it's been that warm in the northern hemspher since human civilization began thousands of years ago, according to Slate.

If warming continues, we'll get to that 2 degree Celcius above normal warmth again, then more and more frequently, until it's always two degrees above normal.

It will be interesting to see what the land-based global temperature analysis will be for February. Those numbers I think are closer to reality. But I bet they'll show another record hot month for the planet.

The latest satellite data is bad news for climate science deniers like Ted Cruz.

The Republican presidential candidate has consistently said that satellite data shows no warming like surface based analysis has. He's not quite right. The satellite data shows warming, but not as steep a climb as data from land based thermometers have shown.

Now, even the satellite data is showng a big jump, at least for now.

The Global Warming Slowdown Is Over

The satellite data gives even more credence to the idea that global warming is accelerating, at least for now.

Global warming appears to have slowed in much of the 2000s, up to the year 2013. notes Climate Central. 

Some climate scientists and activists pooh-poohed the apparently slowdown in the rate of warming, saying it masked increasing heat content in the oceans.

Maybe, but the fact remains that the rate of global warming did, in fact, slow down, despite a few reports to the contrary.  NOAA, for instance, said the warming continued apace, with no slow down.

Climate change skeptics seized on the slowdown by calling it a hiatus, and claiming global warming was over.

That was incorrect, but so was claiming the easing in the rate of global warming didn't exist. It did exist.

"We shouldn't sweep the early 2000s warming slowdown under the rug," said Penn State meteorology professor Michael Mann.

That's significant, coming from Mann, since he has been in the forefront of scientists warning about the consequences of climate change.

Global warming does not cancel out natural variability. Many influences can lower, or raise global temperatures. While increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would inevitably cause the heat to rise, those other natural processes can slow the rate of warming, or speed it up.

It appears that there was a natural cycle in the Pacific Ocean that increased trade winds, which in turn sank excess heat into the deep oceans, rather than letting it sit in the atmosphere. That meant the rate of warming in the lower atmosphere, where we live, kind of conked out as the 21st century opened, says Climate Central.

That natural cycle in the Pacific has pretty much moved on now. El Nino, another natural process, has apparently teamed up with the end of that Pacific cycle, means that global warming since the beginning of 2014 has accelerated to a rate faster than the average over the past few decades.

Which explains why we've been breaking global temperature records by large margins for the past couple of years.

The rate of global warming will continue to fluctuate. Nobody is sure how long the current really fast rate, which is going full steam, will continue. Will the inevitable end of El Nino, probably happening later this year, slow things down again? Or will temperatures keep racing upward and upward.

We'll have to wait and see.

Temperature measurements taken at the surface of the planet from 2001 to 2014 revealed a lull in the rate of global warming, sometimes called the “warming hiatus,” before spiking upward again. 2014 was the hottest year on record until the record was easily beaten in 2015.

Until 2009, scientists had little explanation for the phenomenon. By 2014, though, it was known that the slowdown was caused primarily by a phase in a slow-moving Pacific Ocean cycle, with fierce trade winds driving more heat than normal into ocean depths.

The slowdown at the planet’s surface coincided with a rise in temperatures in ocean depths, worsening sea-level rise.

“The temporary slowdown in no way implies that human-caused warming has ceased or slowed down,” Mann said. “It was temporarily masked by natural factors.”Several recent papers have called into question whether the surface warming slowdown was significant. Some of the disagreements boil down to semantics; others relate to interpretations of data.

Wednesday’s commentary lauded the advances in climate science that helped solve the mystery of the slowdown, while rebuking other scientists whose research has concluded that the slowdown was insignificant or unimportant.

“Given the intense political and public scrutiny that global climate change now receives, it has been imperative for scientists to provide a timely explanation of the warming slowdown,” wrote the 11 scientists, who are based in Canada, England, Australia and the U.S. “Despite recently voiced concerns, we believe this has largely been accomplished.”

One of the studies singled out in the commentary was produced by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists led by Thomas Karl, who directs the agency’s National Climatic Data Center.

Karl’s team believes some historical records of ocean temperatures are flawed, and they corrected them accordingly.  The result of that analysis led them to conclude in a paper published last year in Science that warming during the early 2000s was “far more similar” to the longer-term trends “than previously estimated.”

That surprise finding prompted Rep. Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas who is chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, to aggressively push for access to the government scientist’s emails, part of an investigation that others have characterized as a witch hunt.

Smith has argued that the NOAA study was “expedited to fit” the Obama Administration’s “aggressive” climate policies — a claim the agency strongly denies.

Karl on Wednesday stood by his work, saying “there is no disagreement” that temperatures and warming rates vary between decades. “We showed that one could not claim that the long-term warming trend was significantly different from the shorter period,” he said.Wednesday’s commentary was a reminder that opposition to NOAA’s findings is not just from politicians and fossil fuel groups, but from researchers who are convinced that the warming slowdown was real — and worthy of a public conversation.

The new commentary included new analysis of temperature data that showed what the authors described as a “mismatch” between early-century rates of warming and rates projected by model simulations.

“We’re presenting results to support previous findings of reduced rates of surface warming,” said John Fyfe, a Canadian government climate scientist who coordinated publication of the commentary. “That essentially refutes the Karl et al. paper.”

Fyfe said he had “no doubt” that the commentary would be misused by climate science deniers, but that he had no hesitations about publishing it. “I don’t think we should be in the business of pandering to the climate deniers.”

Two other teams of scientists whose papers were critiqued in the commentary downplayed any differences in opinion, pointing to the consensus that global warming and natural variability both affected early-century surface temperatures.

“Their perspective is very much in line with our previously published work,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, one of four Stanford researchers who wrote a paper published last year in Climatic Change provocatively titled “Debunking the climate hiatus.” “Global warming has resulted in a long-term trend superimposed on natural climate variability.”

Another paper criticized in the commentary was published last year by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. In it, three scientists led by University of Bristol cognitive psychology professor Stephan Lewandowskyconcluded that “there is no evidence that identifies the recent period” of warming as “unique or particularly unusual.”

That paper argued against the use of the term “global warming hiatus,” or “pause,” which is sometimes used to describe the recent global warming slowdown.

Wednesday’s commentary agreed that recent temperature trends have been framed “in an unfortunate way,” suggesting that “reduced rate of warming” or “temporary slowdown” would better describe them.

Although Lewandowsky’s paper was singled out in Wednesday’s commentary, he said it fundamentally addressed different scholarly questions.

“As far as we’re concerned, there’s no discrepancy,” Lewandowsky said. “They share our view that warming never stopped, and we don't actually disagree at all.”

“We shouldn't sweep the early 2000s warming slowdown under the rug,” said Penn State meteorology professor Michael Mann, one of 11 authors of the commentary published in Nature Climate Change.

California To Get Needed Big Dump Of Rain, But Too Much At Once?

NOAA's maps indicate the possibility of more than eight
inches of rain over the next seven days in parts of northern
California, Oregon and Washington.  

California was banking on a blockbuster stormy winter this year, and a hoped-for cooperative El Nino to dump lots of winter rain and snowstorms on the state to at least ease the crippling drought there.

Things were going OK, not supendous, but OK through January with fairly decent amounts of rain and snow.

That made the intense drought ease a little, but didn't come close to actually ending the drought. Everyone knew an incredible amount of precipitation would have to fall to do that.

Then February hit. It turned brutally dry again, enough to set off a few out of season brush fires. And it turned hot. Record hot.

So warm that some of the snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains melted. You don't want it to melt yet. It should melt later in spring and summer, when the water from that snow can feed parched brooks and rivers.

Now California is hoping for a wet March. That hope might jusy turn into reality. Signs point to a change in the weather pattern that would dump boatloads of precipitation on California over the next couple of weeks at least.

That's great news, but it comes with a price. So much rain might fall in such a short period of time that some of that needed water would run off quickly in the form of dangerous, life threatening floods.

It's too soon to get into the specifics on precisely which days the heaviest storms might hit California and how bad they might be.

But a few computer models suggest as much as 20 inches of rain during the montho of March on parts of northern California and as much as 25 feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada.

That's the upper extreme, of course. It might not be that bad. The hyped 25 feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada would be a good thing. Oh sure, it would cause temporary, immense problems with travel through the mountains. A few structures might collapse, which would be bad. And where do you put 25 feet of snow if you have to get it off your driveway.

Still, one or two dozen feet of snow in the California mountains would be immensely helpful for water supplies this summer.

The heavy rain is more complicated. On the one hand, some of the runoff from the anticipated storms would get stored behind dams in reservoirs.

But jeez, a foot or more of rain in some spots over the course of a couple weeks? Cue the floods and mudslides.

The initial waves of storms don't look too bad. Weak ones today and Friday in northern California will drop light rain and snow there, and pretty much nothing in southern California.

Stronger storms over the weekend will be heavier, but won't be extreme, especially given the dry conditions left over from February.

But we'll have to watch this pattern, as we could get a few rounds of incredibly torrential precipitation in California into the middle or even end of the month.  It's a wet pattern, but figuring out if it's going to be merely wet or inundating is premature right now.

The heavy rain pattern will extend north into Oregon and Washington as well.

On the other extreme, southern California in particular could miss out on some of the rain. Some uncertain preliminary signs hint at a rainy ten day stretch in southern California followed by drier conditions. But such long range forecasts are unreliable. I'm just putting that out there as a possibility.

If you don't live in or near California, but elsewhere in the United States, this change in the weather pattern affects you. Yes, you.

The storms in or near southern California would eventually eject out into the Plains States. If they go far enough north from there, and are strong enough, the have the potential to cause outbreaks of severe weather and tornadoes.

It's too soon to declare how widespread or how bad any bursts of severe weather would be anywhere from the Plains to the East Coast, but it is worth watching as the storms begin to parade across the nation next week.

The changing weather pattern also favors warmth in the eastern half of the nation, so if you're pining for spring, or spring weather is already embracing where you are, this is good news for you.

BREAKING: NOAA Says January Was Ninth Consecutive Hottest Month On Record

Once again, last month the world set a record for
a hottest month on record. This time, January 2016
is the warmest January on record, says NOAA. 

The monthly, eagerly awaited NOAA climate summary for January is just out this morning, and, Surprise! Last month was the hottest January on record for the Earth.

Incredibly, it was also the ninth month in a row that was the hottest on record. As far as I can tell this is totally unprecedented.  

For the world's land and oceans, January, 2016 was 1.87 degrees above the 20th century average for the month. It surpassed the old January record by 0.29 degrees set in 2007, says NOAA's Centers for Environmental Information. 

Beating an old record by 0.29 degrees might not sound like much, but if you are looking at the entire Earth, breaking the record by that amount is a huge margin. In fact, NASA, in their own set of data, said earlier this week that January broke the record for a hottest month by the largest margin of any in their data set.

Today's NOAA data says the margin by which January broke the record is only the second greatest. THE greatest margin by which a record was broken was set a couple months ago, in December, 2015.

This January's heat was powered by the oceans, which were the hottest on record. Land-based temperature readings for January were "only" the second hottest on record.

This is ominious because its a sign that there's a lot of potential heat stored in the oceans that could, in the future, wreak even more havoc with the weather and climate.

It's true the record strong El Nino in recent months drives up both the world's average ocean temperature and air temperature. That's definitely contributing to this spate of record worldwide warmth in the past couple of years, but it certainly appears human caused global warming is a major driving factor in this, too.

Once El Nino fades, I imagine worldwide temperatures might temporarily settle back away from record setting values for awhile, but still run well above normal. Then, my guess is, in a few years, we'll start setting worldwide heat records again.

Some observers are saying that 2016 will be the hottest year on record, beating out 2015, which set the worldwide heat record by a large margin. 2015, in turn beat 2014 as the hottest year on record.

It remains to be seen if 2016 will be the hottest year on record, but it's off to a rip-roaring start in that category.

California Rain And Snowfall Starting To Sputter, Which Isn't Good

This chart shows this year's California
 precipitation (in black) is near normal
so far, but well below the level of past El Ninos. 

This was supposed to be a winter that smashed, or at least badly dented California's epic multi-year drought.

El Nino would drive numerous storms into the West Coast, and the Sierra Nevada snowpack would be incredible, and reservoirs would fill to the brim under relentless rains.

So far, this winter has turned out to be "meh" in California.

It definitely is a lot better this winter than in recent ones. The Sierra Nevada snowpack is much, much deeper than last year.

Storms have brought inches upon inches of rain to California, especially the northern half.  But if you look deeply at the figures, the rainfall and snowfall is less than spectacular. Good, but not great.

In the Sierra Nevada, snow pack is a little below normal for this time of hear, not way above like hoped. Plus, not much snow is forecast for the next week. AND, temperatures are way above normal, so some of that snow pack is melting prematurely.

Frankly, winters rains have not been good at all in outhern California, which has missed out on many of the storms.

Worse, a hot ridge of high pressure has settled over California this week, and will hold firm for at least another week yet.

That means rain-bearing storms will be shunted away from California. Record heat is increasing evaporation of what water there is, and, as noted, eroding the  snowpack in the Sierra Nevada. You want the Sierra snowpack to remain intact as long as possible into the spring,  That way, melting snow in the summer would keep feeding thirsty reservoirs.

The current heat is pretty intense. It's been in the low 90s this past week in some southern California communities. Los Angeles this week endured three days in a row with record high temperatures.

This is weird for an El Nino year, for sure. Climate blogger Robert Scribbler speculates climate change is impacting the ability for El Ninos to deliver rain to the Southwest.

Writes Scribbler:

"Quite frankly, it's insane that we're still seeing these conditions during a monster El Nino. These droughts should be rolling back as the storm track intensifies and hurls severe weather at the U.S. West Coast. But that's no happening. At least not consistently.

Instead, we keep getting these extreme ridge patterns in the jet stream over western North America. We keep getting these very warm, very dry spells of weather during the wet season. And now we have California snowpack melting away in February of all times."

The big hot ridges of high pressure that Scribbler notes have repeatedly formed over the West Coast over the past month, echoes the entrenched pattern in 2012 through 2014 that kept California in its torrid drought for these recent years.

Southeern California precipiation so
far this year is a little on the low side of normal,
and WAY below that of previous big El Nino years.

Is something broken? Has climate change permanently reduced the amount of rain and snow that comes down on the American Southwest. It's possible, and we need to study this further.

Actually,people are studying it further.

In a recent paper, Andreas Prein, a postdoctoral researcher with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, looked at the 12 major weather patterns that typically affect the Southwest. Only three of those patterns tend to make it rain more there, says ClimateCentral.org.

This research is in contrast to other research, which looked at overall precipitation trends in the Southwest. That prior research also indicates a multi-decade drying trend in the Southwest.

Prein's research shows that the three wet weather patterns he put under scrutiny are becoming less frequent.

"Nowadays, the droughts are not the same as 30 years ago. They can be more intense and last longer than we would expect 30 years ago," ClimateCentral.org quotes Prein as saying.

That raises the spectre of megadroughts - decades long dry spells.  With tens of millions of people living in southern California and the rest of the Southwest, that brings up some scary questions. Questions that affect us all. Not just some family in Encino or something.

How do we get the needed water to them if there really isn't any to be had? Who pays for the billions of dollars in fixes to get water to the Southwest, somehow? What about the national and worldwide economic disruption if commerce can't continue in the Southwest like it does now? What if there's a reverse "Grapes of Wrath?"

You know how people fled the Dust Bown in the Great Plains in the 1930s to escape drought? What if millions of people flee a drought-stricken California for somewhere else? That's quite an upheaval.

All this might or might not happen of course. And if it does, we're talking long range planning here. Not tomorrow. There won't be an economic or population crisis because of the drought in California this weekend. But it's something to think about.  Better than being caught with flat feet years or decades down the road.

By the same token, and this might seem contradictory, some scientists fear occasional mega storms in California, energized and empowered by global warming.

The apparently contradictory scenarios make sense, though. There's a potential future of increasing western drought, punctuated by an occasion rare but intense storm that causes flooding. Then the water runs off pretty quickly, and the drought resumes.

In the short term, meaning over the next few weeks,  there's still hope, of course. Late February and March could still prove incredibly wet. Some El Nino years save the bulk of California's precipitation for late winter. Maybe that will happen this year, too.

California better hope so. It's sunny and beautiful and very warm in California today. Sometimes gorgeous weather is a bad thing. California has had way too much nice weather for its own good.

El Nino: Let The Ocean Waves REALLY Crash On The Coasts

A huge wave about to send the vehicle in the
circle flying last week in coastal Chile. 

We're having the near record strong El Nino, the periodic warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean, which mucks up worldwide weather patterns.

Of course, the places most affected by all this are those near the epicenter of El Nino, namely the west coasts of North and South America.

We saw this recently, as erosion from Pacific storms, some driven by El Nino, threatened to dump California buildings into the Pacific Ocean.

It's just as bad in Chile, where El Nino driven storms are causing havoc.

Here's a video of a recent storm smashing the Chilean coast. Luckily, the occupants in the emergency vehicle you'll see in the video being tossed by the waves are OK.

Bystanders braved the waves to help the people inside the vehicle get out. Still, very scary.

Watch the video:

A Very Tornadic Florida Winter Continues

A tornado dropped one car atop another
in a community college parking lot
in Coconut Creek Florida Wednesday 

There's been a LOT of tornadoes in Florida this winter as El Nino-driven storms have made conditions ripe for twisters in the erstwhile Sunshine State.

Yet another nasty one touched down yesterday in Coconut Creek, Florida, near Fort Lauderdale.

The EF1 tornado flipped cars on a highway and in a college parking lot, ripped the roof off a condominium and caused other damage, NBC Miami reports.

Luckily, only one relatively minor injury was reported in this storm, as opposed to another tornado that killed two people east of Sarasota about 10 days ago.  

I'm pleasantly surprised there weren't more injuries in Wednesday's twister, since it happened in a populated area and did some scary things. Like picking up a car traveling on the southbound lane of the Florida Turnpike and dropping it back down on the northbound lane, says NBC Miami.

El Nino in winter tends to sharpen up the jet stream and send strong storms rolling along the far southern tier of states in the United States. That puts Florida in the cross hairs.

It's certainly not the best winter to enjoy Florida's warm sunshine. Yeah, it's warm, but it's a little scary and difficult to enjoy the beaches when severe storm warnings are blaring.

In addition to the tornadoes, the storms are causing high winds, destructive tides, and especially heavy rain in Florida.  Miami had its wettest December on record. (And Florida also had its warmest December on record, too.)

Along with the severe weather Wednesday, torrential rains hit. West Palm Beach had 4.79 inches of rain yesterday, with a total of over nine inches this January.

It's raining hard in Florida today, and flood watches are now posted. There's also a chance of severe weather and perhaps another isolated tornado today.

Next week, a large new storm threatens more severe weather and tornadoes in parts of the South, including Florida.

Following are a couple videos of the tornado that are pretty damn dramatic.

Here's a video taken at a home in Coconut Creek, Florida, yesterday. It appears to be right on the edge of the tornado. You can see debris flying through the air in the background. Luckily, the guy taking the video wasn't hurt, and his property didn't suffer too much damage:



Here's the tornado crossing the Florida Turnpike. It's hard to see with all the wind and rain, but watch the black car pass the viewer on the right. That's the one you'll see that gets picked up from the southbound lane and tossed to the northbound. REALLY scary:

California Storms About To Sent Apartments, Houses Plunging Into The Pacific Ocean

Apartment buildings teetering on the edge of eroding
cliffs this week in Pacifica, California.
Photo y Leah Millis, San Francisco Chronicle.

A series of winter storms coming off the Pacific Ocean is about to sent some Califrnia apartment buildings and houses plunging off eroding cliffs into the sea, it appears.

The trouble is happening in and around the coastal community of Pacifica, where delicate sand and sandstone cliffs are rapidly eroding as the series of storms brings pounding waves to the coastline.

You'll see a video at the bottom of this post the cliffs eroding before your eyes, and you'll see just how doomed the buildings are.

This erosion has been a problem for years around Pacifica, which is just a little south of San Francisco, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. 

Some of the apartments were condemned some time ago because of the encroaching erosion. Two buildings at one apartment complex were evacuated in 2010. Now, this week, more residents are being forced out by the increasing danger.

While most have left, others vow to stay. Which is risky in terms of buildings falling into the water. And more immediately risky because police might arrest people who stay out of concern for their safety.

The California drought of the past four years had at least one bright spot in Pacifica: The lack of winter storms from 2011 to 2015 meant the erosion slowed dramatically.

It even gave a chance for regional officials to try to save some of the buildings by piling huge rocks at the base of the cliffs and re-enforcing them with concrete.

But you can't stop the power of the oceans.

Another view of the endangered buildings in Pacifica, California
Photo by Leah Millis, San Francisco Chronicle. 

This year,  a series of winter storms, fueled in part by El Nino, have been repeatedly slamming into mostly central and northern California.

The storms have made the cliffs erode rapidly again. The city declared a state of emergency in the past few days after a series of cliff collapses over the weekend.

The last couple of times there was a strong El Nino, like the one we're having this year, the worst storms to hit the California coast came in February and March, so you can see how this is going to be a long couple of months in Pacifica.

Here's that striking video of the erosion in Pacifica with the cliffs collapsing, taken via drone on Saturday:

I Knew 2015 Was Going To Be The Hottest On Record, But WOW!

2015 was warmer than average in most places on
Earth, except northeastern Canada and the central North
Atlantic Ocean. 

To nobody's surprise, the year 2015 was the world's hottest on record, says NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information.

The surprise, though, is by how wide a margin the record was broken, and how many heat records for Earth have been piling up over the past many months and several years.

Here are some of the highlights in the report, issued today:   

--- The year 2015 was 1.62 degrees warmer than the 20th century average. That beats the old record by 0.29 degrees, the widest margin for any year to break a new mark for heat.

Breaking a record by about a third of a degree doesn't sound like much, but when averaged over the entire globe, it's a lot.

By the way, the old record for hottest year on Earth in modern records was set way back in 2014. Yep, a little over a year ago.

--- 2015 marked the fourth time this century that the Earth broke a record for heat. There are a few climate change deniers that are still clinging to the myth that global warming peaked in 1998, but 1998 has now been relegated to a tie for 6th hottest on record, behind 2015, 2014, 2010, 2013, 2005 in that order.

Also, some people who say global warming doesn't exist say graphs show a leveling off of global warming starting in 1998. But that "pause" really didn't exist, if you look at the recent yearly heat records. And if you add 2014 and 2015 to the graph, you see global temperatures still trending up, up, up, up.

--- Ten months in 2015 were the hottest on record. Five of those months broke the record for heat by the widest margin observed in modern recofds.

--- The latest NOAA report also included the analysis for December, 2015, which - surprise! -- was the hottest on records in data that dates back to 1880. December broke the previous record for the hottest 12th month by a whopping full 2 degrees.

A monthly global departure of two degrees above normal has never been observed in modern records until now.

By the way, December was also the hottest on record in the United States as a whole, and was the hottest on record where I live in Vermont by a huge margin.

It's interesting that there's a persistent cold patch in the North Atlantic Ocean that has showed up consistently for months or even years now. Many scientists suspect that melting ice from Greenland is affecting ocean currents, leading to that cold spot in the Atlantic.

Which means even a cold statistic is troubling in the age of global warming.

Obviously, 2015 got a boost in temperature from El Nino, which tends to raise global heat, especially when you get a strong one like the current El Nino now under way.

Still, when you break records by margins like this, something other than El Nino is going on, and I can't think of anything other than global warming, despite what the skeptics say.

When El Nino fades, we'll likely have some years that are not the hottest on record. I'd say 2016 might or might not be as hot as 2015, and my inkling is 2017 will be cooler than 2015, as El Nino will certainly have faded by then. But then again, I've been surprised before

Regardless, unless somebody can show convincing evidence to the contrary, I would also bet there will be years not that far beyond 2017 that will be even hotter than the sweaty 2015 was.

Scary Video Shows What Happens When California Rain Comes Down Too Hard

The view through a car windshield as a big debris
flow approaches during heavy rain last
week in California. The motorist slammed
it into reverse and got out of there. Good move. 

Last week, southern California got some much needed rain.

As often the case, the rain came down too fast and too hard in some cases, leading to debris flows, mudslides and flash floods.  

The frightening video at the bottom of this post shows how fast a California debris flow can come on when it rains too hard.  Spoiler: The motorist got out of there just fine.

More is coming. Quite a lot of rain is possible in central and northern California over the next week. It won't rain quite so hard in southern California, at least for now.

With the possibility of heavy rain in mind, though, I'm sure people will be bracing for more damage from floods and mudslides.

Here's that video:

Update: A Couple Videos Of California Flooding

NBC7 in San Diego posted this photo on its Twitter feed
showing flooding yesterday around San Diego. 

As I noted yesterday, heavy rains arrived in California, which is good news to help ease the big drought, but sometimes the rain comes too fast and too torrentially.

There's already some flooding going on, and more is expected today.

In fact, things could get worse. A second in a series of storms will bring showers and thunderstorms rather than a steady rain. The bursts of heavy rain could cause debris flow and mudslides, especially in areas that were burned over by wildfires last year.

One to four inches of rain could come down over many areas in central and southern California.

Here's a news report from ABC 10 regarding flooding in the Ocean Beach section of San Diego:



People are already stalling their cars in the California flooding, too:

California Rains Are Wonderful! California Rains Are Horrible!

Car stuck in floods n Sepulveda Basin in southern California's
 San Fernando Valley on Tuesday. Photo from KTLA. 

Talk about double-edged swords: A series of storms that might last two weeks or more began in California last night.

The storms promise to drop inches and inches of rain onto the parched landscape, definitely eroding a multi-year drought, perhaps the severest in memory.

Many feet of snow will accumulate in the Sierra Nevada mountains. That's also great news: If it keeps accumulating like crazy, there will be plenty of melt water flowing from the mountains into the state's nearly empty reservoirs.

Who can complain about that?

Well, everybody. California's landscape is not good at big rainstorms. There's steep slopes that can become saturated and turn into deadly mudslides.

There's been a lot of wildfires in California in the past few years because of the drought. In areas where vegetation has burned away, there's nothing to hold the soil in place. That increases the risk of mudslides and debris flows.

Flash flooding is also common when it rains hard in California.

Ideally, the way to break the California drought is to have daily light rain and drizzle all winter to soak into the ground and restore the aquifers after such a horrible drought.

However, that's not how California winter storms work, especially in years when there's a strong El Nino, like this one.

In the short term, the first storm so far has created some local floods and mudslides and debris flows in California, but nothing hugely destructive so far.

There was flooding on the 101 Freeway, and boulders fell on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu Canyon, the Los Angeles Times reported. 

More flash flooding is possible Wednesday, but it looks like there might be a break in the rain over the weekend and early next week, which is a good thing.

Beyond that, the parade of storms coming off the Pacific Ocean could feature bursts of heavy rain that makes flash flooding more likely, despite the drought.

This problem could keep getting worse if the storms keep coming through the rest of January, February and into March. The steep hills will get more and more saturated, and will become more likely to give way, sending walls of mud into densely populated neighborhoods.

The damage from floods could get pretty nasty too. Everybody is especially worried about the area around Sacramento.

It's widely believed that Sacramento has the second biggest flood risk of any metro area in the nation, behind New Orleans. And we all know what happened to New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005.

As the Sacramento Bee put it:

"A levee breach in Sacramento could cause many deaths and cripple the economy for 1.4 million people in the metro area who depend to some degree on the city of Sacramento staying dry."

As I noted El Nino storms tend to have a lot of juice, a lot more moisture and energy than storms that happen when there's not an El Nino. You could also get a series of so-called "Pineapple Express" storms, which are basically huge atmospheric rivers that tap deep tropical moisture and spray it like a fire hose onto sections of the West Coast.

Plus, climate change has, in general, made rain storms more intense, since warmer air can hold more moisture than cooler air.

Indeed, there have been more frequent extreme floods in recent years and decades. Ask anybody in Missouri, or South Carolina, or Texas, or where I live in Vermont.

I am being all gloom and doom here, I realize. If we're lucky, if California is lucky, the floodig and mudslides won't be too bad. Maybe there will be frequent dry breaks between storms allowing the water to soak into the ground. That would help end the drought without causing too many flash floods or mudslides.

If we're lucky, California will have a gloriously wet winter without anything too extreme.

If we're lucky.