Enjoy Vermont's Last Nice Summer Day For Quite Awhile

Today is everything you want in Vermont summer day.

Any place depicted in orange is expected to have above
normal temperaturs at mid-month, according to this 8-14
day forecast. The darker the orange, the greater the chances
of warmer than normal temperatures. Only a tiny part of
the Pacific Northwest (in blue) will be coolish

There's plenty of sunshine.  It's going to be warm, with most of us getting to 80 degrees or a little above.  It won't be humid.

It's hot enough for a day at the beach and comfortable enough for a hike in the Green Mountains. You won't get rained on. Apply some sun screen and maybe some bug spray and away you go.

This will be your last chance to enjoy the Vermont outdoors for awhile.  We have another long period of hot, humid, oppressive weather that will last right into the weekend at least.

I know that a few of you like hot, humid weather, so sorry for insulting you by complaining about it.  But most of us, frankly, are not enthused about this.

It'll start tomorrow. Last night was a refreshing night for sleeping, and tonight won't be bad either.  The humidity blasts in tomorrow, and by late afternoon you'll feel it.

That warm front bringing us this nasty spell could cause a few scattered showers and tbunderstorms, but most of us won't get wet.  Another little disturbance could trigger some showers and storms here and there on Wednesday, but, again, not all of us will get wet.

The partial cloudiness will keep daytime temperatures "cooler" Tuesday and Wednesday with highs "only" in the mid and upper 80s most places around here.

The heat seems, at least at this point, as if it will peak Thursday and Friday with higha in aome of the valleys reaching the mid-90s. Ugh!  The humidity will be higher than during that big heat wave we had in late June, so it will feel even worse than it did back a couple weeks ago.

Overnight lows will stay in the 70s in many areas, so getting a good night's sleep will be difficult without air conditioning.

There are signs that it could turn a little wetter again by next weekend.  That would drop temperatures a little bit, but the humidity would stay awful.  At least we'll have a shot of getting some badly needed rain five or six days from now.  Of course, the way this summer is going, the prospects of rain next weekend could evaporate before we get there.

The epicenter of the heat will shift gradually from the Northeast and Great Lakes to areas of the Plains and Midwest as the week goes on. That will continue for the following week as well.

Long range forecasts are tricky, as I always point out.  As it stands now, though, a torrid, dangerous heat wave will settle into the central United States.  We in Vermont will likely be out of the main heat zone by about a week from now. However, temperatures will remain warmer than averaage, with very likely some genuinely hot days thrown in.

It's too dry here, but at least the repositioning of the heat toward the west will slightly increase rain chances here in the Northeast starting next weekend, as noted.

This is very bad news for the middle and western parts of the nation, however, Much of the Rockies and Plains are in an increasingly bad drought.  The heat dome that will set up over the Plains will shut off pretty much all precipitation chances out there.

Plus the intense, sunny heat will make the drought intensify much faster.  Wildfires in the Rockies and elsewhere will intensify, too.

The super hot weather will also drive people indoors into air conditioned spaces.  Research into the coronavirus pandemic suggests that air conditioned air, if there's inadequate outside air intake, can make the spread of the virus worse in offices, factories, apartment buildings, restaurants and such.

This summer's weather pattern is consistent with what climate experts have been watching.  Heat waves and hot spells in general across most of the globe have been getting longer and more intense. 

As an aside, I was talking with my mother, age 91, and a lifelong Vermonter.  She said she doesn't remember such consistent and long and frequent hot spells when she was younger. Sure, there were heat waves, but they didn't practically last all summer.

That's an anecdotal story, of course, but telling.

During the upcoming week, try to get into cool places as much as possible. Don't overexert yourself, even if you are healthy.  Drink plenty of liquids and check in frequently with elderly relatives and freinds, because they are especially prone to illness and death during heat waves.

That's especially true with the hot spell coming in over the next few days, because the expected muggy nights won't give ua a reprieve from the effects of the heat.

Hot Times Go On: Worldwide, May Was Hottest, Or At Least Tied For It

Extreme warmth, relative to average, in Siberia was a big contributor to
make May, 2020 the warmest on record for the globe. Eastern North
America was one of the few coolish spots. 

Last week, the numbers came out on how the world fared climate wise in May.

To almost nobody's surprise, we're #1 again.

May was the hottest on record for the world as a whole, according to several monitoring agencies, including NOAA's Centers for Environmental Information.

It's been a hot decade, too.  Each of the seven warmest Mays have occured in the past seven year, according to NCEI.

Siberia basically pushed the world over the top in terms of May heat.  Relative to average, that part of the world was off the charts warm.

The only relatively cool spots were eastern Canada, eastern United States, Australia and parts of eastern Europe.

If anything, the trend in global warming has accelerated in the past several year. Each of the past 12 months have either been the hottest or second hottest on record on a global basis.

According to Jeff Masters, writing for Yale Climate Connection:

"The year-to-date period January-May ranks as the second warmest such period on record, just 0.06 (degrees Celcius) behind the record set in 2016.  According to NCEI's annual temperature outlook, the year 2020 has more than a 99.9 percent chance to rank among the five warmest years on record, and a 49 percent chance of being the warmest year on record. If so, calendar 2020 would mean each of the past seven years would be among the seven warmest on record."

As noted last month, global economic lockdowns to slow the spread of the coronavirus will probably reduce carbon emissions by 5 to 8 percent from the record highs of 2019. Even with that reduction, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere will continue to grow.

Plus, the coronavirus crisis might only last another year or two.  That's way too long for us humans, who hate to see these tragc deaths and illnesses from the virus. In the grand scheme of things, though, the coronovirus problems won't last long enough to cause any dent at all in atmospheric carbon concentrations.

According to USA Today, Kennth Gillingham, a climate economist at Yale University was pretty clear on this, saying, "The only reason emissions dropped is that we're all stuck at home....As soon as the lockdowns lift, they are likely to rise again."

For those of you keeping track, May, 2020 was the 425th consecutive month with above normal global temperatuires.

Hot Arctic, Bad Hurricanes, Carbon And Coronavirus: All Bad Climate Change News

A few reports, studies and breaking news this week have all been bad news in the climate change department. Let's get into them:   

Recent temperature depiction of the Arctic.  The more orange, the
further temperatures are above normal.  Notice Siberia and the
area around the North Pole have the deepest orange.

ARCTIC HEAT

The (sort of) breaking news is a weird Arctic heat wave that has spread from Siberia and is reaching the North Pole and parts of Greenland. 

As noted in Gizmodo, temperatures at the North Pole will probably get a bit above freezing in the next few days.  For most of us, temperatures in the low to mid 30s most certainly does not constitute a heat wave. 

But such temperatures are odd for the North Pole, especially this early in the season.  Plus, it gets the Arctic off to an early start to the melt season. 

Same is true in Greenland.  The warmth has gotten the melt season going two weeks earlier than normal.  True, not a huge amount of ice has melted in this heat wave, compared to some mid-summer epic melts in recent years, especially last summer, which saw record melts in Greenland. 

As Gizmodo points out, though, this year's early melt exposes older dirtier snow sooner in the year than nornal. This old snow and ice can then absorb more warm sunshine during the rest of the summer than newer, whiter, fresher snow and ice would. This would bring up the risk of major melt events later in the summer. 

We should care more about Greenland's melt than Arctic Ocean melt.  If ice floating on the sea melts, it won't raise global sea levels. But ice melting off the above sea level glaciers in Greeland flow into oceans, raising their levels globally. 

Meanwhile, Siberia is once again on fire after its warmest winter and spring on record. Fires have already crept north of the Arctic Circle. Gizmodo reports there are even some "zombie fires" which smoldered in buried peat all winter and then sparked back up again amid the current record warmth in high latitude Siberia.  

TURBOCHARGED HURRICANES

Climate change appears to be making hurricanes and typhoons and such more intense, according to new research from NOAA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies. 

As The Weather Channel reports:

"The researchers discovered that the probability of a tropical cycle having Category 3 or higher wind speeds (at least 111 mph) increased by aboug 15 percent between the first and last halves of the analyzed satellite data. This corresponds to about an 8 percent increase per decade over the period of the study. The proportion of all tropical cyclones exceeding major hurricane intensity showed a similar increase of about 6 percent per decade."

The largest increase in bad hurricanes was in the Atlantic Ocean, but other influences might have helped increase the odds of such storms, too. 

CARBON/CORONAVIRUS

Daily global emissions of carbon dioxide fell by 17 percent from the same period in 2018 as nations locked down their economies to battle the coronavirus pandemic. Most of that decrease was due to less travel and less industrial output. 

I suppose that's good news for people who are not fans of climate change, but obviously we would have all been better off without the pandemic.

Also, this cut in carbon emissions won't really dent the pace of climate change. Economies are already opening back up, and emissions will rise correspondingly.  Even a sustained 17 percent reduction in carbon emissions lasting years wouldn't really solve the problem. 

Said Richard Betts, head of Climate Impacts Research at the Met Office Hadley Centre in England said, "It's like we're filling a bath and have turned down the tap slightly, but not turned it off - the water is still rising, just not as fast. To stop the bath overflowing, we need to turn the tap off."

So yes, the world is rightly consumed with battling the pandemic, but we still need to deal pretty intensely with climate change at the same time. 

Busy Atlantic Hurricane Season Ahead?

Satellite view of Hurricane Dorian trashing large parts of the
Bahamas last year.  Colorado State University researchers think
the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season will be busy. 

Yesterday,  I speculated about the possibility a subtropical storm forming in the Atlantic, born out of the storm that gave us Vermonters the dreary weather yesterday and today.

That's still a big question mark, but the Colorado State University Tropical Meteorology Project added fuel to the seasonal tropical expectations this year.  They're predicting a busier than normal hurricane season this summer and autumn.

They're predicting 16 named storms, compared to the normal of 12. Colorado State University says eight of those storms will be hurricanes against an average of six annually. Four of the hurricanes are predicted to be real biggies, compared to a normal of three major hurricanes.

The devil is the details, of course. Even if their forecast turns out to be spot on, Colorado State University meteorologists, or anybody else for that matter, have no idea where all these storms will form or go.

If they all somehow stay harmlessly out to sea, then it's obviously no big deal. If a lot of them start crashing onshore, especially the major hurricanes, then we have huge trouble to face.

I'm guessing you're aware there's a huge, tragic, highly disruptive pandemic going on now, and all kinds of emergency services are stretched to the breaking point. Even if the pandemic wanes over the summer - a big if - imagine trying to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people from say, Florida as a dangerous hurricane approaches.

Then deal with the aftermath - dead and injured, massive property damage, infrastructure such as roads, electricity, internet all wrecked in a big area. You can see how challenging that is in better circumstances. This is the year you really don't want to deal with this.

Last year, the United States was relatively lucky with hurricanes, even if other parts of the Atlantic Basin were clearly not so lucky.  Hurricane Dorian, which leveled parts of the Bahamas, only skirted the United States and made landfall in a weaker state in North Carolina.

Dorian did cause a lot of damage in the United States, but it could have been immensely worse. The only other highly destructive storm was Tropical Storm Imelda in Texas.  There wasn't much wind with that one, but it caused massive flooding.

We don't want years like 2017 and 2018, when destructive hurricanes hit hard in America.

One of many factors that will influence hurricanes this year is El Nino or La Ninas in the eastern Pacific. El Ninos feature warm water in parts of the eastern Pacific which help squelch Atlantic hurricanes. La Ninas, cooler water in the eastern Pacific can encourage Atlantic hurricanes.

The signals are kind of mixed this year, but feature either a situation in which there won't really be an El Nino or a La Nina. Or maybe there will be a weak La Nina.

Ocean temperatures are broadly warmer than average in the Atlantic Ocean. If that trend continues into the summer and fall, that could also encourage more and stronger tropical storms and hurricanes.

We really have to watch the Gulf of Mexico.  It's now incredibly toasty, almost at record high levels. That could change by hurricane season, but if not, that area could be a hotbed for storm development.

In the shorter term, the hot Gulf of Mexico is a potential tornado trouble maker. We're heading into peak tornado season.  A very warm Gulf would encourage warmer and more humid air than usual to make its way north into the middle of the nation.

Warmer, more humid air is one critical ingredient for severe storms.  If other conditions come together just right on occasion over the next couple of months, then tornadoes could be more destructive and frequent than usual.

Tornado season this year is already off to a bad start. So far this year there have been at least 180 tornadoes, causing 33 deaths, according to NOAA's Storm Prediction Center.

Getting back to hurricanes, the Colorado State hurricane forecast, issued Thursday, is just that, a forecast.  It's not set in stone, and like all weather predictions, especially long range forecasts, this one will surely be a little off one way or another.

Forecasters will refine tropical storm expectations as we head toward the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season.

Weather Disasters And Coronavirus: It's Complicated, For Sure

Hundreds of houses destroyed by an Oklahoma tornado in 2013. How
would you shelter all those people during and after a similar tornado
during the coronavirus pandemic? Emergency officials in much
of the nation are mulling that questio. 

Severe thunderstorms and tornadoes are still a good bet later today in and around Illinois, which means people will have to take shelter.

But where?  The coronavirus has us hunkered down in our houses already.

Of course, houses with basements are fine. You get a tornado warning and head for the basement. But lots of homes and entire neighborhoods rely on community storm shelters when tornadoes threaten.

The risk, aside from the actual tornadoes, is that some people who think there are available storm shelters for them when there might not be.

Some community storm shelters might be shuttered because of the coronavirus threat.  The pandemic has altered the entire world, so all the familiar rules are gone. It's up to local officials to decide which shelter is open and which is closed, so everybody will need to check.

The situation in Illinois is particularly dangerous today.  NOAA's Storm Prediction Center is considering whether to upgrade the risk to its highest level because of the possibility of very strong, long lasting tornadoes in Illinois later today.

People have been advised to figure out by this morning where to take shelter before by this morning to know where to go when the severe weather starts. By the time tornadoes form and warnings are issued, it's too late to begin considering where to take shelter.

This is especially true with this potential Illinois outbreak: Any tornadoes that form are expected to have a forward speed of 60 mph. That's awfully fast. Warnings won't be issued much in advance of the tornadoes hitting, and you won't be able to outrun them in a car.

Assuming community shelters are open, people might be hesitant to crowd into these places with lots of other people. After all, the experts unanimously tell us to stay home, and if we must go out, remain at least six feet away from other people if at all possible.

That's impossible in storm shelters. It's not a great choice, but the bigger danger is the tornado. The National Weather Service advises people to take the shelter from the tornado, and then worry about coronavirus after the storm.  The tornado, when it's happening, is the more dire of the two events.

It's only late March, so the tornado season is just beginning in earnest. It peaks from April to early June. Today's situation in Illinois will almost certainly repeat itself pretty frequently in one fashion or the other over the coming weeks.

Lots of places are already thinking about this, which is good. For instance, officials around Kansas City, which is definitely a tornado-prone area of the nation, said they have contingency plans for a weather disaster atop of the coronavirus outbreak, according to local news station FOX4

The pandemic makes things much more complicated, though.  How do you treat people injured in storms while avoiding Covid-19?  What about people whose homes have been destroyed by a tornado? Where do you put them and keep them safe?  What about cleanup and recovery? Rebuilding? Insurance and government permits for that rebuilding?

According to FOX4 in Kansas City, the planning continues.

"'Unfortunately, Mother Nature doesn't slow down because of Covid-19,' Matt May, the emergency management director of Wyandotte County, told FOX4. 'People are having those conversatios about what we woul do if we had a tornado now.'"

An even bigger problem could unfold in the late summer and autumn if the coronavirus pandemic in the United States remains uncontrolled. By then, it will be hurricane season.  Landfalling hurricanes in the U.S. and elsewhere require mass evacuations often involving tens or even hundreds of thousands of people. You end up with thousands of people packed cheek to jowl in emergency shelters.

People can only hope that the coronavirus pandemic fades out by August, when hurricanes really begin to crank.  Otherwise, that'll be yet another reason why we're really screwed.

Meanwhile the severe weather this weekend in the Midwest is just beginning to crank up, and will only get worst later today Some video:

Here's some hail damaging cars in Jefferson City, Missouri last night, as viewed by someone on their apartment balcony.  Some understandable NSFW language in here.

How Cononavirus Might Affect Pollution And Climate Change

Map depicts NO2 pollution in China. Map on the left, with the
oranges and reds, shows plenty of NO2.  During the
coronavirus lockdown in China, that pollution
largely disappeared. 

Large swaths of the world, including much of the United States, are in lockdown or near lockdown because of the coronavirus.

That means emissions from businesses, cars, planes and such are also way down.

This, I suppose, is the tiniest of silver linings from this mess is that there is less air pollution out there.

Before I go on, I want to make something crystal clear. Given a choice between a bit of air pollution and no cornonavirus, I would very obviously go with no coronavirus. I, like everybody else on the planet, wish we weren't dealing with this deadly disease.

We wish life had just gone on as normal, even with some air pollution to breath. We all would rather breathe some vagely smoggy air than air that could have that virus floating in it.

But here we are, hunkered down, trying to avoid Covid-19.

Pollution has dropped noticeably in hard hit places.  The most obvious change has been declining concentrations of nitrogen dioxide (NO2), first in China, then in Italy, and now in the United States and elsewhere.

NO2 comes from tailpipe emissions, factories, and all kinds of other sources like that. In high enough concentrations, it can cause breathing problems, including in people with asthma.  The reductions of NO2, though, won't help anyone who contracts Covid-19.  The illness is just too overwhelming.

Still, the reductions in nitrogen pollution are striking. The area around hard-hit Milan, Italy saw a 40 percent drop in NO2 compared to last March. Similar declines were seen in China.

More recently, NO2 concentrations are falling fast in cities like London and New York.

NO2 is not a greenhouse gas that causes climate change.  However, carbon dioxide, which comes from the exact same sources as NO2, does cause climate change.   So will the coronavirus blunt the effects of global warming, at least briefly and marginally?

Again, first of all, we don't want coronavirus to be a "cure" for climate change.  Everybody knows it's not worth the price, at all.

Early indications are, this won't have a huge effect on climate change.  True, the amount of carbon dioxide going up into the air will be reduced.  Coal consumption, probably the worst source of climate change pollution, declined by 36 percent in China due to the virus, for instance.

Still, the overall amount of climate changing gases like CO2 won't decline enough to slow or stop climate change.  As Bob Henson writes in the Category 6 blog, we will still be increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, just at a slower rate.

Plus, there's already more than enough carbon dioxide floating in the atmosphere to keep climate change going.

There have been economic events - not as big as this one - that caused declines in fossil fuel emissions. But those emissions came roaring back once the global economy recovered.

Here's one more factor Henson brings up:  The lockdowns have also caused a sharp decrease in aerosols going up into the air.  Aerosols are tiny, tiny particles emitted from such things as power plants, vehicles and such.

Aerosols block the sun a bit, which can interfere a little bit with the effects of climate change. Less sun getting through the atmosphere because of aerosols, the less heat gets in.

With less aerosols in the air, the coronavirus could briefly make the world hotter than it otherwise would be in the coming months.

The world's climate generally was getting warmer in the first half of the 20th century until the 1940s, when it leveled off.  Some scientists thing aerosols slowed down or temporarily stopped the heating.  Pollution control legislation in the 1970s reduced atmospheric aerosols, so the temperature could resume rising.  And it did.

We don't yet know what societal changes coronavirus will bring.  Perhaps telecommunting will become a more permanent fixture in the workplace environment, which of course would help bring down fossil fuel emissions.   Perhaps more people will grow a little more food on their own properties, which would also help.

I'm not being Pollyanna here. I need to emphasize again I don't see a bright side to the coronavirus. But this crisis will change the world permanently. Whether it will ultimately be for the better or worse is up to us.

Don't Count On Summer Warmth To Squelch Coronavirus

Coronavirus has spread to most nations (blue shading) and will
continue to envelope the world  Viruses often wane in the
 summer, but don't count on that with th coronavirus. 

As all of us know, the coronavirus pandemic we're enduring is much worse than seasonal flu we get every year.  Many more people will die from this than the regular flu, which is why we are all in a panic.

This virus has some simularities to the flu virus though.  The usual flu the world gets every year tends to wane in the summer, as warm weather seems to hinder its spread.  That begs the question: Will we get a similar warm weather break with the coronavirus?

The answer seems to be: Don't count on it, but maybe. Even if it does wane in the summer, that won't solve our problems.

As National Geographic reports, recent research indicates many viruses are more likely to stay intact and travel further in cold, dry air.  These viruses tend not to spread well in warm, humid air.   Some scientists think that low humidity, - you know the dry indoor air we deal with in the winter - makes mucus in the nose function less efficiently.

That mucus helps block viruses and bacteria from getting into your body, and the cold air might weaken that barrier, National Geographic notes. 

Additionally, summer tends to be sunnier than winter, and viruses usually don't do well in sunshine.

Of course, summer doesn't give complete protection from viruses. People still get sick in the summer.

This conronavirus now torturing us is new, so scientists really don't know whether it will wane in the upcoming warm weather in late spring and summer.  We are totally NOT off the hook, I can tell you that.

The current pandemic is seen around the world, including the Southern Hemisphere, where summer is just ending. (Actor Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson recently announced they have the virus, and they caught it in summertime Australia).

It's unclear if the coronavirus will get worse in the Southern Hemisphere as their winter sets in.  The bottom line is scientists really don't know if the coronavirus will wax and wane with the seasons.  Plus, viruses circulate all year in the hot, humid tropics, so summer isn't exactly a disinfectant.

Dr. Marc Lipsitch, Director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, writes that  "new" viruses like the current coronavirus have an advantage.  Pretty much nobody is immune to it,  unlike "old" viruses that have been circulating for years.

New viruses can jump from host to host, person to person freely, without any interference from warm summer weather.  The new viruses like the one in the current pandemic have plenty of low hanging fruit to seize.

Older viruses, not so much.  Lipsitch writes: "Old viruses, which have been in the population longer, operate on a thinner margin - most individuals are immune, and they have to make do with transmitting among a few who aren't. In simple terms, viruses that have been around for a long time can make a living - spreading through the population - only when the conditions are the most favorable, in this case, in winter."

Even if summer gives us a slight break from the coronavirus,  it could easily come roaring back in the autumn.

Jeffrey Shaman, a Columbia University researcher on the flu-weather connection thinks that the virus will continue to rapidly expand in the United States and elsewhere through the month of April, and might finally start to decline in late May or June. This, according to a report by Bob Henson in the Category 6 Weather Underground blog. 

It we get lucky and the coronavirus does wane in the summer, that buys us a little time to get a handle on it. But even so, it would probably come roaring back in the autumn, before humanity has had a chance to develop a vaccine and innoculate people around the world.

One ominous precedent, according to Henson in the Category 6 blog, was the great pandemic of 1918. Sporadic cases popped up in March of that year, but seemed to subside.  Then the pandemic roared to life, killing 195,000 Americans in just the span of a month in October, 2018.  The pandemic would go on to kill many more.

Whether or not this coronavirus ends up being a seasonal thing, a lot of scientists say it's here to stay, and will circulate around the globe perhaps forever, always sickening and killing people.  That's why it's so important to develop a vaccine against this thing to limit the damage and prevent the vast majority of the world from continuing to all victim to the disease year after year.

Scientists are working intensely to develop a vaccine, but one that works is more than a year away, likely more than that.

I don't offer this report just because I want to scare people. It's just to tell you we are in this for the long haul.  Keep washing your hands, folks, and keep up the social isolation.