Storms Were A Bust; Burning Amazon, Tropical Storm Chantal

Water drops rest on one of my Country Club variety day lilies as
the evening sun somes out Wednesday in St. Albans, Vermont.
Areas south of me got much more rain than my gardens did.

Ahead of yesterday's weather, I asked in this blog thingy if it would be boomer or bust. It could have gone either way.

Well, it was a bust, except in far southern Vermont.  Good news if you don't like wind damage to trees and powerlines and such. Bad news if you wanted a lot of rain.

Most of Vermont did manage some weak thunderstorms and most places got some decent rains.

I missed out up here in St. Albans, Vermont with only 0.2 inches. Though we did squeeze out a brief shower this morning for a bit of additional wetting.

Enjoy it, because for most of us, it's not going to rain again for several days.

The storms did prove to be pretty intense further south, including the far two southern counties of Vermont. Tornado warnings went up west of Saratoga Springs, New York, near Lawrence, Massachusetts and near Hartford, Connecticut, but I'm not aware of any confirmed touchdowns.

Today, the actual cold front will come through, so we'll transition during the day from the humid stickiness of this morning to a dry, comfortable evening.

There will be that hint of autumn in the air, especially Friday and Saturday, with high temperatures just making it into the low 70s for many of us, with most of us getting into the 40s at night.

AMAZON BURNING

Smoke from Amazon fires can be seen from space, as you
can see from this satellite photo via The Weather Channel.

A much, much  more serious situation than strong thunderstorms is unfolding in the Amazon rain forest now.

As NPR reports, more than 74,000 fires erupted in the Amazon this year, with 36,000 or so starting within the past month. Big cities like Sao Paulo, Brazil, are getting pretty smoked out by these fires.

Subsistence farming and ranching is responsible for much of the Amazon deforestation and fires, and it hasn't helped that the relative new far right wing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has railed against enviromental regulations because he thinks it hurts economic development. He has also cut funding and staff to environmental agencies, says NPR.

NPR and other news agencies also say Bolsonaro has baselessly accused NGO's of setting the Amazon fires as revenge against his administration for cutting funding to them. Which is rich. So the NGO's who are trying to save the Amazon are burning it down in a snit.

Bolsonaro sounds a lot like a United States politician whos name rhymes with Frump, but what do I know?

We've been fretting all summer over worrisome wildfires in the Arctic, Siberia and parts of northern Canada, but the Amazon fires could be worse.  The Amazon sucks a lot of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Destroy the forest, and release the CO2 into the atmosphere to boot, and you get more bad climate change news.

Sigh.

TROPICAL STORM CHANTAL

By now, the Atlantic Ocean should be beginning to bubble up with tropical systems, storms and hurricanes. It looked like this year we might have gotten through a rare August without an Atlantic tropical storm.  But then....

Chantal formed the other day at around 40 degrees north latitude, which is awfully far north for a tropical storm to form. It is only one of six tropical storms since at least 1950 to form that far north - basically southeast of Newfoundland, as the Category 6 blog notes. 

This weak tropical storm was able to get going because it was just on the northern edge of the warm Gulf Stream. (Tropical storms and hurricanes need warm water to survive.)

Chantal was always a fairly minimal tropical storm, with top winds in the 40 mph range. It's expected to die out over the central Atlantic any minute now.  However, there are signs that the tropical Atlantic is awakening, so in the coming weeks we're going to have to watch for more tropical storms and hurricanes - ones potentially more threatening than the isolated and lame Chantal.

Cut Down The Amazon Forest And You Make Sao Paulo Run Out Of Water

The Jaguari Reservoir near Sao Paulo looked
pretty full in this satellite image from 2013
From Earth Observatory.  

Sao Paulo, Brazil, South America's largest and richest city, is about to go broke in one respect: Unless they get a bunch of rain soon, they're going to totally run out of water.

Brazil is having a big drought. Some of it is probably due to natural cycles in the weather and climate. Some of it probably has to do with global warming altering weather patterns.

But according to Reuters, another culprit causing the drought is probably the idiots cutting down all the trees in the vast Amazon jungle.

Trees emit oxygen, which is great since we need it to breath. But they also emit water vapor. Lots of it.

The same reservoir is pretty much dried out
in this recent satellite image from
Earth Observatory.  

That's one reason why it often feels damp or humid in a forest. Since there are zillions of trees in the Amazon, or at least there was, a lot of water vapor came from that forest.

"Humidity that comes from the Amazon in the form of vapor clouds - what we call 'flying rivers' - has dropped dramatically, contributing to this devasting situation we are living today,' said Antonio Nobre, a leading climate scientist at INPE, Brazil's National Space Research Institute.

What Nobre is saying is a lot that moisture the Amazon trees were belching out blew toward Sao Paulo.

The humidity often helps form showers, rain and storms that kept the Sao Paulo metro area and it's 20 million people nice and hydrated.

Deforestation is increasing in the Amazon again, jumping 29 percent in the 12 months ending in July, 2013, the last available year of record. It was the first increase in deforestation since 2008.

They're cutting down so many trees in the Amazon to make room for cattle ranches, industry, dams and development. Regulation isn't always so great in the region,  as you can tell, so greed often trumps conservation and sensible planning.

The drought is really screwing up Brazil. In addition to the looming water crisis in Sao Paulo, exports of key crops from Brazil like coffee, oranges, soybeans and sugarcane are down.

For now, all they can do in Brazil is pray for more rain. And pressure agribusiness and industry to stop cutting down the Amazon trees.

"What's happening now highlights the importance of preserving and replenishing the Amazon if we want to prevent Sao Paulo from becoming a desert," Nobre told Reuters.