Arctic Summer Has Been Too Much Like What We Normally Get

X marks the spot where the North Pole is on this map. Red box
points to where there was lightning recently. 

Time to check in once again to the not-so-Great White North, meaning the Arctic, which continues to have an extraordinarily hot summer.

You've seen some posts this summer noting how hot it is up there, but the news keeps coming. Alaska beach weather. Arctic wildfires. Summer thunderstorms rattling around the North Pole.

This in an area that is normally bleak and chilly despite the usual 24-hour a day sun in the first half of summer.

LIGHTNING NEAR NORTH POLE

Here in Vermont, we endured lightning strikes every summer.  That's just normal this time of year around here. But recently. lightning was also striking within 300 miles of the North Pole, which is really something.

In general, if you want a thunderstorm, it's fine to have cold, dry air aloft, but you need relatively warm, humid air near the surface.  We get that here in Vermont in the summer, so we have thunderstorms. As does pretty much everybody else in the mid-latitudes.

The Arctic has always had plenty of cold, dry air around. But warmth and humidity, at least compared to what it normally is up there, is usually scarce. Which means so are thunderstorms.

It's possible there has been lightning that far north before, but nobody that I've found knows of it. And one thunderstorm doesn't prove climate change. But this is odd. And warm.

It does make sense that lightning could become more common in the Arctic. There are signs it already is getting more frequent.  When the Arctic ocean is more ice covered, that stabilizes and chills the air, squelching any attempts at the billowing clouds that can produce lightning.

When there's open water, it can collect more heat, creating rising air currents and produce thunderstorms under the right conditions. Arctic sea ice is at its lowest level on record for this time of year, so it's kinda not surprising they had a weird thunderstorm up there.

The thunderstorms occurred in an area that was frozen over. But open water was just 150 miles away. The storms apparently got going there, over the open water, then moved north. 

ALASKA HEAT UPDATE

The ever helpful Category 6 weather and climate blog has given us a nice update on this summer in Alaska, which statewide, was the hottest on record.

The records are incredible, but the town that takes the cake in my opinion is Kotzebue, along the coast in northwestern Alaska. May, June and July there were the hottest on record. They have not had a single cooler than normal day since February 14! The last time Kotzebue had a cooler than normal month was two years ago.

That pretty much the entire state of Alaska was record warm in July is particularly incredible considering how vast it is. Superimpose Alaska on the Lower 48 and it covers the entire middle of the nation.

So far, the warm Alaska summer has extended through the first half of August.  Another heat ridge might build up there over the coming week or two, which would prolong the odd hot summer in Alaska.

SEA ICE AND OUR WINTERS

At least one new study suggests that melting sea ice is NOT
making our winter in Vermont more harsh. The debate continues....

As I've mentioned in previous blog posts here, some climate scientists have been wondering if the loss of Arctic sea ice have been making winters here in Vermont, elsewhere in the United States and in Europe harsher.

The theory is that the loss of sea ice makes the jet stream wavier and helps get it stuck,  causing cold air to plunge down on us from the north.

A new study questions this theory.  As ScienceDaily points out, the study says that although low winter Arctic ice levels and tough winters here often coincide, the low sea ice isn't having a big influence on these winters.

With or without climate change, Arctic sea ice levels fluctuate year to year. Sometimes there's not much ice, other times there's quite a bit. The overall trend is down for the ice, but it's not a steady drop over years and decades.

Atmospheric weather patterns tend to promote particularly relatively small amounts of sea ice in the Arctic during some winters. Those same weather patterns cause cold snowy winters in eastern North America and western Europe.

This won't be the final word on this issue. I'm sure the scientists will continue studying and debating this one.

Severe Weather Outbreak To Draw A Big Crowd, Including Scientific Researchers

A severe thunderstorm looms over Indiana on Thursday. Teams of
scientists will be on the Plains over the next month studying
severe storms and tornadoes. Photo via
Twitter by Kyle Lockhart, @eas3964

There have been pushes over the years to really study severe weather and tornado outbreaks in the Midwest and South, resulting in forecasts and warnings that are much better and more timely than they used to be.

Those better forecasts have helped lead to days of anticipation this week that a severe weather outbreak in the Plains would begin in earnest today and last for several days. That is turning out to be the case. 

Which gives scientists a chance to poke and prod these storms even more, in the hopes of improving forecasts even more.

As the Category 6 blog notes, the largest experiment in years to study supercells and tornadoes kicks off this week, coinciding with the start of this severe weather outbreak. The study was long planned. The timing of the severe weather this weekend was just a lucky break.

Says Category 6:

"The TORUS project (Targeted Observation by Radars and UAS of Supercells) is drawing on a $2.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation plus about $1.5 million from NOAA."

One area of focus is rotating thunderstorms, which sometimes produce tornadoes. Here's the problem:  There's often thunderstorms with enough rotation to prompt tornado warnings, but most of these rotating storms ultimately don't produce tornadoes.  Up to 70 percent of tornado warnings are false alarms, which means there's a real risk people will ignore tornado warnings since there "always" is no tornado.

Scientists want to better understand which rotating storms are not much to worry about and which ones will produce tornadoes. That would reduce the number of "false alarms."

Unlike past big tornado studies in the 1990s and early 2000s, there is a new tool this time: Drones.

Drones will take video, like that famous one of a drone's eye view of an Oklahoma tornado earlier this year. But the main purpose of the drones, says Category 6,  is to take data just above ground level, to an elevation of up to 2,500 feet. That will help the scientists better understand just what is happening in the clouds of storms that produce tornadoes, and those that don't.

A hurricane hunter will also be deployed to check out the Plains storms. It's not hurricane season, so the plane is available.

This all sounds like an update of the movie "Twister," and I'm sure the graduate students in this study have a bit of a giddy feeling that they're advancing science while at the same time being awestruck by the sight of Plains supercells.

There will also be hordes of other storm chasers out there over the next few days. Let's hope they stay safe, and don't take too many reckless chances in the name of getting spectacular too-close tornado videos.

A life is not worth a few extra clicks on social media

We Might Never Know Puerto Rico Maria Death Toll, But U.S. Surely Dropped Ball On Response

Harvard researchers say the death toll in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria
last year was many times more than the "official" count. I guess
Donald Trump throwing paper towels into a Puerto Rican
crowd was inadequate hurricane relief. 

People are rightly appalled by the figures provided by Harvard University researchers who put the death toll from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico last year at 4,645.

That's far above the "official" death toll of 64 attributed to the Category 4 hurricane on the island.

The Harvard researchers' findings is an estimate and could well be off. Still, it's horrifying.

It's based on a survey of 3,299 Puerto Rican households, which indicates 31 percent of respondents reported disruptions in medical services and 14 percent said they were unable to get their medications, according to the Associated Press. 

From there the researchers extrapolated the number of deaths caused by the lack of medical care post-Maria.

And that's the big takeaway from this research as far as I'm concerned. However many people died from the hurricane in Puerto Rico, the overwhelming majority of the casualities were not caused directly by storm surges, or flooding or high winds.

Most of the deaths were caused by a weak response to Maria. Yes, surely, some people would have died of medical complications in the immediate aftermath of such an extensive disaster. But the fact that the power was out for months in many areas, and that resources weren't applied adequately to the island is a national shame.

Remember, Puerto Rico is part of the United States. I remain convinced that because most Puerto Ricans aren't white, and most are Hispanic, the response wasn't as robust as it could have been, due to, yes, racism.

Let's face it, the response to Hurricane Harvey in Texas and Hurricane Irma in Florida last year was way more effective and timely than the Maria response in Puerto Rico. 

I do agree with Vox and other commentaries that the poor response to Maria was a mix of the Trump's administration's racism and its incompetence. As Vox says:

"Suspicion will, of course, linger for years that there's a connection between Trump's habit of weaponizing anti-Latino hysteria as the centerpiece of his politics and the unfolding of an essentially unprecedented human tragedy in a Spanish-speaking U.S. territory. 

The possibility that Trump and his team simply have no idea what they're doing should not, however, be dismissed out of hand. The fat of the matter is this is the only real crisis we've had occasion to see Trump try to wrestle with, and it's been a total fiasco - with a high human cost."

The Trump administration did not adequately gear up ahead of the storm when they knew it was coming. The relief effort was paltry and rife with incompetence or worse. Trump blamed Puerto Ricans for not recovering from Maria by themselves. He seemed to think throwing a few rolls of "beautiful soft" paper towels at people in Puerto Rico after Maria would make all the difference.

More people are researching to determine more precisely how many people died in Puerto Rico due to Maria and the U.S. government's paltry response.

George Washington University is also conducting an independent review to determine the number of Maria-related deaths in Puerto Rico. The results of that study were due out in May, says the AP, but the research team asked for and received more time to complete the study.

I hope more research does shed more light on this travesty, and if people in the Trump administration didn't do enough, let's hold them to account.

Report: Tornado Deaths, Destruction To Greatly Increase In Coming Decades

A tornado carved a deadly path through Washington,
Illinois in November, 2013. As cities and towns
grow and expand, they become bigger targets
for tornadoes, so scenes like this might become more
common in coming decades. 

We're in the heart of tornado season in the United States now.

There was a handful of tornadoes in Oklahoma Thursday, but no deaths or serious injuries was reported, and damage was relatively muted.  

We've got several chances of more tornadoes in the coming week as several weather systems seem likely to touch off some bad weather in the middle of the country.

This has been kind of a bad, destructive and deadly tornado year and a report in USA Today gives us a scary glimpse into the future:

The number of deaths and damage from tornadoes could triple by the end of this century.

This isn't a story about global warming. (Usually, when there's a dire warning like this, it involves climate change. Not this time.)

Instead, the problem is development.

Cities and suburbs keep sprawling outward and coverning more land. The more land covered by houses and developments, the bigger the target for tornadoes.

Instead of harmlessly churning across open fields, the growing size of towns and cities make them bigger targets for tornadoes to chew up.

The student was done by Villanova University's Department of Geography and the Environment.

"Disasters are are socially constructed....We're building ourselves into disasters," said Stephen Strader, the study's lead author, according to USA Today.

This potentially deadly trend is most likely in the Midwest and Southeast, where tornadoes are most prevalent and cities are sprawling. Places like metropolitian Dallas, St. Louis, Kansas City, Chicago and Atlanta are big targets, for instance.

In terms of global warming, the jury is still out on whether climate change will make tornadoes more frequent or worse. The tornado season might become longer, since warmer air earlier in the spring could contribute to weather patterns that encourage twisters.

But the biggest problem is development. People in tornado prone areas ought to consider building storm shelters if they don't already have them. Or at least bolster the structural integrity of the houses they live in.

Is Warming Arctic Making Our Winters More Miserable

Boston during the winter of 2015. Will a warming
Arctic paradoxically give us more winters
like the one pictured?

Another study is telling us that the warming Arctic might not be doing us in the Northeast if we hate cold winters, and hate paying big heating bills.

As the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang reported this week, we're going to have to talk about the polar vortex again, that weather system that became such an internet sensation a couple winters back.  

The polar vortex is always up in the Arctic in the winter. It's a tightly wound circulation of frigid air that is perfectly normal, not the monster it was made out to be in the winter of 2013-14.

But a warming Arctic might be screwing around with that polar vortex.

Says the Washington Post:

"Occasionally (the polar vortex) fragments and pieces of it plunge into eastern North America, carrying bitter cold air. The winters of 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 witnessed several such polar vortex disintegrations and resulted in record setting cold snaps."

The polar vortex has showed a weakening trend over the past three decades, says the study in Nature Climate Change, making it easier to fragment and sent cold air into parts of Europe, Asia and North America, especially in the late winter and early spring.

Other studies have shown this overall polar vortex weakening, but the latest study takes things a little further. It's complicated, but an oversimplified version of it is this:

There's more open water in the Arctic in the autumn and early winter in recent years. That means more evaporation, and more water vapor in the air that falls as snow in Siberia and other high latitude locations.

The snow cover up there is thus, counterintuitively, more widespread than usual, which helps sets off weather pattern changes that make the polar vortex more likely to fall apart.

Additional complicated weather patterns favor fragments of the polar vortex to unload on eastern North America in late winter and early spring, mostly March, so we would be more prone to terrible cold snaps during that time of year, which prolongs winter.

Or at least give us weather whiplash. There have also been notable heat waves in recent years during March when the polar vortex isn't unloading on us. Remember the 80s in mid-March, 2012. And 70 degrees plus in early March last year?

The hints of spring might be prone to getting clobbered by these cold waves. Which screws ups and freezes early budding plants and fruit trees, causing crop losses, and less importantly, aggravated gardeners. It's a situation we saw last year, I know.

Of course, this doesn't always happen. A strong El Nino last year kept the Arctic air pretty much bottled up over the far north, and many of us in the Northeast enjoyed (or cursed) the warmest winter on record.

Even then, a brief very sharp cold wave around Valentine's Day brought some daily record low temperatures, and there was a temporary chill down in the second half of March and early April before the warmth returned. Which created the above mentioned havoc with frozen flowers on fruit trees.

As Scientific American notes, this is just another piece of evidence that global warming can cause more extremes in weather. Occasionally, those extremes are bitter cold, despite the overall warming trend.

This new study the Washington Post cites is not the final word, as there is controversy among scientists as to what Arctic thawing means, exactly how it affects the polar vortex, and howwe might feel the effects down here where we live.

We just know that things are getting screwed up with climate change, and we're only beginning to understand the picky details of how this will play out.

By the way, as I write this on a mild early November morning, there is much above snow cover in Eurasia, including Siberia, and much below normal Arctic sea ice, the Weather Channel notes. 

Many forecasters are saying this will lead to a bitter winter this year. Starting as soon as just before Thanksgiving, according to some predictions.

Bundle up and stow cash for those high winter heating bills!

Many Americans Don't Worry About Global Warming Because We've Been Enjoying It So Much

An ice skater in shorts and t-shirt enjoys record
Christmas week warmth in New York last December.
Photo from New York Daily News.  

I'll confess to a guilty pleasure.

Where I live in Vermont, we just came off the warmest winter on record.

I know it was bad for the winter sports industry, and if I don't like winter, I should just move to someplace warmer.

However, in many ways, I enjoyed this past winter more than I enjoy most winters.

I wasn't constantly struggling with layers of clothes, ski parkas, boots, etc. It didn't take an hour each morning to get dressed, start the truck and get to work.

I even got work done out in the gardens which is unheard of in Vermont.

I guess I was part of the crowd, judging from a new study I've seen discussed in the news lately.

It turns out at least in the United States, global warming has caused winters to warm up much more than summers.

Winters are generally easier, than the once were and summers aren't that much more unbearable than they used to be.

Despite the ever wilder storms and floods and such that keep pounding us Americans, in general, global warming has made the weather "nicer," at least in the opinions of many.  We tend to like milder winters and dislike hot, humid summers.

With winters warming faster than summer's, we broadly think the weather has gotten more pleasant in recent decades.

According to the Associated Press: 

"Americans are getting the wrong signal from year-round weather about whether they should be concerned about climate change," said study lead author Patrick Egan, a public policy professor at New York University. "They're getting the good parts and haven't had to pay the price of the bad part."

If you're totally selfish and don't care what's going on with climate change and its effects on people in other parts of the world, it's all good for us Americans, right?

Um, no, At least the climate scientists are saying no.

Here's the deal: Eventually, summer temperature rises are going to start catching up with the winter temperature increases.

That means in the coming decades, American summers will turn quite a bit hotter, and in many places, quite a bit more humid.

We humans tend to get cranky in such oppressive weather. Even worse, it's dangerous. You'll see more heat related deaths and illnesses, and diseases, most of them spread by bugs such as mosquitoes, will spread north into previously unaffected areas.

Plus, as climate change worsens, storms, floods, droughts and sea level rises will also screw up the lives of Americans, and the rest of the globe for that matter.

That totally sounds like not much fun.

Quoting from the AP again:

"America 'may have been lulled into a complacency when it comes to the impacts of climate change,' said Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann, who wasn't part of the study but called it a solid analysis."

Of course, our complacency over summer is because it's not all that hard to crank up the air conditioning. And if you have to go outside, it's still easier than going out in a blizzard.

I guess we'll have to wait and see how cranky we get if the summers start getting a lot hotter. And stormier. And droughtier.

Vermont Among Fastest Warming States in U.S.

An interesting story by Seth Borenstein with the AP indicates Vermont is tied with Maine as the fastest warming areas of the United States as global warming takes hold.  

A hot summer day on Lake Champlain off Burlington, Vermont.
The Champlain Valley is among the fastest warming
regions in the United States.  

He did an analysis of temperature trends in the past 30 years - between 1984 and 2014, to come up with the regions in the United States that warmed the fastest and most slowly.

The five fastest growing regions in the United States include two in Vermont: The Northeast Kingdom and the Champlain Valley.

The other ones are the St. Lawrence Valley of New York, northern Maine, and the northeastern plains of New Mexico.

The fastest warming spot, including Vermont, are at least 2.5 degrees warmer than they were in 1984. That doesn't sound like much, but it does represent a significant shift in the overall scheme of things. It's almost as if the climate of Springfield, Mass. moved to Burlington, Vermont

Warmer winters are driving the increasing heat in Vermont and the rest of the Northeast. Hotter, drier summers are heating the Southwest, it seems.

The data show how randomness, local effects and other cycles that have nothing to do with human-caused climate change can cause varying rates at which places warm.

According to Borenstein:

"The continguous United States annual average temperature has warmed by 1.2 degrees since 1984, with summers getting 1.6 degrees hotter. But that doesn't really tell you how hot it's gotten for most Americans. 

While man-made greenhouse gases warm the world as a whole, weather is supremely local."

The theory is Vermont has gotten hotter faster in part because of global warming, and in part for whatever, reason, the North Atlantic was unusually warm during much of the past 30 years, which influenced the New England climate.

More importantly, Vermont's warmer winters are part of a feedback loop. It's milder, the snow melts, the dark ground reflects less winter sunlight than snow cover, so the lack of snow makes it even warmer than it otherwise would have been.

Meanwhile, the southeastern United States warmed more slowly than other regions. Those areas rely more on coal for electricity. The pollution from coal plants reflected away a little bit of sun, tamping down the warming there.

There's no guarantee that the regions that are warming the fastest will continue to do so. The rate of warming in Vermont might, or might not slow down over the next 30 years. But the world as a whole continues to get hotter.

Your kids will say that their climate is not their father's climate, that's for sure.

Most, Least Pleasant Weather Spots In the United States Ranked

Over on Buzzfeed, I stumbled upon a link to a comprehensive interactive map that tells you how pleasant the weather is where you live in the United States, relative to everyone else.

What I would regard as a pleasant
day in Burlington, Vermont in April, 2012.
However, by the criteria in the "pleasant"
ranking, this day was not so nice because
the mean temperture was below 55 degrees.  

The map enumerates how many pleasant days there are per year in a given location.

The criteria is subjective, but here it is: A pleasant day is one in which the mean temperature is between 55 and 75 degrees. Pleasant days must also have a low temperatures warmer than 45 degrees and a high temperature cooler than 85 degrees

There also can't be any appreciable precipitation on a pleasant day and there can't be any snow on the ground.

The "pleasant weather" map was compiled by Kelly Norton, a designer and software engineer in Atlanta, Georgia. The data for the rankings come from NOAA Global Summary of the Day daily archive. 

For the record, the city with the most pleasant weather, at least by this criteria is Los Angeles, with 183 pleasant days per year. This is followed by San Diego (182), Oxnard, Calif (166), Simi Valley, Calif, (156) and San Francisco (153)

The place with the least pleasant weather is McAllister, Montana with 14 pleasant days per year. That's followed by a three way tie for second least pleasant between a spot northeast of Reno, Nevada, Clancy, Montana and Douglas, Wyoming, with 15 pleasant days a year.

Not surprisingly, northern Vermont, where I live, ranks low in the pleasant scale. Burlington has 37 pleasant days a year.  It's nicer where my in-laws live in Yankton, South Dakota, with 44 pleasant days.

Of course, everybody has their own criteria as to what pleasant weather is. Hell, I imagine a storm chaser thinks a day with a tornado is a pleasant day, or a skier things a blizzard is pleasant.

My idea of pleasant weather changes with the season. This time of year, in February, pleasant would be a snowy night and a sunny day, with lows near 20  and highs in the upper 20s with light winds.

In April and May, a pleasant day to me is a breezy, sunny one with highs in the low 60s. In the summer, I like it sunny, with low humidity and in the low to mid 80s.

What's your idea of the most pleasant weather you can get?