My colleague Tom Bracegirdle and me have devised a fairly simple cold-air outbreak index. If you know the temperature of the sea surface and the air temperature at an altitude of some 2,000 metres, this index can be calculated at any time and place. I've done just that and picked out the most extreme cases in the last few years. This satellite image was taken over the North-East Atlantic around noon on 23 January, 2003 (click for a larger version):

The wind is coming from the north-west, down through the Fram Strait between Spitsbergen and Greenland and off the sea ice along the east coast of Greenland. After travelling a few hundred kilometres over the open ocean, it is heated enough for some no-nonsense clouds to develop. The white areas with the spirally shape are polar lows. The surface winds in this region were around 50 knots at the most intense. That's not so far from hurricane force winds.

Another very cool feature is the von Kármán vortices [?] downstream of Jan Mayen near the middle left edge of the picture.

This kind of weather is important in many ways. The potential for accidents is only the most obvious issue. The worst accident in later years was when the British trawler FV Gaul went down in 1974, killing all 36 men on board [?]. Colleagues of mine here in Bergen have simulated the weather on this day using numerical weather prediction models, and they found that there was an "arctic front" (a phenomenon that is highly related to polar lows) in the region when the ship sank.

In Norwegian waters, there are numerous examples of ugly accidents at sea, especially in earlier times, when the forecasts were erratic or even non-existent.

Cold-air outbreaks are also important for the ocean. Alan Condron of Woods Hole, MIT is the lead author a new, important paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research. His group found that if the weather typically associated with cold-air outbreaks had been better represented in the widely used re-analysis data sets such as ERA-40 [?], it would have led to (in models)

enhanced surface latent and sensible heat fluxes and a dramatic increase in the cyclonic rotation of the Nordic Seas gyre by four times the average interannual variability. In response to these changes, Greenland Sea deep water formation generally increases by up to 20% in 1 month, indicating more active open ocean convection.

Condron's study is a welcome addition to the literature, in that it couples the atmosphere and the ocean in an elegant manner. The disciplines of meteorology and oceanography, for all their similarities, are too often treated as separate entities. For instance, it was not until 1957 that one realized that the ocean phenomenon El Niño was intimately coupled with the atmospheric Southern Oscillation. Although one sometimes still refers to this system as simply El Niño, it is now known as the combination of the two: El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO [?].

Look for this to change...the last warm day...as a cold front will push through tomorrow afternoon/evening, bringing cooler air, and rain chances.

On a side note, even though we hit the upper 70s near 80 today, it just wasn't enough to tie or break any record high temperatures. I guess we'll take the record warm lows and leave it at that!

City           Old Record          New Record/Tie      Oct. 13th Record

Austin            62°                         63°                          64°
Charles City   59°                         61°                          65°
Preston          63°                         65°                          66°
Rochester      61°                         61°                          60° 
Mason City    61°                         61°                          68°

http://english.people.com.cn/china/home.html

Time Magazine got some good pieces from time to time. Amanda Ripley lists 10 reasons to actually like today's oil price.

Less pollution is obvious, but off course important and good thing about expensive oil and gasoline. If driving makes us bankrupt, we'll probably park the car. Actually higher expenses connected to driving is seen as the best way to cut the pollution from automobiles.

In the western world we love to live in suburbs. The countryside-city mixed areas gives us space for four bathrooms and garden parties. But the way our communities are planned and built makes us car dependent. Real estate agents in the USA tell about a growing demand for homes closer to cities.

More surprisingly things like four days work week and more cops in the street are also listed as consequences of the oil price.

But most important of all is human life. If you are age 5 through 34, you are more likely to die in traffic than any other way. Less driving means that lives will spared. Gas prices at $4 per gallon for a year or more can save 1000 people from dying in traffic each month, writes Ripley.

That’s something to think about!

1. The intense energy fluxes from the ocean to the atmosphere are made visible by the clouds at the outskirts of a polar low. This aerial photograph was taken during the IPY-THORPEX field campaign near Tromsø, Norway in March, 2008.

2. These footprints were left by scientists and the crew at a coast guard icebreaker in the sea ice near Svalbard. The photograph was taken during the IPY-THORPEX field campaign in March, 2008.

3. A helicopter leaves a coast guard icebreaker in the sea ice near Svalbard. The photograph was taken during the IPY-THORPEX field campaign in March, 2008.

4. The intense heat fluxes from the open ocean to the atmosphere can be seen as "Arctic Smoke". The photograph was taken from a coast guard icebreaker in the sea ice near Svalbard during the IPY-THORPEX field campaign in March, 2008.

Tonight it could be a tie-breaker, at the very least, for Record Warm Lows. We'll be around the low 60s for overnight lows. Here's at look at the records for some area cities (Courtesy NWS La Crosse):

Warmest Minimum Temperatures for October 12th

Northeast Iowa...

                Warmest Min
Location        Temperature  
--------        -----------  
Charles City       59F       
Decorah            64F       
Oelwein            60F
Mason City         61F       

Southeast Minnesota...

                Warmest Min
Location        Temperature  
--------        -----------  
Austin             62F       
Preston            63F       
Rochester          61F       
Winona             69F       

Western Wisconsin...

                Warmest Min
Location        Temperature  
--------        -----------  
La Crosse          65F       
Medford            56F       
Prairie du Chien   63F       
Sparta             61F        

They apologise for the length, but hey, its a lot briefer than those IPCC reports.

I'll say more, perhaps, when I've read them (sigh). The number of PDFs on the various hard drives I use these days you would not believe...

How much of their future do we really think about? Do we only think about the economics of their future life? Can we include in our worries their future environment?

We don’t know what problems the future will bring. From previous generation to today’s generation we experienced wars, poverty, political and economic instabilities (which includes dot.com bubble and today’s credit crunch). I think the future will uncover a much worse problem than what we face now. How will you solve environmental problems caused by generations of neglect – climate change, pollution, food shortage? Money we’re trying to save will not save our children from these problems.

It’s worrying that majority of people and businesses don’t realise the urgency of this issue. Each individual has a contribution to make and they can also bring that contribution to their workplace. Businesses should take this seriously and not only use it for publicity or marketing strategy. They should actively implement their policies concerning the environment and energy efficiency. I would put this above the issue of health and safety as breathing polluted air and destroying the environment is a broad part of health and safety issue.

Our blog from previous weeks discussed many things how we can contribute to solutions on environmental issues affecting our children’s future. My sacrifice will not stop just providing them economic security.

How much are we willing to pay for our children’s future?

Read more: Companies need green directors article from the BBC.

There are two main kind of cities right now in the world. The obsolete type - sprawling, radial cities, which can be found especially in southern Europe (in the Northern part they didn't manage to survive), some parts of Africa, South America and, of course, Australia. They're still the majority worldwide, even if in ice-covered Europe and Asia, as well as in North America, they are not.

And there's a reason for this. Not only the weather, which was terrible 40-10 years ago (but slowly started to warm up in the last 8 years), with ice and snowstorms engulfing much of the Northern continents for 7-8 months each year. But also an economic and ecologic reason.

Talking about the weather first. In the '30s, the global warming heated the continents so much,  that carbon-neutral cities like this one (eventually built in 2020 but on a smaller scale in Dubai, it still exists but it's a slump) started to be interesting. They provided shelter from the heat, nice internal transportation (getting rid of cars), a controlled climate and such. There were dozens of them built in America, Europe and Asia, many of them accessible only for the elites.

But as the '50s came, with their huge storms, food shortages and icy-cold weather (due to the Atlantic current reversal and a host of other climateric changes), interest for this kind of cities increased 100%. However, for entirely different reasons than before. Before people wanted to feel cool and be protected from the scorching sun, afterwards they flocked to such projects to be protected from the snow storms and icy weahter. As the '70s came, with 5-6-month winters, a short spring in July and August, and devastating freezes in September, millions died. The horrible 8th decade saw the first underground cities, with huge domes above and, looking retrospectively, this kind of investment was the most unfortunate of all.

Those cities have all sorts of problems right now, starting with the way that they were built. The city in which I live is aging beautifully, though. It's built 80% on the surface, with two concentric built areas, surrounding a huge 3-miles-radius park, with a space between the inner building and the outer building (two concentric circles with a 3 miles, respectively 3.2 miles radius each). That inner courtyard is covered and has a controlled climate, as well as all the amenities of a big city.

I live in a huge mall with big condos and terraces on the outside, if you want. And that type of city managed to solve most of the XXI-st Century first half problems. Transport is integrated through elevators and people carriers, the city itself being connected through high speed trains and electric cabs to the cities in the vicinity. No traffic jams, no pollution, no noise.

But I digress. Now that the planet heats up again, nobody pretty knows what to expect. The new generation is eager to have individual homes with gardens, again, and the politicians are pushing for this return to the original way of housing. I suspect they have big real estate interests, but the problem we all face is: if in the next 20-30 years we manage to bring back the climate to a more moderate one, would the return to original individual housing ruin all that we accomplished?

I mean, OK, people are fed up with living in 'hives', but you couldn't possibly house 9 billion people in sprawling cities like in the past. Look at South-America, were they didn't manage to salvage cities like Mexico and Buenos Aires when the big storms of the '50es came. It will simply not work.

There's currently a debate to make a compromise. That is, to build not huge cities with hexagonal or circular 30-50 stories high buildings encompassing huge parks, but smaller, similarly shaped cities, connected through a network of transport. These would have only 2-3 stories-high buildings, would encompass only 0.2-0.3 miles radius parks, and would ensure that everybody feels like they would own an individual home and garden.

My main objection to this is that the land for agriculture is scarce right now due to the harsh climate, and that the hive structure of current cities really allowed for the remaining land to be rationally cultivated.

I think we'll wait and see. I'm going for a stroll in the park right now, so... (a virtual one, of course, I can connect through the ksphere for limited amount of times now...)

LLNL researchers and colleagues from 11 other scientific institutions have refuted a recent claim that simulated temperature trends in the tropics are fundamentally inconsistent with observations. This claim was based on the application of a flawed statistical test and the use of older observational datasets.

The summary of the new research published in the International Journal of Climatology:

A paper published online last year in the International Journal of Climatology claimed to show definitively that “models and observations disagree to a statistically significant extent” in terms of their tropical temperature trends.[...]

In marked contrast to the earlier claim, LLNL’s Benjamin Santer’s international team (with 11 other groups working in tandem) found that there is no fundamental discrepancy between modeled and observed trends in tropical temperatures.

“We’ve gone a long way toward reconciling modeled and observed temperature trends in the problem area of the tropics,” said Santer, the lead author of a paper [...]

The major cited reasons by Santer that led to the incorrect claim of the earlier was

[that claim] was based on the application of a flawed statistical test and the use of older observational datasets.

[read more]

National Review on line

October 9, 2008

Tom Nelson notes Reuters quoting expert economic commentary from the mysteriously funded Alliance for Climate Protection and expert climate commentary from Prince Albert of Monaco. Apparently, Prince Charles was unavailable to comment on either issue.

(...) 

The anthropogenic roots of global warming are clear to Prince Albert of Monaco, who told the Reuters summit he didn't "adhere" to Palin's skeptical view.

"There are obviously cycles, but how can you not consider the graphs that have been shown to us?," Prince Albert said. "Those who can't see the correlation between man-made activities and greenhouse gas emissions, it's going to be hard to convince them; but somehow we will have to do so."