September 2024 PNW Weather Discussion

[iFred]

What’d I miss? I’ve got three missed calls from Act Blue and a Venmo deposit from the Climate Action Fund, so something is up.

[iFred]

2 minutes ago, Timmy said:

Nice day!  The stink bugs are back. 

Great day for grass growing. Sadly my pumpkins have been attacked by powdery mildew, so they were not able to enjoy this wonderful sunny day.

[Front Ranger]

13 minutes ago, SpaceRace22 said:

Again, implying that climate change is scarier than it is not the equivalent of outright denying that it's real. The actual comparison here would be the lunatics saying that climate change is going to literally kill all humans and people who outright deny it.

I dare you to find a single mainstream media article claiming that we are literally all going to die from climate change.

[Front Ranger]

36 minutes ago, Deweydog said:

Speaking of winter, three months from RIGHT NOW Santa will be in flight!

And we MAY know the outcome of the election!

Downvoting this in remembrance of Jescadia.

[Slushy Inch]

3 minutes ago, Front Ranger said:

Downvoting this in remembrance of Jescadia.

Where has he been?

[Jbolin]

Just now, Slushy Inch said:

Where has he been?

BANNED

[Slushy Inch]

7 minutes ago, Jbolin said:

BANNED

What for?

[GHweatherChris]

6 hours ago, TacomaWx said:

In my opinion the stats from just one location don’t reflect how well a winter went as a whole. 

WRONG, the only stat that matters is what happens in our own personal backyard when reflecting on how good of a winter it has been for us real weather weenies.  

[SilverFallsAndrew]

Rest in power Jessie 

[snow_wizard]

1 hour ago, Front Ranger said:

Frame it how you want, but meatyrologist's post was derogatory on an individual level towards snow wizard, not to mention obvious ad hominem.

F*ck politics, especially election years.

Yeah.  I really want to not bring it up again, but I always fail.

[Phil]

5 hours ago, Tenochtitlan said:

The 1930’s had those Dust Bowl-era heat waves that were fueled by desert-like conditions in the Great Plains. (As a result of agriculture.) Ironically, that was another example of human activity affecting weather. 

Those heat waves were not “a result of agriculture”. They were driven by a tropically-forced intradecadal circulation regime that supercharged the +CGT pattern during boreal summer.

Poor agricultural practices did contribute significantly to the dust storms, however.

[snow_wizard]

18 minutes ago, Slushy Inch said:

What for?

Consistently being an azz hat.  It was not just a unilateral decision by Fred.

[snow_wizard]

2 minutes ago, Phil said:

Those heat waves were not “a result of agriculture”. The dust was definitely made worse by it, though.

Yes.  There was a significant natural element to it.  The craziness of the 1930s was greater than anything we're seeing now IMO.

[Tenochtitlan]

6 minutes ago, Phil said:

Those heat waves were not “a result of agriculture”. The dust was definitely made worse by it, though.

Did you see the subsequent discussion? It seems the dust likely worsened the drought beyond what it would have been otherwise (with only natural causes).

After I made that post I corrected myself for speaking too soon. I thought the drought was caused only by agriculture, but that’s not the case. Nonetheless, it does seem to have exacerbated it. 

[Phil]

6 minutes ago, Tenochtitlan said:

Did you see the subsequent discussion? It seems the dust likely worsened the drought beyond what it would have been otherwise (with only natural causes).

That doesn’t make physical sense. Dust serves as clean CCN, it would augment cloud formation.

The dust bowl was forced by a persistent boreal summer +CGT pattern that reflected across the entire NH. Poor farming practices over the US Great Plains (< 1% of NH surface area) did not throw the entire hemisphere out of whack.

[Tenochtitlan]

3 minutes ago, snow_wizard said:

Yes.  There was a significant natural element to it.  The craziness of the 1930s was greater than anything we're seeing now IMO.

It depends on the part of the world. There was some discussion on here a while back about how the Midwest is now one of the slowest places to warm, possibly because of increased evapotranspiration from corn farming. 

[Tenochtitlan]

1 minute ago, Phil said:

That doesn’t make physical sense. Dust serves as clean CCN, it would augment cloud formation.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0810200106#:~:text=La Nina conditions%2C with additional,amplified the drought (1).

[snow_wizard]

1 minute ago, Tenochtitlan said:

It depends on the part of the world. There was some discussion on here a while back about how the Midwest is now one of the slowest places to warm, possibly because of increased evapotranspiration from corn farming. 

That is possible.  I was just referring to the 1930s in general being a time of extremely perturbed weather patterns.  Just absolute crazy swings from year to year.

[Tenochtitlan]

Just now, snow_wizard said:

That is possible.  I was just referring to the 1930s in general being a time of extremely perturbed weather patterns.  Just absolute crazy swings from year to year.

Ah, ok that’s fair. There was also that major hurricane in New York in 1938. 

[Deweydog]

47 minutes ago, Timmy said:

Nice day!  The stink bugs are back. 

Holy buckets…

You ain’t kidding.

[Jbolin]

29 minutes ago, Slushy Inch said:

What for?

Pick any reason whatsoever 

[Phil]

11 minutes ago, Tenochtitlan said:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0810200106#:~:text=La Nina conditions%2C with additional,amplified the drought (1).

Soil moisture feedbacks aren’t driven by dust in the air, though. That would actually have the opposite effect.

Yes, soil moisture feedbacks increase diurnal boundary layer heating as more insolation goes into direct/sensible relative to latent heating/evaporation. It is the norm during prolonged drought patterns at any given location.

But the amount of heating doesn’t change overall in this equation. And the tropical forcing regime that produced the massive +CGT pattern throughout the 1930s would have done so regardless of agricultural practices. High temp records were set across much of Asia during the 1930s, as well.

Human activity made the dust much worse, but the pattern itself was externally forced.

[snow_wizard]

4 minutes ago, Tenochtitlan said:

Ah, ok that’s fair. There was also that major hurricane in New York in 1938. 

One day I should do a thread on the 1930s in the NW.  Just a wild roller coaster.  As an example Palmer, which is near where Tim lives, had 54 inches of snow on the ground in January 1935, and it was gone 4 days later.  A severe cold wave accompanied that snowstorm and was followed by a solid week of max temps 15 to 20 degrees above normal.

[DeepFriedEgg]

18 minutes ago, snow_wizard said:

Consistently being an azz hat.  It was not just a unilateral decision by Fred.

People on the internet are so soft. He should not have been banned.

[snow_wizard]

58 minutes ago, iFred said:

What’d I miss? I’ve got three missed calls from Act Blue and a Venmo deposit from the Climate Action Fund, so something is up.

It wasn't me! 

[Tenochtitlan]

7 minutes ago, Phil said:

Soil moisture feedbacks aren’t driven by dust in the air, though. That would actually have the opposite effect.

Yes, soil moisture feedbacks increase diurnal boundary layer heating as more insolation goes into direct/sensible relative to latent heating/evaporation. It is the norm during prolonged drought patterns at any given location.

But the amount of heating doesn’t change overall. And the tropical forcing regime that produced the massive +CGT pattern throughout the 1930s would have done so regardless of agricultural practices.

Hmm. Did you read the journal article? The authors point to dust and devegetation as two separate factors that both worsened the drought and moved its focus to the northern Great Plains. Not just dust alone—also the massive removal of native grasses from that whole area. These grasses hold moisture in their root systems, even in times of drought. 

This also reminds me of the way agriculture caused the Aral Sea to dry up, aridifying the climate there. Not that an inland sea disappearing is the same as denuding grasslands, but they’re two examples of how agriculture can have some enormous effects on the land, and the climate. 

[snow_wizard]

3 minutes ago, DeepFriedEgg said:

People on the internet are so soft. He should not have been banned.

I think he just wore out too many people on here.  Too bad it happened.  

[Tenochtitlan]

1 minute ago, snow_wizard said:

I think he just wore out too many people on here.  Too bad it happened.  

I wonder if they could have just disabled his emoji reacts instead of an outright ban. 

[Phil]

26 minutes ago, Tenochtitlan said:

Did you see the subsequent discussion? It seems the dust likely worsened the drought beyond what it would have been otherwise (with only natural causes).

After I made that post I corrected myself for speaking too soon. I thought the drought was caused only by agriculture, but that’s not the case. Nonetheless, it does seem to have exacerbated it. 

Okay I see you edited your post. I’m in closer agreement with that.

Yes, poor farming practices likely contributed to soil dryness, which may have increased diurnal heating by a couple degrees. But the drought pattern itself would have occurred regardless.

It was a strange, highly anomalous, hemisphere-wide regime of circulation that produced similarly large anomalies in other parts of the NH, as well.

[DeepFriedEgg]

5 minutes ago, snow_wizard said:

I think he just wore out too many people on here.  Too bad it happened.  

Fair enough I guess. I guess he never really picked on me and I haven’t been here for very long.

[SilverFallsAndrew]

21 minutes ago, snow_wizard said:

That is possible.  I was just referring to the 1930s in general being a time of extremely perturbed weather patterns.  Just absolute crazy swings from year to year.

Perturbed member

[DeepFriedEgg]

3 minutes ago, Phil said:

Okay I see you edited your post. I’m in closer agreement with that.

Yes, poor farming practices likely contributed to soil dryness, which may have increased diurnal heating by a couple degrees. But the drought pattern itself would have occurred regardless.

It was a strange, highly anomalous, hemisphere-wide regime of circulation that produced similarly large anomalies in other parts of the NH, as well.

If I recall most of the all time records that still stand today are confined to the plains where the agriculture had an effect.

[Phil]

FWIW, the medieval megadrought dwarfed the dust bowl both in duration and amplitude. It lasted for centuries, and dust from that event can be found in Greenland ice cores to this day.

Attribution re: climate anomalies is never as linear/straightforward as it seems, especially on local/regional scales.

[snow_wizard]

9 minutes ago, Phil said:

Okay I see you edited your post. I’m in closer agreement with that.

Yes, poor farming practices likely contributed to soil dryness, which may have increased diurnal heating by a couple degrees. But the drought pattern itself would have occurred regardless.

It was a strange, highly anomalous, hemisphere-wide regime of circulation that produced similarly large anomalies in other parts of the NH, as well.

Makes you wonder what triggered the craziness of that decade.  I read a book a while back that indicated things started to get kind of strange even in the 1920s, but then it went full blown nuts.  Seems like the 1930s were just a perfect storm of awfulness, both naturally and societally.  Although some of the weather events of the 1930s were downright spectacular and would have been fun to experience.  

[ShawniganLake]

It was kind of muggy today. Only 78F for a high but the dew point was 66F.  It’s raining ️ now though. 

[Slushy Inch]

11 minutes ago, snow_wizard said:

I think he just wore out too many people on here.  Too bad it happened.  

He was usually pretty negative towards me. But I didn’t let it bother me.

[snow_wizard]

2 minutes ago, Phil said:

FWIW, the medieval megadrought dwarfed the dust bowl both in duration and amplitude. It lasted for centuries, and dust from that event can be found in Greenland ice cores to this day.

Attribution re: climate anomalies is never as linear/straightforward as it seems, especially on local/regional scales.

I didn't know about that one!

[DeepFriedEgg]

Looks like plains and midwest

[snow_wizard]

Some good stuff on here tonight.

[Phil]

1 minute ago, DeepFriedEgg said:

If I recall most of the all time records that still stand today are confined to the plains where the agriculture had an effect.

No, our greatest heatwaves and drought patterns (by far) also occurred in the 1930s, and agriculture was not a player here.

It was just a different weather pattern altogether, supercharged +CGT pattern across the NH (of course the heat dome response is always greatest in North America in such a regime).