When I was in 4th or 5th grade, my elementary school brought in a weather balloon to show us what was causing a flap in our obedient news services. It all made good sense. At least to anyone with half a brain and little belief in government agitprop.
Here we are…all over again…with the same class of scumbags in charge. And equally gullible idjits messing their drawers over the goblins in the sky. 75 years later.
Here’s the record of 66,000 hits one day in June
Lightning strikes are rare in Northern and Central California — so infrequent as to be overlooked by science.
But the subject has been of urgent interest since August 2020, when a massive complex of thunderstorms thrashed its way across the state, dropping not rain but thousands of bolts of “dry lightning”: cloud-to-ground strikes without accompanying rainfall exceeding one-tenth of an inch (2.5 millimeters). The effects were predictable, immediate and immense: wildfires, 650 in total, burning upward of 2 million acres…
“Our team knew dry lightning happens in California during the summer,” said the paper’s author, Dmitri Kalashnikov of Washington State University at Vancouver. “But we didn’t know that it would be almost half (46 percent) of all lightning strikes in 34 years that were dry…”
“The higher elevations, like the Sierra Nevada, they get most of their dry lightning strikes in July and August, sort of during the monsoon season, and then by September and October, their dry lightning mostly goes away,” Kalashnikov said. “Whereas, in contrast in the lower elevations … it’s kind of an ongoing dry lightning season. So, whether you’re in June or July or August or September, you get about the same amount of dry lightning strikes as the other months…”
And this is just the beginning of Professor Kalashnikov’s study. I imagine something similar results in similar environments around the country, around the world. Just raises my curiosity bump even more.
The summer of 2021 was a glaring example of what disruptive weather will look like in a warming world. In mid-July, storms in western Germany and Belgium dropped up to eight inches of rain in two days. Floodwaters ripped buildings apart and propelled them through village streets. A week later a year’s worth of rain—more than two feet—fell in China’s Henan province in just three days. Hundreds of thousands of people fled rivers that had burst their banks.,,In mid-August a sharp kink in the jet stream brought torrential storms to Tennessee that dropped an incredible 17 inches of rain in just 24 hours; catastrophic flooding killed at least 20 people. None of these storm systems were hurricanes or tropical depressions.
Soon enough, though, Hurricane Ida swirled into the Gulf of Mexico, the ninth named tropical storm in the year’s busy North Atlantic season. On August 28 it was a Category 1 storm with sustained winds of 85 miles per hour. Less than 24 hours later Ida exploded to Category 4, whipped up at nearly twice the rate that the National Hurricane Center uses to define a rapidly intensifying storm. It hit the Louisiana coast with winds of 150 miles an hour, leaving more than a million people without power and more than 600,000 without water for days. Ida’s wrath continued into the Northeast, where it delivered a record-breaking 3.15 inches of rain in one hour in New York City. The storm killed at least 80 people and devastated a swath of communities in the eastern U.S.
What all these destructive events have in common is water vapor—lots of it. Water vapor—the gaseous form of H2O—is playing an outsized role in fueling destructive storms and accelerating climate change. As the oceans and atmosphere warm, additional water evaporates into the air. Warmer air, in turn, can hold more of that vapor before it condenses into cloud droplets that can create flooding rains. The amount of vapor in the atmosphere has increased about 4 percent globally just since the mid-1990s. That may not sound like much, but it is a big deal to the climate system. A juicier atmosphere provides extra energy and moisture for storms of all kinds, including summertime thunderstorms, nor’easters along the U.S. Eastern Seaboard, hurricanes and even snowstorms…
Fascinating – and dangerous – forecasting. Even here in the desert Southwest, we can look forward to drought and unusual cloudbursts. The scariest part being rapid intensification – with circumstances changing dramatically in a matter of hours. Not only an interesting read. Something needing to be added to our understanding of changing weather systems in our future – for simple self-preservation.
Click to enlarge
Storm Dennis, one of the deepest low-pressure centres to have formed in recent years, has brought severe weather to Iceland and many western and central parts of the UK.
Some of the regions now being affected by Dennis were also hit by a preceding storm, Ciara, which brought stronger winds than Dennis but less rain. Nevertheless, rivers were already full and the ground saturated before Dennis’s arrival.
The military has been called in provide assistance in parts of northern England, where rivers have overflowed in recent days.
Click through and check out the photos. The worst waves haven’t hit land [yet?]. They’re up to 100 feet high.
From Top L, clockwise: Pacific Trough, Arctic High, Alaskan Ridge, Arctic Low – Simon Lee
Winter weather patterns in North America are dictated by changes to the polar vortex winds high in the atmosphere, but the most significant cold snaps are more likely influenced by the tropics, scientists have found…
It is already well established that the vortex wind strength influences weather in Europe and Asia, and the study revealed it also has a strong effect on three out of the four main winter weather patterns in North America, giving forecasters an additional tool to understand potentially high-impact weather during winter.
The study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, also revealed that, unlike in Europe, the most extreme cold snaps affecting the whole of North America are not most likely to occur after a weak vortex. Instead, the shape of the vortex and conditions in the tropics were identified as stronger influences of these conditions…
(Researchers) found widespread extreme cold is more common when an area of high pressure extends up to Alaska, and the polar vortex stretches down towards North America – pushing cold Arctic air southward in the lower atmosphere.
The scientists say the influence of the stratosphere on weather patterns, as well as how this interacts with long-term weather patterns in the tropics like El Niño, should be studied further and incorporated into forecasts to improve their accuracy.
Still, awfully complex. Certainly requiring a CPU stronger than my little gray cells. But, my confidence in forecasters incorporating more into their offerings isn’t diminished. Technology keeps on rocking, capabilities continue to grow and expand.
Click to enlarge — Antonio Chiquito/Facebook
❝ Antonio Chiquito was having a relatively normal winter day in Tinian, N.M., on Feb. 17. Temperatures were about 30 degrees, with heavy snow showers, and nothing seemed too out of the ordinary. And then he spotted a tornado — made out of snow.
“I had been at church, and then I came home and took the sheep out,” recalled Chiquito, who lives on the eastern end of the Navajo Nation. “When I was heading inside to warm up, I glanced up and saw the funnel cloud.”
❝ Sure enough, Chiquito’s suspicions were correct: It was a tornado. At first, he was a little frightened, but surprisingly not shocked. He had seen twisters in Tinian before but never following a snow squall.
❝ The National Weather Service in Albuquerque…confirming the funnel as a landspout, which is a tornado that forms from the ground up rather than one that descends from spinning clouds above.
Out-of-the-ordinary weather is now becoming “occasional”. Conservative politicians at a minimum have to acknowledge the existence of real events. Unless they’re president, of course.
❝ How can you see the atmosphere? By tracking what is carried on the wind. Tiny aerosol particles such as smoke, dust, and sea salt are transported across the globe, making visible weather patterns and other normally invisible physical processes.
❝ This visualization uses data from NASA satellites, combined with mathematical models in a computer simulation allow scientists to study the physical processes in our atmosphere. By following the sea salt that is evaporated from the ocean, you can see the storms of the 2017 hurricane season.
Click image for full view; play, enjoy, learn, utilize
Eideard 