74 F. high in St. Cloud Wednesday.
78 F. average high on August 26.
74 F. high on August 26, 2014.
August 26, 1915: Severe cold and killing frosts across Minnesota with 23 degrees at Roseau.
Erika Is No LadyBeware
of the Caribbean in late August and September. There's a reason why
hotel rooms and cruises are slightly discounted: hurricane season peaks
in the coming weeks.
September 10
is the date when a hurricane landfall is most likely, statistically,
here in the U.S. - corresponding to peak ocean water temperatures.
Hurricanes derive their energy from warm ocean water; the warmer the
water the greater the potential for intensification.
In recent
weeks wind shear, dry air aloft and Saharan dust has kept a lid on the
tropics - at the same time we've seen a parade of Category 5
super-typhoons in the western Pacific - but that's changing. The latest
model consensus brings a weak, Category 1 Hurricane Erika near Florida
by
next Monday. Uncertainty is high regarding track and intensity; the ECMWF curves the storm closer to the Carolinas.
Smoke
from Washington wildfires left yesterday's sky an eerie shade of
dirty-blue. Clouds increase today; heavy showers and T-storms slosh
across southern Minnesota
Friday with locally heavy rainfall possible. The sun should be out this weekend and daytime highs flirt with 90F from
Sunday into much of next week.
NOAA's GFS model was right 2 weeks ago, hinting at a late-summer hot spell. Don't pack away the short shorts just yet.
* Enhanced IR satellite loop of "Erika" courtesy of
NOAA.
Official NHC Forecast.
As of Wednesday evening here is the projected path, along with the
"cone of uncertainty". There's a fair amount of uncertainty with Erika,
but there's little question the east coast of Florida may be threatened
by Monday of next week. From there things may get very
interesting/precarious for the southeast coastline of the USA. Source:
NOAA NHC.
NOAA HWRF Model.
Here is the latest projected path of Erika from NOAA's high-resolution
hurricane model, the HWRF, which keeps the core of strongest winds and
heaviest rains well offshore. Source: WeatherBell.
GFS Model.
NOAA's GFS model brings a strengthening Hurricane Erika into Florida by
late Monday, with further strengthening projected as the storm tracks
along the Georgia and Carolina coast early next week, doing one big loop
just offshore. It may be a very close call for Miami, Vero Beach,
Jacksonville, Savannah, Charleston and the Outer Banks of North
Carolina.
ECMWF: Monday Morning.
The European model, which often does a better job with tropical systems
(Sandy comes to mind as the most prominent example) pulls a small,
compact, rapidly strengthening Hurricane Erika very close to the east
coast of Florida by Monday morning.
ECMWF: Wednesday Evening.
The same model predicts additional strengthening over the warm waters
of the Gulf Stream, with the storm remaining just off the coast of the
Carolinas. A bit close for comfort. It's too early to project any
potential landfall with a high degree of confidence; interests from
Florida to the Outer Banks will want to keep a very close eye on Erika's
progress in the days to come. The forecast will change.
U.S. Coastline Vulnerability Is Growing To Unprecedented Levels.
A decade-long hurricane drought is breeding apathy; at some point the
bubble will burst and we'll experience another year like 2005. Here's an
excerpt of a
Washington Post explainer: "...
The
stark reality is coastal communities are living on borrowed time, and
to adapt a quote from a well-known Hollywood movie, are seemingly
writing checks their collective municipalities cannot cash. How rare is
the current 10-year “drought”? The results of a 2015 statistical study
by Timothy Hall of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
indicated a nine-year hiatus in major hurricane landfall along the U.S.
coastline would be expected to occur once every 177 years..."
Graphic credit above: "
Montage of several 2005 hurricanes." (CIMSS)
Flood Damage After Katrina Could Have Been Prevented, S&T Expert Says. Hindsight is always 20/20 but hubris and overconfidence often has tragic consequences. Here's an excerpt from
Missouri S&T News and Events: "...
The
journal article focuses on the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers and its
lack of external peer reviews that allowed for faulty flood walls to be
installed in the city. It pinpoints the key factors that led to the
walls’ failure and the actions taken years before the disaster that
allowed the engineering oversights to occur. “As more information has
emerged from the time of the disaster and its prior decision-making
processes, new details allow us to have a better idea of the situation
and what led to the various levee failures,” says Rogers. “This article
is meant to put the record straight about the conclusions people drew
from the disaster, many of which were based on incorrect information...”
10 Years After Katrina Louisiana Is Becoming a Model for Climate Resilience.
Huffington Post has the story; here's the intro: "
A
decade after Hurricane Katrina devastated coastal Louisiana, forcing
1.5 million residents to evacuate and causing $100 billion in damage,
the region is becoming a model for climate change adaptation planning --
even if some people in the state still don't want to say the "c" word.
Louisiana's governor, long-shot Republican presidential candidate Bobby
Jindal, has been non-committal on climate change. He'll acknowledge it's happening, but
says he's uncertain how much humans are to blame. Nevertheless,
Louisiana officials have been planning for rising temperatures and the
cascading impacts climate change will have on the state, from rising
seas to potentially more dangerous storms..."
Photo credit above:
Gerald Herbert/Associated Press. "This Nov. 26, 2012, photo shows a flood wall and floodgate along Lakeshore Drive and Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans."
Are More Sightings of Noctilucent Clouds a Harbinger of Warming? This isn't the first time I've heard this;
AOL.com has an update; here's the intro: "
Blue
clouds are becoming more common in certain areas, and scientists are
wondering if it could be a sign of global warming. Noctilucent clouds or
NLCs, which glow blue, have been appearing at more southerly latitudes,
with sightings as far down as Northern California. Computer models
suggest that as greenhouses gasses warm the lower levels in the
atmosphere, the upper layers cool. That scenario is conducive to these
high clouds forming..." (Credit: Peter Rosen).
Half of U.S. Could Be Harmed by Earthquakes. Here's the intro to a sobering report on new USGS research from
sfgate.com: "
Half
the United States population is at risk of being harmed by earthquakes,
and tens of millions are in the bull’s-eye of much
stronger earthquakes. That’s the grim outlook of a U.S. Geological
Survey report published earlier this month that focused on answering the
great and terrible question: How devastating can earthquakes actually
be to Americans and what should we do about it? The report states matter-of-factly:
More
than 143 million Americans living in the 48 contiguous states are
exposed to potentially damaging ground shaking from earthquakes. When
the people living in the earthquake-prone areas of Alaska, Hawaii and
U.S. territories are added, this number rises to nearly half of all
Americans.
Wind Power Must Now Contend With Extreme Weather. More volatility in weather means more variance in average wind speeds; as reported by ClimateWire and
Scientific American: "...
California,
Washington, Oregon and Texas, hotbeds for wind farms, had a
particularly slow winter. Some regions saw winds around 50 percent lower
than normal. Since then, conditions have started improving into early
summer but have remained largely below average for most regions in the
West, according to Vaisala. Lower winds mean turbines have been churning out less electricity. A U.S. Energy Information Administration analysis confirmed
that wind farms in California, Oregon and Washington had been working
at a reduced rate this spring compared with the five-year mean..."
How Accurate Is The Farmer's Almanac Winter Forecast? Take any (weather) prediction beyond 2 weeks with a monstrous grain of salt; here's an excerpt from
TIME: "...
In 2007, Penn State meteorologist Paul Knight penned a damning examination of Almanac predictions.
His view reflects that of much of the meteorological community—while
forecasts are central to weather prediction, the chance of being
accurate so far in advance is “zero,” he said. One major point of
contention between meteorologists and the Almanac is the El Niño weather
pattern, which the meteorological community says is getting stronger
but the Almanac says is getting weaker..."
Climate Stories...
Climate Change and Hurricane Katrina: What Have We Learned? Here's an excerpt of a story at
The Conversation, written by MIT Professor of Atmospheric Science, Kerry Emanuel: "...
An
obvious point is that slowly rising sea levels increase the probability
of storm-induced surges even when the statistics of the storms, such as
top wind speed, themselves remain stable. Storm surges are physically
the same thing as tsunamis but driven by wind and atmospheric pressure
rather than the shaking seafloor, and they typically arrive near the
peak of the storm’s fury. As with Katrina and Sandy, they are often the
most destructive aspects of hurricanes. Had Sandy struck New York a
century ago, there would have been substantially less flooding, as sea
level was then roughly a foot lower. As sea level increases at an accelerating pace, we can expect more devastating coastal flooding from storms..."
Hurricane Katrina Showed What "Adapting to Climate Change" Looks Like. Here's a clip from a Dave Roberts story at
Vox: "...
First
is the fact that people are extremely bad at envisioning inclement
circumstances they haven't experienced or witnessed. We are generally
familiar with natural disasters as rare and extraordinary one-offs. This
leads people intuitively to underplay both the severity of the damages
climate change threatens and the effort and expense required to prepare
for them. In fact, if climate change remains unchecked, there will be
multiple simultaneous disasters: heat waves, droughts in key
agricultural areas, rising sea levels and more frequent floods, food
shortages, resource conflicts, and mass migrations..." (Image: NOAA, NASA).
Yes, Climate Change Has a Hand In The California Drought. Here's a clip from an
Ars Techinca story that jumped out: "...
In
the end, the researchers calculated that anthropogenic global warming
was responsible for 8 to 27 percent of the extremity of the drought
between 2012 and 2014, with the dearth of rainfall chipping in around 70
percent. Because of the way they estimated anthropogenic impacts, the
researchers say these numbers are conservative estimates. If you think
in terms of the probability of a drought this extreme taking place, the
anthropogenic contribution is enough to make it about twice as likely.
The researchers write that “this analysis illustrates the general fact
that the anthropogenic drying trend, while still small relative to the
range of natural climate variability, has caused previously improbable
drought extremes to become substantially more likely...”
Image credit above: "
Vegetation was pretty sparse in early 2014."
NASA Earth Observatory
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