WeatherNotions

“As one of its major goals within the 10 years, the hurricane center hopes to generate six- and seven-day forecasts to give residents, businesses and the military more time to prepare….Currently, the center issues track forecasts out to five days, with an average error of about 275 miles.” – from a story at staugustine.com; details below.

“From February through April, pollen was at record high levels. This coincided with one of the driest and warmest winters on record.” – from a story at NJ.com – details below.

Why Do El Nino And La Nina Trigger Weather Chaos? Reuters has an informative article; here’s an excerpt: “From record floods to crippling droughts and wildfires, a natural swing in Pacific Ocean temperatures can trigger climate chaos around the globe. The El Nino ocean-weather pattern is linked to droughts in Australia and floods in parts of South America, while its sibling La Nina causes the opposite, with the two phenomena occurring at irregular intervals. A powerful La Nina triggered record floods in eastern Australia in 2011 and has been blamed for the withering drought in Texas and severe dry spells in South America, hitting corn and soy crops.”

DC3: Chemistry of Thunderstorms. Flying planes into thunderstorms to gather more data? I suspect drinks are not served on these flights; here’s an excerpt of an eye-opening article at redorbit.com: “NASA researchers are about to fly off on a campaign that will take them into the heart of thunderstorm country. The Deep Convective Clouds and Chemistry (DC3) field campaign will use an airport in Salina, Kan., as a base to explore the impact of large thunderstorms on the concentration of ozone and other substances in the upper troposphere. The campaign is being led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA. “Thunderstorms provide a mechanism for rapid lifting of air from the surface to higher altitudes in a matter of minutes to hours,” said James Crawford of NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., and a member of the mission’s scientific steering committee.”

Photo credit above: “NASA’s DC-8 Earth Science laboratory sports numerous probes for collecting atmospheric samples. The aircraft, based at the Dryden Aircraft Operations Facility in Palmdale, Calif., is ready to participate in the DC3 campaign. Credit: NASA/Tom Tschida.”

Hurricane Center To Develop 6 And 7 Day Forecasts. Details from staugustine.com: “FORT LAUDERDALE — For the first time, the National Hurricane Center plans to develop six- and seven-day track forecasts for an entire storm season. It also plans to do a better job keeping them secret, as they leaked out to the public last year, cutting the experiment short. “We weren’t able to button them up; people were finding them,” said James Franklin, the center’s top hurricane specialist. The long-range forecasts are one of four in-house experiments the hurricane center plans to conduct in the upcoming season, which officially starts June 1.”

Hurricane Center Testing Forecast Improvements. Here’s another perspective fromThe Boston Herald: “MIAMI — The National Hurricane Center plans to broaden its forecasting capabilities by conducting four in-house experiments in the upcoming season, including developing six- and seven-day track projections. The other tests include extending the tropical weather outlook from two to five days, developing advisories for disturbances before they become tropical systems and issuing watches and warnings if disturbances threaten land. At the same time, it will employ more sophisticated models to help with intensity predictions, an area where forecasters have struggled for decades.”

U.S. Government, Wireless Carriers, Launch Weather Emergency Alerts This Month. Text alerts should be part of your family’s severe weather action plan, along with TV, radio, web, e-mail, NOAA Weather Radio (and sirens). Details from mobileburn.com: “The U.S. Government and wireless carriers in the States are set to launch the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) system this month. The WEA is a free service that uses text message alerts to inform cellular phone users of nearby weather emergencies. The alerts will warn users of weather emergencies and dangerous weather conditions such as tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, typhoons, blizzards, dust storms, extremely high winds, and ice storms. The system is location based, so users will only get alerts that apply to where they are currently located. The WEA system is supported by AT&T, Cellcom, Cricket, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, U.S. Cellular, and Verizon Wireless, which combined offer cellular service to about 97 percent of the users in the United States.”

Exposure To Natural Cold and Heat: Hypothermia and Hyperthermia Medicare Claims, 2004-2005. With a rapidly aging population, more baby boomers moving into their “golden years”, I found this research paper at medscape.com interesting. Here’s an excerpt:  “Older adults (≥ 65 years) and persons with chronic diseases are at risk for heat- and coldrelated mortality and morbidity during extreme ambient temperatures. Even slight changes in temperature can adversely affect these populations because of their weakened physiological adaptability and socioeconomic factors. As the growing evidence of global climate change supports anticipated increases in the intensity and frequency of heat waves and extreme cold events, older adults and those with chronic diseases will be at an increased risk for hyperthermia and hypothermia. The US Census Bureau projects that the number of older adults will rapidly increase during the 2010 to 2030 period. Accordingly, it is projected that by 2030, the older population will be 2 times greater than in 2000, growing from 35 million to 72 million, or nearly 20% of the total US population.”

Data App: Track Texas Reservoir Levels. Although the drought has eased a bit over parts of Texas, water levels are still very low, especially from the Hill Country into the Texas Panhandle. The Texas Tribune has details of a new online resource for tracking reservoir water levels: “The most intense drought in Texas history lowered reservoir levels around the state, stirring widespread concern about water shortages. By April 2012 many had bounced back, particularly in Central and East Texas, after those areas saw an unusually rainy spring. But many West Texas levels remain very low. Using data collected from the Texas Water Development Board’s reservoir status tracker, we have built a tool that visualizes the current levels of the state’s reservoirs. The map will be updated daily with fresh data. Each icon on the map represents an individual reservoir, color-coded based on how full it is currently.”

Get Rich U. Author Ken Auletta writes “there are no walls between Stanford and Silicon Valley. Should there be? Here is an excerpt of a thought-provoking article at The New Yorker: “Stanford University is so startlingly paradisial, so fragrant and sunny, it’s as if you could eat from the trees and live happily forever. Students ride their bikes through manicured quads, past blooming flowers and statues by Rodin, to buildings named for benefactors like Gates, Hewlett, and Packard. Everyone seems happy, though there is a well-known phenomenon called the “Stanford duck syndrome”: students seem cheerful, but all the while they are furiously paddling their legs to stay afloat. What they are generally paddling toward are careers of the sort that could get their names on those buildings. The campus has its jocks, stoners, and poets, but what it is famous for are budding entrepreneurs, engineers, and computer aces hoping to make their fortune in one crevasse or another of Silicon Valley.

Climate Stories…

As Global Warming Advances, Risky Responses Gain A Following. Here’s an important article focused on geo-engineering, using technology to slow or reverse the effects of global warming. Good idea? What could possibly go wrong? Here’s an excerpt from MinnPost.com: “A British chemical engineer, Peter Davidson, presented a webinarearly this morning on his strategy to combat global warming: Fog Earth’s upper atmosphere with paint particles, streamed from giant balloons, to reflect sunlight away from Earth and offset the greenhouse effects of burning fossil fuel. Plan B, indeed. As the years roll by with essentially no meaningful progress on cutting carbon emissions, “geo-engineering” solutions like Davidson’s attract more attention and perhaps even faith from those inclined to believe that since technology got us into this mess, technology can somehow get us out.”Photo credit above: Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility. “A new paper proposes using large balloons to scatter sunlight and slow global warming.”

Oil And Gas Industry Moving Aggressively To Silence Critics. Here’s an excerpt from a story at The Huffington Post: “At an industry public relations conference last year, Michael Kehs of Chesapeake Energy described a Wall Street Journal op-ed to gathered oil and gas officials, saying it pointed out the industry’s “credibility problem.” “And I’m sure some of it relates to defensiveness,” Kehs added. (MP3 Audio)  Small wonder. For years, the oil and gas industry has adopted a war-like mentality towards its critics. When confronted with problems caused by drilling and fracking, instead of acknowledging them and working to prevent more, their approach has too often been to cover up the issues while attacking any critics who make problems known publicly. This pattern has sharply accelerated in recent months.”

Wind-Generated Energy Is Working Well For Us In Iowa. Here’s an excerpt of a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal from Iowa Governor Branstad: “Your recent editorials on the federal wind-energy Production Tax Credit (PTC) and renewable portfolio standard (RPS) (“Gouged by the Wind,” May 5 and “Windy Republicans,” May 7) are off the mark. The wind-power industry is an American success story that is helping us build our manufacturing base, create jobs, lower energy costs and strengthen our energy security. As a country, we should support energy diversity and development of all domestic resources, creating an “all of the above” energy strategy. To that end, our state and national energy plans have long relied on varying policies and incentives, such as the PTC and RPS, to deploy technologies that ensure a diverse domestic energy fleet.Iowa has long played a leadership role in developing wind power—a clean, domestic, affordable resource. During my first term as governor, I signed the first RPS in the country, and it continues to drive billions in private investment in Iowa, as well as helping electric consumers.”

Americans Would Pay More For Clean Energy. Would Congress? Here’s a snippet from The Washington Post: “Would Americans be willing to pay more for cleaner electricity? A new study finds that they would — $162 a year extra, on average. But there’s a catch: This “willingness to pay” isn’t evenly spread across the country, which may explain why Congress isn’t eager to pass a clean-electricity bill. Last year, a trio of researchers from Yale and Harvard conducted a national survey asking Americans a very simple question: Would they be interested in a law that required utilities to get 80 percent of their electricity from low-carbon sources such as wind, solar and nuclear by 2035? Different respondents were given different descriptions of the bill and different price tags. (After all, low-carbon energy often costs more.) The results were recently published in Nature Climate Change. And, on average, $162 a year extra was the breaking point. That’s what Americans would pay.”
Photo credit above: “Would you pay $162 for this? (Paul Sakuma – AP).”

Hawaii’s Beaches Are In Retreat, And Way Of Life May Follow. Here’s an excerpt fromThe New York Times: “Little by little, Hawaii’s iconic beaches are disappearing. Most beaches on the state’s three largest islands are eroding, and the erosion is likely to accelerate as sea levels rise, the United States Geological Survey is reporting. Though average erosion rates are relatively low — perhaps a few inches per year — they range up to several feet per year and are highly variable from island to island and within each island, agency scientists say. The report says that over the last century, about 9 percent of the sandy coast on the islands of Hawaii, Oahu and Maui has vanished. That’s almost 14 miles of beach.”

Photo credit above: Hawaii from space courtesy of universetoday.com.

Earth’s Environment Getting Worse, Not Better, Ahead of Rio+ 20. The Guardian has the story – here’s a clip: “Twenty years on from the Rio Earth summit, the environment of the planet is getting worse not better, according to a report from WWF. Swellingpopulation, mass migration to cities, increasing energy use and soaring carbon dioxide emissions mean humanity is putting a greater squeeze on the planet’s resources then ever before. Particularly hard hit is the diversity of animals and plants, upon which many natural resources such as clean water are based. “The Rio+20 conference next month is an opportunity for the world to get serious about the need for development to become sustainable. Our report indicates that we haven’t yet done that since the last Rio summit,” said David Nussbaum, WWF-UK chief executive.”

Running From Climate Change May Trip Up Some Species, Study Says. Here’s an excerpt from The Boston Herald: “As climate change transforms their habitat, some animals are already on the move. But a new analysis from the University of Washington warns that many species won’t be able to run fast enough to survive a warming world. On average, about 9 percent of the Western Hemisphere’s mammals migrate too slowly to keep pace with the rapid climate shifts expected over the next century, says the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In some areas, including parts of the Appalachian Mountains and the Amazon basin, nearly 40 percent of mammals may be unable to reach safe haven in time.”

Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapse Recorded In Octopus DNA. Here’s a fascinating story from Scientific American: “Octopuses have made themselves at home in most of the world’s oceans—from the warmest of tropical seas to the deep, dark reaches around hydrothermal vents. Antarctic species, such as Turquet’s octopuses (Pareledone turqueti), even live slow, quiet lives near the South Pole. But these retiring creatures offer a rare opportunity to help understand how this extreme part of the Earth has changed in recent geologic times—and what climate change might bring there in the near future.”

Chance Of Bangladesh Sinking Under Rising Sea Levels. Here’s an Op Ed from The Financial Express: “Science as a Contact Sport; inside the battle to save Earth’s climate” by Stephen Schneider is an illuminating book by a world renowned climate scientist and professor at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. In 2007, Schneider received the Nobel Peace Price on behalf of the International Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), along with Al Gore. His book is a recounting of his efforts over three decades to get the US government and the rest of the world to pay attention to climate change science. The basic question which climate science has tried to answer is: how serious is climate change? But communicating a scientific answer to this question has been impossible, Schneider says, as politicians, journalists and the average person on the street does not understand that scientific predictions and models of climate change can only predict probabilities of particular outcomes.” Photo above: NASA.

Climate Change Believers Split From Heartland Institute. An update from slate.com: “On Friday, the libertarian, Chicago-based Heartland Institute made a routine-sounding announcement. It would “spin off its insurance research project effective May 31.” The D.C.-based Center on Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate would break off; its director, Eli Lehrer, would found some new project. “We urge any individual, foundation, and corporation with an interest in insurance and related finance issues to contribute to Eli’s new organization once it is up and running,” said Heartland President Joseph Bast in a statement. “We look forward to working closely with Eli in the future.” Today, the spin-off — dubbed the R Street Institute — sent out a statement from its spokesman, R.J. Lehmann. Most of it was boilerplate about how the team of six Heartland refugees would keep working on “much the same portfolio of issues we already have been.”

ABOUT ME

Paul Douglas

Welcome to the WeatherNation blog. Every day I sift through hundreds of stories, maps, graphics and meteorological web sites, trying to capture some of the most interesting weather nuggets, the stories behind the forecast. I’ll link to stories and share some of the web sites I use. I’m still passionate about the weather, have been ever since Tropical Storm Agnes flooded my home in Lancaster, PA in 1972. I’ve started 5 weather-related companies. “EarthWatch” created the world’s first 3-D weather graphics for TV stations – Steven Spielberg used our software in “Jurassic Park” and “Twister”. My last company, “Digital Cyclone”, personalized weather for cell phones. “My-Cast” was launched in 2001 and is still going strong on iPhone, Android and Blackberry. I sold DCI to Garmin in 2007 so I could focus on my latest venture: WeatherNation. Twitter: @pdouglsweather