Stump the Meteorologist

some call me the gangster of cheese

some people call me Amarie

cause I speak to and kill doves

people talk about me, Carlyyyyyyyyyyyyy

Scientists link frozen spring to dramatic Arctic sea ice loss

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/mar/25/frozen-spring-arctic-sea-ice-loss?CMP=twt_gu&CMP=SOCNETTXT8763I

Well thats a bugger- Ive no one to blame to for my gas bill now!! Times like this I wish I believed in a God then I could allocate appropriate blame.

Hmm...I would have thunk the effect would be stronger mid continent and not as noticeable along the coasts. But the continents aren't uniformly arranged, so the waves will be not so simple. Have to find that paper.

If I find time I'll write an explanation of why/how the jet stream may move based on the ice caps, but my understanding of how it works in the real complicated world we have is a bit shaky.

So, there's this great big fan on the ice caps, is there? So who powers it - the Russians?

is it still snowing in England and Scotland guys I heard it was bad?.here its still colder than normal and wet, but the south is 25 degrees, b******* are sunbathing, and we up North are still bejumpered.

Been lucky where I am- the ridiculously strong winds coming in off the sea has kept the snow on the hills for the most part- but places closeby havent been so lucky.
Arran was badly hit- the whole islands electricty is out and looks like it could be a week to get sorted.







pics from BBC Scotland

Wow.

I suppose people have their own generators up there? It makes me shiver just thinking about those winds yuck i hate Winter.

when i was getting my phone at Best Buy last week mentioned i was going to Boston and the guys helping me did spot on accents the whole time

You're making me wonder if you really aren't who I thought you weren't.

So Maryland only gets like two snowstorms big enough to cover the grass for all winter, and then four days after the spring solstice we get our biggest snowstorm of the year.

I had mentioned when chris first posted this on the quantum thread that tornados often form from horizontal rolls caused by high winds.  Here is something I wrote to train students for a science festival in New York:


 The situation in Chris's video above with low moist wind from the south and cool dry air from the west above it sets up in "tornado alley" just east of the Rockys.   Air flowing from the Gulf of Mexico is guided north  along the base of the Rocky mountains.  The prevailing winds from the west lose water due to precipitation over the mountains, then cool because the tops of the mountains are cool.  So this air spills over top of the air from the gulf.

If you put a pencil between one flat hand rolling away from you and another hand rolling right to left, you'll find the pencil turns at a 45 degree angle and then rolls between your hands.  The winds do the same thing, setting up the situation above.

But with warm moist air below and dry cool air below, you have what's known as a "loaded gun" for thunderstorm formation.  If local warming causes a column of air to rise, as it cools with ascent the water in the lower levels will condense.  If evaporation cools, condensation heats.  So now you have heated the bottom of the column more than the top, and you get explosive convection, which is a thunderstorm.  Because of the built-in rotation, these storms often form tornadoes.  No other place on earth has this setup of a large body of water offset from a fairly smooth line of mountains that guide the moisture while drying out the prevailing winds, hence Tornado Alley, the most tornado infested place on the planet.

We live in a valley, and most of it is semi- arid, so we have a little desert, snakes and some  scorpions and the rest is like sunny Italy with wineries in the spring and summer. But we can also have snow for months in the winter that is hip high or just rain. We take everything about with us, brollies and mitts and whatever. We listen to the weather on tv and then laugh. A lot of meteorologists have gone missing. It is rather an exciting profession here, if you live for more than four months you are elevated to hero status and people actually let you come to their malls and be the guest of something or other.

day after tommorow was a good film

halfwise wrote:I had mentioned when chris first posted this on the quantum thread that tornados often form from horizontal rolls caused by high winds.  Here is something I wrote to train students for a science festival in New York:

Interesting!!! It may explain the effects we often see here in our big storms (which we're forbidden to call hurricanes).

In the December 2007 gale they measured 131 mph (210 km/hr) at the tower on the hill behind my house, and 137 a little farther north, but at surface it was only blowing about 90. You'd see circles through the forests that looked like Godzilla footprints about 100 yards in diameter where the trees of all sizes were shattered and flattened, laying in clear circular patterns while the timber on all sides was untouched. These would smash houses and throw cars exactly like in tornado pictures. This was usually in or near hills.

I'd figured there must have been a shear between the upper and lower wind layers that was disturbed and caused an eddy to descend from the higher energy above and crush us like ants, but that didn't account for the curious spirals. After seeing your diagram I wonder if something similar isn't happening here: the two wind layers form a horizontal tubular vortex that breaks and goes vertical. (Of course we probably aren't allowed to use the word "tornado" either. Words like "hurricane" and "tornado" seem to be trademarked by the east coast and midwest. )

could Day After Tomorrow ever happen? really

glad you agree Mrs Figg!

Probably is the rotated vortices, David.  As they go vertical and mass is pulled up into low pressure, the vortex contracts and speeds up like a spinning dancer.  Normally you have air coming in towards low pressure from all directions (time period too short for coriolis effects to be important) and the air butts heads at the convergence and is not diverted upwards efficiently.  A whirlpool effect organizes the transition from horizontal to vertical so that air from all directions can be moved upwards with greater efficiency.  Rotation doesn't cause strong updrafts so much as allows them to grow without loss to turbulence.

Hey Figgy, the basic premise of Day after Tomorrow is based on an as yet undemonstrated theory of how ice ages can occur so fast.  The ice cores show transitions from warm to cold happening within decades!   The transition back to warm is much slower.

The scary thing about this theory is that warming can actually trigger an ice age.  here's how: warm water is transported northwards by the gulf stream and it's Asian sister the Kuroshia current.  As they go north water evaporates and they become more salty, until finally in the northern oceans they become so dense with salt that they sink, and return southwards as deep currents.

But as global warming causes the ice caps to melt, they can mix in fresh water with the salt water, keeping them less dense so they don't sink.  With no return current south, the northern current shuts down.  With no warm current going northwards, the ice caps expand.  Expanded ice caps reflect more sunlight, cooling things further, which results in more ice cap growth and whalah (how do you spell that stupid french word?) you are in an ice age.  We have no proof that this is what has caused previous ice ages, it's just a theory with some modeling behind it.

But it happens over decades, not days.  Decades are scary enough - if it wasn't seen in the ice cores I wouldn't believe it!

Mrs Figg wrote:could Day After Tomorrow ever happen? really

Nah, it was basically a political scare piece. Keep in mind that it was released in the middle of a hotly contested US Presidential election.

I think you spell it voilà

thats scary if it happens over decades, after all i think there was a mini ice age round about 17th or the early 19th century I seem to remember something similar, because they could set up little shops on the Thames the ice was so thick. But it was that super freezing wind that dessicated anything on contact thats was the most horrible. I dont know if ice storms like that are even possible on Earth. good film though, music was nice too.

that mini ice age was probably why Napoleon was defeated in Russia.

Yep, wide swings in historical weather is a big reason why people are skeptical that we are causing modern trends.  But the ice cores do indeed show that temperature swings track well with carbon dioxide, and we have well cataloged that something like 90% of the current trend in CO2 is caused by us.   Al Gore showed it very dramatically in An Inconvenient Truth, which was astonishing for just how few scientific inaccuracies it had.