Snow and Holiday

So the Boston area got a few inches of snow today which means:

Just after 7 Sunday evening, with another 2.9 inches of fresh snow blanketing Boston, the National Weather Service in Taunton announced that the city notched its snowiest winter since records started being kept in 1872.

The official total at Logan International Airport reached 108.6 inches — one inch more than the previous record, which was set in the 1995-1996 winter, according to the weather service.

It could be that will be all we get, but there are still a few weeks for more possible snow.

For some reason this reminds me of Green Day:

Ok, not really but I was thinking back to the time this came out. The days of ‘Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’, being called traitor if you didn’t like all the parts of the Patriot Act, being asked why you loved Saddam Hussein and hated America if you questioned going to war in Iraq. A time when all of America came together, until Republicans decided it made for a good campaign issue. This song was one of the first loud attacks against these attitudes and it made me very happy.

Sun sun sun

Given that the area is supposed to get another 8-10 inches of snow tonight and tomorrow, this is looking really good (Credit: NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory):

Snow

So, it seems that the Boston area needs a bit more snow. The latest says that there could be a total of up to 2 feet by tomorrow. This adds to the 41 inches from the last two storms in the last two weeks–the record for the year is about 108 inches (the average is about 41 inches). Oh, and just for fun, it’s supposed to get nice and cold for the weekend.

I assume this means that Northeastern University will be closed on Monday which would be the third snow day (for me, Tuesdays have also been cancelled but I don’t teach on Tuesday). Since there are 3 Monday holidays that means I’m missing two weeks of classes. A short semester.

Here’s a bike path near me (it is plowed, so this is snow from the current storm):

 

Winter

Officially winter is a month away, but I think it’s safe to say that winter has come to Buffalo

The National Weather Service warned that the snow, generated by cold air blowing over the warmer Great Lakes, would continue through Wednesday and could eventually total 6 feet in places.

…

The town of West Seneca recorded 45 inches by late morning and Alden, to the east, had 48 inches. But typical of lake-effect snow, areas just a few miles away, including downtown and north Buffalo, had just a couple of inches.

That means we will start to hear jokes about global warming. This is funny because August, September, and October were the warmest on record , the 6 months from April to September were the warmest on record, and the year is on track to be the warmest. And real scientists say that this doesn’t prove anything by itself:

“When you look at all the red in that map, there is no doubt that April through September was unusually warm in most of the world, but it’s the decadal trend that is more significant,” said Gavin Schmidt, GISS director. “Earth has experienced rapid warming in the last few decades, and the most recent decade was the warmest of all. What has happened so far in 2014 extends this ongoing trend. But in the context of climate change, it does not make sense to try to derive much meaning from a single month—or, for that matter, even a single year.”

You can see that trend in this video

Storm cell

This is a pretty impressive cloud (you can read about it more here; image credit: NASA / Stu Broce):

The plane, the ER-2, that took the picture is pretty impressive also–the plane can fly as high as 70,000 feet and is the civilian version of the old U-2 (Credit: NASA/ Tony Landis):

Super Typhoon Haiyan

Wow, this is scary:

The Joint Typhoon Warning Center has increased its estimate of Haiyan’s maximum sustained winds to 195 mph with gusts to 235 mph. The storm is now within a few hours of landfall in the central Philippines at peak intensity as among the most powerful storms witnessed anywhere in modern times. Widespread destruction, unfortunately, seems inevitable.

Here it is (Credit: NASA Goddard MODIS Rapid Response Team):

I found Nemo

It’s a bit early, but the wind is picking up here in Malden:

A few hours later:

Sandy cometh

The forecast for where Sandy ends up is still unsure, but this is a  nice picture of the hurricane (this is from yesterday as it passed over Cuba. Credit: NOAA/NASA):

NASA has a page for hurricanes here and you can also look at the National Weather Service.

A tornado in Queens

I haven’t heard of this before (maybe I’m sheltered):

A waterspout with winds up  to 70 mph churned onshore and turned into a tornado toward Breezy Point,  officials said, a Queens neighborhood on the western edge of the Rockaway  peninsula.

Amateur video captured  images of the twister spiraling a mixture of sand and debris, which was largely  flung onto a nearby baseball field, according to Ross Dickman, a National  Weather Service spokesman.

The funnel churned about  600 yards inland before dissipating and was thought to be a relatively  low-strength twister, Dickman said. But it still had enough power to knock down  trees and power lines, causing minor structural damage to nearby buildings.

A second confirmed tornado  touched down in Brooklyn, another New York City borough, around 11:30 a.m.,  according to the weather service. This twister was about 50 yards wide as it  traveled a half mile in Canarsie, about 9 miles north of the other reported  tornado.

Katia from space

Here’s a picture of Katia  (Credit: NASA) taken from the Space Station (those are two Russian vehicles in the picture):

I really like the fuzzy outline of Earth’s atmosphere you get in pictures of this type, it reminds me that I need to get new tennis balls … or something.

More Republican compassion

It isn’t just Rep. Cantor that has a problem helping people with a disaster, there’s also Fox News (via here):

Today the NWS justifies itself on public interest grounds. It issues severe  weather advisories and hijacks local radio and television stations to get the  message out. It presumes that citizens do not pay attention to the weather and  so it must force important, perhaps lifesaving, information upon them. A few  seconds’ thought reveals how silly this is. The weather might be the subject  people care most about on a daily basis. There is a very successful private  TV channel dedicated to it, 24 hours a day, as well as any number of phone and  PC apps. Americans need not be forced to turn over part of their earnings to  support weather reporting.

Can those private companies send out warnings to everybody such as tornado warnings)? It’s also interesting that it’s not noted in the article that the National Weather Service provides information (such as satellite imagery) to these private weather services free.

Ron Paul (via here), of course, tops them all:

After a lunch speech today, Ron Paul slammed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, and said that no national response to Hurricane Irene is necessary.

“We should be like 1900; we should be like 1940, 1950, 1960,” Paul said. “I live on the Gulf Coast; we deal with hurricanes all the time. Galveston is in my district.

Hmm, what happened in Galveston in 1900:

The Hurricane of 1900 made landfall on the city of Galveston in the U.S. state of Texas, on September 8, 1900.^[1] It had estimated winds of 145 miles per hour (233 km/h) at landfall, making it a Category 4 storm on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale.^[2] It was the deadliest hurricane in US history, and the second costliest hurricane in US history based on the US dollar’s 2005 value (to compare costs with those of Hurricane Katrina and others).

Umm yeah, that’s how we should respond to hurricanes. Paul wasn’t finished though:

“It’s a system of bureaucratic central economic planning, which is a fallacy that is deeply flawed,” the Texas congressman said on “Fox News Sunday.” “FEMA has been around since 1978. It has one of the worst reputations for a bureaucracy ever.”

The libertarian-minded Paul acknowledged that FEMA can’t be replaced overnight, yet he claimed the agency is wasteful and funnels money to contractors instead of the victims of natural disasters.

Should FEMA need emergency funding, Paul told host Chris Wallace he would vote against additional appropriations.

Gov. Christie (New Jersey):

TAPPER:  Is there anything that the state of New Jersey needs from the federal government that you’re not getting?

CHRISTIE:  Not at this point, Jake.  We have FEMA representatives here at the — at the Regional Operations and Intelligence Center, been working with us.  I’m going to be calling Secretary Napolitano in an hour or two to make a further request of additional needs. But so far, FEMA has been very responsive.  I spoke to Secretary Napolitano in the last 24 hours.  She’s offered to do whatever she needs to do to help us out here in New Jersey.  She knows how hard we’re going to be hit.  So right now, the cooperation between New Jersey and FEMA has been great, and I’m going to be calling Secretary Napolitano shortly to ask for some more help.

Gov. O’Malley (Maryland):

“The good news is this: because of FEMA’s partnership, because people listened, we were able to avoid any big problems in terms of threats to the public, to lives and to public safety,” O’Malley told host David Gregory.

He returned to the subject later in the interview, praising the work of FEMA Director Craig Fugate, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and President Obama.

“They have been excellent,” O’Malley said. “They have been with us since day one, and actually, before the storm arrived, they were here, and it’s worked really, really well. This is a much better FEMA than the olden days.”

Now O’Malley is a Democrat, but Christie is not. Maybe it’s only when Republicans are President that FEMA has a bad reputation?

More Irene

Irene has now come ashore at North Carolina and is working its way up the coast. It’s an impressive looking thing (Credit: NASA/NOAA GOES Project):

Irene

Hurricane Irene is moving up the coast it seems (Credit: NASA/NOAA GOES Project):

I post this not because of Irene, but because it’s quite a nice picture (click on it for the full size version).

Hot

I’m a little slow to get to this, but July was a bit warm in the South:

• Both Oklahoma and Texas had their warmest months on record, with monthly statewide average temperatures of 88.9 degrees F (31.6 degrees C) and 87.1 degrees F (30.6 degrees C), respectively. Oklahoma’s statewide average temperature was the warmest monthly statewide average temperature on record for any state during any month. The previous warmest monthly statewide average temperature was also in Oklahoma, during July 1954, at 88.1 degrees F (31.2 degrees C).
• Regionally, the South climate region, which includes Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas, had its warmest single calendar month for any climate region since records began in 1895. The average temperature of 86.1 degrees F (30.1 degrees C), bested the previous all-time record of 85.9 degrees F (29.0 degrees C) set in July 1980 in the South climate region.

and it was the fourth warmest month for the US on record. You can see distribution here (Credit: NOAA–click on it for a larger image):

Bacteria cause rain?

Well then. I might have seen this before but it didn’t register. It seems that much, maybe even most, of rain and snow is caused by bacteria:

The accepted precipitation model is that soot, dust and other inert things form the nuclei for raindrops and snowflakes. Scientists have found these bacteria in abundance on the leaves of a wide range of wild and domestic plants, including trees and grasses, everywhere they have looked, including Montana, Morocco, France, the Yukon and in the long buried ice of Antarctica. The bacteria have been found in clouds and in streams and irrigation ditches. In one study of several mountaintops here, 70 percent of the snow crystals examined had formed around a bacterial nucleus.

The bacteria then use the snow to attack plants to get nutrients. Hmm, does that mean if we want sunny days or less snow we should encourage plants to use antibacterial soap?

In any case, this is another clear indication of the complicated nature of life and the weather.

Another interesting piece is some of the new knowledge of corn. It seems that corn was first cultivated about 9000 years ago and took perhaps 1000 years to change into the form it currently takes (it seems that they were bred from a grass). This is pretty impressive, but the ability to figure this out is also pretty impressive.

Weather, wind, and a poem

I’m a bit slow getting to this, but so was everyone else (note the bold):

The concession came three days after the World Meteorological Organization posted a snippet on its Web site saying a panel of experts reviewing extreme weather and climate data turned up a 253 mph gust on Australia’s Barrow Island during Cyclone Olivia in 1996.

That tops the 231 mph record set atop Mount Washington on April 12, 1934.

And for some reason I didn’t know this:

The Blue Hills Observatory in Milton, the oldest continuously operating weather station in the country, is celebrating its 125th anniversary this weekend with a full slate of events.

which really is just an excuse to include this picture again:

If you click on the picture to see it full size you can almost/maybe see tower type things on the top of the Blue Hills (the highest thing in the picture).

And since it’s Friday, here’s a poem (yeah, I know, it rhymes):

I look in the mirror and see
Not me
I cringe in terror asea
In glee.