weather Global Weather

[SteamyTea]

This is a bit worrying.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/climate-change-emergency-jet-stream-shift-warning-global-warning-extreme-weather-a7111661.html

Worth watching the video.

 

May account for our awful spring and early summer.

[TerryE]

Nick, thanks for the link and how depressing!   But take heart: Mr Trump doesn't believe in Climate Change so we are all really experiencing mass delusion

[ToughButterCup]

Thank you very much indeed for that post Steamy.

The information in the video was extremely interesting. It is a great pity that the narrator doesn't explain in any depth why the North South separation of the Jet Stream matters. There was a bit about earth temperature evening out because of the mixing of the two 'blocks', but very little about why we should worry about that. Has this happened before? How long is the period of this particular Rossby wave pattern? 

I had the great good fortune of meeting and befriending a climate science research associate at my old college - he was researching the underlying mathematics of Rossby wave patterns  . He did that in a lab where he documented the patterns in a Petri Dish of all places. And that sparked a life-long interest in Jet Streams.

Thanks for the nudge!

Ian

 

[Ferdinand]

Does anyone know what happened to the Jet Stream route in 1997-8 for a comparison? I don't know where to find it.

This is a Very Strong El Nino year, which forces the northern Jet Stream south, and 1997-8 was the last such.

http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jetstream/tropics/enso_impacts.html

http://ggweather.com/enso/oni.htm

Ferdinand

Edited July 1, 2016 by Ferdinand

[TerryE]

2 hours ago, Ferdinand said:

Does anyone know what happened to the Jet Stream route in 1997-8 for a comparison? I don't know where to find it.

This is a Very Strong El Nino year, which forces the northern Jet Stream south, and 1997-8 was the last such.

Ferdinand, you are right to point out that this might be driven by the strong El Ninos so this may have happened in the past but that we didn't have the contemporary data.  But note his discussion of the QBO at around 13:00 in. This had maybe 15 or so cycles, which meant that this dataset went back 30  years and there wasn't the same sort of dive from max to min in less than 6 months before which supports his assertion that this is very unusual.

Yes the lecture had a polemic element, but all the guy is trying to do is to flag up that we should have a better understanding of what it going on here and that there might be a global impact on our food production.  Yes, if we look back in the historic record we've had some huge failures in the past, for example Krakatoa cause two years of crop failures and many millions starved globally as a result.

Surely the response to such calls should be measured impact assessment by governments and their scientific advisors. The hate responses that the guy got for putting this online were truly depressing. Climate denial seems to have become a religion rather than an evidence informed debate about the data, cause and effects.

[Jeremy Harris]

I shared an office a few years ago with a chap from the Met Office who had just come from running the Hadley Centre for Climate Science.  He was a climatologist who had moved across to MOD proper (the Met Office was a part of MOD then) to run the defence met research programme (climate and weather plays a massive part in defence research, as it helps determine how we need to equip our armed forces for the future). 

He was a fascinating chap to talk to, and listening to him relate all the hard research and the challenges they faced in trying to get historic data calibrated to a common scale, I realised that the very simplistic rubbish spouted by the ill-informed climate change deniers was based on a fundamental misunderstanding as to just how damned complex climate is, and how every single indicator pointed towards an acceleration in climate change that seemed more pronounced that those in the historic record.

I'm not going to get embroiled in any argument as to cause, suffice to say that at that time (2005) I made a big lifestyle change.  I sold my 2.3 litre supercharged Merc and bought a Prius hybrid, with less than 1/3rd the emissions.  I added a lot of insulation to our house.  I changed our boiler to a far more efficient condensing one, with lower emissions.  I fitted the best double glazing I could find and I started thinking about building a low energy house.  I doubt that any other individual has had such a profound and life-changing effect on me as the quiet chats over coffee we had in the office back then.

[TerryE]

BTW, the site that this guys is using is earth :: a global map of wind, weather, and ocean conditions.  How to configure it is at around 2:40 into the talk.  It's really worth a look at this site!

[Gone West]

Thanks Terry, a very interesting site with a lot of detail.

[SteamyTea]

It is a good site to see what is happening when a large storm hits.