Snow in Plain Sight

Friday, May 3, 2013
8:24 A.M.

The last couple days have been pretty darn nice around the Pacific Northwest, but if you are a fan of the weather now, just wait until the weekend. Highs are expected to top 80 Sunday and Monday here in Seattle, and it will be even hotter near the Cascades. The average high for this time of year is 62.

Photo taken from Barbara Robertson (my aunt) from Belton, Missouri on May 2, 2013

But while we’ve been simmering in summerland, my mom’s side of the family two time zones to the east has been seeing some extremely rare early-May snowfall. The last time Kansas City saw this much snowfall this late in May was back in 1907, when Teddy Roosevelt was president and people were driving the Ford Model N, which made the Model T look like a Bugatti Veyron in comparison. As you can see from the picture above, it didn’t take a whole hell of a lot of snow to break a 100 year old record… I believe 1.7 inches fell on Kansas City in 1907. By now, 2-3 inches have fallen in most of the city and suburbs, with another possible inch in spots before the snow is over and done with.

What’s causing all this snow? Well, we’ve got an extraordinarily cold pool of air for this time of year that is plunging southward across the plains, and when you sprinkle some precipitation over that air mass due to an upper-level trough over the area, you get snow. There have been some pretty hefty storm totals from this trough, with some portions of the Upper Midwest receiving over 18 inches of snow from this storm. Had this occurred in the winter, it would likely be regarded as a fairly run-of-the-mill storm. For this time of year, however, a storm like this is unprecedented.

Ford Model N - 1906: Photo retrieved from Wikipedia Commons. Uploader - Harz4

The snow is starting to wind down over much of the area now, but it is being replaced with a likely greater threat: the risk of flash flooding. The same frontal boundary responsible for all this snow will continue to crawl eastward, but a surface low will develop due to the aforementioned upper low closing off over the Lower Mississippi Valley. This low will not be particularly strong pressure-wise, but it will be fed by ample subtropical moisture from the Gulf and Atlantic, and, most importantly, will be slow to make eastern progress through the states. The combination of ample, subtropical moisture and the lack of upper-level winds to carry the storm eastward is very conducive to flooding events because certain regions have the potential to get soaked with tons of rain for long periods of time.

As you can see, there are a bunch of flood warnings currently up along the Mississippi River. Just by looking at this radar, you can tell that the Mississippi and points east are getting absolutely drenched. As of 12:44 A.M. PDT Saturday, Alabama and central Tennessee look to be taking the brunt of the rainfall.

The good thing is that we will not see much in the way of severe thunderstorm activity from this system. Powerful, long-lasting supercells need wind shear to keep the updraft and downdraft separated and the storm structure intact, and this wind shear can lead to a rotating updraft if the conditions are right. Because the winds aloft are weak and there is very little shear going on, tornadoes/hail/high winds are not a major threat from this system.

Enjoy the weekend here! I'm definitely planning on going swimming in Lake Washington. Water temperatures are still in the mid 50s, but with our first heat wave of the year upon us, you shouldn't have any problem staying warm.

Charlie

Divesting in Fossil Fuels

Saturday, April 27, 2013
12:48 A.M.

Seattle Mayor, Mike Mcginn stands in solidarity with students from University of Washington, and Seattle University for divestment! This photo was taken with permission from the "Divest University of Washington" Facebook group.

On Thursday night, I was cordially invited by a wonderful wonderful friend to come to a talk on climate change that was hosted in Bagley Hall on the Seattle UW campus. The talk was hosted by SAGE, which stands for the "Student Association for Green Environments."

There were three principal presenters: Thomas Ackerman, Nick Bond, and Stephen Gardiner. I'll give you a brief background on each of them and talk about their respective presentations.

Tom Ackerman

Tom Ackerman is the director for the Joint Institute for the Atmosphere and Ocean (JISAO) and professor of atmospheric sciences at the UW who has done research related to clouds, radiation, remote sensing, and aerosols. For this presentation, he talked about climate change basics, such as the science behind the greenhouse effect, and also forayed into ocean acidification. I was already familiar with most of the diagrams he presented and phenomena he described, but it was a very interesting and well-laid-out talk nonetheless. One thing that stood out about his presentation is that he stressed that while certain meteorological events will become more or less frequent as the Earth warms, you cannot blame any single event on global warming. As an example, he explained how models currently predict there will be a slight decrease in the number of tropical cyclones in the Atlantic but an increase in their intensity, but reiterated that Hurricane Sandy was just a single storm and that you cannot base your future predictions off one event. I forget who came up with this metaphor, but somebody compared global warming and extreme weather events to steroids in baseball. A baseball player on the juice might hit a higher number of home runs, but you can't blame any single home run on steroids. After the lecture, I introduced myself to him and learned that I will probably be taking one of his classes next year, so I'm excited for that.

Nick Bond

Nick Bond is the head honcho Washington State Climatologist and is also both a scientist working with JISAO and an affiliate associate atmospheric sciences professor at the University of Washington. His research covers a broad range of meteorological and climatological topics in the Pacific Northwest, and he also does some research relating the health of the marine ecosystems in the North Pacific to changes in global climate and ocean acidity. For his presentation, he posted PowerPoint slides containing two statements, and we were supposed to choose the one that was most correct. Some of them were trick questions in that both choices were correct. Mr. Bond was a great speaker and seemed like an awesome dude. I hope I get to spend more time with him in the future.

Stephen Gardiner

Stephen Gardiner is actually a professor for the Department of Philosophy at the UW and specializes in environmental ethics, particularly those related to climate change. He also holds the Ben Rabinowitz Endowed Professor in Human Dimensions of the Environment in the College of the Environment at the UW, so he is a very multidisciplinary man. His talk was on "The Ethics of Climate Change," and he discussed the morality of emitting fossil fuels such as carbon dioxide to sustain our lifestyles as human beings. He believed that completely cutting off all fossil fuel emissions with no forewarning would be highly unethical, as we need fossil fuels to sustain our economy, grow food for the population, and keep the human race afloat. On the other hand, he stressed that continuing on the path we are going on right now is unethical as well because we are  not being good stewards of the Earth for future generations of not only humans but cheetahs/blue whales/cyanobacteria as well. One of the most thought-provoking things Gardiner said was that future generations will look back upon this one with disdain for not taking more action to mitigate climate change. I can't remember if he gave any specific examples or not, but one example that immediately jumped into my mind was that of slavery. Two hundred years ago, we thought it was perfectly ok to own a person like they were a piece of property. Now, we look shamefully upon those who pushed for slavery, and anybody who still supports slavery today is nearly universally denounced as a racist and bigot. In two hundred years, will humans look shamefully upon the people who didn't take steps to reduce their carbon emissions? Maybe not as strongly as those who supported slavery. Maybe more strongly. It's an interesting topic to think about.

These three guys gave some very interesting talks, but honestly, the highlight of the evening was not their talks, nor was it an extended, intimate question-and-answer session with a panel consisting of the three guys above and three others: Michelle Koutnik (Ice and Glaciers), Jeffery Arnold (Army Corp of Engineers, Climate Change Adaptation, and Guillaume Mauger (Climate Imapcts Group: Terrestrial and Aquatic Ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest).

The highlight was a brief presentation by some UW students about a new organization called Divest UW. Divest UW aims to reduce the economical power that oil companies have by calling upon universities' endowments to divest from these companies and reinvest in funds that are more environmentally and socially responsible. More specifically, Divest UW calls upon the University of Washington to divest from the top 200 publicly-traded companies that own the majority of carbon reserves.

Divest UW has a Facebook page here. Much more about the organization can be found on the page. There's not much point in just moaning and groaning about all the horrors of climate change (they may not be horrors now, but tell that to Bangladesh in 150 years); we have to do something. And Divest UW looks like a great opportunity to get involved in some sort of activism prompting a change in the way our society and economy work. I still have yet to go to a meeting, so that's something that I need to do. I'd encourage anybody who goes to the UW and has any interest in divesting in these companies to come with me.

I hope to hear from some of you! Thanks for reading, and have a nice rest of the day/night/applicable time for your reading of this post.

Charlie

Never Too Late To Snow

Monday, April 29, 2013
10:52 P.M.

 

First off, let my apologize for my lack of punctuality when it comes to posting these blogs as of late. I've been very busy recording an album for a funk band I am in, and I have had a string of seizures to boot. Thankfully, the album is almost done, and I'll be going into the Swedish Neuroscience Institute on Thursday to get some brain tests done and see if we can get the seizures under control. If anybody knows how to fix the human body, it's those Swedes. I've also been in the process of writing a more in-depth post about a climate talk I went to, but when the Snoqualmie Pass WSDOT cams took my breath away today, I knew that the Weather Gods were calling upon me to write a quick blog in the immediate future.

In any event, I hadn't been following the weather closely, so I was extremely surprised when I saw a layer of white covering I-90 from Denny Creek to Easton. I've seen Snoqualmie Pass covered in snow in mid-June, so it wasn't the time of year that had me trippin'. What really struck me was that most regions in the sound reached the mid-to-upper 50s today, which meant that for there to be sticking snow at Denny Creek (I think Denny Creek is at approximately 2,000 feet), there must have been an incredibly steep environmental lapse rate (decrease in temperature with height). This would imply that the atmosphere was very unstable, but I don't recall seeing any massive cumulonimbus popping up over the area this afternoon. 

I tried to get the Sand Point profiling data which would give me an estimation of how the temperature varied with height, but I was having problems opening the .gif files from the profiler. Instead, I decided to look at the radiosonde soundings from the 00z Quillayute weather balloon launch. The plot below shows the temperature and winds as a function of increasing elevation (and hence decreasing pressure), and it also gives the statistics for things like CAPE (Convective Available Potential Energy) and other acronyms that are Greek to me.

This plot is called a "Skew-T" plot because the axes for temperature are angled and have a positive slope instead of simply being vertically oriented parallel to the y-axis. At first glance, it would look like the temperature more or less remains the same before increasing in the upper levels up the atmosphere, but once you know that this t-plot is skewed, you know that the temperature decreases until it more-or-less flattens out above 200mb. We are concerned with the air near the surface, and you can see that there is an extremely rapid decline in temperature with height between the 1000-900mb levels.

Here are the current conditions along I-90. Seattle has cooled down to 46 degrees, but it is still snowing well below the pass. This snow will continue throughout the night before dying down tomorrow morning.

The Summit at Snoqualmie is technically still open for the season, and they claim that the last day they will be open is May 5th for Cinco de Mayo. I hope to be up there listening to Jimmy Buffett with the best of 'em, but even if that doesn't end up happening, I would not be surprised in the least if they extended the season for another week. This is what happened during the massive snow year of 2007-2008, and I skied the Alpental Backcountry on Memorial Day of that year, which was officially the last day any part of the Summit was open. Don't count on them keeping it open much longer though... even if there is enough snow, they still gotta find a way to make a profit. And if only season's pass holders are coming up to the slopes, Boyne is losing money.

Thanks for reading! My brain is still a little scrambled for a seizure I had Sunday night, so if you come across any awkward phrasing, cut me a little slack. I'll get my other post-in-progress up soon.

Charlie

A Taste of Summer

Saturday, April 20, 2013
12:28 A.M.

Long Beach, California - Taken April 3, 2013 using a Nikon D3000. Photo credit: Michael Trofimov.

Hey everybody. Sorry for leaving you guys hanging for a couple days, midterms called. I think I had a false sense of this quarter being easy just because I have relatively more time compared to last quarter. Well, it turns out I still have a lot of work to do, more than I anticipated.

On another note, the above picture was taken by Michael Trofimov, a fellow weather buddy who is four years my junior and therefore still in high school. He's an extremely bright kid and takes some great pictures, and he's given me permission to use them on this blog. His Flickr Photostream is here, and I'll also post his site under the "My Favorite Weather Links" list on the left side of this blog. Thank you Michael!

This last week has been pretty darn wet. So wet, in fact, that it has pushed our April rainfall total to the second-highest total on record at Sea-Tac. The record for April precipitation is 6.53 inches, and this was set way back in 1991. As of 6 PM Friday, we've received 5.49 inches, which is 3.63 inches above our average value to date: 1.69 inches.

January had 4.16 inches of rain, February had a measly 1.58 inches, and March had 2.74 inches. These values were all below average, with those months averaging 5.57, 3.50, and 3.72 (yes, March is rainier on average than February!) inches respectively. Thus, our average value through these three months is 12.79 inches, and we received 8.48 inches, leaving us 4.31 inches below normal. As of 6 PM Friday, we have received 13.97 inches since January 1 (and probably over 14 inches by the time I will be finished writing this blog), which is only 0.68 inches below our average yearly-to-date value of 14.65 inches. Well done, April.

By the way, I got all these climate statistics from "Climate Data" under "Data and Forecasts" from the University of Washington atmospheric sciences department page. Here's the link: http://www.atmos.washington.edu/data/data.php?loc=climatological.

I wish we could use the next eleven days of the month to smash the rainfall record, but that won't happen. We look to be entering an extended period of abnormally warm and dry weather. Here are the predicted 6-10 day temperature and precipitation anomalies over our area from the Climate Prediction Center. Take a look for yourself, we will be warm and dry.

Here's a look at the 500 millibar chart for Monday over the Eastern Pacific. The semi-permanent Eastern Pacific High is creeping northward, a sign that summer isn't too far away.

Valid 08:00 pm PDT Mon, 22 Apr 2013 - 75hr Fcst: UW 00z WRF-GFS: 36km 500mb absolute vorticity, heights

This trend looks to continue for the foreseeable future. Brace yourselves, we are in for a boring ride.

Charlie

How to: Take a Shower

Monday, April 15, 2013
4:34 P.M.

Last night, I had a spiritual revelation of sorts. I had just finished shaving (my face) and was getting ready to hop in the shower. I eagerly turned on the water, but after about five seconds or so, I estimated that the temperature had only risen from ~50 degrees at the start to ~70 degrees, and it plateaued there. I was extremely discouraged that all the work I had put into successfully taking a shower had gone to waste, so I trekked 20 feet back to my dorm room to try and kill time for 20 minutes while waiting for the water to heat up.

Twenty minutes later, I marched straight into the bathroom and authoritatively turned on the showerhead. Much to my dismay, the water temperature was still a bone chilling 70 degrees. This time, though, I wasn't just gonna let this water be the boss of me. I was going to own the shower and nothing was going to stop me from scrub-a-dub-dubbing.

As I attempted to boldly glee as the frigid water trickled down my back, I came to an amazing realization. I realized that if I wanted to keep warm, I should use the absolute least amount of water possible. So, after dousing myself for a good 60 seconds, I turned the shower completely off and proceeded to wash my head, shoulders, knees and toes. I was able to get them pretty clean... I feel like the increased friction due to the relative lack of water made for a more effective cleansing method, as I had the ability to apply more force towards unearthing the unwanted grime that covered my body due to the higher friction coefficient k of slightly moist skin as opposed to wet skin.

After I was done evacuating the unwanted contaminants nested upon my epidermis, I proceeded to turn the water back on and wash everything off. The whole washing off process probably took around 90 seconds, as I needed to get the shampoo off my hair and get the soap off everywhere else. The soap was deeply nested in my skin and didn't just slide off by itself... further evidence that when it comes to scrubbing, a little lubrication goes a long way.

Soon, I was fresher than Bel-Air, and I only had the water on for around 2-3 minutes.

People always say that the trick to reducing water usage is to take short showers with low-flow showerheads. While there is definitely truth to this statement, the shower is more than just a cleaning cubicle. Some of life's greatest awakenings occur in this sacred place. With my newly embraced shower-taking method, I can use minimal water in a slippery, soapy silence, and shine brighter than the sun with the knowledge that somewhere, some salmon is smiling.

Charlie