Record Cold To Some, Record Heat to Others

While all of us recover from 55 straight hours of below freezing temperatures, other parts of the world are dreaming of cooler temperatures!

Temperatures in California and Arizona have been about 10-15 degrees above normal for almost the last two weeks. Now, while many of us might find it hard to feel bad for those areas “struggling” with highs in the 70s, it’s the weather pattern that is associated with it that is causing so many problems. 

That pattern is causing incredibly dry conditions. Parts of California and Oregon had their driest year on record last year.  Eugene, California missed their average rainfall total by over a foot (-24.91” below normal), and Big Sur, California was over three feet below average (-37.62” to be exact)! But even those numbers would have been appreciated in Occidental, California where they had a rain deficit of -41.54” last year.

Some of these places didn’t just beat the old records by a little; a few beat the previous records by less than half of the old numbers! For example, Santa Cruz had only 4.78” last year compared to their old record low of 11.85" in 1929. Over in Kentfield (a suburb of San Francisco) they picked up 7.80" last year compared to the old record of 20.30"back in 1939!

Now, yes, parts of California are always dry, like Death Valley. So, let’s put things into perspective. Last year Death Valley picked up a total of 2.17” of rain. Paso Robles picked up only 1.92” (10.86 inches below normal). King City picked up only 1.98” (10.08 inches below normal). Even cities like Burbank and Los Angeles weren’t too far behind. Burbank only had 3.03” (14.28” below normal); downtown Los Angeles had 3.60” (11.33” below normal).

That heat relates to the high temperatures as well. Three record high temperatures have already been set just outside of Los Angeles area so far this year, and we are only eight days in! That same area saw seven days in December alone with record high temperatures.

It was the eighth hottest year on record for Phoenix.  Tucson had its fifth hottest year on record. In Australia, last year was the hottest year since records have been kept in 1910. Just how hot was it in Australia? So hot they had to add new colors to their temperature maps! (here’s a map to show you). To make matters worse, Brisbane is expected to get above 105° Saturday, and 102° for northern parts of New South Wales. 

Sources: National Weather Service, Australia Bureau of Meteorology, NOAA, Weather.com

New Tornado Alley

We all know that severe weather, especially tornadoes, are a threat to the Southeast every year, and it can occur in any month. However, what many of us were taught as children, and even as adults, as to where the most tornadoes, and also the largest, occur has changed, and it may surprise you. 

The "traditional" Tornado Alley stretches from Texas all the way up to South Dakota. Dixie Alley is the not quite as bad, but still important "mini" Tornado Alley. However, in the last 40 years those maps changed ... a lot! 

 

A new study done by the University of Alabama at Huntsville, and published by the American Meteorological Society shows that very little of the original Tornado Alley is still a part of the NEW Tornado Alley.

 

The study focused specifically on F2 strength tornadoes or higher. Because those are the ones that cause the most damage along with injuries and fatalities. They also looked at how long the tornado stayed on the ground, because the longer it does, the more damage it causes. The research found that Deep South tornadoes typically have longer paths than those in the Great Plains because they actually travel at a faster rate.

The study only did the last 40 years. It started in 1973, after the Fujita scale was first implemented, but stopped in 2010. They took out 2011 for fear the super outbreak would skew the results. But that's what makes this even more interesting. Even WITHOUT the super outbreak of 2011,when the Southeast was anihilated by over 300 tornadoes, the new tornado map never changed.

So why is this important? Very little research money is coming to the Southeast at this point to study tornadoes. It's all funneled into the Great Plains. So as Tornado Alley begins to shift, perhaps that research money needs to shift as well.

Sources: AMS, University of Alabama-Huntsville

 

Typhoon Man-Yi Hits Japan

Typhoon Man-yi made landfall in Japan on Monday, but days later it is still wreaking havoc by compromising recovery at the Fukushima Nuclear plant. The storm had winds around 162kph (about 100mph—the equivalent to a category 2 hurricane). Three people so far have been confirmed dead, with five others still missing.

Typhoon Man-Yi as seen from space     Courtesy: NASA Goddard

Over 4,000 homes are flooded, with 200 classified as destroyed, mainly due to strong winds or landslides.  Many boats were ripped from their docks or untied, and were seen floating down the Katsura River. One boat crashed into a bridge along the river in the town of Kyoto. Authorities had advised over 300,000 homes to evacuate due to the unprecedented rains and landslides.

Workers at the Fukushima nuclear plant were pumping out water from areas near tanks storing radioactive water. According to the plant’s spokesman, some leaks are believed to have seeped into groundwater, although it was unknown exactly how much water was released.  

Destroyed home in Kumagaya, Japan      Courtesy: AP Photos

 

Many people also crowded the airports as more than 600 flights were canceled Monday and Tuesday due to the typhoon. The weather is expected to improve over the next few days, allowing for flights to resume normal schedules, and hopefully allow for things to go back to normal. 

Cars underwater in Obama, Japan      Courtesy: AP Photos

 

It's A Bird, It's A Plane, It's....A Jellyfish???

For everyone in Seattle last Tuesday, August 6th, they were enjoying another beautiful, sunny, warm day. However, there were a few unique clouds that interrupted that peaceful day, and had locals wondering what on Earth might be in the sky. "Mini-cyclone" clouds, "Jellyfish" clouds, or "Ice cream cone" clouds as they are often referred to, because of their shape, made a rare appearance in Washington. Their technical term is actually "Fall Streaks", which are a form of virga.

Courtesy: Dale Jordan in Washington

Courtesy: Brian Lutz in Washington

Virga, is rain from a cloud, but that rain never actually makes it to the ground because it evaporates too quickly. Fall streaks are similar, but instead of being in the form of rain, they are ice crystals. As those ice crystals "fall" from the cloud they change directly from a solid to a gas state, or sublimination.

Notice in the picture below that there is one line of "jellyfish" clouds in the western section of the state near Seattle, and another in the eastern section of the state.

As to the reason why they formed on what would have otherwise been a completely clear day: something called a line of deformation. When you have two low pressures, flanking an area on each side, they tug and pull on the area in between. For that area in between that "tugging and pulling" created lower pressures overhead, and that creates the higher level clouds (usually filled with ice crystals).

This isn't the first place to see these strange clouds. Last year similar clouds popped up in Iowa. Thankfully, I think we can all rest soundly knowing that these are not part of an alien invasion or conspiracy theory :)


Courtesy: Danny Murphy in Iowa

 Sources: KOMO News, Atmospheric Optics, KWWL-TV

Tornado Can't Destroy This Home!

Too often we expect Mother Nature to respect the homes that we have built, when in reality we should be respecting Mother Nature and building our homes around her capabilities instead. We can’t force people to stop building homes along beaches where hurricanes or erosion could destroy them, nor can we expect people whose whole livelihoods are in Oklahoma and Kansas to just pack up and leave everything in the chance that a tornado might hit there. So the solution may be to build homes that can evade Mother Nature’s cruelest abilities. One company is doing just that.

Ten Design Company in Hong Kong has created a prototype home modeled off of the survival mentality of a turtle. The home is constructed of  simple hydraulic levers which push the home in and out of the ground, when the home’s outer shell detects high velocity winds associated with thunderstorms and especially tornadoes. For decades people have been building their homes up, either on stilts or columns in the hopes that water and/or air would flow underneath them, not affecting the main structure of the home. The problem with this is that people often forget the flying debris that may be associated with that tornado, or the surge that could be associated with that tropical system. Both of those elements are great examples of how going under ground, could be the best option.

The home is not tornado-proof per-say, but rather tornado-evading, since it is instead dodging the weather rather than trying to go against it. The homes are built with a series of solar cells and layers of Kevlar to be able to allow the home maximum natural light, while also keeping it safe from the day-to-day elements. They are also looking into putting carbon nanotubes on the shell of the home to absorb some pollution turning it directly into fuel for the home to power the hydraulics, but this would be something that would likely not have on the initial homes to keep costs down.

As soon as warning sirerns would go off, the sensors on the home would activate, and entire neighborhoods of these homes can be collapsed in mere seconds. After the home has been lowered into the ground, a water tight seal on the roof is locked, making the structure water and wind proof.

10 is currently developing a prototype with a group of ship builders in the US and Africa. The company’s hope is to get a prototype built in the mid-western U.S. to be able to test it in real-life weather scenarios. They would like to take that prototype house to a state fair somewhere in the mid-west to be able to show what it can do, to the people that would likely fit the company’s intended audience.

 

Source:  10 Design Company

Less Pollution = More Rain?

For most people living in the southeastern section of the U.S., many probably feel like they live in Seattle or the Amazon Rainforest instead thanks to the non-stop rain. Well, they can thank the Clean Air Act for that…..sort of.

Back in 1970 the Clean Air Act was passed. This initiative focused on reducing airborne pollutants that posed a threat to human health. Jeremy Diem, a climatologist at Georgia State University performed research looking at 18 National Weather Service co-op weather stations and noticed that Atlanta’s average annual rainfall increased by 10 percent in the decade following the new Clean Air Act. He studied specifically the summer months during the years of 1948 to 2009.

"It suddenly just changed dramatically in the '70s. It wasn't a gradual change. It was pretty abrupt," explains Jeremy Diem, a climatologist at Georgia State University who performed the research. But not everyone agrees. "Other people said we had a recession and that caused less fuel to be consumed," Diem said, although he does agree that that was also probably a factor.

Diem explains that having a lot of pollution in the air can lead to clouds being “less efficient”. In general, any water molecule can create a cloud, but you need specific types of water molecules to make a cloud drop rain. Standard clouds form from small particles that are almost perfectly uniform in both particle and water vapor size. This is especially the case when a lot of pollution is factored into the clouds. However, in order for the cloud to create falling rain, the particles must be of various sizes.

"You don't want tons of little ones, which is what Atlanta had in the '50s and '60s," Diem said.

How does he know that? Well, the first 5 years after the Clean Air Act was passed, the recorded emissions of particles with diameters of 10 micrometers or less decreased by about 40 percent nationwide, that according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Diem took his research one step further. He used the results he got from looking at the weather stations in rural areas to predict what the rainfall values would be at some of the urban and suburban locations. What the results showed was that rainfall in the urban areas was greatly suppressed before the Clean Air Act. How much so? The urban/suburban areas had rainfall totals of about 1.6 inches less in the 1950 and 60s (when air pollution peaked). In the 1970s those summer rainfall levels went back to the normal 11.8 inches. Starting in the 1980s the numbers started to become more consistent, and remained that way all the way through 2009 (the last year that was studied).

Diem’s research will be published in the August 2013 edition of the Journal of Atmospheric Science, although he says he isn’t finished. He would like to continue the study in other cities such as Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Dallas, Oklahoma City, and a few others.

For more on the EPA’s Clean Air Act click here.

Sources: Live Science, National Geographic, Southern Environmental Law Center, EPA

Ice Required For Icewine!

Seems like a obvious concept right? You have to have ice in order to make icewine? Well, the strange thing is, counterfeiters are using a loophole to get into the icewine business, but Canada is striking back!

Some white wine producers have been adding artificial sweeteners to simulate icewine's very sugary taste. Other companies have been picking the grapes early and then freezing them inside of buildings. Doing so helps minimize a loss of the crops due to rot. However, by picking the grapes early and freezing them inside a building, and not naturally on the vine, this can cause the grape to to have inconsistent or incomplete fermentation.

"[These companies] can produce a fine wine, but that should not be allowed to be called icewine," explains Dan Paszkowski, the head of the Canadian Vinters Association.

Canada is hoping that by implementing new federal standards requiring that "the grapes must be naturally frozen on the vine", it will help prevent fraudsters. The Canadian province of Ontario already has these same rules, but now the changes will be mandated across the country effective January 1, 2014. 

So what exactly is icewine? Icewine is a very unique, yet risky to make, dessert wine. Weather plays a vital role in the making of icewine. In fact, it has to be grown in a very cool climate because the grapes cannot be harvested until the temperature has fallen to below 18°F (-8°C) in Canada, or below 19°F (-7°C) in Germany. In Canada specifically, the first hard freeze may not occur until after Christmas. Once the grapes have met that hard freeze point, the harvesters only have but a few hours to pick the grapes off the vine. Canada and Germany are the worlds top two producers of icewine, but other countries such as Denmark, Czech Republic, Sweden, Austria, Slovakia, United States (specifically in the Michigan, Washington, and Colorado), and China are also producers. It's the last of those countries that is causing the majority of the counterfeit problems.

Icewine has become rapidly popular in China, but not all of it is regulated, and that opens the door to counterfeits galore.

"It's very difficult to regulate greed," emphasizes Paszkowski. "We've identified counterfiet icewines even in five-star restaurants and hotels."

Sources: Reuters, Vancouver Sun, Lancette Arts Journal, The Telegraph, Niagara Wine Trail