Extreme Temperatures
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Snowflake

White Easter: Sweden arises to snow and record low temperatures

Snow-covered flowers in southern Sweden.
© Johan Nilsson/TTSnow-covered flowers in southern Sweden.
Easter Sunday got off to an unusually cold start across Sweden - with three weather records broken as some towns experienced their chilliest April night in decades.

Southern Sweden saw unseasonably cold temperatures, with up to 10cm of snow in northern Skåne, Blekinge, Kronoberg, Halland and Kalmar.

In Örebro, the mercury dropped to -14C, making it the coldest April night since 1944, according to P4 Örebro.

In Karlstad, Sweden's meteorological institute SMHI said temperatures reached -9C, meaning it was the coldest night of April since 1985.

Info

Indigenous peoples around the world tell myths which contain warning signs for natural disasters - Scientists are now listening

A Moken woman stares out to sea.
© Photo by Taylor Weidman/LightRocket/GettyNative knowledge - A Moken woman stares out to sea.
Shortly before 8am on 26 December 2004, the cicadas fell silent and the ground shook in dismay. The Moken, an isolated tribe on the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean, knew that the Laboon, the 'wave that eats people', had stirred from his ocean lair. The Moken also knew what was next: a towering wall of water washing over their island, cleansing it of all that was evil and impure. To heed the Laboon's warning signs, elders told their children, run to high ground.

The tiny Andaman and Nicobar Islands were directly in the path of the tsunami generated by the magnitude 9.1 earthquake off the coast of Sumatra. Final totals put the islands' death toll at 1,879, with another 5,600 people missing. When relief workers finally came ashore, however, they realised that the death toll was skewed. The islanders who had heard the stories about the Laboon or similar mythological figures survived the tsunami essentially unscathed. Most of the casualties occurred in the southern Nicobar Islands. Part of the reason was the area's geography, which generated a higher wave. But also at the root was the lack of a legacy; many residents in the city of Port Blair were outsiders, leaving them with no indigenous tsunami warning system to guide them to higher ground.

Humanity has always courted disaster. We have lived, died and even thrived alongside vengeful volcanoes and merciless waves. Some disasters arrive without warning, leaving survival to luck. Often, however, there is a small window of time giving people a chance to escape. Learning how to crack open this window can be difficult when a given catastrophe strikes once every few generations. So humans passed down stories through the ages that helped cultures to cope when disaster inevitably struck. These stories were fodder for anthropologists and social scientists, but in the past decade, geologists have begun to pay more attention to how indigenous peoples understood, and prepared for, disaster. These stories, which couched myth in metaphor, could ultimately help scientists prepare for cataclysms to come.

Anyone who has spent time around small children gets used to the question 'why?' Why is the sky blue? Why do birds fly? Why does thunder make such a loud noise? A friend's mother told us that thunder was God going bowling in the sky. Nature need not be scary and unpredictable, even if it was controlled by forces we could neither see nor understand.

The human penchant for stories and meaning is nothing new. Myths and legends provide entertainment, but they also transmit knowledge of how to behave and how the world works. Breaking the code of these stories, however, takes skill. Tales of gods gone bowling during summer downpours seems nonsensical on the surface, but know a little about the sudden thunderclaps and the clatter of bowling pins as they're struck by a ball, and the story makes sense.

Snowflake

Global storm intensity rising with wrong seasons in wrong places

cold air
As our Earth's magnetosphere is affected by the Sun entering its grand solar minimum phase, our troposphere will bulge at the equatorial latitudes and compress elsewhere with wild out of place jet streams. We are beginning to see this in 2017 with out of season rain events in dry season across Asia, formerly rare super cells across Europe and rain in deserts of South America, Australia and USA. Regional food crop losses continue and these types of weather events will intensify year upon year.


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Tornado2

Rare 'snownado' filmed at Lake Louise Ski Resort in Alberta

Because it requires a certain condition, snownadoes are rare. Only six of those have ever been captured on camera.
© Spencer PlattBecause it requires a certain condition, snownadoes are rare. Only six of those have ever been captured on camera.
A snowboarding daredevil, Justin Buss, attempted to make his way through a rare "snownado" at the Lake Louise Ski Resort in Alberta.

The moment was captured by Brett Soderholm, his meteorologist companion, and the video was uploaded on YouTube. The clip went viral as soon as it was posted, with some lauding Buss for the stunt. The clip showed Buss walking into the fierce wind formation then disappearing as soon he got close.

CTV news spoke with Soderholm who shared that he also followed his friend right after disappearing in the rare snownado. Soderholm said he did not want to miss the rare opportunity. Soderholm described the experience as "painful."

"There were fierce winds swirling around me with little pieces of ice chucked up against my face," he said.


Ice Cube

Proof cosmic rays are changing Earth's weather: Mini Ice Age 2015-2035

Snow
© KTVL/Libby Dowsett
Svensmark's research into increasing cosmic rays and low cloud layer formation dovetails perfectly with the increase of the Grand Solar Minimum as our Sun enters a weakened activity state in its 400 year cycle. So if this is coming to fruition we should see record floods, snows and unusual out of season precipitation events intensifying globally. These are the six examples from last week.


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Snowflake

Snow arrives 2 months early to ski resorts in Victoria, Australia

Mount Hotham woke to this.
© Mount HothamMount Hotham woke to this.
It's puking snow in the NSW High Country, with the big ski resorts waking to a winter wonderland this morning. And it's only Autumn.

Up to 20cm of snow in the Snowy Mountains overnight heralded Sydney's first wintry blast for 2017: temperatures in the city dropped to 12C overnight, with the chill coming straight off the snow down south.

It's two months until the official start of the ski season, but ski resorts in Victoria woke up to 20cm of snow, and this morning the dusting that had begun to cover the NSW Snowy Mountains had turned to full-on snowstorm.
#Snow is currently falling at Thredbo, expected to turn into rain later today. Get out while you can! #NSWWeather #Winteriscoming pic.twitter.com/e2Wbezm3Om

— BOM New South Wales (@BOM_NSW) April 9, 2017

Ice Cube

$500 billion plan to refreeze polar cap, while icebergs detour ships 650 kilometers south

MV Highlanders is stuck in ice near Low Point, N.S.
© Marine AtlanticMV Highlanders is stuck in ice near Low Point, Nova Scotia
A new plan out by Arizona State University to use 10 million wind powered pumps to re-freeze the Arctic at a cost of $500 billion dollars, is a badly timed release as 400+ icebergs invade north Atlantic shipping lanes driving vessel traffic 650Km south to avoid collision. Record snows in Anchorage Alaska and Record ice growth on Greenland.


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Tornado1

Defying Al Gore's predictions, bottom drops out of US hurricane pattern over past decade

al gore
© IMDB"An Inconvenient Truth" by Al Gore, 2006.
Inconvenient data for those who still insist climate change is making hurricanes more frequent is displayed in these two slides from Dr. Philip Klotzbach. As noted by Dr. Roger Pielke Jr, the bottom dropped out of US hurricanes over the last 10 years.

CommonDreams.org quoted Al Gore back in 2005:
... the science is extremely clear now, that warmer oceans make the average hurricane stronger, not only makes the winds stronger, but dramatically increases the moisture from the oceans evaporating into the storm - thus magnifying its destructive power - makes the duration, as well as the intensity of the hurricane, stronger.

Last year we had a lot of hurricanes. Last year, Japan set an all-time record for typhoons: ten, the previous record was seven. Last year the science textbooks had to be re-written. They said, "It's impossible to have a hurricane in the south Atlantic." We had the first one last year, in Brazil. We had an all-time record last year for tornadoes in the United States, 1,717 - largely because hurricanes spawned tornadoes.
Since Katrina, climate activists have beat a steady drumbeat warning of doom.
  1. "Warming seas cause stronger hurricanes", Nature, 2006 — "Mega-storms are set to increase as the climate hots up."
  2. "Are Category 6 Hurricanes Coming Soon?", Scientific American, 2011 — "Tropical cyclones like Irene are predicted to be more powerful this year, thanks to natural conditions"
  3. "Global warming is 'causing more hurricanes'", The Independent, 2012.
  4. "A Katrina hurricane will strike every two years", ScienceNordic, 2013 — About a widely reported study in PNAS by geophysicist Aslak Grinsted of the Niels Bohr Institute Copenhagen U. Also see "'Katrina-Like' Hurricanes to Occur More Frequently Due to Warming" in US News & World Reports.
  5. "Hurricanes Likely to Get Stronger & More Frequent", Climate Central, 2013 - About a study in PNAS by Kerry Emanuel et al.
  6. See ten even more outlandish predictions from the big 3 networks.

Better Earth

The art of green deception . . .about those record temperatures in Antarctica

antarctica
Warren Blair writes:

On the same day (24 March 2015) in the real Antarctic (not Esperanza on the Trinity Peninsula) Australia's Casey research station had its coldest 24 March day in 18 years (minus 12.7 °C). That wasn't mentioned and neither was any other interesting data like Casey's 2015 March mean maximum temperature was the same as 1990 and lower than 1991, 1992, 2001, 2002, 2006, 2007 and 2009.

Highest Antarctic region temperature was 35 years ago when CO2 was 340ppm (15% less than 2015 levels).

19.8°C was recorded on 30 January 1982 at Signy Research Station located at Borge Bay (near Esperanza Base) .

Highest Antarctic temperature for a Plateau station [>2500 meters] was 28 years ago.

-7.0°C was recorded on 28 December 1989 at an Automatic Weather Station (D-80) located inland from the Adélie Coast.

Highest Antarctic temperature for a continental station (outside the Antarctic Circle) was recorded in 2015.

17.5°C was recorded on 24 March 2015 at the Esperanza Base located on the Trinity Peninsula at Hope Bay (near Signy Research Station).

Better Earth

Scientists link California droughts and floods to distinctive atmospheric waves

wavenumber-5
© Haiyan Teng and Grant BranstatorThe high- and low-pressure regions of wavenumber-5 set up in different locations during January 2014, when California was enduring a drought, and January 2017, when it was facing floods. The location of the high and low pressure regions (characterized by anticylonic vs. cyclonic upper-level air flow) can act to either suppress or enhance precipitation and storms. The black curves illustrate the jet streams that trap and focus wavenumber-5.
From NCAR/UCAR:

Boulder, Colo. — The crippling wintertime droughts that struck California from 2013 to 2015, as well as this year's unusually wet California winter, appear to be associated with the same phenomenon: a distinctive wave pattern that emerges in the upper atmosphere and circles the globe.

Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) found in a recent study that the persistent high-pressure ridge off the west coast of North America that blocked storms from coming onshore during the winters of 2013-14 and 2014-15 was associated with the wave pattern, which they call wavenumber-5. Follow-up work showed that wavenumber-5 emerged again this winter but with its high- and low-pressure features in a different position, allowing drenching storms from the Pacific to make landfall.

"This wave pattern is a global dynamic system that sometimes makes droughts or floods in California more likely to occur," said NCAR scientist Haiyan Teng, lead author of the California paper. "As we learn more, this may eventually open a new window to long-term predictability." The finding is part of an emerging body of research into the wave pattern that holds the promise of better understanding seasonal weather patterns in California and elsewhere.