Extreme Temperatures
S


Igloo

Spain braces for 'coldest summer in 200 years'

Alex Dunham
The Local, Spanish
Mon, 27 May 2013 18:07 UTC
If you've been looking forward to spending your Spanish summer sunning yourself by the pool, don't pack away your winter clothes just yet.

France's main weather channel has announced that there is a 70 percent chance of this summer being cold and wet across Spain, France, Portugal, Germany and Austria.

Cold maritime fronts and weak solar activity during the winter months have not only given us a chillier Spanish spring than normal, they're also going to make the summer months unusually dreary and rainy.

According to Meteo, June and July are only likely to have short periods of summer heat which will in turn bring heavy storms in August.

September and October are likely to register higher average temperatures and less rain, the French weather agency announced on Monday.

The year without summer, 1816, is not an old wives' tale.

Overcast skies and cold temperatures across the northern hemisphere led to severe crop failures and food shortages in France, England, Ireland and the US during the summer months of that year.
Read More...
Ice Cube

River ice jam causes major flooding in Alaska interior


Associated Press via Yahoo News
Wed, 29 May 2013 15:49 UTC
The National Guard has helped evacuate residents from a small community in Alaska's interior where a river ice jam caused major flooding, washing out roads and submerging homes and other buildings. State officials estimate several hundred people have left the town of Galena, which remained mostly underwater Tuesday with the Yukon River ice jam firmly in place, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reported.
Image
In this May 27, 2013 photo released by the National Weather Service, ice and water cover the roads in Galena, Alaska.
National Weather Service meteorologist Christopher Cox said 90 percent of the community's roads were flooded, and many buildings had 7 feet of water in them. Some of the people who were displaced said they escaped in rafts battered by ice chunks and floating debris.

After rising floodwaters breached a wall protecting the Galena airport, the National Guard flew in to evacuate any remaining residents who wanted to leave the community of nearly 500, the Anchorage Daily News reported.

Evacuee Shane Edwin stepped off a flight to Fairbanks on Tuesday afternoon and described the scene he left behind as "a whole bunch of chaos." "The roads are all gone," he said. "The houses are flipped over. It's just trashed. I couldn't grab anything, not even my ID. The water came so fast."

Additional images
Read More...
Ice Cube

Centuries-old frozen plants revived


BBC
Tue, 28 May 2013 17:06 UTC
Image
Glacier retreat has markedly accelerated in the period since 2004 - and many new species lie beneath
Plants that were frozen during the "Little Ice Age" centuries ago have been observed sprouting new growth, scientists say.

Samples of 400-year-old plants known as bryophytes have flourished under laboratory conditions.

Researchers say this back-from-the-dead trick has implications for how ecosystems recover from the planet's cyclic long periods of ice coverage.

The findings appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

They come from a group from the University of Alberta, who were exploring an area around the Teardrop Glacier, high in the Canadian Arctic.

The glaciers in the region have been receding at rates that have sharply accelerated since 2004, at about 3-4m per year.
Read More...
Cloud Precipitation

Rain further delays historically slow U.S. corn, soybean planting

Sam Nelson
Reuters
Tue, 28 May 2013 16:00 UTC
Rain over the weekend and this week will drag out late season plantings of corn and soybeans in the United States that are already at a historically slow pace, an agricultural meteorologist said on Tuesday.

John Dee, meteorologist for Global Weather Monitoring said from 1.0 to 3.0 inches or more of rain fell over the weekend in the central Midwest and 0.5 inch to 1.5 inches is expected at midweek in the northern Midwest.

"The only planting that will take place will be in the southern two-thirds of Illinois, Indiana and Ohio the next couple of days," he said. "If it were all planted this would be perfect, there was pretty good planting progress last week but not like the week before."

Farmers have been scrambling to plant corn and soybeans through mid and late May in an attempt to catch up from weather delays in April and early May.

In its weekly crop progress report released on May 20, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said corn planting was 71 percent complete, up from 28 percent a week ago but still behind the 79 percent five-year average seeding pace.

USDA has projected U.S. 2013 corn plantings at 97.3 million acres, the largest land area devoted to its production since the 1930s.

Soybean planting progress rose to 24 percent from 6 percent a week earlier, USDA said.

USDA will release updated planting data in its weekly crop progress report late on Tuesday.
Read More...
Igloo

Germany now recording coldest spring in 40 years! "...Climate experts running out of arguments..."!

P Gosselin
NoTricksZone
Mon, 27 May 2013 19:06 UTC
The recent weather in Germany indicates everything but global warming and widespread drought, which climate experts have been telling us would be the case unless we stopped burning fossil fuels fast.
Germany's Mean Temps
© Josef Kowatsch, data from German Weather ServiceGermany’s mean temperature trend continues falling sharply (1998 – 2012). 2013 so far is well below normal.
Today the online Augsburger Allgemeine reports that the statistics for the 2013 German meteorological spring (March-April-May) have been 95% tabulated and show that this year's German spring is the "coldest in in decades". The Chiemgau24 news site reports that it is the coldest spring in 40 years.

This past weekend, snow even fell in parts of Germany at elevations down to 600 meters.

No reasons are cited as to why the spring 2013 is so cold. The Arctic is covered with ice and so it can't be an exposed Arctic sea disrupting atmospheric patterns.
Read More...
Snow Globe

Warbler 'fallout' on Park Point, Dulth amazes birders

Sam Cooke
Duluth News Tribune
Sun, 26 May 2013 14:29 UTC
Starting last weekend and into the past week, birders in Duluth witnessed one of the most dramatic bird "fallout" events in many years

Image
© Mike HendricksonA mourning warbler seen at Park Point during a recent “fallout” caused by bad weather
Starting last weekend and into the past week, birders in Duluth witnessed one of the most dramatic bird "fallout" events in many years.

Wind, rain and fog coming off Lake Superior forced migrating warblers and other species to take refuge on Park Point, where they flocked in trees and on the ground, resting and searching for food.

"It was fantastic," said Duluth birder Mike Hendrickson. "It was one of the best fallouts of migrants in my life, and I've been birding Duluth for 31 years."

It was good for birders, but tough on the birds, Hendrickson noted. He saw one dead warbler, but no other dead birds were reported.

In a message sent on the Minnesota Ornithological Union listserv, Duluth's Peder Svingen wrote that last Sunday, May 19, he and other birders identified 24 warbler species on Park Point. Only two of the 26 warbler species that can be observed in Duluth were missing, and they were later seen by others.
Read More...
Sherlock

5000 cave paintings discovered in Mexico; likely made by early hunter-gatherers

Michael Briggs
Design&Trend.com
Fri, 24 May 2013 10:20 UTC
Nearly 5,000 cave paintings have been discovered in a mountain range in a section of northeastern Mexico near the U.S. border.
Image
© National Institute of History and Anthropology in MexicoA photo of one of the cave paintings discovered by archaeologists in Mexico near the U.S. border.
Archaeologists were stunned by the find, as previous research did not suggest pre-Hispanic groups resided so far north. The red, white and black paintings were found in 11 different sites, and were likely made by early hunter-gatherers. The images depict humans in activities such as hunting, fishing and gathering, and animals like deer, lizards and centipedes.

"The find [is] important because with this we were able to document the presence of pre-Hispanic groups in Burgos, where before we said there were none," said archaeologist Martha Garcia Sanchez of the Autonomous University of Zacatecas.

"These groups escaped Spanish control for almost 200 years," Garcia Sanchez said. "They fled to the San Carlos mountain range where they had water, plants and animals to eat. The Spaniards didn't go into the mountain and its valleys."
Read More...
Igloo

Rapid cooling triggered Bronze-Age collapse and Greek Dark Age

Robert Felix
IceAgeNow
Tue, 21 May 2013 17:08 UTC
ice age
Of course the politically correct verbiage is "climate change."

Between the 13th and 11th centuries BCE, most Greek Bronze Age Palatial centers were destroyed and/or abandoned throughout the Near East and Aegean, says this paper by Brandon L. Drake

A sharp increase in Northern Hemisphere temperatures preceded the wide-spread systems collapse, while a sharp decrease in temperatures occurred during their abandonment. (Neither of which, I am sure - the increase or the decrease - were caused by humans.)

Mediterranean Sea surface temperatures cooled rapidly during the Late Bronze Age, limiting freshwater flux into the atmosphere and thus reducing precipitation over land, says Drake, of the Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico.

This cooling and ensuing aridity could have affected areas that were dependent upon high levels of agricultural productivity. The resulting crop declines would have made higher-density populations unsustainable.

Indeed, studies of data from the Mediterranean indicate that the Early Iron Age was more arid than the preceding Bronze Age. The prolonged arid conditions - a centuries-long megadrought, if you will - lasted until the Roman Warm Period.

Comment: Speaking of 'collapse of civilization', read Laura Knight-Jadczyk's latest research
Comets and the Horns of Moses (The Secret History of the World) for a more enlightened study of civilization's recurring collapses.

Read More...
Fish

What is causing hundreds of fish to die?

Rachel Kingston
wvib.com
Tue, 21 May 2013 11:28 UTC
Temperatures, just as News 4 reported in March


What is causing hundreds of fish to die?

Buffalo, N.Y. - Canalside is just weeks away from being packed with people attending summer events. But visitors could be met with hundreds of dead fish in the water.

Hundreds of dead fish started washing up from Lake Erie, the Niagara River and their tributaries in March, and News 4 reported after concerned viewers called about the dead fish. And though it's been months, you can still find dozens of them floating in the Commercial Slip.

Donald Zelazny, the DEC's Great Lakes Program Coordinator, said, "This is actually one of the larger die-offs of these fish that we've seen in quite a while."

So it's no surprise that people who see them are worried about disease and pollution. But the DEC now has biological evidence of what it has said all along: these fish, a member of the herring family called "gizzard shad," died of natural causes.

"They're very susceptible to cold temperatures and temperature fluctuations. So we generally see a die-off of this particular type of fish every year," Zelazny explained.
Read More...
Snowflake

Anchorage, Alaska sets new record for longest snow season- 232 days!


The Extinction Protocol
Mon, 20 May 2013 09:43 UTC
232 days - it took over 30 years for Anchorage to set a new record for the longest snow season on record. The National Weather Service measured 2/10ths of an inch just after 9 p.m. Friday and 1/10th Saturday morning - breaking the old record of 230 days set in 1981-1982. Anchorage police responded to 22 crashes, 4 with injuries and 37 vehicles in distress between midnight and noon Saturday. Police say roads were wet and not icy midday and "motorists should use caution if the temperatures drop below freezing. Other parts of the city had much higher amounts of snow, however official measurements must be consistent and observed at the Sand Lake forecast office. The recent snowfall also broke the daily record for liquid precipitation, lowest maximum temperature for May 17, and a host of other records. NWS says Saturday evening's forecast calls for "mostly cloudy with isolated snow showers in the evening...then partly cloudy after midnight - lows in the upper teens to mid 20s and north wind to 15 mph." For Sunday, the forecast will be mostly sunny, highs in the 40s, and light winds, according to NWS. -NBC
Image
Read More...