Gusty winds
Hi folks. If you are following the Moon's movements on the Freemonth
forecast of my website, you'll notice the Moon at southern declination on
Saturday, Sept. 9th. This means the Moon is down over our hemisphere, so
causing more gravitational pull. As it starts it's northern climb on
Sunday, all gusts should begin to ease after Saturday. Southerlies should
kick in around 11th.
It's not often that in the same week one gets one's website listed on Xtra Editor Max Newmann's list of favourites, PLUS one gets an email from Mr Bob McDavitt, NZ's weather 'ambassador'. I must say I was touched and honoured he took the time to write, even more honoured that he ordered some of the books I'm selling, and I reprint some of what he said. Bob, you may recall, was the one who was asked after New Year to comment on my predicting correctly the Millennium Day weather over Gisborne from 6 months out. He said I would only be right 80% of the time. Naturally, I adamantly disagree. (I didn't think I was THAT high.)
Bob says:
Hi there Ken
I have forecast enough tropical weather to know about the Madden -Julian
Oscialltion,Ý which is around 4 weeks (some say six weeks) and uncanningly
mimics the monthly lunar cycle.Ý
.. my scientific side probaly will not agree with the size of the impact
of the lunar pattern on our weather. Our planet is too large and
turbulent, and the moon is too small and far away. Having said
that, please understand that us meteorologists DO check the days that the
moon's perigee is within a day of new or full moon....we are aware that
any storms around on those days may bring coastal flooding because of the
higher than normal sea tides.Ý We call these events KING TIDES and I have
set-up a special watch program which comes into affect several days before
a KING TIDE period.Ý We have issuedÝ 3 "Anomously high water advisories"
since 1998 and been right twice and wrong once.Ý We issued a news release
about the closest perigee/largest moon in a lifetime (last December) and
know all about NIWA's prediction of a flood last 5 July (nearly right).
Bob McDavitt (also known to work for MetService)
(Hmm Bob...is that like having your cake and eating it, I wonder?)
Here's my prediction. I sent this out a week ago as a news release to ALL NZ major TV stations and radio networks and newspapers. Not one has thus far made any mention of it. Some overseas agencies have responded though, because I put it up on an astrology chatline as well. Let's hope, for the organisers' sake, I'm wrong.
Sept 15 - Oct 1st
The period between Full Moon and Last Quarter is the most prone to
unsettled weather. The opening of the Games should be fine but a
deterioration will probably set in a couple of days afterward. Five days
of uncertain weather will follow, then a fine spell followed by a day or
so of showers. The closing ceremony will be under clear skies again.
15th - 16th: - fine (an anticyclone sits over Sydney)
17th: fronts pushed by southwesterlies could spell rain
18th: wind change to westerlies.
19th -21st: - more fronts from the southwest serving up variable skies and
showers(due to lunar perigee and northern declination)(Bob -uncannily
MIMICKING lunar perigee and northern declination)
22nd - 27th: - fine
28th -29th: - showery
30th: - clearing
1st: - fine
Here in NZ we are a bit starved for a balanced view on these 'calamities'.
I present two articles here from well respected publications, the Wall St
Journal and the New York Times.
1. The first, from Wall St Journal, Aug 28, 2000, entitled
"Sure, The North Pole is Melting, So What?"
It is fashionable these days to blame almost everything on man-made global
warming.Ý So it comes as no great surprise to read in a recent New York
Times story that "leads" of open water in ice fields near the North Pole
filled cruise passengers on a Russian icebreaker with a sense of alarm
about impending climate disasters.Ý Two scientists who were lecturing
aboard, a Harvard zoologist and an American Museum Paleontologist (experts
on animals and fossils, but not on meteorology, were shocked, as ABC News
reported, to find Santa s workshop underwater.
I am a veteran of two Arctic expeditions with the U. S. Navy, and I can
testify that icebreakers always search for leads to make their way through
the ice.Ý After a long summer of 24 hour days it is not unusual to find
open leads all over the place, especially after strong winds break up the
winter ice.
Nor is this a recent phenomenon.Ý In a 1969 Dutch atlas the following
passage appears: The Northern Ice Sea is never completely frozen: 3- to
30-meter-thick ice floes continue moving slowly around the pole.Ý At the
North Pole the winter temperature is never lower than -35 degrees Celsius.
Summer temperatures can rise to 10 to 12 degrees Celsius.Ý These last
temperatures are well above freezing.
But all this proves little about climate change or about enhanced
greenhouse warming.Ý For this purpose we use instruments: thermometers at
weather stations, carried into the atmosphere by weather balloons twice
daily and, of course, Earth-circling weather satellites that sense
atmospheric temperatures remotely.Ý All of these agree that the polar
regions have not warmed appreciably in recent decades. Climate models do
call for a warming trend as levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide rise,
because of the burning of fossil fuels.Ý Hence the dilemma: Do we believe
theoretical models of the atmosphere or the atmosphere itself?Ý I prefer
to believe in the atmosphere and the actual observations that show no
current warming.Ý If this clashes with the accepted popular wisdom and
media hype, so be it.Ý I go with the published data.
The Earth did warm between about 1900 and 1940, with the climate
recovering from a previous cold period that climate experts refer to as
the Little Ice Age.Ý As a result of these changes, which have nothing to
do with human influences, it is warmer now than it was 100 years ago.
This has had an influence on polar ice, which has been slowly thinning, as
it melts from beneath.Ý And the ice will continue to thin for some time to
come even though the climate is no longer warming. Moral: It takes a lot
of time to melt ice.
Weather satellites tell us that polar ice cover is shrinking - likely a
delayed effect of the pre-1940 warming. The Northeast Passage has opened
up, allowing ships to sail from London to Japan along the coast of
Siberia.Ý Its all part of a natural climate cycle and need not cause
concern.Ý Recall that 1,000 years ago the climate was so warm that Vikings
settled Greenland and grew crops there for a few centuries.Ý Just imagine,
Santa's reindeers would have had to swim to get here from the North Pole.
Ý
(Mr. Singer, former director of the U. S. Weather Satellite Service and
chief scientist at the Department of Transportation, is emeritus professor
of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia.)
(thanks to Mary Lee Coleman for sending)
Article 2. "Open Water at Pole Is Not Surprising, Experts Say"
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Recent eyewitness reports of open water from melting ice at the North Pole
have prompted climatologists and other scientists to make a closer study
of satellite imagery and other observations of northern sea ice, past and
present. Although striking and unusual, those reports are not as
surprising as suggested in a news article on Aug. 19 in The New York
Times, which was based on the descriptions and interpretations of two
scientists who had just visited there.
The data scientists are now studying reveal substantial evidence that on
average Arctic temperatures in the winter have risen 11 degrees over the
past 30 years, and in the late 20th century were the warmest in four
centuries. Data also show that the ice pack over the entire Arctic Ocean
has in recent decades been shrinking in area and thickness.
But climatologists said they were still not sure if diminishing polar ice
reflected some short-term natural cycle or was a wake-up call of possibly
drastic climatic consequences of an industrial civilization's release of
heat-trapping gases.
"There seems to be a pretty coherent picture of change going on now in the
Arctic," said Dr. Mark Serreze, a climatologist at the National Snow and
Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. "But there's nothing to be necessarily
alarmed about. There's been open water at the pole before. We have no
clear evidence at this point that this is related to global climate
change."
The ice covering most of the Arctic Ocean, several researchers said, is
broken by long, wide cracks and gaping holes in many places, sometimes
even at the pole, and especially in the summer. During a typical summer,
90 percent of the high Arctic region is covered with ice, with the
remaining 10 percent open water. This has probably been true for
centuries, they said, the result of motions in the ice sheet caused by
winds and the force of ocean currents, as well as warming temperatures.
Dr. Serreze said an examination of satellite images from July 15 showed
what looked like a large body of ice-free water about 10 miles long and 3
miles wide near the pole. On Friday, the ice data center made available
two images taken by NASA's Terra satellite on July 26, about the time
visitors on the Russian icebreaker Yamal were in the polar region.
Although the pole was obscured by clouds, the images show how fractured
the ice was near the pole and the many large patches of open water over
much of the area.
"The fact of having no ice at the pole is not so stunning," said Dr.
Claire L. Parkinson, a climatologist at the Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt, Md. "But the report said the ship encountered an unusual amount
of open water all the way up. That is reason for concern."
Dr. Parkinson said that her examination of satellite data since the 1970's
revealed that the Arctic ice cover had been retreating on an average of
one-quarter of a percent a year. But there are fluctuations up and down;
the retreat was striking in the 1980's, then rebounded somewhat in the
90's. "So we are very reluctant," she said, "to make projections into the
future" based on only two or three decades of observations.
In a February report, Dr. Parkinson said, "If trends toward shortened sea
ice seasons and lesser sea ice coverage continue, this could entail major
consequences to the polar and perhaps global climate, and to the
lifestyles and survivability of selected Arctic plant and animal species."
Dr. James J. McCarthy, a Harvard oceanographer who was quoted in the
article in The Times, said he would not argue with critics who said that
open water at the pole was not unprecedented.
"What was really unusual was that over a period of two weeks we never had
a day of what would be considered normal ice," Dr. McCarthy said. "When we
reached the pole and found open water, that simply punctuated what we were
seeing everywhere. These were conditions that did not seem representative
of a transient phenomenon."
Dr. McCarthy, director of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, is
the co-leader of a group preparing reports for the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change, which the United Nations is sponsoring for the study of
the possible consequence of a warmer climate. Dr. Malcolm C. McKenna, a
paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan,
also was a passenger on the Yamal and joined Dr. McCarthy in describing
their surprise at finding thin ice and intermittent open seas.
Even while cautioning against reading too much into such anecdotal
evidence, Dr. Parkinson said, "It did get into the public consciousness
that, hey, there are changes going on that might be really important."
Scientists said the descriptions by Dr. McCarthy and Dr. McKenna focused
new attention on the collection and analysis of more data about polar ice
conditions.
The end of the cold war, for instance, has brought to light important
sonar measurements of Arctic ice collected by United States Navy
submarines. They are being analyzed by Dr. Drew Rothrock at the Applied
Physics Laboratory of the University of Washington in Seattle. By
comparing measurements of ice thickness between 1958 and 1976 with data
from 1993 and 1997, he determined that the thickness had decreased from
10.2 feet in the early period to 5.9 feet in the 1990's.
"This is not a case of thicker ice appearing in one region simultaneously
with thinner ice appearing in another, induced perhaps by a change in
surface winds or other transient conditions," Dr. Rothrock said, noting
that the decrease was widespread in the central Arctic Ocean, and most
pronounced in the eastern Arctic.
Researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are analyzing images from the
Canadian Radarsat spacecraft, which has made the most detailed satellite
observations of the expanse of the Arctic Ocean. Passing over at an
altitude of about 400 miles, the spacecraft bounces mapping radar signals
off the polar region to produce a complete image every three days. This
permits researchers to track the short-term dynamics of the sea ice,
watching cracks open up and grow wider, sometimes more than 1,200 miles
long, and seeing thin ice eventually covering some of the openings.
"If the ice is thinning due to warming, we'll expect to see more of these
long cracks over the Arctic Ocean," said Dr. Ronald Kwok, a senior
research scientist at the Pasadena laboratory. But Radarsat has been
returning data for only four years, not long enough for researchers to
recognize any meaningful patterns in Arctic climate.
Much as I love doing this, and having a goodnatured look at weather-related news, due to other commitments this will be the last until end of October. Sorry and all that. Hence this fatter issue.
Ozone report just out from NAASA
NAASA has just put a latest Antarctica ozone layer update scare-news story out. I picked it up today on National Radio. Don't be fooled. It's nothing to get worried over. I expect such a report EVERY SPRING and they've never disappointed me yet. Sure, each year around this time the ozone over Antarctica APPEARS to deplete, because the winter is just finishing and the effect takes a while to drift around to where the people live and measure ozone, not only on land but also in space. In fact researching these wind drifts and their lag were the reason they discovered ozone in the first place. So why does the ozone deplete in the southern winter? Because ozone is produced by warm rising air hitting downcoming sunshine. Wherever that occurs all around the world, ozone is made. It is therefore replenishing itself somewhere every second, EXCEPT at spots where there's no sunshine and no rising warm air. One particular spot especially, where it's just coming out of winter and the where sun never shines there then. I wonder if you can guess. Scientists can't.
Olympic Games weather
Ýhttp://www.qldnet.com.au/~carls/Olympics.html
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