Volcanic Winter

Figured someone might find this interesting / cool. This is an actual ground level pic of the Hunga Tonga eruption column. The majority of images you can find for the Jan 15th climactic eruption are satellite images, owing to the volcano’s geographic isolation. There are a few close images of sub-plinian / surtseyan eruptions, but those are from the 14th and even earlier. Much smaller events. The Jan 15th blast created an absolutely titanic eruption column, and not visible are the underwater ignimbrite / pyroclastic flows that reached upward of 80KM’s away. Insane. Note that this image was taken something like 60Km away on a nearby island and this was early on in the climactic blast.

From Typhoon Tip on the NE subforum, thought this was a great post worth sharing here:

I’m really cherishing last January, it was a gift for me in this overarching crappy state of winter the past few years. Was cold and wintry almost the entire month, and that area wide Jan 7th event was the kind of thing it feels like we’ve been missing lately (moderate snows). And then Jan 29th was extremely fun to track with lots of swings and surprises, despite it being not quite a blockbuster for most of the subforum it still brought me a 22f 16 inch snowstorm which is top end for this current enduring pattern of meh.

Hoping we can get some -NAO back to battle the ridge and maybe we’ll at least do better than whatever this hybrid-Niño crap is. It’s certainly demoralizing and the prospect of an actual shutout seems plausible, but the platitude of “there’s a lot of winter left” still seems applicable. Lots of weather left between here and April.

Nice cool and damp commute up the parkway this morning. Much flake, many snow. Yeah, this sucks. Looks like SEMA got our “snewstorm.”

I'm certainly not

Thank you, your posts and analyses are very much appreciated. Remain optimistic we’ll see something (the area), eventually. No doubt this awful pattern will eventually yield into hopefully something a little less awful. If we go back to RNA/SE Ridge so be it, maybe we’ll get a brief period inbetween where we can hopefully snag a moderate event at least.

Yeah but a young to mid young 30 year old cactus or a 56 year old cactus?

We’re all the same age…

That's sort of baffling, what model is indicating snow potential within that stripe right now outside of a very small number of ensemble members? Why would they stoke the hype machine at this point with such an abysmally low percentage storm? ... nevermind.

I was saying “kill me” internally while typing that.

I got down to 31F overnight, was surprised. Pinelands microclimate ftw.

I’m taking my wife into New England (location undetermined at this point) for a little hiking and wining / dining trip for my birthday in February (love having an early Feb bday). Was hoping to possibly catch a glimpse at that fabled white substance. At this rate we’ll have to go to the Canadian border (in Maine) or the summit of Mt Washington…

Me all day.

The inability of people to comprehend this is still astounding to me. All I'll say on the subject.

Blizzard of 96 is my first vivid “snow memory,” with the exception of my parents taking me to Vermont when I was four years old for a ski trip (mostly for them, lol). Definitely remember going outside in central Monmouth where I grew up to snow up to basically my chest. To be honest, I have nothing but wonderful snow memories throughout my childhood and teenage years. I don’t necessarily remember which storm was which, but I never felt or thought snow was “rare.” It was something we expected to have yearly, and I have memories of piles of snow in our driveway persisting into spring. That seems foreign lately.

I actually feel like the climate change stuff is rather simple as per the physics involved. We’re adding thermal energy into the atmosphere at a tremendous rate. Boom, done. What else is there to discuss? It’s not political nor is it arguable. It’s not about blame. The Industrial Revolution did its job, and we just didn’t know a hundred years ago. But we know now, right? Now it’s time to figure it out and come together to make sure Volcanic Winter on AmericanWX forums still has cold and snow in winter to fetishize. I’m feeling a little overly thawed right now…

It’s of course safer to have minimal to zero expectations pretty much uniformly around the forum right now, but there’s next to zero chance IMHO the models have this system fixed correctly yet. Reading all forums and all points of view, this is definitely a “keep the caution flags up but wait” type deal for a few more days at least.

Skewed by higher infant/childhood mortality.

Honestly for us in the northeast? Iceland. 5 hour flight from EWR, October to end of March. Best time IMO is late October through November. Long nights and generally not “full” winter there if you’re not especially interested in dealing with harsh snow and windstorms (the latter being what will actually shut the roads down), though Iceland can get severe squalls and whatnot as early as September even. Weather there is generally luck of the draw. But they’re always in the game to see an aurora almost nightly, barring cloud cover. On my two week trip end of Oct into November we saw the lights 8 nights total, but we also were rather lucky this trip. Over four trips there, the worst we did was three nights over a ten day trip. Some people go and never see them, though that seems especially unlucky or you’re not trying “correctly.” Sometimes have to stay outside for a few hours to maximize chances without cutting away and “checking back” because that’s often how you miss them. Sometimes they’ll flare up for 10-15 minutes and then disappear for the rest of the night. Plainly visible right in Reykjavik this evening.

Gotta agree for now not to get too hung up on OP swings. NE thread meteorologists staying more optimistic about this for now, verbatim the OP shows a disaster for them as well. Nothing else to add but the obvious, let’s just see what happens.

The Capital Region in the southwest recorded -20C readings recently, and the interior southwest was colder than the North. Very unusual for Iceland, at least AFAI understand their climate after four trips there. The North is insanely gorgeous though.

I wanted to go back so bad to experience their coldest Dec in a hundred years, you have no idea. Was almost begging my wife. We missed the onset by a couple weeks. Snow in Reykjavik is actually less common than here and the capital roads were even crazy and covered. We toured the north and while there was plenty of snow and cold, it wasn’t nearly as cold as it can get there even in November. And I think by now you know my almost fetishistic feelings on cold weather lol.

It sucks that the MJO may not be a magic bullet, but I’m grateful to continue learning about how it influences our weather. We can’t deny that if a decently strong amplitude cold phase of the MJO isn’t starting to register on the models in the form of even normal temps, that maybe it’s not capable of driving the pattern at the moment. Of course I’m hoping this changes. I want to break my good down parka back out I put away after Xmas in exchange for dry fit polos.

Yup, likely to be the first large eruption known to feature surface warming tied back to it. The only other exceptions are flood basalt eruptions, which are entirely different and separated temporally by millions of years. I had some fleeting hopes other elements could win out and produce some favorability, but in reality that water vapor signal might be completely overpowering. You can’t deduce this stuff regionally as even severe volcanic-affected climate years have significant regional variability, but looking at what’s going on with Europe (although Eastern Europe is going to freeze soon) makes me wonder. Can’t wait until more is published about this. Edit: Just found this which I actually haven’t read before: Might be illuminating with respect to this topic, though they’re using Krakatoa 1883 as a baseline. That eruption was significantly larger (roughly 3x) and injected an extreme amount of typical volcanic aerosols that produce cooling, unlike HTHH which most notably injected water vapor. So the conclusion may be based off an entirely different type of eruption. Still interesting.