OceanStWx

I think climate communication is probably better than it's ever been, the problem is there is a firehose of BS that spills out into the airwaves too. And the public is generally not very receptive to statements that we don't really know a lot about sensible impacts. We have the warming trends pegged pretty good, but we don't know how those feedback into every day weather well. That's a hard concept to grasp for many, and gives the sense that scientists don't know what they are talking about. I also struggle with the flip side articles that blast use of RCP8.5 by arguing we'll eventually come up with a solution. Well that seems pretty pie in the sky too given the current state of affairs. I mean the latest budget has millions in it for research into geoengineering (spraying aerosols into the stratosphere to block insolation) and wait until the chemtrail crowd gets a hold of that!

I really feel like it popped up this past year or two out of nowhere really. Are emissions from flying important, yeah 10% is a pretty large number on the transportation pie. But it really felt more like an effort to curb climate scientists from attending conferences and traveling for research than actually trying to limit emissions. Faux outrage in my opinion.

Teaching climate change is schools? What a novel idea. RCP8.5 is a business as usual emission curve that is unlikely to totally apply to the future, but the fact of the matter is that until I see any concerted effort to curb emissions (which have gone up in the last two years in the US) I don't see why it's any less ridiculous to rely on emissions scenarios that show mitigation applied. And somewhere between those two scenarios is still pretty bad.

This is the perfect straw man argument Steve. People will make money off making solar panels and wind turbines? Then we can't transition to those energy sources. Fossil fuels companies make more money than they know what to do with, yet the same complaints about money in that industry don't apply. You flight shaming me for taking a vacation is another good one. Individuals taking vacations are not contributing to carbon emissions. The New Yorker that travels every week for work to SFO does. Shaming people into taking small individual actions is a great way for the largest emitting industries to shirk responsibility. Domestically we're talking about 10% of transportation emissions from flying. Non trivial, but whistling past the graveyard when it comes to car/truck travel (especially when the current administration is trying to reduce regulation on car emissions/fuel efficiency - which by the way will not save anyone any money in the long run except for car companies). Do plastic straws contribute to pollution of our waterways? You betcha. My wife and I use metal straws to do our part, but we don't shame anyone if they choose not to. Because in the end straws are a fraction of the plastic pollution out there, but it is a convenient smokescreen to mask the larger contributors. And good luck with China? Yeah, good luck if we aren't the shining city on a hill to point towards when it comes to clean energy policy. Alaska being cold one winter out of a decade is not really a newsy story. Nor are the Dakotas being cold in winter. The magnitude is, and it has been covered, as I pointed out. Dismissing coverage of warmth as agenda is disingenuous at best. This is a topic I care a lot about. I do my research and stay up to date on it, I make my individual actions, and I vote primarily based on who has the best policy ideas to tackle the problem. I'm really not sure what moral high ground you are claiming to call others who believe/care about this lemmings.

I see you skipped past all the national media articles about the polar vortex.

Right.

ACATT There was plenty of talk of the cold in the Upper Midwest last year. It was breathless media coverage of the wind chills and polar vortex. Selective memory FTL.

Cold where it's supposed to be cold isn't exactly a story.

AK stole Scandinavia's winter.

It's a dry cold. Definitely a once in a generation type cold winter up there this year. They were due for a good one.

Ripped off 1.59" at PWM. Pack was only about 20% ripe though, so lots of absorption and minimal real loss except where runoff was occurring.

I don't know, it was the first storm of an evolving favorable pattern. It didn't have the same odds stacked in its favor as that February did.

Yeah the bigger issue was not only buying the Euro whole cloth, but running with 36" forecasts. When that shifted out of the city and onto LI that's a lot of bad press.

I don't have the time to see what I said, but it's possible that the first was true while the rest was also true. Snow lasted about 16 hours at BOS, that's not really a "long" event if you think about 6-10 hours of WAA plus a few hours of deformation on the backside.

Hell all of the New England offices received NOAA awards for the March blizzards. Edit: Sorry, it was GYX, BOX, OKX, PHI, WPC, OPC.

Your wife and kid had to move out of the house in the lead up, but it was worth it.

It's a state thing. Typically an environmental or health agency determines unsafe air quality and requests that we highlight the product. This definitely isn't our first winter AQA this season. For trapped wood smoke as you've said. Summer is typically build up of ozone (from sun breaking down car exhaust) or onshore flow sending pollution from the big cities back towards the coast.

Getting close to the convective scale introduces problems. Not my area of expertise, but I would imagine it leads to more of the chaos effect in the long term when you develop those small scale, but sometimes large magnitude features.

Meh, they're still getting better. I think what we've discovered with higher resolution and more frequent model runs, is that run to run variability is very high with a complicated process like the atmosphere. When we were limited to sparse data and infrequent model runs they seemed more locked than was actuality. In the long term they really are just another ensemble member.

Get yourself into the Pemi watershed and we can daisy chain some toasters together and catch Dendrite on down into NE MA.

I don't think it's far enough north.

While somewhat true, in general the more events we have the better our stats tend to get. I can basically reverse engineer what our probability of detection should be for instrument flight rules (IFR) based on the amount of IFR conditions we experience over a period of time. Similar to snow events. The more warning events we have, the better our detection rate/false alarm should be. Individual events can throw that off because a single winter isn't a large sample size of course. Valentine's Day did a number on us, as well as the events in December. But we did well during November and the late January Scooter's Revenge event.

Yelling at random strangers as they walk to the bathroom.

Given how snowy it was our winter forecasts should've been pretty good. But we ended up accurately warning 91% of the warning events that occured, but falsely warned at a rate of 37%.