July Doldrums - Summer in full effect Pattern and Model Discussion

[weathafella]

Actually just for Boston, 30 year normals based on 1981-2010 are pretty similar to when I arrived and the data was 1931-60.

[Typhoon Tip]

well... the climate is shifting - all tongue and cheeksims, sarcasms, and/or game-denials/bargaining aside...that's an irrefutable fact.

It's also, shifting N up the eastern Seaboard.  It's just a matter of acceptance of truth, versus wasting time digging and probing for any plausible excuse to deny that reality. 

I think the question that is paramount is, ...at what rate of change is that taking place?   

Rest assured, your winters are still more prone to stochastic global-based indices ... which are still more dominant in the total equation of natural forces governing the system of weather/climate.  The processes that are causing GW are what can effect the seasonality ... because...well, that's just simple math.  GW has to mean ... the Globe is warming - duh

By the way, pertinent to discussion, ...speak of the devil I came across this article which is a nice softer presentation on the subject matter at hand:

https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-have-shifted-the-earth-s-seasons-for-the-first-time-with-climate-change

 

[Damage In Tolland]

4 minutes ago, Typhoon Tip said:

well... the climate is shifting - all tongue and cheeksims, sarcasms, and/or game-denials/bargaining aside...that's an irrefutable fact.

It's also, shifting N up the eastern Seaboard.  It's just a matter of acceptance of truth, versus wasting time digging and probing for any plausible excuse to deny that reality. 

I think the question that is paramount is, ...at what rate of change is that taking place?   

Rest assured, your winters are still more prone to stochastic globa/-based indices ... which are still more dominant in the total equation of natural forces governing the system of weather/climate.  The processes that are causing GW are what can effect the seasonality ... because...well, that's just simple math.  GW has to mean ... the Globe is warming - duh

By the way, pertinent to discussion, ...speak of the devil I came across this article which is a nice softer presentation on the subject matter at hand:

https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-have-shifted-the-earth-s-seasons-for-the-first-time-with-climate-change

 

I’ve fought it for a long time. But after all the empirical evidence .. particularly in regards to the northeast , and the different pests, animals, flora etc that are rocketing North into places they’ve never been near before .. it’s happening. I also think this type of warm to at times hot and especially humid summer will become our normal.. in our lifetimes 

[HoarfrostHubb]

1 minute ago, Damage In Tolland said:

I’ve fought it for a long time. But after all the empirical evidence .. particularly in regards to the northeast , ad the different pests, animals, flora etc that are rocketing North into places they’ve never been near before .. it’s happening. I also think this type of warm to at times humid summer will become our normal.. in our lifetimes 

Well, the data suggests temp changes are largely imperceptible on the human time scale for the most part. I’m not totally sold on that’s idea, but a 0.1F rise over 15 years is not really something I feel, but the impacts on the environment will become more noticeable.

[Typhoon Tip]

Hard to say for certain, Kev' ...

In one respect, we are not so far gone that ...some super volcano or MEI 6.5+ doesn't dim us back a bit.... Plus, we have the next two solar minimums supposedly destined for historic lows, and that does represent feed-back shadow of unknowns....both from how it effects polar atmospheric chemistries ...which parlays ultimately, differently, in blocking winters versus non... But also, even decimal reductions in the global insolation budget ...when also combined with increased WV attributed cloud cover to cause greater cloud-top albedo ... and, jesus - 

the system is complex.  That's probably why right there, climate 'curves' are far from curvilinear... They are more like serrated ...where longer term trends have to be gleaned... 

In the other respect, those should not be relied upon as outright compensators. They confuse course...but don't alter it  - that's the way to think...  But the point being, hot humid summers as "normal" might take time to be the case yet.  Or not ... time (which we ironically we may not have as a species) will tell. 

[OceanStWx]

35 minutes ago, dendrite said:

A NYC/NJ climo? Noted for DJFM.

Snows from Long Island north?

[Typhoon Tip]

50 minutes ago, HoarfrostHubb said:

Well, the data suggests temp changes are largely imperceptible on the human time scale for the most part. I’m not totally sold on that’s idea, but a 0.1F rise over 15 years is not really something I feel, but the impacts on the environment will become more noticeable.

..Mmm be careful .. 

You could be right, and that hypothetical decimal you used there could disseminate over a benign ...well-behaved daily massaged departure of +0.1 for 5,475 straight days... like a permanent hand-held grace period at a new job... 

Or, what that decimal really represents is an increase in event frequency, and it could comes in torridity spikes that are detrimental to living conditions for both nonsessile biota, as well as agrarian concerns - code for anything alive, under the sun.  In this sort of more realistic paradigm ... their severity is secondary characteristic that is also in its self, in growth... 

I mean ...as a side note, species cannot really adapt at those time scales... both animals and plants.  Meanwhile, people are inexorably dependent upon the entire system of those species of the world to exist.  You know? I keep hearing this mantra ...in retorts out there on the web ...television... general media et al...   How humans have remarkable adaptive capacitance, perhaps more so than any other species on the planet bigger than 50 kg. I find that argument to me extraordinarily myopic and well...flawed.  Firstly, we don't do this in a vacuum... We cannot merely adapts to no food, and low oxygen...  Case in point, we f- with the Photoplankton thru chemistry induced shock combined with ill-adaptive temperature changes...etc,  and that part of the oceanic biome fails?  Adios muchachos.   Everything > 50 kg mass is having a bad time of it.   That's just one aspect among many of the larger integrated codependent construct that is the biosphere of this planet... Yet aholes want us all to bury our heads in their sands of ...'it's okay, because we can adapt'  

But I digress... excluding the possibility that global free-oxygen levels suddenly, abruptly extinguish ... As those innocuous decimals increase, they reflect a change in destructive events, too.  So we may feel that more than we think... We aren't going to remember +0.1 in 15 years (and it's probably a bigger value than that)... no, but you only have to die of heat exhaustion once.  

[RUNNAWAYICEBERG]

1 hour ago, dendrite said:

A NYC/NJ climo? Noted for DJFM.

Climo switches to Caribou-like once we throw our pumpkins into the trash. You know the drill.

[Great Snow 1717]

2 minutes ago, RUNNAWAYICEBERG said:

Climo switches to Caribou-like once we throw our pumpkins into the trash. You know the drill.

Actually he thinks the cold should settle in right around 9/1. Right now he's enjoying the heat and "high dews" but come early Sept he'll be singing a different tune once he realizes the heat and humidity is going to linger well into the fall.

[OceanStWx]

Congrats Kevin!

Haven't quite reached 2013 levels yet, but it's been dewy, and at all hours of the day. 

[dendrite]

oh man....heavy, heavy depression in the early 80s.

[OceanStWx]

3 minutes ago, dendrite said:

oh man....heavy, heavy depression in the early 80s.

Cracked and dusty mulch beds.

[RUNNAWAYICEBERG]

You can look at that and think snowfall. Wierd.

[ORH_wxman]

26 minutes ago, OceanStWx said:

Snows from Long Island north?

It does remind me....the geography of New England tends to make us somewhat "immune" from modest warming in terms of snowfall. A huge portion of our snowfalls are storm track dependent far more than temperature dependent...and the storm track is dependent on baroclinicity. The max baroclinic zone isn't really shifting...esp in winter. It is still found near the gulf stream and where cP airmasses run into it. So in our case, the increased moisture (about 7% since the middle 20th century) offsets the losses on the margins such as snow we get on front enders that may be less due to slightly warmer temps or missing an extra clipper with a further north PJ and arctic jet. Further south around DC, the temperature margin was smaller and the storm track there is less dependent on that baroclinic zone south of SNE...more on the general PJ...so they are losing the battle with a negative trend.

Though it's varied a bit by location even in NE...I notice BGR has a pretty solid negative snowfall trend....but CAR is positive while PWM is basically flat....and then places south like BOS/ORH are strongly positive. Further west, BTV is strongly positive. Some parts of western SNE have been pretty skunked recently so their trends might be negative....the data out there is really bad though, aside from maybe the Norfolk, CT coop. Snowfall can have some measurement error of course...but I think the evidence points to at worst, a wash, and likely a slight positive trend over a lot of NE.

 

The warming trend for 850 temps over NE back to 1948 (first year of reliable data) is +0.13C per decade....I kind of use that layer as the baseline when discussing snowfall so we do not bring mostly irrelevant factors into the trend such as strong radiational cooling which we see at the surface. Given, the average 850 temps in the winter are around -4C over SNE, we'd probably need to see at least another 1-2C of warming aloft to see a very noticeable climate signal in the snowfall totals in a negative direction.

[OceanStWx]

1 minute ago, RUNNAWAYICEBERG said:

You can look at that and think snowfall. Wierd.

Quick glance and you could see a correlation, but there are some biggies that were duds on the dewpoint front. 

[OceanStWx]

4 minutes ago, ORH_wxman said:

It does remind me....the geography of New England tends to make us somewhat "immune" from modest warming in terms of snowfall. A huge portion of our snowfalls are storm track dependent far more than temperature dependent...and the storm track is dependent on baroclinicity. The max baroclinic zone isn't really shifting...esp in winter. It is still found near the gulf stream and where cP airmasses run into it. So in our case, the increased moisture (about 7% since the middle 20th century) offsets the losses on the margins such as snow we get on front enders that may be less due to slightly warmer temps or missing an extra clipper with a further north PJ and arctic jet. Further south around DC, the temperature margin was smaller and the storm track there is less dependent on that baroclinic zone south of SNE...more on the general PJ...so they are losing the battle with a negative trend.

Though it's varied a bit by location even in NE...I notice BGR has a pretty solid negative snowfall trend....but CAR is positive while PWM is basically flat....and then places south like BOS/ORH are strongly positive. Further west, BTV is strongly positive. Some parts of western SNE have been pretty skunked recently so their trends might be negative....the data out there is really bad though, aside from maybe the Norfolk, CT coop. Snowfall can have some measurement error of course...but I think the evidence points to at worst, a wash, and likely a slight positive trend over a lot of NE.

 

The warming trend for 850 temps over NE back to 1948 (first year of reliable data) is +0.13C per decade....I kind of use that layer as the baseline when discussing snowfall so we do not bring mostly irrelevant factors into the trend such as strong radiational cooling which we see at the surface. Given, the average 850 temps in the winter are around -4C over SNE, we'd probably need to see at least another 1-2C of warming aloft to see a very noticeable climate signal in the snowfall totals in a negative direction.

Yeah, it's the margins that will change most noticeably. New England was never really in the margins when it comes to winter.

But I am glad I live north of the Pike. 

[Damage In Tolland]

22 minutes ago, OceanStWx said:

Congrats Kevin!

Haven't quite reached 2013 levels yet, but it's been dewy, and at all hours of the day. 

AWT!!

[powderfreak]

2 minutes ago, OceanStWx said:

Yeah, it's the margins that will change most noticeably. New England was never really in the margins when it comes to winter.

But I am glad I live north of the Pike. 

I've always been on the warmer means more precipitation which means more snowfall...as our snowfall is much more tied to precip amounts than temperatures.  

In my mind we'd see increasing snowfall until it hits that breaking point at which point snowfall would decline rapidly.... but that's a long way off.

[ORH_wxman]

1 minute ago, powderfreak said:

I've always been on the warmer means more precipitation which means more snowfall...as our snowfall is much more tied to precip amounts than temperatures.  

In my mind we'd see increasing snowfall until it hits that breaking point at which point snowfall would decline rapidly.... but that's a long way off.

I'm skeptical it would ever get there for a place like Stowe anyway...the warming you'd need to see is probably only going to happen in one of those unrealistic RCP 8.5 scenarios.

[RUNNAWAYICEBERG]

9 minutes ago, Damage In Tolland said:

AWT!!

Gotta find the dew point lapse rate kid for the NECT summit unless we use BDL for you all year around.

[powderfreak]

30 minutes ago, ORH_wxman said:

I'm skeptical it would ever get there for a place like Stowe anyway...the warming you'd need to see is probably only going to happen in one of those unrealistic RCP 8.5 scenarios.

Yeah I'm just thinking hypothetically anywhere...I feel like you would see an increase in moisture and thus snowfall, until some magic warming line is crossed and then snowfall falls off a cliff.  Yeah not worried about it up here in the next few generations.  

But I really like your post about storm tracks because I never thought of it that way.  As long as storms go east of us, it's likely going to snow and if they go west, it won't.  Regardless of the climate per se.

[Ginx snewx]

1 hour ago, Damage In Tolland said:

AWT!!

summers of yore, yore being 2013

[Ginx snewx]

1 hour ago, powderfreak said:

Yeah I'm just thinking hypothetically anywhere...I feel like you would see an increase in moisture and thus snowfall, until some magic warming line is crossed and then snowfall falls off a cliff.  Yeah not worried about it up here in the next few generations.  

But I really like your post about storm tracks because I never thought of it that way.  As long as storms go east of us, it's likely going to snow and if they go west, it won't.  Regardless of the climate per se.

Lol at the  "it may never snow again" crowd in here. 

[tamarack]

5 hours ago, Damage In Tolland said:

N Maine and even downeast is in its own weather world . The weather there rarely matches the rest of New England 

For summer warmth, especially downeast.  That cool water has a huge effect on anyone within a few miles of the coast.  Long time ago (1978), but one crazy example was a late May heat wave in the north, in which HUL reached 96 while at the same time EPO was a foggy 49 just 90 miles away (though they'd been a bit milder before the sea breeze kicked in.) 
 

You include June too?   Maybe back in our home in NNJ but you’re barely out of snow season!

As PF noted, it's met summer.  If I limited "summer" to the warmest 2-month (say, 61 day) period, it would run June 23-Aug 21.  And heat can come at strange times.  Last summer's 4 warmest days:
91   May 19
88   June 11
87   June 12
85   Sept 24
Go figure.

[weathafella]

The biggest marker of warming to me is the ocean.  When I was in school, you couldn’t really swim in the ocean north of the cape-it was too cold.   Now it’s like it was off of New Jersey growing up.

[weathafella]

15 minutes ago, tamarack said:

For summer warmth, especially downeast.  That cool water has a huge effect on anyone within a few miles of the coast.  Long time ago (1978), but one crazy example was a late May heat wave in the north, in which HUL reached 96 while at the same time EPO was a foggy 49 just 90 miles away (though they'd been a bit milder before the sea breeze kicked in.) 
 

You include June too?   Maybe back in our home in NNJ but you’re barely out of snow season!

As PF noted, it's met summer.  If I limited "summer" to the warmest 2-month (say, 61 day) period, it would run June 23-Aug 21.  And heat can come at strange times.  Last summer's 4 warmest days:
91   May 19
88   June 11
87   June 12
85   Sept 24
Go figure.

What’s your warmest 90 days?

[wxeyeNH]

3 hours ago, OceanStWx said:

Congrats Kevin!

Haven't quite reached 2013 levels yet, but it's been dewy, and at all hours of the day. 

Pretty impressive.  I think it would be pretty easy to add at least 50 hours and perhaps a lot more over the next week.  That would put Hartford in line for perhaps the most humid summer over the several decades.  What's good for Hartford is good for most of New England.  Is there an easy link to generate a similar graph for other New England sites?

[Typhoon Tip]

It's going to get pretty dewy this week...

 

[Damage In Tolland]

2 minutes ago, Typhoon Tip said:

It's going to get pretty dewy this week...

 

Next 3-5 weeks you mean?

[dendrite]

Lows near 70F for awhile. Pure dog days.