14" snow near Badger, Minnesota (Roseau County) Thursday. Details below.
"
There is no correlation between early season snowfalls and
overall winter precipitation. In fact, several of the winter seasons
with early accumulating snows ended up with below normal seasonal
snowfall totals." - Grand Forks NWS.
Marathon Weather Update. Dig out the jackets (which
you may abandon by mile 20 as the mercury reaches the upper 40s). Bright
sun, temperatures around 33 for the start of the marathon, temperatures
near 50 by noon, peaking in the mid 50s by mid afternoon. Better than
Saturday, with a west/southwest breeze at 10 mph.
55% chance of El Nino forming in the Pacific, down
from 70%. Don't count on another record warm winter for Minnesota. Image
above: NOAA's
El Nino page.
Snowfall Subtotals as of Thursday evening:
14" 10 miles north/northwest of Badger, MN (Roseau County)
8" Middle River (Marshall County)
7" Roseau, Minnesota
4" Thief River Falls, Minnesota
3.5" Grand Forks, North Dakota
1-2" Fargo/Moorhead
* Grand Forks photo above courtesy of Jeff Murphy. Source of snowfall totals
here.
"...
these snowfall amounts appear to be record amounts for this
early in the season for many areas. The previous record snowfall for
October 4 or earlier at the NWS in Grand Forks was 2" on October 2,
1950. The NWS at Grand Forks reported 3.5" of snow with this storm on
October 4, 2012. While records from around the area indicate that the
October 2, 1950 storm produced about 2-5" around the region with
localized heavier amounts, with Leeds, ND receiving 7" on October 2,
1950, and Hallock 4.5"." Source:
Grand Forks NWS.
Early Snows Not Unheard Of. Dates of earliest measurable snow above. Here's a clip from the
Grand Forks NWS office that caught my eye: "...
looking
at the above table it is apparent that the first inch of snow in the
Northern Plains can occur quite early. Trace snow amounts have been
noted earlier than the dates listed above. Also, there is no correlation between early season snowfalls and overall winter precipitation. In fact, several of the winter seasons with early accumulating snows ended up with below normal seasonal snowfall totals."
First Freeze. The close-in suburbs and downtowns
have yet to see the first frost/freeze of the season. That will change
over the weekend, with the coldest temperatures Sunday morning as skies
clear and winds subside. The mercury rebounds to or above 60 by Monday,
according to the ECMWF above.
Like A Christmas Postcard. Thanks to Terri Smith from Warren, Minnesota for sending this photo in.
"
A 4-inch rain occurs about once in 25 years at any given point
in Minnesota but a 6-inch rain only occurs about once in 100 years..." - Minnesota Climatology Working Group. Photo courtesy of Mike Hall.
Minnesota's Drought Worsens. Yes, I'm just
perpetually paranoid. What's the next shoe to drop? The entire state of
Minnesota is now "abnormally dry", up from 41% just 3 months ago. 45% of
the state is in a severe drought, including the north metro and St.
Cloud, up from 0% in early July. Extreme drought is expanding across
south central and southwestern Minnesota, and much of the Red River
Valley - nearly 20% of Minnesota experiencing extreme dry conditions.
The latest U.S. Drought Monitor for Minnesota is
here.
Extended Outlook: Indian Summer. After holding in
the mid 40s today and Saturday, temperatures rebound next week, a run of
50s and even a few low 60s. Shocking news: no significant precipitation
is in sight.
A Preview Of Coming Attractions. Check out the wintry panorama at Glacier National Park.
Postcard-Worthy. Another pic from Glacier National Park. Wild Goose Mountain, Montana, to be exact. Stunning.
Autumn Blaze. A setting sun illuminated a smear of
mid and high level clouds adrift over Columbia, South Carolina
yesterday. Photo credit: Hunter Coleman.
Warp Drive Looks More Promising Than Ever In Recent NASA Studies.
I'm always amazed when what passes for science fiction becomes
scientific reality. Here's an excerpt of a fascinating article at
gizmag.com: "
The first steps towards interstellar travel have been taken, but the stars are very far away. Voyager 1
is about 17 light-hours distant from Earth and is traveling with a
velocity of 0.006 percent of light speed, meaning it will take about
17,000 years to travel one light-year. Fortunately, the elusive "warp
drive" now appears to be evolving past difficulties with new theoretical
advances and a NASA test rig under development to measure artificially
generated warping of space-time. The warp drive broke away from being a
wholly fictional concept in 1994, when physicist Miguel Alcubierre
suggested that faster-than-light (FTL) travel was possible if you
remained still on a flat piece of spacetime inside a warp bubble that
was made to move at superluminal velocity. Rather like a magic carpet..." Photo credit: Shutterstock.
Apple Turning To Select Retail Employees To Help Improve Maps For iOS6. Details from
MacRumors.com;
here's an excerpt: "MacRumors has learned that Apple is piloting a
program to tap into its vast number of retail store employees to help
improve the company's new Maps app for iOS 6. Details on the
initiative remain unclear, but multiple sources have indicated that
participating stores will dedicate 40 hours of staff time per week,
distributed among a number of employees, to manually examine Apple's
mapping data in their areas and submit corrections and improvements.
ifoAppleStore
posted a Tweet a short time ago indicating that it too has received information on the effort..."
An $11,000 Cup Of Coffee? Designed for the fraction of the "1%" that has more money than common sense; details from
gizmag.com: "
The
Blossom One Limited coffee machine by Blossom Coffee promises to
provide connoisseurs of the black stuff an exceptional cup of coffee
with every pour, and is designed by former NASA, Apple and Tesla
employees as a bespoke product which would add some flair to any kitchen
counter. The catch? A cool US$11,111 price tag, barista not included..."
* Photo above: Jeff Murphy.
Fresh Air!
"Uh oh. This early blast portends a tough
winter. An I-can't-feel-my-fingers, Call-Out-The-National-Guard! ordeal,
one notch above a summer internship in Antarctica." I'm hearing a lot
of this. Let me put on my therapist hat and assure you that it's human
nature to make knee-jerk forecasts based on what you see outside your
window. Resist the urge.
45 percent of Minnesota is stuck in severe
drought (including the north metro). 3 months ago there was no severe
drought reported, statewide.
The first rule of weather: don't buck the
trends. Our dry spell will probably linger into December, taking the
edge off rain and snow amounts. Late winter? I'd bet my snowmobile we'll
still see more snow than last winter.
It'll probably be colder than last winter, based
on NOAA guidance. Why? The odds of a full-blown El Nino have dropped
from 70 to 55 percent.
Winds gust to 30 mph today. A few stray flakes
may delight Twin Cities residents Saturday, followed by the first hard
freeze Sunday morning. No heat exhaustion for this year's (chilly)
Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon.
A few 60s return next week.
My advice: keep your winter expectations low. That way you'll never be disappointed.
Climate Stories...
PBS NewsHour's Lehrer Ignores The Environment In First Presidential Debate.
Media Matters has the story and follow-up to Debate #1; here's an excerpt: "
Despite
hundreds of thousands of petitions asking for a question on climate
change, former PBS NewsHour host Jim Lehrer did not ask the candidates
what they would do to address manmade global warming as moderator of
the first presidential debate. Even more stunning, Lehrer did not ask a
single question about the environment or energy issues.Lehrer, who currently
serves as NewsHour's executive editor, said at the outset of the
debate that he wanted to focus on "specifics." Yet while both President
Obama and Mitt Romney brought up energy issues frequently, the moderator never pressed them on distortionsmade on these issues. And neither Lehrer nor the candidates raised climate change, which was discussed in each of the last three sets of presidential debates. In both 2000 and in2008,
the debates featured specific questions on climate change, and
Republican and Democratic candidates each acknowledged the issue."
Poll: Obama Or Romney Climate Change Stance Can Win Undecided Votes. Here's a clip from a story at
U.S. News and World Report: "
For an hour and a half Wednesday, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama talked
about jobs, the economy, and more jobs—but they didn't touch on the
environment or climate change. A new study suggests maybe they should
have: Undecided voters seem to care about global warming as much as
Democrats do. With polls showing a dead heat in the race to woo
independent voters and neither candidate doing a great job on climate
change (a prominent climatologist told the San Francisco Chronicle
earlier this week that "the silence of Gov. Romney and President Obama
on climate change is deafening"), could the issue break the tie?"
Photo credit above: "
An El Niño-powered storm pounds the pilings of ocean front homes on Pacific Coast Highway in 1997 in Malibu, Calif."
Pentagon Study Cites Climate Change As National Security Threat. Here's a snippet from a story at
The Huffington Post: "
Even before recent predictions
that Arctic sea ice would melt by the summer of 2016 in a "final
collapse," setting off a "global disaster," the Pentagon and the Center
for Naval Analyses's (CNA) Military Advisory Board had already gone on record warning
about the impacts of climate change as a threat to national security.
To better understand the impact of global water challenges on U.S.
national security interests, Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton requested the intelligence community to produce a
National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) which resulted in an unclassified
Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) prepared by the National
Intelligence Council (NIC). Even after the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence (ODNI) released its ICA on Global Water Security in February, 2012 and the ICA and the CNA released its National Security and the Threat of Climate Change
in 2007, the current incarnation of the Republican party continues to
deny the relationship of CO2 emissions to extreme weather patterns --
with presidential candidate and former Governor Mitt Romney stating that "there remains a lack of scientific consensus on the extent of warming... and the severity of the risk." Photo: Wikipedia.
Climate Change Denial Getting Harder To Defend. Here's an excerpt of a story at
The Los Angeles Times: "...
This
was the 36th consecutive July and 329th consecutive month in which
global temperatures have been above the 20th century average. In
addition, seven of the 10 hottest summers recorded in the United States
have occurred since 2000. Such rising temperatures and climate
anomalies have been documented around the world. But there's also one
bit of good news: The increasingly powerful evidence of a long-term
warming trend is making climate-change denial more difficult to defend.
Take "Climategate" — the argument that scientists have based their
evidence for global warming on fraudulent science. The Koch Foundation
provided funding to physicist Richard Muller of UC Berkeley,
a longtime climate-change skeptic, to disprove the widespread
consensus on global warming. Instead, his re-analysis showed the exact
same warming trend found by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change and other scientists..."
Photo credit above: "
Drought-damaged corn plants stand in a field during harvest in Le Roy, Ill."
(Daniel Acker / Bloomberg / September 11, 2012)
Climate Change Skepticism Highest In U.S. And Britain. Here are a few sentences from a story at rawstory.com: "Awareness
of climate change is high in many countries, especially the tropics,
but in Britain, Japan and the United States many are doubtful about the
cause, a poll published on Thursday said. A survey of 13,492 adults in
13 countries who were questioned by Internet found that 88 percent
believed the climate had changed over the past 20 years....On the
question whether climate change had been scientifically proven,
agreement was highest in Indonesia, Hong Kong and Turkey (95, 89 and 86
percent respectively). It was lowest in Japan (58 percent), preceded by
Britain (63 percent) and the United States (65 percent)."
Another View: Climate Change Is About Jobs And The Economy. Here is an excerpt of an Op-Ed at
The Des Moines Register that caught my eye: "...
But
isn’t what matters the economy and jobs? OK, forget science; this is
about business. Assume climate change is a hoax. Don’t go to Las Vegas
on the odds of that being true, but it turns out that it doesn’t
matter. If all you are is a profit-maximizing capitalist, you’ll do
exactly what you’d do if you were scared to death of climate change,
because we know how to solve it at a profit. My recent book, “The Way
Out: Kickstarting Capitalism To Save Our Economic Ass,” details how
hundreds of entrepreneurs, companies and communities are prospering
from energy efficiency, renewable energy and sustainable agriculture
that are more profitable than business as usual, and which, if
implemented across the country, will end the recession..."
