"brothers and sistahs
heed the coolista
it might get hot
or maybe not
beware of the herd
they aint the only word
so dont jailista
our favorite coolista"

LOL, G Diddy.

Here is the sea surface temperature anomaly chart for through to July 7th. Bang up to date data from the irrepressible Dr Roy Spencer.

.



For the moment, the SST's and surface pressures are not in El Nino or La Nina mode. It's more of a "La Nada" for now.

Dr Roy thinks the SST is going to start falling again over the next couple of months, and I agree. A "Double dip" La Nina is not ruled out.

Another big winter in US and Europe as a result?

Thanks for the update.

George, possibly, but 'big winters' in Europe and the U.S. are due to different things. Cold snaps in northern Europe are mainly down to loops in the N.H. jet stream caused by a blocking high pressure zone over Greenland pulling arctic air down over Britain and scandinavia. Heavy snows in the U.S. are more due to La Nina conditions bringing humid air in off the north Pacific. There is some connection, but through several links in the chain of causation which subtly change each year.

For this winter in the U.S. I predict less snow, but cold and cloudy weather. Europe is hard to call, it depends what happens with the arctic oscillation and the polar vortex.

For the Met offices latest thoughts on weather prediction, this is a good article:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/35145bee-9d38-11e0-997d-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1RacNghPj

It contains a juicy quote from Adrian Scaife too:

"We now believe that [the solar cycle] accounts for 50 per cent of the variability from year to year"

Something of a vindication for me I feel. Nice to see my message getting through at long last anyway.

Rog,

I read about Met article. Fascinating. Some of them have spent their whole careers there and followed their fathers careers.

Reading through does give one a sense of the complex variables at play in trying to forecast the weather in more than a few days.

Will be interesting as the supercomputers become more and more powerful, to see if we can ever accurately predict the weather in two weeks : )

Thanks for posting the link,

gm

George,
what comes out of supercomputers is only going to be useful if the parameterisations put in are correct. Even then, there is an element of chaos in weather patterns which won't ever be resolved. The best we can do is carry a pair of shades, a brolly, and a smile.

However, I believe that I am able to make reasonably accurate forecasts of general trends and even some seasonal forecasts for specific geographical areas. The daily stuff I leave to the weather guessers.

Edited by tallbloke on 07/14/2011 03:50:53 MDT.

"For this winter in the U.S. I predict less snow, but cold and cloudy weather." Thinking now like I had better just buy a warmer baselayer for this winter since you were spot-on concerning last winter's cold & snow in the US.
Thanks for the prediction and the great article.
I just love the way that the phrase "despite global warning" has been popping up everywhere, even heard it in a grocery store radio ad for fresh fruit. Weird.

Heck the local weatherman can't get tomorrow's weather right most of the time :)

Rog's prediction got me to thinking about something that happened to me over 30 years ago.

I had been hiking in the desert around Tahquitz Canyon one summer day and had finished all my water. Coming out of the canyon into Palm Springs I headed to the first building I could see, some offices next to the Sun Center shopping center to see if someone could give me some water. By chance, I walked into the offices of Irving Krick and Associates, who happened to be a commercial weather forecasting company. The receptionist gave me some water and the lobby had a lot of interesting photographs. I asked her what they did and Mr. Krick heard us talking and came out of his office. He was quite a charismatic guy, and invited me into his office. For the next couple of hours he told me about his career and what he did. He was very proud of the weather forecasting he did during WWII.

From what I remember he said that accurate forecasting comes from "viewing" the earth from above, not from the ground up. Weather is determined by things outside our atmosphere, not what happens down below. He said that if we collect data over decades or even longer, we just need to look at similar high level scenarios and we can model/predict the weather years in advance with a high level of accuracy. He also said that the sun drives weather. I seem to remember he used the term solar winds.

Anyway, I had long forgotten about that day. I did a Google search and found this interesting reading:

http://weathersage.com/texts/boesen/index.htm#contents

One for Jerry, if he's still around.

Jeff Glassman says:
IPCC features this conclusion:

The present atmospheric CO2 concentration has not been exceeded during the past 420,000 years, and likely not during the past 20 million years. TAR, Ch. 3, Executive Summary, p. 185.

The rise in CO2 seen at MLO from 1958 to 2008 is a 50 year event. The period of 420,000 years is a reference to the Vostok record, which samples CO2 about every 1,300 years. The chances it would have sampled a single 50 year event is less than 4%, which translates into a confidence level. Usually science works with confidence levels like 85%, or 90% and up. We would need to track MLO for a sizeable portion of a millennium for the usual confidence levels to apply.

What? Where am I? Hello?

Okay, Rog must not be paid to make irrational global warming denial propoganda statements : )

Wait a second... you're about to post something that shows how the CO2 levels are actually normal and caused by natural processes... I'm wise to you Rog... Do I look like an idiot????

>> What? Where am I? Hello?

Additionally, who, how and when?

The truth about Rog, and this will all come out eventually, is that he is only pretending to forecast the weather. In reality, he is actually controlling the weather. Rather than world domination due to his powers, he chooses just to play games so the concensus will go crazy.

Nick,

When are you going to write a book about the events that occur when you come walking out of deserts. I'm thinking a movie. Who will play you?

All kidding aside was a good story. Thanks for sharing.

"The rise in CO2 seen at MLO from 1958 to 2008 is a 50 year event. The period of 420,000 years is a reference to the Vostok record, which samples CO2 about every 1,300 years. The chances it would have sampled a single 50 year event is less than 4%, which translates into a confidence level."

I assume you mean the Mauna Loa Observatory. I was up there in July 1991, and I breathed on the sensor for as long as I could, but no red lights came on. Hiking across the lava fields to get up there was no fun.

--B.G.--

>> I was up there in July 1991, and I breathed on the sensor for as long as I could, but no red lights came on.

Unbelievable! I was working there at that time. You have no idea of the terror of that day. We were all huddled together in a corner singing kumbaya. We all ran for our lives the following morning. Now we know what really happened.

I'm sure there will be a silent black chopper arriving at your location shortly.

George, if you were _really_ there on July 11, 1991, you would know the date significance.

--B.G.--

lol - nice!


search engine to the rescue : )

We need to be more concerned that all the page numbers at the bottom of the screen are going to start wrapping around and eclipse the entire screen.

"When are you going to write a book about the events that occur when you come walking out of deserts. I'm thinking a movie. Who will play you?"

Magical things happen in deserts, and there are many unique characters attached to the land. I still occasionally run into an old prospector. A really cool desert story is "The Man from the Cave," by Colin Fletcher, who captured the flavor of those who wander around theses mystical places. A lot of the story happened in my stomping grounds, and he did explain the the mysterious rock house I had seen many times before reading the book.

As for the movie, I was thinking Jim Carey :)

Nick Said:
From what I remember he said that accurate forecasting comes from "viewing" the earth from above, not from the ground up. Weather is determined by things outside our atmosphere, not what happens down below. He said that if we collect data over decades or even longer, we just need to look at similar high level scenarios and we can model/predict the weather years in advance with a high level of accuracy. He also said that the sun drives weather. I seem to remember he used the term solar winds.

Here is the site my friend Richard Holle runs. Well worth a look for US weather prediction. He bases his forecasts on exactly those principles, and extends them to a consideration of the tides in the atmosphere caused by the Moon.

See whether you find his work useful, there is no charge.

http://www.aerology.com/default.aspx

Wow, there's some great entertainment going on in the UK right now. Here's the skinny on the climate angle to the phone hacking scandal.

Arrested former tabloid editor Neil Wallis is up to his neck in the hacking scandal and his association under contract with the top guys in the Metropolitain Police has brought about the resignations of the Commissioner and his number two John Yates, who ran the anti-terrorist squad. Steve McIntyre, the famous climate auditor got a call from the anti-terrorist squad after climategate broke, trying to find out if he had anything to do with the liberation of emails and data from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

Before climategate broke, Steve M, in his ongoing efforts to get a list of the surface stations Phil Jones had used to construct the HadCRU global temperature series, asked his readers to make FOIA requests to the CRU, asking for copies of the confidentiality agreements they supposedly had in place with the countries which had supplied temperature data, and which had been used as the excuse for denying Steve's requests. I chose Cuba, Trinidad and Jamaica.

My FOIA request was denied on the grounds that the confidentiality agreements were themselves confidential, but despite not sharing their data with me, the UEA had no problem handing over my confidential info to the Norfolk police, who interviewed me as a potential suspect in the climategate hacking enquiry, which still hasn't reported, 18 months later.

Now it turns out that the UEA hired a PR firm to help them deal with the negative publicity the contents of the emails caused. Guess which PR guru they got. Yep, Neil Wallis, who was under contract at the time as a 'communications consultant' to assistant commissioner of the MET John Yates, who headed the anti-terrorist squad who called up Steve McIntyre.

More popcorn please.