wattsupwiththat.com/2011/.../massive-drifts-and-late-melting-snowp... - Cached
Jun 11, 2011 – (Updated from post http://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2011/06/10/.... This heavy snow pack is blamed on AGW, AGW can do anything but good. ..... IMHO, we have seen some of both in the western US this year & I think ...
earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=51429 - Cached
In June 2011, above Sioux City, Iowa, the Missouri River Basin experienced the ... heavy snowpack on the plains, near-record snowpack in the western U.S. ...
www.predictiveservices.nifc.gov/outlooks/NSAW_REPORT_2011.pdf
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - Quick View
On April 19-21, 2011 fire, weather and climate specialists convened virtually via ... Western U.S., except in areas experiencing extended drought. ... The existing heavy snowpack will melt slowly under these conditions. ...
stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/.../near-record-cold-air-and-wa... - Cached
May 19, 2011 – ... Epic Snowpack To The Western US. Scott says: May 19, 2011 at 1:56 pm ... see that the foothills west of town are buried in heavy snow. ...
www.worldweatheronline.com › Images - Cached
5 days ago – Blue dominates most of the western United States in this color-coded map, ... By June 2011, the heavy rain had translated into heavy runoff. ...
www.grandviewoutdoors.com/.../2011/.../heavy-snowpack-delays-w... - Cached
Jun 23, 2011 – A heavy snowpack has delayed the annual, 6000-year-old spring migration of most of a herd of pronghorn antelope in western Wyoming, ... AR Guns & Hunting Summer 2011 Available Now .... Turkey Hunting · About Us · Contact Us · Press Releases · Advertise · Guidelines · Privacy Policy · Site Map ...
www.tickencounter.org/prevention/tick_bite_protection_action_plan - Cached
Mar 7, 2011 – But in the eastern and mid-western USA, it starts with ticks left over from last year. The heavy snowpack from the winter of 2011 is finally ...
www.infobarrel.com › Geography › Countries › United States - Cached
Jul 8, 2011 – With the heavy snowpack during the winter of 2010/2011, many western mountains and the plains were deeply covered. Due to the cool spring, ...
article.wn.com/.../2011/.../Record_Snowpacks_Could_Threaten_We... - Cached
May 22, 2011 – photo: photo: US Coastguard / Petty Officer 2nd Class Bill Colclough. ... Late snow in Rockies could create bad floods out West2011-05-19 ... concerned about the heavy snowpack and the potential for historic flooding, ...
www.abqjournal.com/.../2011/.../western-us-mountains-still-snowy... - Cached
May 27, 2011 – Epic snowpack in parts of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, ... May 27, 2011 5:37 a.m. — Western US Mountains Still Snowy ...
www.summitpost.org/some-thoughts-on-early-season.../612206 - Cached
Jump to Snowpack Conditions Update: ... this year's snowpack in the Western US was a monster ... The result is a heavy snowpack, one of the heaviest in ...
USGS-led study finds that recent unusual snowpack declines in the Rockies may signal a fundamental shift from precipitation to temperature as dominant influence
12 June 2011
A new study led by the US Geological Survey (USGS) suggests that snowpack declines in the Rocky Mountains over the last 30 years are unusual compared to the past few centuries. The paper is published in Science.
Over the past millennium, late-20th century snowpack reductions are almost unprecedented in magnitude across the northern Rocky Mountains, and in their north-south synchrony across the cordillera. Both the snowpack declines and their synchrony result from unparalleled springtime warming due to positive reinforcement of the anthropogenic warming by decadal variability.
...Together these events may signal a fundamental shift from precipitation to temperature as the dominant influence on snowpack in the North American Cordillera, with significant consequences for regional water supplies.
—Pederson et al.
Runoff from winter snowpack accounts for 60% to 80% of the annual water supply for more than 70 million people living in the western United States.
USGS scientists, with partners at the Universities of Arizona, Washington, Wyoming, and Western Ontario, led the study that evaluated the recent declines using snowpack reconstructions from 66 tree-ring chronologies, looking back 500 to more than 1,000 years. The network of sites was chosen strategically to characterize the range of natural snowpack variability over the long term, and from north to south in the Rocky Mountains.
With a few exceptions (the mid-14th and early 15th centuries), the snowpack reconstructions show that the northern Rocky Mountains experience large snowpacks when the southern Rockies experience meager ones, and vice versa. Since the 1980s, however, there were simultaneous declines along the entire length of the Rocky Mountains, and unusually severe declines in the north.
Snowpack in the northern Rocky Mountains has shrunk at an unusually rapid pace during the past 30 years, according to a new study.
The decline is "almost unprecedented" over the past 800 years, say researchers who used tree rings to reconstruct a centuries-long record of snowpack throughout the entire Rocky Mountain range.
Their work, published yesterday in the journal Science, suggests that the plummeting snowpack could have serious consequences for more than 70 million people who depend on water from the runoff-fed Columbia, Colorado and Missouri rivers.
"The Northern Rockies have shown the greatest response to warming in terms of snowpack decline," said lead author Greg Pederson, a research scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey's Northern Rocky Mountain Research Center. "Temperature, especially now, seems to be undercutting snowpack."
That's a marked shift from the pattern that predominated from A.D. 1200 to the 1980s: When snowpack was low in the Northern Rockies, it was high in the Southern Rockies -- and vice versa.
But for the past 30 years or so, snowpack in both regions has shrunk. Pederson and his colleagues pin the blame on warmer springs driven by a combination of rising greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere and natural climate variation.
"In the last 30 years, there's been this growing synchrony where the whole West is getting warmer," said Philip Mote, director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute at Oregon State University. "That part is not new, but they point out a few other occasions in the last millennium where there has been low snowpack in the West were also periods that were unusually warm. That's a pretty strong message: that historically, low snowpack and warm spring go hand in hand." This time, no return to cooler period
Tim Barnett, a climatologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said the new results appear to agree with his earlier work that used climate models to show humans' greenhouse gas emissions have contributed to declining snowpack in the western United States.
"I think we get some idea of what natural variability is in the snowpack," said Barnett, though he noted his expertise lies in climate models, not tree-ring studies. "The fact that things have sort of gone south here in the last 30 to 40 years [in the new study] pretty much jibes with what we've done."
Meanwhile, Pederson said he sees an important difference between modern conditions and the brief 14th- and 15th-century periods of warm temperatures and low snowpack along the Columbia and Missouri river headwaters.
"They were eventually followed by cooling," he said. "Now, alas, we don't expect to return to a cooler period."
-?
( arent you expecting the unexpected?)
__________________
Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.-- Ovid (43 B.C.-A.D. 18)
Things ain't what they used to be and probably never was. ~Will Rogers
Tomorrow hopes we have learned something from yesterday.
"Shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's 'bold new imaginative program' with its proper age?" "Under the tousled boyish haircut it is still old Karl Marx—first launched a century ago.
There is nothing new in the idea of a government being Big Brother to us all. R.Reagan-1960
What these guys don't tell you is how shaky their simulation modeling is. See a post I started recently on global warming news. There has been a new study published based on ten years of NASA satellite data that shows that the heat radiation functions in the global warming models is dramatically wrong. Much more heat is radiated and much sooner in the cycle than the models assume. What does this mean?
The earth is viewed as a thermdynamic system. Heat is input and heat is radiated so a steady state is achieved. If you perturb the system -- change some properties -- the system seeks and achieves a different steady state. In the present case, the system is perturbed by increasing the concentration in the atmosphere of greenhouse cases (CO2, methane, etc), the system heats up. The $65000 question is . . . . how much does the system heat up. Science is about numbers, quantification. To answer this question, you need a good equation to represent the heat radiation function. The existing models -- per the results of this study -- have a p1ss poor equation that leads to dramatic errors. This is pretty important. It is a pretty fundamental short coming. It affects all simulations. And what do we have other than predictions and simulations?
The science is immature and highly speculative. I don't see this as a moral failing on the part of these scientists, but I do think they should be more forthcoming about the uncertainty and provisional nature of any specific findings. I certainly think the science is way to immature to be undertaking dramatic policy initiatives. This recent study is a good object lesson to that point. Al Gore says "The science on this is settled." Settled, and they don't even have a reasonably accurate heat radiation equation build into their thermodynamic models? The science isn't settled. It behooves scientists to be humble and to keep constantly in front of them the contingency of their conclusions. The history of science is replete -- I repeat replete -- with examples of big time errors in state of the art findings. It is best to bear this in mind.
As an example from early in the 20th century of a state-of-the-art scientific conclusion that turned out to be dramatically wrong. Variable stars are known to have a characteristic relationship between their absolute brightness magnitude and their period of variability. You can use this as a measuring stick of distance. You know how bright you see them, from their variability period you can determine their absolute magnitude, from the difference between their observed magnitude and actual absolute magnitude you can calculate distance from here to the subject star. Such variable stars were observed in a smudge of light we now call the Andromeda Galaxy, and it was calculated this variable star was in our body of stars we now call the Milky Way Galaxy. We didn't see variable stars in other galaxies because they were too far away to resolve with our instruments then. But then it was determined there were different catagories of variable stars having different absolute magnitude functions. This altered the calculation of this distance to at least two times as far away, and then it was no longer plausible to deem this patch of light to be part and parcel of our patch of light called the Milky Way Galaxy. This had to be a vast separate, self-contained sea of stars independent from our self-contained sea of stars. And oh, by the way, there were a bunch of other of these objects out there too. This minor correction and tweeking altered our view of the universe from one single soup bowl containing everything to millions of separate soup bowls. I think Edwin Hubble made this discovery/reasoning in about 1924. Hubble went on to articulate the use of red shift and from this to deduce the rapidly expanding universe and the big bang theory. Total, absolutely totally different view of the cosmos all started from reevaluating what variable star periodic variation patterns are telling us.
Be humble, o ye scientists!, and contemplate the errors your forebears have made!
Actually, I'm probably attributing too much to Hubble. I looked briefly on Wikipedia, and I think someone else suggested the red shift as a measure of velocity based on analogy to the doppler effect. Still, I do think Hubble made the variable star measuring stick correction.
The science is immature and highly speculative. I don't see this as a moral failing on the part of these scientists, but I do think they should be more forthcoming about the uncertainty and provisional nature of any specific findings. I certainly think the science is way to immature to be undertaking dramatic policy initiatives. This recent study is a good object lesson to that point. Al Gore says "The science on this is settled." Settled, and they don't even have a reasonably accurate heat radiation equation build into their thermodynamic models? The science isn't settled. It behooves scientists to be humble and to keep constantly in front of them the contingency of their conclusions. The history of science is replete -- I repeat replete -- with examples of big time errors in state of the art findings. It is best to bear this in mind.
I agree yep -
Quote:
What these guys don't tell you is how shaky their simulation modeling is
shaky very shacky imo( those tree ring studys i read could be effected by sheep, insects( some other variables) etc. Read & liked your story on the other thread on global warming news to.
But i think politices,( its a shame) money( personal biases that limit there sciences to) etc come into play in these things /sciences, for some( not all)- are not as pure as a new fallin snow & out just seeking the truth, no matter where the data may lead imo.
( i read kat sung posts ,to feel normal & to tell mmyself see- yer not so paranoid )
__________________
Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.-- Ovid (43 B.C.-A.D. 18)
Things ain't what they used to be and probably never was. ~Will Rogers
Tomorrow hopes we have learned something from yesterday.
"Shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's 'bold new imaginative program' with its proper age?" "Under the tousled boyish haircut it is still old Karl Marx—first launched a century ago.
There is nothing new in the idea of a government being Big Brother to us all. R.Reagan-1960
New study says recent snowpack decline in the west unusal?
um & recently?
Image: National Park Service
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