Arctic Thaw this Winter

One thing it means is that parts of Europe are having a very cold late winter period.

I understand, warnings went out for England to brace itself for a cold snap.

20cm (8in) of snow fell in the county of Kent overnight 26th-27th February 2018. The main roads were all passable by mid-afternoon, remarkably.

That is remarkable,... They were calling the storm 'The Beast from the East'.

Another 3-4cm (~ 1.5in) fell overnight in the county of Kent 27-28th Feb 2018. It seems to have encouraged road users to go on foot in urban areas rather than use motorised transport. Maybe it's the start of a trend.

One might expect another 3-10cm (up to 4in) over the coming 24h, according to weather forecasts. There's a nasty-looking feature in the Bay of Biscay just west of France heading northwards and exactly what it is going to do is not clear at this time.

More later!

Thanks for the update...

Not that this is a challenge, on who can top who...

My girlfriend sister and her family lives in Amarillo, Texas, which is located on the High Plains, it always windy there, about 5 years ago, they has something like 2 feet of snow, (Moist air from the Gulf Meets cold air coming from the Artic.) They sent a picture of their deck buried in snow,... 18" or something.

Anyways, They didn't have any snow plows (Municipal Trucks with Snowplows or private snow plows), no snow tires, no snow shovels... the area basically just shut down... or at least what could shut down.

In Wisconsin, we live by Lake Michigan, back in 1980 I believe it was 36" but my memory fails me,... of snow in a day... (All lake effect snow, Real light, big fluffy snow flakes.), It was actually drivable, .... if you knew where the road is.

Ok,... it is a competition,... game on...

The strange thing is, we usually get warm weather when it's nasty on your side of the pond. But our weather is nearly identical to yours these couple of days. There's 20 cm in my driveway this morning to shovel, and another 5-10 on the way tomorrow.

Of course for us, the only thing unusual about it is the fact we had little or none until this point.

My girlfriend broke her ankle last week Thursday by slipping on ice, Yesterday it got up to the mid 50's.

The ice has been super bad for us this year too, with the freeze-thaw-freeze... I had a nasty fall myself, went down hard and fast flat on my back - nothing broken luckily. But the shoulder that took the brunt was sore for a week.

I used salt on the driveway this year, which I usually avoid entirely. I've used more salt this season than I have in the last 20 years put together. And finally resorted to coffee grounds as an alternative.... I'm liking it. I'm still finding some doing its job when I shovel off the fresh snow. The fresh supply of grounds is endless and effortless, and as a bonus it won't kill any trees.

This year has been pretty good, I only took the snow blower out maybe 3 times for 4"-12" snowstorms, otherwise yes, the thaw took most of it away.

Its was unfortunate for us, I was traveling the past 4 weeks for work. She actually slipped on a sidewalk in front of the accountant that does her taxes.

Wow,... you must drink a lot of coffee. I should try that... but then I'd have to pick up the pods...

Coffee grounds instead of salt for sidewalk ice treatment does sound interesting. Does it melt the ice or just provide traction?

In theory the dark color of the grounds should pick up more solar heat and help to melt. In practice below a certain temperature it just sits there providing traction. It was looking really dry on the surface during our colder weather.

Today we're right about the freezing mark, just finished my shovel (1 hr 50 minutes- quite a bit and heavy) and compared one rut coffee grounds vs one rut salt in the end of the lane - put down a couple of days before this snow. The coffee rut is melting pretty quickly and looking a bit of a mess, but traction is decent. The salt rut is the icier of the two, once the snow is removed. That's because the stuff melts a bit of ice then dissolves and runs away. The pooled water refreezes and you're back where you started. I was using fine chipped rock one year, and had the same problem. It sinks during the thaw and the puddle refreezes over it.

In theory the dark color of the grounds should pick up more solar heat and help to melt.

Some golf courses do that with charcoal.

What an amazing ankle.

The movie is coming out next week... right after the novel....

Expecting another 10-15cm (4-6in) Friday 2nd March 2018...

Curious,... how's the grocery stores shelves holding out. Was there a run on food to stock up on?

In one particular store, which isn't a statistically significant sample, ready-baked bread began to run low at one point. Apart from that, no problem.

As of Tuesday 6th March 2018 the snow had all melted away, leaving some upland areas at risk of flooding. There has been very little in the national news channels, though.

..."High temperatures such as these occur in the Arctic when amplified, wavy patterns in the jet stream — conveyer belts of wind that carry heat and water vapor around the planet — interact with strong storms in the northern Atlantic Ocean, James Overland, an oceanographer with PMEL, told Live Science.

"They're bringing warm air and moisture from the south into the central Arctic," he said.

"We've seen something like this once every ten years in the past, but this is the second major example of this happening in the last couple of years. What's different this time is that we have less ice and thinner ice in the Arctic. When you bring warmer air north, it doesn't cool off as fast as it used to," Overland explained.

Sea-ice cover in the Arctic is thinning faster than expected and reached record lows in recent years. By 2017, it had declined so much that NOAA scientists declared in the agency's annual Arctic Report Card that the region would likely never again return to its "reliably frozen" status of the past. Without those masses of cooling sea ice, warm air brought to the Arctic can penetrate further inland than it ever did before and can stay warmer longer — which drives additional melting, according to Overland.

"We may be losing ice in the Arctic faster than we thought," he said."...

https://www.livescience.com/61864-arctic-temperatures-record-high.html

Just wait the Solar Minimum is coming, that will cool it down again probably....

https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/news-articles/solar-minimum-is-coming

According to ice core analysis, the variation in temperatures has been rather flat for the last 100,000 years. Before that, up to the end of the ice record 250,000 years ago it was much more extreme. So, we've been enjoying a quiet spell for so long we thought it was normal.

Well, it could be normal. Throw in a mega volcano every once in a while and it gets much worse. We have yet to see what this pretty blue ball is capable of throwing our way.

There is plenty of fossil evidence of the water level making massive shifts, but not recently. Give it some time. We will see that again.

That wall that Trump wants needs to be on the coastlines.

I'll pick a snowstorm over a hurricane any day...

I'd rather sweat than shiver...

I see your problem,... you didn't pack correctly for the northern winters...

Well of course the wall needs to protect the beaches as well!

What, do you really think government denials of mermaid existence might actually prevent their illegal immigration? That would be a cheaper option, can we just extend that to all those we don't want to immigrate here?

.

^.._{For that one of you(...or perhaps maybe even those of you) unwilling or unable to perceive a satyrical or otherwise less than simply-straight-forward tone, this is your notice that what was written here was said in jest. Find some other excuse for having your nose bent out of shape. Someone might be walking on your lawn....quick, go make sure no one is on your lawn.}

Mermaid, schmermaid, it's the giant squid you'll be wanting to wall out!

That Arctic ice looks crazy thin. From what I read this winter, the erratic movement of the Polar Vortex and arctic air down into Texas etc earlier this winter is at least in part a consequence of the ice reduction - a solid arctic ice mass stabilizes these polar air currents, it was said.

We had a strange and mostly snowless winter here in the atlantic northeast, with thaws 2-3 times a week and going up to/above 50 F/10 C, and very strong southerly winds - now that was the strangest part, because we usually only get southerlies with tropical storms/hurricanes and that in the fall, certainly not in the winter. So there was something different going on for sure.

As to what it means for the summer, I'm thinking "hot and early" for most of you in the USA? Read somewhere else today that spring is expected to be 20 days earlier in the southeast.

For our summer, it probably means a "Manhattan" or two.. or three.. cracking off Greenland's ice shelf and bobbing down to chill our drinks.

Last winter where I live, was the coldest and snowiest in 25 years, with 3 times going below zero (ºF).

This year, we have had one of the warmest and sunniest winters.

I have no reason to believe that many other areas over the world have the same thing going on, at least to some degree.

With such temperature erraticity, how can we hope to come up with a representative sample of a global temperature?

I believe they take an average or some such ordinary math.

I'm not so sure it is as simple as you suggest. Perhaps if all the measurements had been taken by the same method at the same times of day in the same substance in all the same places spread uniformly over the Earth.

Currently numerous adjustments are made for things like different methods of measurement and being near a place with heat island effect. Other adjustments are used to compensate for places where measurements are not available. Additionally the sea surface temperature meeasurments are sea water temperatures while others are air temperatures.

Oh, if only somebody could explain why and how climate data gets accepted into an average measurement. And those so called satellite measurements, nobody understands what these measurements mean or how they are performed. I mean where and how does a satellite place a thermocouple or other thermometer anywhere while hurtling high above the Earth's atmosphere. It's unnatural I tell you.

Then there's the myth of more data always being better. They're all outliers skewing the data.

Wait, so there are only two choices?

Why must it be either simple or nefarious?

The sarcasm is clearly evident without emoji help.

I understood your sarcastic pleading for someone to explain acceptance of surface measurements and satellite temperature measurements as intended as ridicule of my statement that the calculation of global temperature is not that simple.

I don't know outright that that was the intent, but is seems likely. I also don't know outright that you consider my claim that the calculation is not so simple to be an attack on the credibility of the end result, but that also seems likely.

To be fair, I do believe significant error probably remains in the calculated values. There have been several sizable adjustments to the record published. I suspect if you compared the adjustments to the previously stated confidence interval, it would suggest significant bias towards over confidence....but that could be my own bias at play as I haven't yet done any digging to that end.

Anyway, my point is there is a huge nonquantized range of possibilities for reality outside of just the two options of either simple or nefarious plot.

<sarcasm circuitry disabled>

You are very correct that a calculation of global temperature is not always as simple as taking a simple sum of data points and averaging them. At the same time a simple sum and averaging of data points is not necessarily an invalid metric of global temperature. It certainly can be valid in one application but not another. It all depends on the details. Most of the time for a simplified news report or web blog these boring critical details are not clearly declared and thus it is very easy to misapply them. Nonetheless they are not invalid, they just have an unstated uncertainty tolerance.

<sarcasm circuitry engaged but not active>

Perhaps we are trying to put a representative figure on the wrong thing...a derivative of the more fundamental thing about which we should be concerned.

Maybe we would be better served by a few satellites in very high orbits getting representative measures of inbound radiation and outbound radiation so that a range for change in total energy might be calculated.

But what if people refuse to believe satellite data?

I'm certain some people will have doubts about the data. It woulf be weird if everyone just accepted everything they were told without question.

My point was that if the fundamental concern is that the Earth is not radiating away as much energy as it is receiving plus energy from internal decay, then it might be useful to have a good idea of how much energy is coming in and going out.

I know we have general ideas about this, but I don't know of any widespread actual measurements taken.

Here is an explanation of how it's done:

https://www.carbonbrief.org/explainer-how-do-scientists-measure-global-temperature

See the graph comparing the four datasets that are used to track global temperature.

Although they don't record data from all the same places, they nonetheless concur on the general trend fairly well. Big task, yes. But is there a problem coming up with a representative sample of global temperature? Evidently not.

The temperature trends are averages over decades. Year to year can be quite erratic; what counts is the average over a long period. But it does seem to be more erratic than "normal" the last few years.

Well my local forecast has been updated to account for the early arrival of pack ice. The map for Feb 26 showed our waters clear of ice, but then the wind changed...

Interesting blog entry about the ice conditions off Greenland. They too felt the impact of the (unprecedented? afaik) round of southerly storms this winter. Incidentally, 2017 was an ice+ year for Greenland balking the multi-year trend of massive ice loss, due to the impact of the wayward hurricane Nicole last season bringing them snow.

https://robertscribbler.com/2018/02/26/a-large-area-of-open-water-forms-in-the-melting-sea-ice-north-of-greenland-during-february/