Climate Change

Occasionally, knowing or learning my occupation, someone will ask what I think about global warming. I always forget, and then only slowly realize, that generally the other person has already made up his/her mind, and is only waiting for me to agree.

Climate is complex—hard to see the forest for the trees. In The Climate Fix, Roger Pielke Jr. provides a good overview of the forest. The book begins with the opening rounds of the public global warming debate, which was kicked off in June of 1988 by a Senator Gore hearing. The memory of that hearing escapes me. But I do recall that later that year was when I first started meeting folks who had already made up their minds.

The scientific debate has never been about predictions. It is about communicating predictability. Recently the debate has been depicted as weather forecasters vs. climate scientists. But weather forecasters are equally as inept as climate scientists at communicating ambiguity (or the lack of it). When I was a student at Penn State, there was a senior forecaster notorious for overstating the prospect of getting a foot of snow. The exaggerated forecast would be broadcast in the evening. The following morning a neophyte would squint into the sunshine while fielding snide telephone queries, Where's the snow? The problem exists in the other direction as well. It'll never happen verifies as a wise and gutsy forecast every time, except for when it does happen.

In the sidebar is a link to Roger Pielke Sr.'s Climate Science blog. I've enjoyed reading the guest posts there by Hendrik Tennekes. Professor Tennekes' course on turbulence was a valuable introduction to a different way of thinking. Exam questions would instruct you to Estimate ... rather than Calculate ... Some students persisted in calculating precise answers. I think maybe they became climate modelers.

I ran across this 1988 article (cookie required) by Hendrik Tennekes discussing predictability. In the two decades since that article was published there have been tremendous advances in understanding uncertainty in weather forecasts. Ensemble forecasts (e.g. the GEFS) try to capture the full range of possibilities, i.e. everything that could go wrong. Sometimes the answer is continued uncertainty, even when the event is only a short time away. Other times the ensembles reveal surprising confidence in the extended outlook. Unfortunately, little of this information about ambiguity (or lack of it) gets communicated to the general public. Weather forecasters criticizing climate scientists for not faithfully communicating predictability is like the pot calling the kettle black. Still, the criticism is warranted. I don't think uncertainty confuses the general public. I think the reluctance to recognize unresolvable uncertainty is what is confusing. Most people can understand that uncertainty about climate change is a cause for concern, not an excuse to be complacent.

Election Lessons

Although the results overall were disappointing, the two Congressional Democrats representing Tucson appear to have survived the barrage of lies aimed at them by special interests. Now that most of the “early” ballots have been verified and counted, both will be returning to Washington. Having weathered the Republican wave, the two Democrats should be recognized nationally (and not just by Keith Olbermann) as truly understanding the concerns of their constituents in southern Arizona. Their expert opinions would provide a counterpoint to the fear and hate that has prevailed in discussions of border issues.

My representative, Gabrielle Giffords, should give some of the credit for her victory to the presence in the race of Libertarian candidate Steven Stoltz, who took about four percent of the total votes. I enjoyed listening to Mr. Stoltz during the debates as he gave calm, concise explanations of the Libertarian positions on the issues. Although I disagree with him on many of those issues, I sometimes found myself nodding in agreement. As best as I can comprehend it, the Tea Party is an awkward marriage of Libertarians and Social Conservatives. Congresswoman Giffords managed to remind at least some of the true Libertarians that they had an option other than the Republican/Tea Party. Pundits are mistaken when they attribute the abating of the Republican wave as it moved west solely to the Hispanic vote. It's also due to the Libertarian streak in the West.

Much has been made of those McCain districts (districts carried by the Republican presidential candidate two years ago) where a Democratic congressional incumbent was running for re-election this year. A few of those incumbent Democrats survived, including Congresswoman Giffords. Two other survivors are in western Pennsylvania, where I grew up, in the middle of the Lake-Effect-Snow Belt (or as Chris Matthews is describing it, the Scranton-to-Oshkosh Belt). In contrast to the West, back in Pennsylvania I don't remember ever hearing about Libertarians. The voters who Democrats need to win back back there could be described as “anti-Libertarian”—conservative on social issues while keeping the faith in public investment. It is a very different situation from the West.

Some, including Chris Matthews, have been discussing what it will take for Democrats to win back voters in the Scranton-Oshkosh Belt. So far the discussion has focused on economic issues. But I think that Democrats also need to understand, and respond to how issues are framed. (See George Lakoff's discussion of framing in the recent election on Huffington Post, along with the comments to Lakoff's post by “Ricktay” and “Olampean.”) Back when the hearings were just starting, Health Care Reform was already being demonized from a variety of perspectives. I'm familiar with a few of the groups who spread Republican propaganda masquerading as advocacy on behalf of the interests of those groups. Paradoxically, that advocacy has harmed the group interests. (For example, see this analysis, A Middling Perspective: Catholic Election Losses?, in the November 3 Common Good Forum at the web site for Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good.) Democrats need to reach swing voters in those groups and remind them that the Republican agenda puts their interests at the bottom of the list of priorities while the policies that they abhor are at the top of the Republican list.

La Niña and Tucson Winter Rain

Soon media attention will focus on the monthly and weekly outlooks from the Climate Prediction Center, which are consistently expecting a possibly moderate to strong La Niña this winter. Much will be said, some of it accurate, about La Niña's effects on Tucson rainfall.

Below is a plot of winter rainfall at the Tucson airport over the last 60 years¹ as a function of sea surface temperature anomalies in the Niño 3.4 region.² The SST anomalies are averaged over five-month periods of November through March, while the precipitation is totaled for the five-month periods.³

The winters are color coded by decade, as labeled. The decade is for the beginning of the 5-month period, so the most recent winter (2009-2010) is included in the 2000's. The two lines are manual fits to the 90th percentiles and the 10th percentiles of the total precip. On each line the abrupt change in slope is intentional, emphasizing aspects of the data distribution that may be overlooked when attention is focused on the means. Noting first the right side of the figure, El Niño is not so much about well-above normal winter rainfall. Very wet winters occur even without El Niño. More striking, especially as you move into the moderate and strong El Niño territory, beyond +1 °C, is the sparsity of winters with rainfall below average (60-year mean 3.89 inches). Last winter's moderate to strong El Niño, at 4.94 inches easily satisfied the “not below average” expectation. Similarly, La Niña's are not the only times to be concerned about the possibility of well-below normal rainfall. Several neutral winters have been well below normal. Attention instead is focused on the complete absence of above normal rainfall for moderate and strong La Niñas. There are two weak La Niña winters that had well-above normal rainfall. Both of these followed moderate to strong El Niños, but by two years, not one. The intervening year was very dry in both cases.

In summary, there will be times this winter, as there are in every winter, when the weather pattern shifts to one that favors periods of rain in Tucson. With La Niña these wet patterns will probably be relatively infrequent and/or short-lived. It's very unlikely that the total precipitation for the winter will be above average, but it's plausible that it could be close to average. It's also possible that it could be well below average.

1. Source is the Western Regional Climate Center.


2. Source is the CPC link to the Extended Reconstructed SST (ERSST) anomalies.
   As explained in the CPC updates, the Oceanic Niño Index (ONI) is defined as the three-month running-mean of SST departures in the Niño 3.4 region. Since the ONI is already a 3-month average, the 5-month average for NDJFM, plotted in the figure above, is approximately, but not quite the same as an average of the ONI for NDJ, DJF and JFM, but weighted by (2/5, 1/5, 2/5).


3. Why a 5-month season, instead of 3 months? Because there's not much difference between weather systems that manage to produce rain in Tucson during the “border” months of November and March vs. Tucson rains during the standard meteorological winter of December, January and February. Winter rains in Tucson are often separated by extended dry periods, sometimes a month or more, and so I think the longer period gives a better picture. Years that manage to produce significant rain in November and March deserve the extra credit.

The 1944 Tornado in Greene County

I was sorry to read this morning about the author of the “Ten Mile Creek Country” blog. Only recently one of his older posts caught my eye. That post includes a brief summary about tornadoes that struck Southwestern Pennsylvania on the evening of June 23, 1944. I don't remember having seen before the photo in that post showing the devastation at Chartiers (Lat. 39.961N, Lon. 80.051W). Over the years I probably heard bits and pieces about twisters, but didn't connect them. I recall seeing 30 or 40 years ago a map of paths of deadly tornadoes across the entire country. There were just a few short lines in Southwestern Pennsylvania—anemic compared to the major events farther west. That particular graphic may have been misleading.

Since coming across the “Ten Mile Creek Country” post, I've been searching online for more information. The closest thing to the original surveys is the Monthly Weather Review report on tornadoes during 1944. That report references a survey by the Weather Bureau in Pittsburgh. The tornado in Greene County was part of a path of destruction that extended 80 miles from near Wellsburg [between Wheeling and Steubenville, on the West Virginia side of the Ohio] to western Maryland. That path was flanked by three parallel paths: two on the north and one on the south. According to MWR, “Observers who witnessed the paths of the tornadoes from the air stated that there were some meanderings but the general direction was from northwest to southeast, and the paths looked as though huge rollers had flattened everything in their way.” It should be noted that before crossing into Greene County, the storm would have passed over very rural parts of Washington County. Then near Chartiers, it would have encountered surface elevations rapidly fluctuating from about 800 feet along the South Fork of Tenmile Creek to over 1100 feet on the surrounding hills.

The Pennsylvania Weather Book has a description of this event. Some of the details, including the F4 rating, are apparently based on a review published by Grazulis in 1993. The online follow-up by Grazulis, The Tornado Project, lists the Chartiers tornado among the deadliest tornadoes in Pennsylvania. I don't have access to the 1993 publication, and thus no knowledge about its conclusions regarding path length. But it is interesting that the associated time (6:11 pm) provided at the online site corresponds to the start of the path at Wellsburg. In Greene County the time was, according to online newspaper reminiscences, "a little after 8 p.m."

A more recent post on the “Ten Mile Creek Country” blog alerted readers to the availability of aerial photographs covering Pennsylvania. Comparing a photo of the area taken 5 years before the tornado with one taken 14 years after, you can see which structures were destroyed. Online newspaper reminiscences record that one of the structures destroyed was the company store. This might explain an observation from Hiller, 7 miles to the northeast, where strips of clothing fell from the sky (newspaper summary at Glenn Tunney's site). The terminus of the debris would seem to offer pre-radar confirmation, if it were not already obviously the case, that the Greene County tornado was associated with a large, long-lived, rotating supercell.

Arizona's New Law

(aka SB1070, “Arizona's Immigration Law”)

Besides moral concerns by religious leaders and potential legal problems with the new law, there is the simple question of whether the new law makes sense—whether it is a valuable addition. You only have to read the first paragraph of SB1070 to understand what the problem is. The preamble states that the intent of the law is “attrition through enforcement.” It is not about attritting violent crime or drug smuggling, trespassing, vandalism, theft. Things that have been cited as “reasons why Arizona had to do something,” the new law does nothing about. By diverting scarce resources, it may even worsen those problems. If the total number of people in Arizona without proper documentation were to be reduced by half, while at the same time the volume of illegal drugs passing through Arizona, the incidence of violence on both sides of the border, and the number of desperate migrants dying in the desert heat were all to double: the authors of this law would claim success. It is truly an absurd law.

The Bridge on the River Mon

Pennsylvania is building a link in the Mon-Fayette Expressway around my old hometown. The construction is mostly “out in the country.” Some might well question how this investment will be paid for, or whether it is the wisest priority for infrastructure. Leaving aside those concerns, it is an amazing engineering and construction project.
Driving up-river from Bridgeport (see July 4 post), trees eventually close in on both sides of the highway. The old industrial site of Alicia has become a forest. Though signs warn of construction ahead, it takes awhile for a glimpse of the columns to appear through the trees. At the construction site there is a clearing on the left. Immediately you drive back into the forest.
The picture below was taken from across the river, on the Washington County side, looking back towards Fayette County on the other side. Bridgeport and Brownsville are on the far side, 2 miles to the left.

The foreground park is a recent development, having been occupied for decades by a large slate (coal mine refuse) dump. Near the middle of the picture, above the park bench, the trees are on the far side of the river; the dark horizontal swath marks the rail line. Hidden from view is the mouth of Rush Run, which reaches the far side of the Mon River through a large culvert under both the highway and the railroad. On hot humid days deep down beside Rush Run it would be easy to imagine being in a tropical jungle. Rush Run Hollow extends back to the right. Turning attention to the pillar with several layers of scaffolding, and the hillside behind it, Alicia Heights Road climbs steeply up that hill. There is a good view from there looking back down on the construction site. There is a similar view from the construction site's web camera, which is located near the right edge of the photo above. A half mile beyond the hilltop is Telegraph Road, where there will be an interchange. Beyond that interchange is construction on an equally impressive complex of bridge structures that will carry the Expressway about 100 feet above Bull Run Road and about 200 feet above Dunlap Creek.
A little over 100 years ago Rush Run Hollow was briefly the site of another bustling transportation corridor. John K. Gates in The Beehive Coke Years: A Pictorial History of Those Times, includes on page 10 a picture of “Sarah, the town that almost was.” Gates relates, “A railroad spur line was laid down from Brownsville - a distance of several miles.” The spur line ran up through Rush Run Hollow, climbing 350 feet in a little over two miles. You can still see the grade at several places in the hollow. At the end of the spur the construction was far enough along that “Sarah” was looking like a typical mine town, complete with housing for the workers. But then, Gates continues, “... someone discovered that the coal didn't belong to Frick. The tipple was demolished, the hole [mine shaft] filled in, all the buildings (including the houses) were torn down, and the rail line removed.”

The Monsoon Is Here

About an hour ago I took a walk around the block, and felt the first few drops of this year's monsoon. It's still 97F at my house, which is only 7 degrees off the afternoon high. Whatever the low-level dewpoints have been, it doesn't matter. The atmosphere is unstable enough, although the very light showers have now dissipated as fast as they flared up over an hour ago.

In recent years the monsoon onsets have often come with odd, freakish upper-air patterns. This year is different. It is straightforward. The subtropical ridge is setting up to the north, putting us in southeast flow.

Last week was equally straightforward. Last Thursday afternoon I was briefly in moderate rain while driving along Broadway near Alvernon. But then we were still in the westerlies--not the monsoon.

You don't need an artificial index to define when the monsoon starts this year. It's here, today.

Bridgeport

A couple of weeks ago I visited in Pennsylvania. It's always hard to remember how oppressively humid some summer days can be back there. What Tucson considers monsoon levels of moisture, they describe as refreshingly dry.

On one of those sunny days with dewpoints well into the 60's, I drove through the Bridgeport section of Brownsville. Traces of the former industrial glory continue to fade. One portion of Bridgeport was the Bridgeport Patch: mine-company houses built between the railroad tracks and the river. About 10 years ago most of the houses were still there, including the one where my Dad grew up. Now it looks like over half of the Patch houses have been demolished. Even the 17th St. crossing is blocked. Access to the Patch is via a new road named Camino Drive, which crosses the tracks several blocks earlier. Camino Drive curves left through the old rail yard, then approaches the remnants of Bridgeport Patch from what would have been the middle of the roundhouse. As it passes through the rail yard not far from the riverbank, Camino Drive provides an unobstructed scenic view of Krepp's Knob across the river.

John Camino was not the only young man from Brownsville to die in Vietnam, but he was the first, and he was from Bridgeport. I remember the large-type headline in the Brownsville Telegraph. He was about in eighth grade when I was in first grade. I vaguely remember him as a patrol-boy standing at the front of the school bus, flirting long-distance with the patrol-girl in the back. It's nice that Bridgeport will always remember.