Not Four Years

I was wrong (Monessen post in June) expecting that in the kinds of places where I grew up there would be enough wives voting to save the country from a Donald Trump administration.

I agree with Josh Marshall's TPM opinion that the corruption will be endless; all Americans should be afraid of and on watch for that. The Trumps' professions of noble priorities will divert some attentions for a period of time, but the diversions will not remain effective for most people for four years.

Fall Rain

Nice rainbows from about 5:30 - 5:45 PM last evening, near the end of and just after a dump of about half an inch. A faint secondary bow can be seen near the furnace exhaust stack. A short time before this photo, while it was still raining, both bows extended fully off to the northeast.

Tucson airport (misspelled Tuscon at the weather.gov site) has now had 1.29 inches so far in September. (Mine now stands at an even 2 inches.) My post last year discussed the September-plus-October rain for TUS. I won't repeat that, except for a short listing of a few data points already plotted in that post, limited to just the years where the previous winter had been a strong El Niño. The numbers (October Oceanic Niño Index; September plus October Rainfall, inches) are the same as described and plotted in last year's post.

Year	ONI	Rain
1958	0.5	1.42
1973	-1.7	0.00
1983	-0.6	9.26
1992	-0.1	0.97
1998	-1.2	1.34
2016	-0.5	1.29+

This year's October ONI is based on the CPC consensus forecast--currently expecting borderline neutral through the fall and winter. The year 1983 did in fact see a lot of rain in September-October, and it did follow an El Niño winter, but by October of that year the ONI was about where it is now expected to be this year. Nevertheless, it has become a legend about September-October 1983 that it was an El Niño year.
Given that history, it's a bit surprising that so far this fall there have been no Tucson sightings of El Niño laggings. Although it's very unlikely that we could get a significant tropical system over the next ten days, after that there is a period of a few weeks when the potential is high for another tropical system to affect Tucson. If that were to happen, I predict an outbreak of laggings that will quickly escalate into a full epidemic of El Niño year!

Monessen

Though overshadowed by other news yesterday, there was a speech given in Monessen, Pennsylvania. The scene was bizarre, with Donald Trump standing amongst bales of scrap aluminum. I guess that making America great means bundling more scrap. Yesterday's event was held exactly thirty years since steel production in Monessen ended. (If there was a betrayal of workers' loyalty, it happened on Ronald Reagan's watch.) I don't know much about Alumisource, but I do know that the coke plant portion of the old steel mill is operated today by ArcelorMittal, is manned by United Steelworkers, and is fueling steel production (not scrap processing) in Cleveland. The Clinton campaign should counter by pledging continued bipartisan efforts to protect today's steel-producing jobs from foreign dumping.
Long ago I twice belonged to the United Steelworkers union, including a summer at Monessen's coke plant. Some memories about times that will never return:
There were about 14 of us college students hired for that summer. (Probably everyone had some connection. My connection was that my Dad served in the Air Force Reserve with the Human Resources manager for the steel mill.) We were hired to replace about 7 regular workers (including union leaders) who had been dismissed for organizing a work slow-down. I was worried that the year-round workers would resent this. But one of them assured me it was not a problem. An eventual ruling would reinstate the dismissed workers with back pay (he was right about that). In the meantime, they got the summer off, we had jobs, and the union had made the point that more workers were needed to safely satisfy production goals. I'm not sure it wasn't a game that all sides were playing all along.
There was extra pay (about 40 cents per hour) for laboring on top of the coke ovens. Staying cool up there meant moving fast, and I wasn't good at that. But on hot humid days, the older guys would decide that job wasn't worth it. So it passed down to the guy with the lowest seniority. Hot humid days outside here in Tucson feel like those days on top of the coke ovens, except that here there is always air-conditioned comfort to look forward to inside.
I was working the evening that Richard Nixon delivered his resignation speech. We were taking a scheduled break, in a space at the center of the coke-oven batteries. There was a radio. The music stopped, and a news special report was being introduced. One of the regular workers, a younger guy not much older than me at the time, looked at his watch and noted that it was time to get back to work. He was right. But the crew chief saw my disappointment and said, No, this is important. We have to listen to the beginning of this. So we listened to the first few sentences of the speech, and then got back to work.
I imagine that the guy who was looking at his watch may be voting for Trump in November. But his wife will be voting for Hillary.

Will Tucson Get Beyond The Middle?

[Update March 30: Tucson didn't even make it to the middle.] Back at the end of September, I showed a scatterplot of the combined total November through March precipitation at Tucson airport for each of the previous 66 years versus the Oceanic Niño Index (ONI, defined by the Climate Prediction Center) for January, i.e. for the middle of each of those five-month winters. I noted back then that, of the eight previous winters for which the January ONI was greater than +1.0 (i.e., moderate-to-strong El Niños), all eight of those winters were in the upper one-third of the five-month precipitation totals. Below is the same plot, but now with an additional point, labeled 2016 so far.

What can be said for this strong El Niño winter is that at least this year's five-month total won't be in the bottom one-third (assuming that we'll get at least a third of an inch between now and the end of March). [Didn't happen! Only 0.11 inch from mid-February through March.] After the jet breaks under the West Coast ridge near the end of next week, it would not be too crazy to hope for an inch of rain in the last week of February, and then another inch in March. That would put the five-month total just barely above the middle 1/3—comparable to the 1957-1958 El Niño winter, but not even as good as last winter, and nowhere near the 1997-1998 winter that might have been dreamed of.
(The Tucson total precipitation since October 1, 4.59 inches, is still almost an inch above normal. But half of this year's since-October-1-so-far total fell in the month of October.)

Communicating Uncertainty

It's been a week since the heavy snows began. On Sunday, in a story about the Pennsylvania Turnpike reopening, a Turnpike official was quoted as saying that the situation worsened last Friday evening with the arrival of a storm that started earlier and farther west than initially anticipated. (Westbound motorists became stranded on the east side of the Turnpike's Allegheny Tunnel. This link to a wiki article about the tunnel includes a view from the final curve on what I remember as a grim uphill climb to the tunnel's eastern entrance.)
After reading the quote from the turnpike official, I googled "Louis Uccellini" because I remembered seeing a brief television clip showing the director of the National Weather Service cautioning uncertainty about the northern edge of the snow. Would that the local forecast offices in Pennsylvania had been echoing the caution of their Director. Instead, until the last minute, their public forecasts reflected a confident dismissal of the few models that were suggesting the possibility of a rapid northward advance of the heavy snow.
On Monday a Turnpike official clarified that, despite initial anticipations, their crews had reacted and had been doing everything they could to keep their road plowed and treated. On Tuesday the Turnpike officials and the Governor received new rounds of (undeserved, I think) criticism. Last Friday they were caught between a rock and a hard place. Even if an omniscient private forecaster had successfully urged closing the Bedford-New Stanton section of the Turnpike late Friday afternoon or early Friday evening, Turnpike officials would have been criticized by the high volume of travelers who had chosen to escape DC at the last minute, having timed their escape based on the increasingly confident and specific public forecasts, and so not expecting the possibility of being blockaded at Bedford or Breezewood. If I had been traveling west from Washington last Friday, I would not have cut it that close. But then, I'm a meteorologist.