Winter Rain

Here is an update of a figure that I have posted and discussed several times over the past nine years or so. The running total for this 2019-2020 winter, which when it ends will be in a new decade, is off to a good start. As of mid-December this winter has already surpassed the entire, disappointing, strong El Niño winter of 2015-2016.

This winter's ONI is expected to remain on the warm side of neutral territory, just less than the +0.5 threshold that is used to categorize El Niño. This winter's data point may end up shifted a little to the right or left, but probably not by much--the consensus of dynamical model forecasts of (sea surface temperatures that go into calculating) ONI has verified well over the last few years. The only question is how far the point will move up on the vertical scale of precipitation. It would be a shame if this winter ended clustered with the red data points from the 1950's and 2000's. Instead, given the head start, I'll be optimistic that by the end of March this winter will be comparable to 2018-2019.

Hot July

Hot July

In a few days the Weather Service in Tucson will issue a summary specifying, to the nearest tenth of a degree Fahrenheit, exactly how much the average high temperature this July exceeded the current 30-year average. While that number alone should make eyeballs pop, consider also the frequencies of the highs that will have contributed to this month's average. At the Tucson Airport through July 28, the number of days with high temperatures: 1-110, 1-109, 3-108, 1-107, 3-106, 4-105, 2-104, 6-103, 1-102, 3-101, none exactly 100, and only 3 days less than 100. That distribution occurring in June would still be a bit on the warm side for that month, but not so unusual. And in June it is a dry heat, with a good cool off at night. In contrast this month's humidity has been at monsoon levels for the last few weeks. But the rain amounts have not.

When averaged over the years the monsoon daily rainfall peaks this week, and then begins to taper off, slowly at first and then more rapidly toward the end of August. But this July when the upper high has been in its good position to the north it has been too broad--too warm aloft and on most days not enough vertical wind sheer to support organized lines of storms sweeping across the area. Things may change for the rest of this week.

The fact that on average the monsoon peaks about now may not be entirely coincidental with the fact that today, July 29, is Rain Day in Waynesburg (where I was born), Pennsylvania. Don't think they've had any rain yet today. But a sprinkle just before midnight tonight would count, and they may get that.

This Tucson Winter

During this El Niño winter with each storm Tucsonans have been reminiscing about winter rains (and mountain snows) of long ago. People say that this winter is like when I first moved here or when I was a kid. But we need only go back four years to find a winter similar to this one in Tucson.

The scatterplot above is almost the same figure presented and discussed in my post five months ago, but now with this winter included. This November through March five-month period is not complete, and so this winter could yet creep past the one four years ago. Either way, this winter and the one four years ago are the two wettest winters for Tucson since the winter of 1997-1998. Together this decade's three above-normal winters (all El Niños, two of them with ONIs qualifying as weak El Niños) rank 12th, 13th and tied for 16th wettest out of the last 70 years, making up somewhat for the dud strong El Niño winter three years ago.

This year's running total for Tucson Airport for the five-month period November through March stands at 144% of normal. Adding in last year's very wet October, Tucson's running total for October through March stands at 180% of normal. That latter number can be more easily compared with the real-time water-year analyses for the entire Colorado River Basin (under that site's tab Monthly Precipitation; March so far has been very good to the areas in Colorado and New Mexico that missed out earlier).

Fascism

Several months ago I downloaded from Apple a free sample of the 2018 book by Timothy Snyder titled The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. On television I had seen Professor Snyder being interviewed about the topic of his latest book, and I had previously been engrossed by excerpts from his earlier works. But reading through the free sample of the first chapter my eyes glazed over. That first impression was wrong; I would now like to be an evangelist for The Road to Unfreedom.

My change of heart started with the latest issue of the PennStater alumni magazine. In the latest issue the new editor has put his stamp on the PennStater with an interview of a retired Penn State history professor. The interview article is titled Defending Freedom Is Not Easy. The PennStater article includes a sidebar with a list of books for additional reading, among them The Road to Unfreedom.

Following that recommendation, I'm rereading the Snyder book from scratch. The words fascist or fascism appear 33 times in the first chapter of The Road to Unfreedom. The name Ivan Ilyin, a fascist philosopher, appears 125 times, thus the glazing over on my first pass through that chapter. After a second pass I now appreciate that, unlike philosophers whose ideas were later distorted to justify Hitler, there is no misunderstanding Ilyin's prescription of fascism for Russia. Snyder makes the case that the Soviet Union had already entered a politics of eternity during the Brezhnev era, which prepared Soviet citizens for Ilyin's view of the world.

The Ilyin playbook is not just about Russia. The same plays (big lies about past and present, false and eternal crises, artificial enemies, loyalty to the immoral leader) are being used in other countries. For outrageous examples in Hungary, see Hungarian Spectrum and Hungarian Free Press. Putin and Orbán, birds of a feather.