The continued inanity of June 15th

Nine years ago I railed, twice in the same month, about the silly season of talk about the monsoon. In the second of those June 2011 posts I wrote (misspelling site for sight):

Suppose that someone had lived in Tucson for a couple of decades, then fell into a Rip van Winkle sleep for another couple of decades, and finally awoke last week. Rip van Winkle would be bewildered to hear that the monsoon starts Wednesday, and that, alas, despite the approaching start date there's no rain in site (as if rain in site would be normal for this date in June). As terrible as the wildfires have been this year, and as good as it would be to get enough rain to relieve the situation, that's not a realistic hope this early.

The difference this year is that June 15th arrives on Monday, not Wednesday as it did in 2011. It's still silly to talk about the monsoon starting on June 15th, despite a decade of the National Weather Service pretending otherwise.

At this point it might be enough to say, "See previous posts." But following after this April's remininiscing post, this post goes back forty-some years to the weather station at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base here in Tucson. Since the stations's weather radar and human eyes both had a relatively clear line of sight to the south, at this time of year it would not be uncommon for the weather observer to include in a late afternoon or early evening hourly weather observation an uncannilly precise remark that a thunderstorm cloud was being visibly observed 95 miles to the south. So there was no ignorance about moisture pooling in Mexico. But when a trough in the westerlies would briefly pull some of that moisture north and generate a thunderstorm or two, customers would be briefed that, "That was not the monsoon." Emphasis was on the long-term correlation between the north-to-south transition from dry to moist air and the north-to-south transition from westerly to easterly upper-level winds. Thunderstorms, at least scattered coverage, moving generally from east to west, day after day (or at least most days)--like pornography, Tucsonans know what they expect from the monsoon. And until recent decades forecasters understood how to tailor and communicate their monsoon call for locals.

I have no qualms about a firefighter labeling the entire difficult month of June as a nebulous and agonizingly long period known as "at the start of the monsoon." But I doubt a firefighter would insist that the lightning strike on the evening of June 5, which sparked the Bighorn Fire, was "not the monsoon" while at the same time insisting that a lightning strike tomorrow evening would be "the monsoon." That would be just silly.

Earth Day, 50 Years Ago

Decided to jump into remembering the first Earth Day. In the spring of 1970 in ninth grade at Redstone Junior High School, our social studies teacher, Doug "Skip" Harbaugh, was 25 years old, energetic and innovative. About halfway through the school year Mr. Harbaugh had thrown out the standard curriculum, saying, "This isn't going to do you any good!" The first innovative unit was financial, and it's the most financially-valuable course I've ever taken. After that we moved on to environmental. We, the students in Mr. Harbaugh's class, became the Sincere Teenagers Opposing Pollution.

Some classmates specialized in manufacturing armbands; I'm sure that the neat printing with a magic marker was not mine. Doug was active in the Jaycees in Brownsville, and I suppose it was through those connections that he arranged an appearance on what was then the relatively new local radio station, WASP. The station manager had a weekday call-in talk program called Bob's Beeline. (I know, it sounds like a skit from Hee Haw.) There were four of us students selected to be on the program. Not sure if it was on Earth Day itself, could have been a day or two before or after.

The original studio was a small room in the Gallatin Bank Building in downtown Brownsville. Bob was a big guy, and the four of us sat around him--no social distancing. It was additionally uncomfortable for me because my Dad worked at a chemical plant a few miles downriver that manufactured, among other things, sulfuric acid for industrial use. The plant had recently installed pollution control equipment to capture gas that had previously been vented to the atmosphere. The control process had a side effect in that it generated a lot of steam with a fine mist of ammonium sulfate. It was probably better for the trees than sulfur dioxide gas. But unfortunately, though fog tends to accumulate anyway in the Monongahela River valley on clear cold nights, the portion of the fog bank connected to the plant often seemed to be a bit more dense and slower to dissipate. When a call would come in, "What about that cloud from that chemical plant?" I would frantically motion "Don't point that microphone at me!"

Another Wet Winter

The numbers are in for precipitation for this 5-month winter of 2019-2020, and it was another wet one. In fact this was the 13th wettest of the last 71 winters. Hopefully the trend of three good winters in the 2010's will continue for the 2020's. Though the January ONI was a bit into El Niño territory, there is a duration requirement which means that when all is said and done the winter as a whole will have been at the high end of neutral territory, not quite enough to be considered an El Niño winter.

This winter's precipitation was skewed toward the first month-and-a-half of the five months. November was 400% of average (1.74 inches above average), while December was 126% of average, most of that in the first half of December. January was 76% of average, while February and March were each close to average. Thus the total for December through March was close to average. But November was the wettest November of the last 71 years. So this winter's good performance was the result of a fast start during the last two weeks of November, combined with the last four months together keeping up not just with the median but with the mean.

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.