Credit: USDA
WASHINGTON, DC –A new study shows extreme heat events both in the summer and in the winter are increasing across the U.S. and Canada, while extreme cold events in summer and winter are declining.
A new study in the in Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, a publication of the American Geophysical Union, examined absolute extreme temperatures–high temperatures in summer and low temperatures in winter–but also looked at relative extreme temperature events–unusually cold temperatures and unusually warm temperatures throughout the year.
The new study found both relative and absolute extreme heat events have increased across the US and Canada since 1980. This upward trend is greatest across the southern US, especially in the Ozarks and southern Arizona, as well as northern Quebec. That means there are more extremely hot days during the summer as well as more days that are considered extremely hot for the time of year, like abnormally warm days in the winter.
The new research also found both relative and absolute extreme cold events are decreasing, most notably in Alaska and Northern Canada, along with patches along the US Atlantic coast. In these areas, there are fewer instances of temperatures that are extremely cold either compared to the normal range, like in winter, or for the time of year, like unusually cold days in the summer.
Global mean surface temperature, the most frequently cited indicator of climate change, has been steadily increasing since the 1970s. However, temperature extremes pose a greater ecological risk to many species than average warming, according to the study’s authors.
The new study is one of the first to explore relative extreme temperature events, which are changing more rapidly than absolute temperature extremes, and can have important implications for the environment, agriculture and human health, according to Scott Sheridan, professor in the department of geography at Kent State University and lead author of the new study.
“Typically for this kind of research we look at the highest temperatures in the summer and lowest temperatures in the winter. But we’ve also seen that extreme temperatures that are really anomalous for the time of year can have a high impact–these relative extremes are important and underappreciated,” he said.
Investigating temperature extremes
To investigate how extreme temperature events have been changing over time, Sheridan and his co-author conducted a climatology of cold and heat events, both absolute and relative, for North America, followed by an analysis of how they have changed from 1980-2016.
Relative extreme temperature events are changing faster than absolute extreme events, and often occur outside of seasonal norms, according to the new study. In the eastern half of the US, relative extreme heat events occur as early as mid-winter into early spring. Out-of-season extreme temperatures can cause early thaws in mild winters or catch vulnerable populations unprepared and unacclimated.
Across parts of the Arctic, extreme cold events have become almost entirely nonexistent and increasingly difficult to identify, according to the researchers.
“Relative temperature anomalies can trigger what are called phenological mismatches, where a mismatch in the temperature and the season can cause trees to bloom too early and birds and insects to migrate before there is appropriate food,” Sheridan said.
Most notable is the highly anomalous warm event in March 2012, which included persistent mid-summer warmth in multiple locations. The event produced a ‘false spring’ in which vegetation prematurely left dormancy, so that it was not prepared for subsequent frosts, leading to large agricultural losses in certain areas, according to the researchers.
There is some evidence that early-season heat events are more hazardous to humans than heat events later in the season. When people are not acclimatized to hotter temperatures, they are more vulnerable to negative health impacts, especially the elderly, infants, young children, and people with chronic health problems or disabilities, according to the researchers.
The study clearly underlines the importance of not just looking at high temperatures in the summer but also looking at relative temperatures, said Kristie Ebi, professor of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences at the University of Washington, who was not involved in the study.
“Using information generated in the study on regional patterns in extreme weather events, particularly relative extremes in temperature, early warnings could be issued that include information on what people can do to protect themselves and to protect crops and ecosystems,” Ebi said.
###
So what ab out some facts, we are being told that its getting cooler, so lets have some truth not lies about hotter stuff
MJE
extreme heat both in summer and winter except when it is cold.
” Soybeans show the effect of the Texas drought near Navasota, TX on Aug. 21, 2013.”
BFD: Texas is 29th in soybean production at point 1 percent; 3 million compared to 3.3 billion total US production in 2013.
How long did they search to find this photo of a flooded field that dried up later. Back where I come from the flooded end of a field from heavy rain then dries up the surface and cracks while lots of moisture remains deeper.
BTW: US production in 2018 was or is 4.6 billion bushels.
It will be extremely cold in the northeast of the US on November 28, 2018.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2018/11/28/1500Z/wind/isobaric/500hPa/overlay=temp/orthographic=-85.66,44.70,896
In the scheme of climate cycles 1980- 2016 is not a long period. The last two years may not have been on trend and certainly in the 1930s and the 1890s there were extreme heat conditions which appear to have been worse than the period they looked at. Typical cherry picking by warmist extremists.
Zig, I quit reading at the 1980-2016 reference period. It is the ramp-up period in the temperature cycle.
That’s by design – if they went back further, they’d run into the ’30s that would make today’s “extremes” look pretty tame.
If they went back further they’d run into the 1890s too, but that part got excommunicated from the BOM records for flagrant blasphemy, heresy, sinning against the 97%, and providing comfort to the enema.
UHI. Simple. I think UHI is severely underestimated. Not only have our cities and roads doubled in size over the past 30 years, but we have not considered the impact of air conditioners in summer. Air conditioners are outdoor heaters. 30 years ago, very few people had air conditioners, while today 90% of the population has them. Consider a city with 2 million homes (about 5 million people). Imagine 2 million outdoor heaters pumping out heat all day long. That’s what happens now every hot summer day, in every city and town.
All an AC does is pump heat from one area to another. The only heat it would add to the environment is the heat from the work expended, i.e. the amount of energy used to pump the heat.
AC units transfer heat from indoor space and add it the space where it is measured. Man made structures collect heat during the day and slowly release at night. It’s not rocket science to see how UHI contaminates the data sets with an upward bias.
Unless you have “AGW blinders” on, in which case there’s no source of atmospheric warming other than rising CO2 levels.
Joe Crawford :
“All an AC does is pump heat from one area to another. The only heat it would add to the environment is the heat from”…
…the inside of every building that is cooled. Since the inside of each building is measurably cooler, the area outside would be measurably warmer – measured as the UHI.
SR
Yes, but the temperature readers are on the outside where it is pumping heat–not where the heat is being removed from. So you lose the mixture of cold and hot and it becomes hotter where the temperature readers are. Isn’t that right?
When did AC units become 100% efficient? I must have missed that.
^^^^ this. Remember every BTU you move costs 3 to move it. For every BTU we’ve moved outside, we’ve heated the outdoors by 4.
He covered that:
“the heat from the work expended, i.e. the amount of energy used to pump the heat.”
Agreed. Not to mention the additional traffic (and traffic jams), which have gotten much worse over time, and which add plenty of extra heat that has nothing to do with “climate.” UHIs are WAY underestimated.
A “study” of 36 years of weather out of how many million? And we’re supposed to be impressed? There isn’t a climate party due by any chance, is there?
Picking the cherries…
Not according to NOAA’s Climate at a Glance
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/national/time-series
Here’s a link to a Map of the USA-48 showing the declining summer time maximum temperatures state by state:
It just isn’t happening like they say.
I am also sceptic of the results. By my results I predict in the higher latitudes it will be dryer and warmer in the summers and generally dryer and cooler in the winters. It is happening already.
In fact those are the exact results that occurred on the dust bowl plains in the thirties.
Interesting. What’s the source of the map in the second link? I couldn’t find it on the NCDC site, but this (https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/us-trends/tmax/sum#us-trends-select) seems to show similar trends.
Must be about time for American Geophysical Union to finalize their papers on increases in locus infestations, rats, and amphibians falling from the sky. Maybe they also foresee nonbelievers turned to salt.
Do frozen iguanas falling from trees in South Florida count?
https://www.today.com/news/frozen-iguanas-falling-trees-south-florida-cold-snap-t120862
Nope. Only overheated iguanas count.
OMG-you make laugh–both Ian and Sheris response
yes, but they each only count as 1/10th of a frozen turtle washing up on shore.
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/418087-190-sea-turtles-found-frozen-to-death-in-cape-cod
I just discovered the “Awww…sissies! Index” (Accumulated Winter Season Severity Index, or AWSSI) and it looks like the computer models are out to get us again. It’s time to ditch those heat and cold models and play the long game: reprogram old models to just track raw human misery.
EECUTIVE SUMMARY
Thanks to Moore’s law we can now incorporate more factors of agony and dread than ever before, using smaller cell sizes that take us from depressed populations to miserable neighborhoods, to track even dysfunctional family units.
According to Eyeore’s Law, every time you interview a pool of individuals they will quickly run through all the good things they have to say, and begin to relate miserable experiences for themselves but also those around them; this oversampling resolves to Eyeore’s Paradox, in which the sum total of human misery of a group non-intuitively exceeds the total human experience within that group. So as databases and models scale… you can project incredible anomalies from any baseline!
It is also known that showing people detailed projections of how bad things are going to be increases their misery. That is why we run iterative misery models with force feedbacks that are set to terminate only when we type, “Uncle!” The most effective campaigns for forcing involve coordinated scattershot (geographical) misery to inflame the tribal cortex, and cumulative statistics for an overall impending sense of doom. Here we see misery plotted within geography, a coordinated attack by tactical misery weapons:
Even people outside the misery blast radius people will tend to imagine similar or worse conditions in their area. Any areas with no misery coverage will have people thinking that the level of misery there is simply too intense to measure… or perhaps it left no witnesses. No data is creepier than scant data. The other tool for communicating misery tracks General Foreboding,
showing an inescapable rise in misery. Notice that almost the whole rainbow has been given over to various degrees of misery. It has been suggested above [^] that our nascent weather-misery models be expanded to include “increases in locus infestations, rats, and amphibians falling from the sky.” This is a fine idea! In the misery mix we may toss anything, even cattle mutilations, for example. Skeptics of the approach will discard dodgy elements (by the 97% of scientists agree rule) and accept the whole.
In the quoted article there is a hint of greater projected misery to come, even without changing the underlying data. What a trick! You might even call it “Mike’s Human Nature Trick”. Here is the quote, emphasis mine: “the Midwest Regional Climate Center says. Wind and mixed precipitation, such as freezing rain, are not a part of the index..”
There you have it. However bad it looks, it’s worse than you think.
Errata Oops, the quoted article (forgot the link) was
https://weather.com/news/weather/news/2018-11-27-winter-misery-index-awssi-extreme-start-november-2018
I am also sceptic of the results. By my results I predict in the higher latitudes it will be dryer and warmer in the summers and generally dryer and cooler in the winters. It is happening already.
what an utter load!
they ignored the wind patterns behing far nth rises Id bet
and cutoff was timed to avoid the lower than normal records inc snow at harvest in canadian and other areas.
A lot of folks seemingly still get ‘married’ these days.
Even before the gobsmacking $$$ cost of the preamble, the ceremony and the ‘honeymoon’** it’s still a crazy crazy thing to do in that well over 50% of them will crash & burn.
** See the trouble? Why are ‘honeymoons’ (=a month spent alone together consuming (fermented) honey) cut short to only 2 weeks typical?
Probably because we are all sooooooo rich? Yay!!
We know we are rich because we keep tellin ourselves as much.
UK wise, the reason most often cited for marital crashing & burning is ‘Unreasonable Behaviour’ -and almost *always* inflicted by The Boy upon The Girl.
Assuming she even makes it as far as the lawyer’s office:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-46292919
Sigh. The joys of Kwashkior mixed with a myriad of mind-bending shyte. Alcohol, dope, pizza & coca-cola or the lack thereof etc etc….
Otherwise, the girls are saying no. Its my assertion that they’ve realised that Feminism was actually a plot created by men.
An illusion, Snake Oil if you prefer, created to give them the ‘freedom’ to be menial low paid workers, the rewards for such being immediately confiscated by Government and dispersed amongst its (burgeoning) legions of cronies.
And now they’re saying ‘no’
The supply of new babies needed to continue the insanity will stop. Been slowing for some time now in the Western World.
Of course the Kwaskiorian boys, desperate to keep their gravy train on its tracks and their big willies in plain view, imagine the girls have stopped producing because they are sooooooo rich.
How wrong is it possible to be?
I’m veering off topic here, so – The Real Reason for the preamble was to introduce another ‘girl’ who is also saying ‘no’
Often referred to as Mother Nature.
She is also most definitely saying ‘no’ also.
Why do I say that? What inside knowledge have I got that (seemingly) no-one else of the masculine variety is privy to?
What is so amazing, what is at the very nub of unreasonable behaviour, what perfectly defines the actuality of Magical Thinking (we are rich because we say we are rich by example) is shown in the picture (of the soya) at the top of this essay.
You land a miniature Sputnik between those rows of plants, get it to take a picture of the soil then compare it to a photo a twin Sputnik might have taken on Planet Mars.
See if you can tell them apart.
Given a bit of inclement weather and that dirt will pick right up & blow away and it will stay aloft for weeks if not months.
There is precedent, go visit Australia, North Africa, (what was) The Fertile Crescent or the shores of The Mediterranean Sea
The weather is going ‘a bit different’ because A Desert in being created
On the only 10% of Earth’s surface that is still any use to us.
70% =water, 10% already destroyed and the other 10% being permanently frozen.
And what absolutely utterly compounds the madness is a total conviction that burning Biomass stuff is in some way going be be A Saviour.
That is Unreasonable Behaviour in Ma Nature’s eyes and she is calling a halt.
Does so by becoming ‘barren’ or ‘infertile’ – terms that even ‘boys’ can understand.
Just as (human) girls are stopping the production of new cronies (slave keepers & drivers), so Ma Nature is stopping production of ‘stuff that can be burned’
and The Boys don’t ‘get it’
They think they are soooo clever looking at carbonoxide, at how it has seemingly ‘changed the absorbancy/colour of the sky’, they haven’t noticed## or even started to account for, ‘changes in the colour of the dirt’
None so blind eh……..or probably and actually, their huuuuuuuge willies (read= supercomputers, same thing) got in the way
##With the notable exception of Surface Stations Project
Excerpted from published commentary:
What the above means is that Sheridan and his co-author simply used the “temperature data” they obtained from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), …….. and everyone knows that just the “adjustments” introduced by NOAA proved that “every year is hotter than the previous year”.
And yet …
Steve points out that NOAA’s own data contradicts the claim that extreme heat events are increasing.
I think Tony Heller has repeatedly shown the same thing from NOAA’s data as well. It’s pretty much a decline in extreme days since the ’30s.
Tony’s graphs are worth a thousand fear-mongering AGU papers. Must be embarrassing to be so misleading with ‘science’ when your ends justify your means….
https://realclimatescience.com/2018/11/met-office-forecasts/
Not if one ignores the 1930’s!
What’s really sad is they surely know their result is due to cherry picking the start point to coincide with the cooling that ended in the 1970s. And, the reviewers and editor surely knew this as well. It’s not like the data isn’t available going back more than 100 years.
Another fine example of failed science.
Or another example of deliberate misinformation.
The National Organization of Alarmist Adjustments.
Their broad conclusions were not researched in this study due to their examination of only on interval. If this were a financial claim in a prospectus, it would be thrown out or accompanied by a discrediting full disclosure.
A practice I think science should follow in any publication.
The accompanying picture reminds me of a humorous family story about an uncle telling a tall tale about his dog, then saying if you don’t believe him, right there’s the dog.
Right on the heels of a post where a writer and various alarmist organizations labelling the acronym CAGW as a “snarl” assault in conversations; we are informed of a brand new (Not!) study:
From:
Containing:
More impending catastrophes.
More alarms about droughts.
More alarms about “extreme” temperatures.
N.B. The researchers had to cherry pick their timeframe by only using temperatures since 1980.
Thus eliminating increasing temperatures from prior well known periods, e.g. 1930s.
Also ignored are studies where the Texas drought is hardly a drought compared to Texas droughts on record in both length of drought and aridity of the drought.
CAGW CAGW CAGW!
More cries of doom disaster and extreme weather…
What the alarmists fear most is people continuing to dismiss “extreme” claims regarding weather and climate.
bad timing eh? record colds, some by double digits, all over the US this past month.
They probably timed the release of this horse manure “study” knowing the cold snap was imminent, in a “nothing to see in those record cold temperatures, look here!” mode.
Is there correction for urban heat island bias and station environment change in the data? Without that the data is scientifically useless, although politically quite useful.
I find it difficult to believe the authors or publishers could be ignorant of that.
Where is the original study?
Is this it?: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2018JD029066
If so, they conclude:
* Internal variability renders the detection of future changes in the seasonal cycle of surface temperature difficult over many regions
* Europe, North Africa and Siberia, however, exhibit remarkably robust and easily detectable changes across climate model ensembles
* The robust changes over the three regions are primarily driven by changes in surface longwave and turbulent heat fluxes
The first conclusion seems self-evident, but often ignored, and I’d like to see how they arrive at the third conclusion.
So, what we have now is Anthropogenic Localized Climate Extreming (ALCE™). Eeek! It’s way worse than we could have imagined. We’re doomed!
SINCE 1980…BASELINING! So, conveniently leaving out the 1930s, which would make any more recent “extremes” look less, well, extreme. That is, until the Ministry of Truth has a bit more time to “erase” that “inconvenient history.”
So it’s just another headline grabbing “start when it’s colder, end when it’s warmer, declare catastrophe” rerun. Rinse and repeat ad infinitum.
We should start a for COP24 publication count, junk papers that are just there to try and get noise.
If temperature extremes, which are easily measured and documented, are getting hotter in both summer and winter, then everywhere in the world would be experiencing record heat every day. And if that were so, wouldn’t we be hearing nothing but a steady stream of panicked reports to that effect?
The reality is every place on earth with long term temperature records experiences at least a few record hot as well as a few record cold days virtually every year. Plot it all out, and it describes “weather”.
Focusing on extremes (i.e., outlier data) is bad science. Look at the long term trends using real statistical tools, considering mostly the data ‘tween the tails … the 95% confidence interval. That alone is what describes “climate”, which is not a daily random event, rather than “weather” which does describe a daily random event.
But “bad science” is all they’ve got. The whole CAGW story has been a house of cards from the start. And the focus on “extreme weather events” is the latest meme, picked up upon because the propaganda pushers know there will ALWAYS be some “extreme weather” event occurring SOMEWHERE that they can point to like Chicken Little and squawk about, while drawing the obligatory dotted line to “climate change.”
Smells like desperation (not to mention BS) to me.
Irrational wiki belabors skeptics for pointing out that the climate consensus explicitly rekies in hyping catastrophe. Meanwhile the climate obsessed change “less cold” into “extreme heat” for winter.
And people read that ridiculous counter factual nonsense without laughing.
What a hoot.
It is time to start a climate comedy channel.
The asshats producing climate deserve to be ridiculed and dismissed for the clowns they are.
Heck, the climate hypestere give clowns a bad name.
Just reading the results section of the paper’s abstract gives a rather comforting picture –
Extreme Heat Events and [new classification introduced] Relatively Extreme Heat Events, up a little bit, Extreme Cold Events and [new classification introduced] Relatively Extreme Cold Events, down a little bit more. Trend is small, perhaps trivial, and much dependent on a few quite big events. In my view doubtfully significant. Some areas more warm events, some areas, fewer warm events, some areas, more cold events, some areas, fewer cold events. Looks like weather to me. Come back in a century and try again?
Meanwhile, here in NA yesterday, here are the departures from normal for date high temps yesterday:
Ottawa, ON ******** -14°F
Edmonton, AB ****** -14°F
Bakersfield, CA ****** -7°F
Atlanta, GA ******** -21°F
Fort McMurray, AB ** -13°F
Brownsville, TX ****** -20°F
My home in SD ****** -34°F
Obviously, nearly all of NA is colder than the proverbial well digger’s gluteus maximus, and has been for months. Granted that NA is only a small part of the Earth’s surface, but you would have a hard time convincing the many Midwest farmers who have been trying to harvest their corn in the snow this year, or who just gave up because of the freeze damage and filed for their crop insurance, that it is too warm and that extreme seasonal cold events don’t happen any more.
The (largely imaginary) global average temperature has not been increasing steadily since the 1970s. From the PDO shuft of 1977, GASTA grew slightly, then flattened out from the late ’90s, around the super El Nino of 1998-99, until the super El Nino of 2015-16, Since Feb 2016, Earth has cooled.
CO2 started increasing more or less steadily after WWII, but until 1977, ie for 32 years, the planet cooled dramatically. The CACA hypothesis was thus born falsified. The null hypothesis, ie that noting the least bit out of the ordinary is happening in Earth’s climate, cannot not only not be rejected, but is confirmed.
Winner!
High temperatures have increased during the warm phase of the PDO/AMO.
Who’d a thunk it.
Meanwhile, stocks of wheat, corn and soybeans have increased to the point where we’re running out of places to put the stuff. The climate must be getting friendlier to agriculture.
Oh, pish-tush. Weather isn’t the same thing as climate.
Late, chilly spring means the bugs come out late, the trees don’t break buds by mid-April like they’re supposed to and we get an EARLY winter slush-to-snow and below average temperature blizzard in November, when it would normally come in December through February. Ain’t no heat involved in that stuff, except for what’s on my gas bill.
What’s next? Fire from volcanoes? Already have that one in an ongoing state. Devastating storms? All during this past summer, and another one started Sunday night, knocked out power to 364,000 people in my AO, shut down roads and businesses and whatever court proceedings were going on. We’ll probably get more of the same. I’m stocked up on food and kitchen matches, and yes, I will get out my grandmother’s oil lamps and fill the bowls with lamp oil if I have to.
I now have a sort of crush on the linemen from the power company who worked for 4 hours on a thankless task Monday evening from 4PM to 8PM, just to get the electricity back up and running in my neighborhood. All my neighbors were in their cars, trying to stay warm.
Extreme heat? 92F in July is normal, you know. 14F in November is a little odd, but – well, we survived it and we’re all better now.
Conspiracy theories are the work of idiots. I can come up with better stories in the blink of an eye. You guys better stock up on vinegar. Have you watched your trees to see if crows are rooking up there? If they are, you should make sure that your trash is bagged and in the trash bin where it belongs. Otherwise, they’ll stick around to rummage through it.
Oaks in Poland had an extremely large number of acorns. Russian frost is coming.
Since it is demonstrable from NOAA data that absolute e tremes are NOT increasing, the paper invents relative extremes to finally find something increasing.
I’m going to start worrying when it gets to be -14c in summer and + 30c in winter. Until then it is just weather and more warmest blather. (Unless some major strato-volcano blows somewhere in which case just wait a while.)
“Across parts of the Arctic, extreme cold events have become almost entirely nonexistent and increasingly difficult to identify, according to the researchers.”
Arctic warming is normal during a solar minimum.
“Most notable is the highly anomalous warm event in March 2012, which included persistent mid-summer warmth in multiple locations.”
That would have not existed without short term solar variability, nor would have the very cold March 2013.
I went to the original Texas A & M College just up the road from Navasota during the drought of the 1950s. Much, much, much, much worse. Spring of 1957 flood you could not drive across the Brazos River floodplain.
“ EHE = excess heat event; ECE = excess cold event; REHE = relative excess heat event; RECE = relative excess cold event; ETE = extreme temperature event.” Yep, we lived through it. Freezes of 1947 and 1951, drought from 1947 to 1957, worst part, 1954-57.
At least they got back to 1980. Just drove to Louisiana and back below there near the coast, water, water everywhere. Lush, lush, lush. It’s called Texas.
I should add that I just talked to someone born in Wichita Falls in 1927. He remembers living both through the 30s and 50s. It did get very dry there this decade, but it rained. Texas records go back to the 1880s, before computers. Information available, but it requires homework.
I went into reading this with my hackles up. than I calmed down and said to myself, “Shelly, you have to be open to new information and maybe they know something you don’t.” So I carefully and calmly read the study inbetween deep yoga breaths.
This caught my attention:
We already do this every single day. It’s called the weather channel.
I agree heartily with Zigmaster :
And Samuel was pretty coherent
So why would we expect them to find other wise?
But Richard M allowed me to stop with the deep breahing and go for the deep belly laughs
You know, my dog Moxie helps me predict the weather–or Climate–ah, well global warming. If its warming she runs all over the yard and I have to hollar for her to come back; if its cooling, she pees and runs back inside. If you don’t believe me, Coach Springer, here’s my weather predictor dog, Moxie.
http://www.day-by-day.org/weatherpredictor.jpg
Moxie has a lot more trustworthy face than most sentient beings dealing with … [clear throat] … “forecasting climate”.
Haha! Glad you warned us!
So, I searched for this “new study”, and I found it here (full article, NOT paywalled):
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2018JD029150
Sheridan, S. C., & Lee, C. C. (2018). Temporal trends in absolute and relative extreme temperature events across North America. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 123.
The math looks pretty impressive, and the descriptive language is jargonesque to obscure understanding of the calculation for non-tech laypeople such as myself, … BUT this caught my eye:
2.2 Calculation of Extreme Events
The extreme events in this paper are all based on the initial definition of EHF (Nairn & Fawcett, 2014), with the exception that apparent temperature is used instead of temperature.
Now the “with the exception” part of this sentence put me on guard — what’s “apparent temperature” ? They are using NOT “temperature” but “apparent temperature”. Soooooooooo, I had to look up the term to try figuring out what distinction they were making.
As best as I can tell, they are using wind-chill temps and heat-index temps. Well, what if the winds were particularly gusty in some places in certain years?, or what if the humidity was particularly low or high in other places in certain years? And how does this metric using “apparent” temps compare to other studies that might or might not [I don’t know] be talking about the same sorts of highs and lows, calculated the same ways ? And is this really telling us what we need to know at all about temps?, … or is it conflating/contaminating temp data with wind-chill and heat-index data ?
Needless to say, I am suspicious, perhaps ignorantly so, but I’d be curious what math masters here might think.
So, I screwed up my bold face — grrrrrrrrrrrrrr ! — it should have stopped after the word, “temperature” in the calculation sentence.
There’s just something about that “apparent temperature” bugging me. I can’t put my finger on it.
Yeah, they compare like categories of measurement to like categories of measurement over three-day and thirty-day periods, which would seem to be using a consistently defined set of values, but, within each of those values, there seems to be something that is not consistent from value to value.
Is a humidity-value-with-a-temp value comparable to another humidity-value-with-another-temp value? I just get the feeling that the comparison of like measurement to like measurement somehow breaks down.
If heat extremes are more common across the U.S., and they show a field of soybeans in cracked clay-rich dirt as the example, the implication is that these heat extremes are reducing our soybean production?
So I looked up a few years of soybean product – it is trending upwards (amount grown per acre) not downwards. Sooo? What exactly is the problem? We will be growing too much food or something if the trend continues?
They can’t even cherry-pick very well.
The graphs of all agricultural products are trending up with no sign of slowing.
We grow more food now than ever, by any metric one can think of: Yield per hectare, total amount of harvest, acres in production, food per person alive in the world…
And the increases are everywhere in the world, such that the sorts of famines that used to be regular events, requiring massive and immediate food aid, are now virtually unheard of.
Oh hey…forgot this:
Soybeans for five countries back to 1965, and world production of the 3 major grains:
http://www.earth-policy.org/images/uploads/graphs_tables/highlights43_prod_soy.PNG
http://www.earth-policy.org/images/uploads/graphs_tables/indicator3_2012_CornWheatRice.PNG
After 60’s with chemical inputs technology + high yielding seeds + irrigation = increasing trend in yields — I presented these in graph form in my book in 2007 [data in 2000 book]. With rainfed crops it is slow raise with high yielding seed.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
These “scientists” can’t tell the difference between heat and water. Just because it is hot doesn’t mean it can’t rain. Look at Florida and the South-East. Just because it rains doesn’t mean it is cold…
Another nonsense “study” based on statistical voodoo and cherry-picked data. It means exactly bupkis.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2018JD029150
THIS STUDY IS COMPLETELY FRAUDULENT.
“Three‐hourly values of 2‐m temperature, 2‐m dew point, and 10‐m wind speed (from u‐ and v‐wind components) were obtained from the North American Regional Reanalysis (Mesinger et al., 2006) for all available land points over North America between 23°–84°N and 178°–46°W for the period 1979–2016.
For each 3‐hourly period, an apparent temperature was then calculated based on the Steadman (1984) formula for outdoor shade conditions, where AT = −2.7 + 1.04 T + 2.0P − 0.65u, where T and AT are in degrees Celsius, P is vapor pressure in kilopascals (calculated from dew point), and u is wind speed in meters per second. The Steadman AT was chosen over other apparent temperature metrics as it has typically been used in year‐round analyses such as this study, where a standard single metric is needed across multiple seasons. Daily mean apparent temperature (AT) was then calculated based on the average of the eight 3‐hourly values.”
Nothing was measured. This is all made up nonsense.
How do you spell FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFRAUD?
Like others who have commented, I stopped reading when I got to the part where they cherry-pick the cut off dat for the “study”.
Longer terms trends for extreme weather show exactly the opposite trend.
We see the same disingenuous shenanigans in studies of forest fires, and all sorts of other crap.
And if the data does not show what they want it to, they just change it by any of the several means they have devised to do so.
These jackasses should really be ashamed of themselves for stooping this low to try to prove a lie.
A random choice of a Midwest weather station with a long record and little UHI:
COLUMBUS 3 NE, Nebraska
Period of record: 1893-07-02 to 2018-11-27
Maximum number of consecutive days MAX temperature exceeded 100°F:
1936 – 11
1936 – 10
1940 – 8
1935 – 8
1988 – 7
1936 – 7
1939 – 6
1937 – 6
1930 – 6
1901 – 6
In 2002 and 2012 there were 3 consecutive days >=100, tied for 36th in the entire record.
Maximum number of consecutive days MAX temperature remained below freezing:
1936 – 31
1978 – 28
1979 – 24
1929 – 23
2010 – 22
1983 – 22
1979 – 22
1930 – 22
1895 – 22
1966 – 21
Maximum 7-Day Mean Min Temperature °F,
December 1 to March 1:
2000 – 37.6
1913 – 37.5
2000 – 37.4
2000 – 36.7
1930 – 36.7
1930 – 35.9
2000 – 35.6
1930 – 35.1
1930 – 35.0
2000 – 34.6
1981 – 34.6
1931 – 34.6
Not much of trend there.
The record MAX temperature of 115°F occurred in 1936.
MAX temperature this century was 103 in 2012.
A record low summertime MAX of 94 was set in 2014.
The record MIN temperature of -29°F was last reached in 1912. Last winter it was a balmy -17.
According to the USDA August forecast, Nebraska’s 2018 corn, soybean, sorghum, and winter wheat production will all reach record highs this year.
Oh, woe are we to live in such a frightening political climate!
Correction: first listing should be number of days consecutive days MAX temperature exceeded 99°F
Extreme temperatures have been declining in the United States since the 1930’s. I don’t know how these guys can find just the opposite. It just goes to show how statistics can be used to manipulate the truth.
Here’s a graph from Roy Spencer that is pertinent, “Number of days daily Maximum temperature above 100 F and 105 F (US)”. As you can see, extreme heat has been declining since the 1930’s:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/US-extreme-high-temperatures-1895-2017.jpg
When the data series follow a cyclic variation, analysis of truncated data part of the cycle lead to misleading conclusions. Scientists from IITM sent a note to the minister on Indian southwest monsoon rainfall saying that the rainfall is decreasing. The same, minister informed to the parliament with reference to question. IITM brought out a data series [monthly, seasonal] at met sub-division level for the period 1871 to 1994. I simply calculated 10-year averages and plotted on a graph [Reddy, 2000]. This showed a Sine Curve of 60 years. The first two 60-year cycles completed by 1985/86. The third cycle started in 1986/87 [starting year of Telugu 60 year calandar year — Prabhava]. IITM scientists selected the data series starting from the centre of the above average 30 year period and moved on to the lowest point of the below the average 30 year period. This naturally present a decreasing trend. If they would have selected 30 period prior to this, would have presented exactly opposite pattern [increasing trend]. This I brought to the notice of the minister concerned. Also, if the data series present not only principal cycle but also sub-multiples, the pattern could be different. For example Durban rainfall presents 66 year cycle with 22 year sub-multiple. After integrating these two cycles [using amplitude and phase angles with reference starting year] the pattern showed “W” [below the average] followed by “M” [above the average]. Similar situation was observed in Mahalypye in Botswana, Catuane in Mozambique and Fortaleza in Northeast Brazil.
If we come to US temperature and AMO: increasing trend of the 60-year cycle arm of Sine Curve started around 1980. Thus, the truncated data showed warmer conditions in summer and winter. If the authors would have selected 30 year period prior to 1980s, the conclusion will be different — opposite –. So, it is always better to use the data series of one full cycle [if any].
During drought period of natural variability in rainfall generally show higher temperatures. In addition these are modified by urban effect in the down side [advection]. Changes in greenery/forests, etc.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
All of which is irrelevant if there is not a specification on the response times on instruments when they are replaced and even half way to due care and attention to the measurement environment.