Surge of Stinking Hot Weather Next Week
"I look forward to being older, when what you look like becomes less and less an issue, and what you ARE is the point," said actress Susan Sarandon.
Dr. Anthony Fauci gives me hope for productive life after middle age. He's 79, and along with Minnesota's Michael Osterholm, arguably the leading epidemiologists on the planet.
Then again, age has always correlated with wisdom and and perspective. Benjamin Franklin was 70 when he signed the Declaration of Independence. Nelson Mandela was 75 when elected president of South Africa. Mother Theresa received a Nobel Peace Prize at age 69 for her charitable work. John Glenn was 77 when he piloted the Space Shuttle. Seniors have much to contribute, and always will.
Showers arrive today, with more puddles Saturday, before we salvage some lukewarm sunshine on Sunday - the nicer day of the weekend to putter in the yard.
Only in Minnesota can one go from frost to 80s in the span of a week. Next week should be "stinking-hot", with 3 days of 80s and high humidity. Another light-switch summer?
Predicted GFS 500mb height anomalies valid next Wednesday morning, courtesy of NOAA and pivotalweather.com
80s Next Week. It seems like divine, cosmix, meteorological justice of sorts. Slush and frost one week, 80s the following week as a flailing atmosphere tries to compensate. I see 3 or 4 days in the 80s next week. Many of us are ready to make up for lost time. Graphic sequence above: Praedictix and AerisWeather.
Flash of Summer. Our on-again, off-again spring gives way to a preview of summer next week with a few days in the 80s. Both ECMWF (top) and GFS (bottom) hint at 90F by Wednesday of next week. We'll see. MSP Meteograms: WeatherBell.
Trending Warmer Than Average. In spite of a few (minor) cool frontal passages it looks like the last half of May will end on a warmer than average note for much of the USA; baking heat for much of the west and south.
Image credit: "The steep drop in aviation observations from various networks, including AMDAR." (WMO/Canadian Meteorological Center.)
Image credit above: "Five tropical or subtropical storms have impacted the United States in May since 2012." (NASA/WeatherTiger).
Map credit: "A look at the upcoming weather pattern with warmth in the East and a cool-down in the West. Meanwhile, active weather can be expected across the nation's heartland." (WeatherBell)
Pockets of Drought Emerging. It may my meds, but I'm leaning toward drought emerging by the end of summer for parts of the Upper Midwest. Just a hunch, based on how the patterns seem to be setting up. The U.S. Drought Monitor has an update: "..The Corn Belt remains drought-free due to long-term precipitation surpluses, favorable soil moisture, and a cool start to spring (30-day temperatures averaging 2 to 4 degrees F below normal). A small area of abnormal dryness (D0) was decreased this week due to recent rainfall. The largest 30-day precipitation deficits (around 3 inches) exist across northern Iowa..."
New Weather Alerting Technologies Will Save Lives. I wrote a post for Medium, focusing on some of the new and novel ways of receiving severe weather notifications; here's an excerpt: "...Traditional media can provide what your favorite weather app cannot: perspective, context and analysis. Meteorologists add value in real time and help to highlight time-sensitive information that can help to secure property, even save your life. The truth: flesh and blood meteorologists still add value you won’t get from automated alerts. Managing a continuous firehose of information and updates is daunting, for everyone. Social media gossip and speculation runs rampant before a major storm outbreak. Combine that with shorter attention spans, and a spray of notifications, headlines and advertisements, and it can be difficult separating signal from the noise. That is where new technologies come in, offering the rough equivalent of a digital tap on the shoulder. Pay attention. This is important..."
Bill Gates Has Regrets. Could-have, should-have, would-have. Here's an excerpt from a Wall Street Journal (paywall) story: "...In March 2015, Mr. Gates warned in a widely watched TED Talk that an infectious disease pandemic posed a greater threat to the world than a nuclear war because nations have built so few defenses. He called for an international warning-and-response system with mobile units of medical personnel, rapid diagnostics, drug stockpiles and technologies to produce vaccines in months. “An epidemic is one of the few catastrophes that could set the world back drastically in the next few decades,” he wrote that month in the New England Journal of Medicine. Mr. Gates joined other global-health experts calling for better public-health defenses. “In no way was I a lone voice,” he said. “The one thing that’s unique about my voice, though, is that I haven’t spent my life in infectious diseases...”
Image credit: "Melinda Gates and Bill Gates during an April 18 video appearance." Photo: Global Citizen/Reuters.
There is No Evidence That Voting by Mail Gives One Party an Advantage. Here's a clip from FiveThirtyEight: "...Numerous studies have arrived at the same conclusion: Voting by mail doesn’t provide any clear partisan advantage. In fact, as states have expanded their use of mailed ballots over the last decade — including five states that conduct all-mail elections by default — both parties have enjoyed a small but equal increase in turnout. In short: voting by mail is more convenient for some voters but more difficult for others, and these conflicting factors appear to cancel each other out, dampening any partisan advantage. Moreover, the vast majority of nonvoters don’t participate not because it’s too inconvenient to vote, but because voting isn’t a habit for them. Maybe they don’t care about politics, maybe they don’t think their vote matters, maybe they don’t like any of the candidates, or maybe it’s some combination of all of the above..."
Why Time Feels So Weird Right Now. Doesn't it? Here's an excerpt of a plausible explainer at Vox: "...So what we call our internal clock is actually a whole bunch of internal clocks. We’ve got multiple systems, all of them influencing the subjective perception of time. We’ve got systems just for regulating our bodily functions like our sleep cycle. We’re constantly interpreting and synchronizing multiple sensory modalities — our auditory information has to be integrated into and synchronized with what we’re seeing visually, for example. We’re constantly switching our attention and regulating attention. We’re constantly integrating memories and our anticipations into making plans and performing critical actions. So there’s a lot of stuff going on all at the same time that all have to do with our internal sense of the passage of time..."
Illustration credit:
58 F. high in the Twin Cities on Tuesday.
68 F. average high on May 12.
62 F. high on May 12, 2019.
May 13, 1872: A hailstorm hits Sibley County. Hail up to the size of pigeon eggs is reported. Lightning burns down a barn near Sibley, killing a horse tied up inside.
WEDNESDAY: Clouds, few showers. Winds: SE 10-20. High: 57
THURSDAY: Lukewarm sunshine, very nice. Winds: NW 7-12. Wake-up: 52. High: 72
FRIDAY: Partly sunny and pleasant. Winds: NE 5-10. Wake-up: 50. high: near 70
SATURDAY: Unsettled with showers, risk of a T-storm. Winds: E 8-13. Wake-up: 53. High: 67
SUNDAY: Damp start, then getting sunnier. Winds: N 5-10. Wake-up: 54. HIgh: 69
MONDAY: Partly sunny and warmer. Widns: S 10-15. Wake-up: 52. High: 76
TUESDAY: Sunny, windy and almost hot! Winds: S 15-25. Wake-up: 60. High: 84
Climate Stories...
Coronavirus Could Worsen Death Toll of Summer Heat Waves, Health Officials Warn. The Los Angeles Times reports: "High temperatures have rolled through the Southwest unusually early this year, scorching Phoenix and Las Vegas and sending droves of quarantine-weary Southern Californians to the beaches. Even before the outbreak, the hottest parts of the country were struggling to protect their residents from summer weather that, fueled by global warming, has become increasingly dangerous. Now the COVID-19 epidemic has presented them with an added crisis — the possibility of millions of people self-isolating in homes and apartments they can’t keep cool. This is an especially worrying possibility for the elderly and people in poor neighborhoods, where residents are more likely to live in older, less energy-efficient homes and less likely to have air conditioners..."
Missouri River Basin Drought Worst Since Charlemagne: Climate Nexus has links and headlines: "Human-caused climate change caused the Upper MIssouri River Basin to be drier between 2000-2010 than at any point in the last 1,200 years, according to new research. A study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found the drought of the 2000s mirrored the “megadroughts” of the last 500 years, but was made worse by climate change’s impact on Rocky Mountain snowpack, a crucial source of water for the river that is very sensitive to warming temperatures. Scientists used tree ring data to measure annual stream flow since 800 A.D. Climate scientists expect climate change to cause more and worse droughts in the future caused with significant repercussions for the region and beyond. “We’ve designed our agriculture and infrastructure around expectations that this water [from snow melt] will be provided at a certain pace over a certain part of the year,” Erika Wise, a co-author of the study, told the Washington Post." (Washington Post, CBS. Drought background: Climate Signals)
File image: U.S. Geological Survey.
Big Oil Earnings Battered by Virus, But Worst is Yet to Come. Bloomberg has the story: "Big Oil emerged from first-quarter earnings battered and bruised, but things are only going to get uglier. Major oil and gas producers from Norway to the U.S. saw profit plunge in the opening three months of the year. Exxon Mobil Corp. reported its first loss in over 30 years, Royal Dutch Shell Plc cut its dividend for the first time since the Second World War. And that was only the result of the initial spread of the coronavirus. Things have got even worse since as a global pandemic caused an unprecedented oil-market slump. There are some signs of recovery on the horizon, but companies were united in their warnings that the current quarter will be tougher than the first..."
Fact Check: The Coronavirus Pandemic Isn't Slowing Climate Change. USA TODAY explains: "With the coronavirus pandemic shutting down most global activity, a consequent crash in global carbon emissions has been widely reported. While analysts agree the historic lockdowns will significantly lower emissions, some environmentalists argue the drop is nowhere near enough. “Hey so it turns out that the people of earth accidentally did a global experiment to see if every individual could course correct climate change through mass personal change of habits, and it turns out, no! We can't!,” a Facebook post shared more than 4,000 times reads. The post shares a screenshot of another post that links to a Scientific American article with the chatter, "Despite all the 'natural is healing' commentary global CO2 emissions have not considerably declined during the pandemic..."
File image: NASA ISS.
Climate Change Deniers Take On Coronavirus: Climate Nexus has headlines and links: "Climate change deniers are using tactics honed over decades of undermining climate action to spread conspiracy theories over official COVID-19 death counts, the New York Times reports. The Times tracks the ways in which many groups allied with the Trump administration, including many historically funded by tobacco and oil companies to question science, are using tactics similar to those they have used to sow doubt over climate science to inflate coronavirus rumors. In one instance, a claim that the virus’s death toll was being deliberately inflated traveled from a MN state senator, who made the rounds on conspiracy-oriented programs like Infowars, all the way to the president’s Twitter feed. “We don’t have perfect information,” James Taylor of the Heartland Institute, which has long questioned established climate science, told the Times. “The coronavirus models’ failure to make accurate predictions to this point should be instructive when we are told to blindly accept certain climate models.” (New York TImes)
Climate Change in Northern Climes. Cosmos Magazine connects the dots: "...Lakes and peatlands – spongy bogs and fens – make up the remainder of the boreal landscape. Peatlands store vast amounts of water and carbon in layers of living and dead moss and serve as natural firebreaks as long as they remain wet. Peatland mosses are not vascular plants, so as warming continues, they are more prone to drying out, the researchers say. Unlike forests, they have no active mechanism to protect themselves from losing water to the atmosphere. Dehydration exposes their dense carbon stores to accelerated decomposition, turning them from firebreaks into fire propagators – and bigger, more intense fires that can release vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming..."
Photo credit: "Boreal peatlands and forest in Canada's Northwest Territories."Manuel Helbig, McMaster University.
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