Tuesday, July 24, 2018

Melchizedek Weather Anomalies Rage around the World - Heat, Fires, Rain, Floods, Volcanoes, Tornadoes, Earthquakes - what next???


A 'biblical disaster': Greek official on wildfires that have killed 50


At least 10 million at risk as relentless rain will bring 'dangerous, life-threatening' floods to East Coast

USA TODAY July 23, 2018 

Rounds of rainfall to escalate flood concerns in eastern US this week
     AccuWeather
     July 24, 2018








Greece wildfires: Tourists killed after deadliest blaze to hit country in a decade
Yahoo News UK 7 hours ago 


Greece wildfires
Wild: The uncontrollable inferno took over trees near Athens. (Rex)
More than 50 people have been killed by Greece’s worst wildfire in a decade.

The devastating blaze ripped through villages, holiday resorts and rural areas near Athens after being fanned by high winds.

Of the 104 people injured, 69 needed hospital treatment and 11 were in a serious condition, officials said.

Dozens of cars have been left as charred shells and huge plumes of smoke still hang over affected areas as rescue crews battle to extinguish the fires and find survivors.















Flash flooding sweeps across the country as record heat hits from Texas to California

 MAX GOLEMBO,Good Morning America 1 hour 55 minutes ago 


Downpours have triggered flash flooding across the country, with torrential rainfall shutting down highways in Colorado and prompting floodwater rescues in New Mexico.

Parts of Maryland are also underwater, as in Pennsylvania, where the rain closed Hershey Park.

Some areas in the Mid-Atlantic are approaching 10 inches of rain already, with more to come.

Flash flood watches are in effect this week from South Carolina to New York state.
Meanwhile, record heat is enveloping the West.
Waco, Texas, saw its highest ever-recorded temperature of 114 degrees Monday.
Phoenix and Palm Springs, California, hit daily record highs of 115 and 119 degrees, respectively.
It even reached a scorching 122 degrees Monday in Thermal, California, in the Coachella Valley.
And the heat isn't over.
Highs Tuesday will be in the triple digits from Southern California to Oregon.
It's expected to reach 113 degrees in Las Vegas, 103 in Dallas and 102 in Burbank this week.



Heat wave strikes the Arctic, and the climate enters the Twilight Zone
Jerry Adler 18 hours ago
Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Arnaud Bertrande/Getty Images, CBS, Getty Images.

We pause now in our ongoing coverage of the end of Western democracy for a brief consideration of the end of the world. Along with Robert Frost, we can say that the question of fire versus ice as the agent of destruction has been settled in favor of fire, and we even know where the fire is likely to start: above the Arctic Circle, where an unprecedented heat wave has sent temperatures in the far north of Sweden as high as 86 F. The Washington Post’s climate writer, Jason Samenow,  recently reported that the temperature (calculated by extrapolation) in a part of northern Siberia reached 90 degrees earlier this month, 40 degrees above normal. “It is absolutely incredible and really one of the most intense heat events I’ve ever seen for so far north,” wrote meteorologist Nick Humphrey. And after years of increasingly hot, dry summers, the great forests in the far north, all around the globe, are starting to burn.
A forest fire, like virtually all fires, releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, accelerating the greenhouse effect that drives global warming. This is especially true of wildfires at high latitudes, where trees grow back slowly, and where there are the additional risks of carbon-dense peat bogs drying and burning, and also of melting permafrost releasing huge quantities of methane. This illustrates one of the perverse facts about climate change, that almost all the feedback effects are positive (in the technical sense of self-reinforcing, not as in “good.”) As one example, global warming melts ice and snow cover, which tends to reflect the sun’s radiation out to space, while bare earth and seawater absorb it.
Higher temperatures also cause more evaporation, putting more water vapor into the atmosphere. Water vapor — “humidity” to those living in the rain forest, or commuting to work on the subway — doesn’t just make the air feel hotter; it’s a greenhouse gas all by itself, which is why the temperature drops more at night in New Mexico than it does in New Jersey. Some climatologists have hopefully suggested that more water vapor would increase cloud cover and mitigate warming (a negative feedback loop), but the most recent assessment by the International Panel on Climate Change suggests that the net effect of increased evaporation on temperature will be either neutral, or “positive” — i.e., worse.
Almost the entire Northern Hemisphere has been hotter than normal this summer; Denver hit an all-time high of 105 in June, around the same time that Oman reported the highest nighttime low temperature ever recorded anywhere in the world, 109. As I write this, at 10 a.m. Sunday in the East, it is 79 degrees in Austin, Texas, with a forecast high of 105, going up to 108 on Monday. It was so hot there last week that the Austin Fire Department responded to a blaze caused by the spontaneous combustion of tortilla chips (technically, the crumbs and waste from a chip factory that had been left outdoors in the sun). A heat wave in Japan last week put 10,000 people in the hospital; at least 30 died.

It is a convention of the media that any article about heat waves (or forest fires, droughts or hurricanes) must be footnoted with the observation that no one weather event can be definitively attributed to climate change. That reflects both an appropriate caution on the part of scientists, and a preemptive rebuttal to climate-change deniers like Sen. James Inhofe, who a couple of years ago noticed that it was cold in February and sought to cast doubt on decades of climatology by bringing a snowball to the floor of the Senate. But that consensus is beginning to break down. The rule that where there’s smoke there’s fire, which political reporters have begun to apply metaphorically to evidence of Trump campaign collusion with Russia, should apply equally to science reporters covering actual fires.
Inhofe, a mentor to former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, has come in for occasional ridicule for his belief that weather and the climate are entirely in God’s hands, absolving the coal and petroleum industries of responsibility. That is a fairly common belief among extreme conservatives. Of course, not all his Republican colleagues get their scientific information from the Bible. As reported in Climatewire, Scott Wagner, the Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, placed the blame squarely where it belongs, on human activity. Unlike most scientists, though, the activity he had in mind wasn’t burning fossil fuels, but, uh… procreation: “We have more people,” he mused at a panel discussion last year. “You know, humans have warm bodies. So is heat coming off?”
It’s true, an average person at rest generates as much heat as a 100-watt light bulb — which if you think about it, isn’t really that much. But human beings are fueled by food, which is to say, ultimately by sunlight, so their metabolism doesn’t actually contribute any net gain of heat to the atmosphere — it’s just moving calories around, from cropland to the places people live. If people walked instead of drove, they would generate (marginally) more body heat, but fewer greenhouse gases and less climate change. 
Wagner had another possible explanation. “I haven’t been in a science class in a long time, but the Earth moves closer to the sun every year — you know the rotation of the Earth,” Wagner said, at the same panel discussion at which he unveiled his theory that global warming is caused by an excess of people. “We’re moving closer to the sun.”
The Earth does move closer to the sun during the course of each year — and then further away for the next six months — but on average it isn’t noticeably closer than it was before scientists noticed that the climate was changing. Also, inconveniently for Wagner’s theory, July is actually when the Earth is farthest away from the sun. (To save him the trouble of going back to high school, the change in seasons is a factor of the way the Earth’s axis is tilted, not how far it is from the sun.)

“His comments were meant to illustrate that there are a lot of theories about what causes global warming,” his campaign manager told reporters. “Scott is running for governor, not to be a scientist, so he will leave it up to scientists to figure out what the cause of global warming is.”
But scientists actually have figured it out, and if politicians would just listen to them and act on that basis — as they are doing in the rest of the world — we could go a long way toward solving the problem. One Republican who understands that is Rep. Carlos Curbelo of Florida, who is introducing a carbon-tax bill this week. Curbelo, not by coincidence, represents a district that stretches south from Miami to the Keys, an area that is considered vulnerable to both a Democratic wave in November and the kind of wave that comes from the ocean with rising sea levels. Curbelo is a co-founder of a bipartisan group called the Climate Solutions Caucus, which currently claims 43 Republicans; together with the entire Democratic caucus, that adds up to a majority of the House. But getting a proposal with “tax” in its name through Congress and signed by a president who is fond of boasting about how much he loves coal has (extrapolating to sometime in the not-too-distant future) a snowball’s chance at the North Pole.
As for Wagner, he didn’t say where he got his theory. Presumably it wasn’t in science class, but one possibility is this memorable episode of “The Twilight Zone” from 1961. As Rod Serling so presciently put it:
“The time is five minutes to twelve, midnight. There is no more darkness. The place is New York City and this is the eve of the end, because even at midnight it’s high noon, the hottest day in history, and you’re about to spend it in the Twilight Zone.”
We are there now.

Monday, July 23, 2018

Forty Years ago President Jimmy Carter attacked by Killer Rabbit - and Trump thinks he has it bad!





















Wacky and Weird Weather highlights of 2018 in Words and Photos and it is still July!!!


The Weirdest Weather Events of 2018 So Far

By Jon Erdman
June 28 2018 01:45 PM EDT
weather.com


We've already seen our share of winter storms, severe weather, cold outbreaks, flooding and droughts so far in 2018. But there are some weather events every year that are downright strange, and this year is no exception.


The events we consider strange are weather phenomena happening repeatedly in one place, in a place where you wouldn't think they would occur or during an unusual time of year. Some are phenomena you may not find in a Weather 101 textbook.

Here are some of weirdest weather events we've seen so far in 2018, in chronological order.


Freezing Rain in Florida


Just after New Year's Day, Winter Storm Grayson blanketed Tallahassee, Florida, with its first measurable snow since 1989, and the first January such occurrence, there, in records dating to 1885. That's eye-catching enough.  What was even more bizarre was seeing an ice accumulation map involving the Sunshine State. Up to a quarter inch of ice accumulation was measured in Lake City, and light icing on elevated surfaces was reported as far south as Levy County.


February 80s in New England


The heat in New England Feb. 20-21 was the "most extraordinary heat event to ever affect the Northeastern quadrant of the U.S. during the month of February, since official records began in the late 1800s," according to Weather Underground weather historian Christopher Burt. All-time state February heat records were tied or broken in eight states, including 77 degrees at Wells, Maine, 80 degrees at Fitchburg, Massachusetts, 83 degrees at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and 80 degrees at Cincinnati's Lunken Airport. 


The Four-easters



Perhaps as payback for the summerlike February heat wave, four nor'easters – Winter Storms RileyQuinnSkylar and Toby – in three weeks brought misery to millions along the Eastern Seaboard in March 2018. Incredibly, a fifth low-pressure center was a bit too far offshore near the end of March to join the fearsome foursome from earlier in the month.


A Horseshoe Cloud


While the nor'easter parade was hammering the East Coast, a bizarre cloud was captured in video over Nevada in early March. As meteorologist Jonathan Belles explained, this rare horseshoe vortex is fleeting, lasting only minutes, when a relatively flat cloud moves over a column of rising air, which also gives the cloud some spin.



A State Record Hailstone



Alabama's notorious history of severe weather, particularly tornadoes, is well documented.  On March 19, however, it was a hailstone that captured meteorologists' attention. One softball-size hailstone near Cullman, Alabama, was found to set a new state record, more than 5 inches in diameter. 


Orange Snow


Just after spring officially arrived in late March, a plume of dust tapped by southerly winds from north Africa, lead to the sight of orange snow over parts of eastern Europe. While not unheard of, this particular orange snow event observed in parts of Russia, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Romania and Moldova featured higher concentrations of dust than usual, according to the BBC. 



New U.S. Rainfall Record?



Less than eight months after Hurricane Harvey smashed a rainfall record for any U.S. tropical cyclone, a deluge in Hawaii appeared to have set another U.S. rain record. A location on the island of Kauai measured 49.69 inches of rain in just 24 hours from April 14-15. If that is verified, it would top the U.S. 24-hour rain record of 43 inches in Alvin, Texas, during Tropical Storm Claudette in July 1979.



Apriluary, Then a Record Warm May


The coldest April in 21 years for the Lower 48 states was followed by the hottest May, in NOAA records dating to 1895. Climate scientist Dr. Brian Brettschneider wrote this was the largest area of Earth to undergo a record cold-to-warm shift in consecutive months in the last 100 years.  Minneapolis-St. Paul went from its heaviest April snowstorm of record in mid-April to a Memorial Day high of 100 degrees in just six weeks.


New England Long-Track Tornado in May


A 36-mile long EF1 tornado May 4 in western and central New Hampshire was one of the longest on record in New England. As strange as an early-May tornado of any kind is in New Hampshire –  its typical peak tornado month is July – perhaps the most amazing aspect to this was how the tornado was discovered. The National Weather Service office in Gray, Maine, gathered public storm reports, then surveyed relatively remote parts of New Hampshire 10 days after the tornado to piece together its path.


Subtropical Cyclone Off Chile

The northeastern Pacific basin's hurricane season starts in mid-May. In early May 2018, however, a bizarre subtropical cyclone formed in the southeast Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Chile. This appeared to have been a first-of-its-kind storm to form over this typically colder stretch of the southeast Pacific Ocean, according to long-term records.   


Wildfire Spawns a Severe Thunderstorm

Lightning from thunderstorms can often trigger wildfires. On May 11, however, heat generated from the Mallard Fire southeast of Amarillo, Texas, generated not just a photogenic pyrocumulus cloud, but also triggered a severe thunderstorm that ended up dumping quarter-size hail in Wheeler County, Texas, just over 60 miles away.

Back-to-Back Middle East Tropical Cyclones in Unusual Locations 



In less than a week in May, a pair of tropical cyclones took unusual tracks in the Middle East. First, Tropical Cyclone Sagar tracked almost the entire length of the Gulf of Aden before landfalling in far western Somalia on May 19, the country's strongest and westernmost in records since the mid-1960s.  Six days later, Tropical Cyclone Mekunu moved ashore near Salalah, Oman, the first Category 3 landfall in southwest Oman in modern records, dumping over 24 inches of rain in four days in the city. 


Alberto is Pure Michigan

After a Memorial Day landfall in the Florida Panhandle, deep moist air and the lack of strong shearing winds kept what was once Subropical Storm Alberto's remnant circulation intact well inland, to the degree that NOAA's Weather Prediction Center didn't issue its final advisory until Alberto was just southwest of Alpena, Michigan, on May 31.  The only other tropical cyclone to have tracked within 75 miles of Alpena since the mid-20th century, according to NOAA, was Connie, as a tropical storm in August 1955.  As The Weather Channel senior meteorologist Stu Ostro pointed out, this was also a highly unusual track for May.



Two Wyoming EF3 Tornadoes in Less Than a Week

In the first six days of June, a pair of EF3 tornadoes tore through areas near Gillette and Laramie, Wyoming, the first F/EF3 or stronger tornadoes in the state since 1987. Wyoming's low population density typically minimizes the chance of a tornado hitting structures or even trees to allow the National Weather Service to rate a tornado. The June 6 tornado north of Laramie scoured grass from the ground, allowing the NWS to rate it EF3. 



Snow After Summer Arrives

Imagine shoveling snow five days after the summer solstice. This happened on June 26, when a storm off the coast of Newfoundland had just enough cold air to blanket parts of the island with snow, prompting plows to be called out. It was one of the latest-in-season snowfalls on record in Gander. Kids had to to trudge through snow during their last week of school before summer vacation.


Jonathan Erdman is a senior meteorologist at weather.com and has been an incurable weather geek since a tornado narrowly missed his childhood home in Wisconsin at age 7. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.