Current sea surface temperatures

Seeing this, it seems somehow unsurprising that we got three simultaneous Atlantic Hurricanes, including two that repeatedly made landfall as Major hurricanes. That many millions of square miles of high-energy water are not natural, and not good news.

Thank a meteorologist

Where I live, or rather in several of the places where I have lived, meteorology often seems to have about as much predictive accuracy as astrology. The German weather website wetter.com predicts rain for Rostock all afternoon and evening, starting 2 hours from now, while windfinder.com predicts no precipitation at all today. It is currently raining.

Because this kind of obvious failure of retail meteorology is so common, bashing ‘the weatherman’ is a popular and easy past time, and I think this shapes the views of many people on meteorology generally. But when things like Hurricane Sandy do things like this to a densely populated portion of a continent and kill only dozens of people, rather than tens of thousands, that is because of the very healthy state of meteorological science.
Imagine, if you will, the impact of Sandy on the U.S. if meteorology hadn’t progressed in the last hundred years. We would have gotten reports of a hurricane hitting Jamaica, Hispaniola and then Cuba. Folks in New Orleans, hit by Katrina a few years earlier, with even less warning than in the real world, would start evacuating, along with much of Florida and the Gulf Coast. No telling where this thing might hit. New Jersey and New York would scarcely take notice. When Sandy clobbered the Bahamas, people in the Carolinas would need to evacuate fast. Who knows who the monster is coming for? Two days later when the surf in New Jersey started getting really rough, and the wind really strong, the idea that New Jersey and New York could get hit would occur to a lot of people. But what does it mean to get hit? Lots of rain and wind? Flash floods? Would anyone have guessed that there would be a nearly 14 foot storm surge in New York City, flooding houses, lobbies and subway tunnels with seawater? Would lower Manhattan have been evacuated at all? Would there have been time to get out? I doubt it.

My guess is the East Coast would have been far less prepared than New Orleans was for Katrina, because people in real world New Orleans, even if their government let them down, could turn on the TV and know what was coming. In a meteorology-free New York, the idea of large parts of the city being underwater would have seemed ridiculous until walls of water were ripping through tunnels still full of people.
We have come to take for granted that we should be warned, accurately, of major weather events days in advance, and we grumble about the uncertainties and inaccuracies. There is certainly still room for improvement. But the fact that New Jersey was named as one likely landfall while the center of the storm was not yet to Cuba is absolutely amazing. That requires a level of understanding and predictive computing that I find hard to fathom. It frankly seems a bit like magic. The National Hurricane Center nailed this one, and in so doing prevented tens of billions of dollars in damages and tens of thousands of lives. Somebody deserves a medal. Thank you meteorology.

Acclimatized

15C (59F) is quite cool for summer in New York and a normal summer day in Rostock.

25C (77F) is a normal summer day in New York, and a really hot day in Rostock.

35C (95F) is a really hot day in New York, and hotter than it has ever been measured in Rostock.

45C (113F) is hotter than it has ever been measured in New York and would kill half of Rostock.

As I pack for a trip, I am forced to wonder not only what the weather will be like in New York, but if 35C in  New York means the same thing to me now that I have been living in Rostock.

Camels (and alpacas and equids)

There are camels, at least seven of them, in one of the vacant lots adjacent to the Institute. These (the lots, not the camels) are generally dominated by garbage-bespangled weeds and scrubby little trees. Today there is a circus truck, a tent with camel stalls, and a bunch of camels happily chomping the weeds down to the ground. I've seen goats, sheep and even cows used to clear brush, but the camels seem to be eating through the weeds faster than any of these could. The garbage has been removed (hopefully before the camels were let in), and there is a man who looks more like a circus worker than a government worker cutting and hauling away the woody stuff  the camels pass by (actually just throwing it into another one of the vacant lots). It seems like by tomorrow evening they will have to move them to another lot, or bring in fodder. I wonder if the circus is paying for, or being paid for, the use of the lot. Seems like a good deal for both parties.

It is 6C (43F) and sunny, which means that Rostockers think it is summer, and are walking around, admiring the camels. Some college kids have carried their couch onto the waterfront and are setting up a barbeque.  The ice on the harbor has all melted, and the gulls and mallards are looking for handouts.

Given all this, you might rightly ask why I am in the lab on a Sunday, instead of showing my daughter the camels, or walking with my wife, considering that I have excellent student assistants who are doing all of the actual lab work. The answer is that student assistants are not allowed to be in the lab by themselves, regardless of how mature or well trained they might be, or how routine or undangerous the work. So if the animals need to be checked every day, someone has to be here every day to baby-sit whichever student is in that day. This situation has actually gotten somewhat better. For 18 months that someone always had to be me, and I worked 7 days a week unless I was too sick and had to ask a colleague to cover for me. Now I am working with two wonderful post-docs, and only need to be in the lab every third weekend. Soon another graduate student will join us, and it will be every fourth weekend. Of course, the more experiments there are going on, the longer we have to be in the lab each day, and we are at about 6 hours now, and this will increase. So while those 7 day work weeks I was working included two pretty short days, the occasional work weekend will soon mean working almost full time.

This is honestly not so bad, but I’d rather be out watching the camels eat up that vacant lot.

Update: 10 camels, 6 alpacas, 4 miniature ponies, 3 donkeys and 9 horses. Only the camels are out grazing, fodder is being brought in and more tents are being set up in the areas already cleared.

Irene reaches Europe

The National Hurricane Center was remarkably accurate in predicting the track Hurricane Irene would follow up the East Coast of the US. Tropical Storm Irene made her way over New England pretty much as they said she would. They stopped updating that forecast when Tropical Depression Irene passed the northern boundary of Maine into Canada, and even the Canadian press largely stopped covering Irene once it passed out into the Labrador Sea. But now Post-Tropical Cyclone Irene, is forecast to bring gale-force winds to Wales over the next few days. Given that this storm started as a tropical wave over Africa, I wonder if she is just trying to find her way back home. Or maybe she wants to go around again? The only forecast I have seen on the future path of the remnants actually calls for her to come this way (towards the Baltic), as a fairly ordinary low-pressure wave and storm later this week.

Spring is the season of interviews

Spring has sprung and is sprinting toward summer here in Rostock. The horse-chestnut trees that line many of the parks and roads are covered in big spikes of flowers. There are fledglings all over the place, running around on the ground until their wings are developed enough to let them fly. (Many of them don’t make it and the curious eye will spot the occasional bit of carnage under a bush). In the shallow western end of the old city moat, newts are breeding among the sunken leaves and floating catkins. From one day to the next, the skies above the city have filled with squadrons of swifts, whistling incessantly as they outmaneuver any insect that dares take flight.

The days are rapidly getting longer. The sun might officially go down at 9:02 today, but the twilight stretches to well after 10 as the sun skims just below the northwestern horizon. Early this morning there was light streaming in our north-facing kitchen window.

The spring here brings more than just a physical thaw. Come to Rostock in the winter and you will think the population generally has forgotten how to smile. You will see few people on the streets, and often the only parts of them that are visible are scowling. Now the streets are full of summer dresses and shorts, and their occupants are reveling in sunshine.

This, frankly, is the perfect time to be bringing post-doc candidates to Rostock. Flowers, birds, smiling faces, warm breezes, so much sun. These interviews are as much about convincing people they want to come here as they are deciding which people we want to hire. Having the place at its best certainly helps in that regard. We won’t do any interviewing in February.

A Frigorific New Year!

For the first time in about a month, there is not a cold wind blowing through Rostock. The temperature started going up late last night, as announced by the sound our chunks of ice and snow falling 24 stories off the of our building onto the street below.

The temperature of course can't get much above freezing with all this ice all over everything. Looks like a frigorific new year.

Jon Asks: 2

In the Laura Ingalls Wilder book The Long Winter, Laura's father says that you can predict the severity of a winter by observing the thickness of muskrat nests in the summer. Muskrats, he says, will build thicker nests during the summer if the following winter is going to be relatively colder, and vice versa with thinner nests and relatively warmer winters. Has this folk wisdom been investigated? Is it true? And if so, where can I get my own muskrat colony?

I can't find anything on Google Scholar or Web of Science indicating that anyone has published anything about muskrats and weather prediction, other than this:

Man's natural craving for advance knowledge of coming weather extends thousands of years back of any attempts at scientific weather forecasting. Realizing that he has not the necessary foresight himself, he has imagined animals to be endowed with some peculiar sense which enables them to know, weeks or months ahead, what the weather will be. Thus a large group of animal weather proverbs has come into existence. Millions of people believe that the thickness of fur on a muskrat, or the number of nuts stored by a squirrel, or a supposedly early migration of certain birds, indicates a severe winter. Yet it is certain that animals have no such foresight.

from: Robert DeC. Ward. 1926. The Present Status of Long-Range Weather Forecasting
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society,Vol. 65, No. 1, pp. 1-14

He provides no evidence to show that they don't, he is just certain. Note that the version you mention has to do with the thickness of the wall of the house, while the version Ward mentions has to do with the thicknesss of their fur. The fur hypothesis would be easier to test, if you were a muskrat hunter. I am frankly doubtful whether he or anyone else has done the work that would be needed to convincingly either story. You would have to measure the wall thickness of bunches of muskrat houses (or the pelt of many muskrats) in the summer. You would have to do this every year for quite a few years in order to make a convincing analysis of the relationship between wall thickness and hardness of winter. You would probably also want to measure various features of the microclimate, the muskrats behavior and physiology, and the local ecology, in order to get some sense of what the mechanism was. You probably would want to measure the pelts and the houses, just to make sure you were measuring the right thing. This is one limitation to testing folk-wisdom. There are often several versions, and it is hard to know if you are testing the right one unless you test all of them, and then you increase your chances of finding a strong correlation just by chance. My best guess is that there is some, but not a lot of, truth to either version of the story. Certainly they could pick up on whatever cues are available that the winter is going to be hard. But like most weather prediction, they probably aren't very accurate, at least not months in advance.

Cold and Fat

Cold places tend to have fatty cuisines. The usual explanation for this, although I know of no rigorous test, is that cold weather requires us to burn lots of energy to stay warm, and our bodies respond to this greater demand by causing us to eat more rich foods.

This simple idea has several profound implications that I will now proceed to invent.

The first implication is that " burn lots of energy to stay warm" means something very similar to "increase metabolic rate." So people in colder environments should have higher metabolisms. This matches with the current experience of myself and my wife. For the past months the temperature outside our apartment has rarely gotten above freezing, the wind is always blowing and it is generally damp. Our apartment is somewhat difficult to heat, so it is generally cool and sometimes downright cold inside. We have been eating a very rich diet, and rather than gaining weight, I think we are both loosing a bit. And although the short days cause a degree of lethargy, I have been generally quite productive, with fewer problems of concentration than usual.

There is good reason to think, in fact, that colder climates lead to greater productivity. Colder countries are systematically more economically productive than hotter countries, air conditioning raises productivity considerably, and hot countries experience more economic growth in cool years than in warm ones. My preferred speculation is that this is because the experience of coolth induces greater physiological throughput, allowing for greater activity. If one needs to expend energy to keep oneself warm, why not put that energy to some good use, such as thinking, building, or working. Why shiver when I can use the same energy sharpening the knives or generating a hypothesis?

Allow me one further observation and conjecture. Germans, who eat very heavy diets but on the average are less heavy than Americans, are in the habit of opening all the windows whenever it gets warm inside, even if it is below freezing out. Two apparently unrelated stereo-types of modern Americans, both of which have some basis in fact, may in fact be causally related. These are, we are very fat, and we keep our houses very warm in the winter. Perhaps the miracle diet so many have been searching for should include turning down the thermostat. If we burn more calories when we experience cold, and we want to burn more calories, perhaps we should experience more cold.

A month of snow

A cubic meter of fluffy freshly fallen snow weighs about 80kg, while a cubic meter of water weighs a metric ton, 1000kg. This implies that a meter of fresh snow will melt into a paltry 8cm deep layer of water. Enough to make the ground very soggy, but not nearly as impressive as a meter of snow. As ice is slightly less dense than water (about 92% as dense) a meter of snow will squish down into a slightly thicker layer of ice, almost 9cm. A third possibility is to catch a plane to someplace warmer, where the snow never fell at all.

Rostock ten day forecast

Snow
Snow
Mostly Cloudy
Snow
Snow
Snow
Snow
Snow
Snow
Snow

I must really love science, as I don't know what else would keep me in this sun-forsaken place.

Choughs in the wind.

Pilatus is a minor alp at 2132m (7000ft), but impressive for its sheer ruggedness, and the way it hangs over Lucerne Switzerland and several large lakes and forests. Its peak can be reached by a cog-wheel railroad, except in the winter, when snow and ice block the tracks. In these months, only the aerial cable cars, leaving from Lucerne, reach the top. The large gondola that carried us the last few thousand feet to the peek hung from a great cable with no support between its two ends, excepting one tower, which stood atop a sheer drop of close to a thousand feet. The top half of the mountain was snow covered, with evergreens petering out some hundreds of feet below the top. As we stepped out of the Gondola and into the visitor center on the mountain's top, it began snowing.

Standing outside the visitor center we could see impressive peaks, valleys, lakes and forests stretching far and wide. A stiff wind was blowing, and within two or three minutes we couldn't see much beyond the peak we were on. We went inside and had hot chocolate and pastries. As we sat and sipped, gazing through floor to ceiling windows, visibility continued to drop. We noticed that the staff were starting to close up, which seemed odd, as it was still morning. A smiling suited man with a managerial manner came through announcing something in Swiss German and everyone started moving towards the cables cars. Our friend Annette explained that the wind was picking up so much they were afraid they wouldn't be able to run the cable cars, and they were sending us all down the mountain before that happened. By the time we got down one flight of stairs the wind was too strong, the cable cars couldn't safely operate. We and a couple of hundred other visitor and staff waited perhaps half an hour before the manager came through and announced we would just have to wait the storm out. He invited us all back to the restaurant for free refreshments. So we sat in the big exposed glass walled restaurant consuming free soup, hot beverages, pastries and good bread and watched the blizzard lash the mountain. Chunks of snow the size of small cars broke off the cliffs and were thrown up and out. A wooden bench which had been left outside was hurled into a metal fence hard enough to snap some of the welds. Visibility was perhaps ten meters.

In the middle of this frozen hurricane, this onslaught of white fury, something, no two somethings black and sleek and solid appeared on the edge of visibility and simple hung in the storm. It seemed ridiculous that anything could live on a mountain peek in such a blizzard, but these forms seemed not only unconcerned, but rather playful. Annette and I, both former ornithologists, each had binoculars out and pointed within five seconds. Too slow, for the seemingly magical forms rotated slightly and in unison shot at amazing speed down wind and into the white-out.


"Alpine Choughs!" announced Annette, and several tables-full of other tourists turned around to look for the now vanished birds.



Over the next hours, as the storm slowly passed, we watched the choughs hovering, flipping, clearly playing, in conditions that would kill any normal bird long before it could flee down the mountain. They seemed to seek out the crevices through which wind blew fastest, so as to make their acrobatics all the more impressive. When it finally stopped snowing, we could see dozens of choughs racing and chasing with no apparent goal but to use the still gale force winds to show off for each other. As the winds slowed most of the choughs settled into a snow bank a few meters below the absolute top of the mountain. Their bright yellow beaks and red feet did not hide within their thick black feathers, but stayed exposed to the ice and wind, as though the weather was warm and sunny. They danced on the barbed wire that keeps animals away from the weather station at the peak, swinging in time with the wind.


And with that the manager stopped handing out the free refreshments and herded us down to the cable cars. Our car, rated to hold up to 3000kg, was stuffed with 2985kg of tourists. The wind swung the car side to side as we slid down the cable and over the cliff. It took at least four cars to get everybody down.

Safely back in Germany, I've been reading about the choughs, and they are pretty amazing. They can be found at the tops of high mountains from North Africa to western China, and unlike most other wildlife often do not move to lower elevations in winter. Being corvids (members of the crow family) they are smart and social. They are omnivores, feeding in rapidly moving flocks on insects, seeds, eggs and anything provided by tourists. They eat a lot of berries in winter. They will eat from people's hands at ski resorts and other places where they are fed regularly. Their bills are smaller and their feathers thicker than other crows, but otherwise nothing about their appearance would make one think they were so immune to cold. They likely store food in rock crevice where the cold keeps it good until they want it. They may nest at higher elevation than any other birds. Seeing them play was well worth being stranded on a mountain top for, especially when the stranding was accompanied with free soup, hot chocolate and pastries. I would gladly have shared the pastries with the Choughs, if I wouldn't have had to go out in the storm to give it to them.