Ice Cold Polar Vortex Takes Over America

On the heels of a winter storm named "Hercules" that brought blizzard conditions to the Midwest and New England and caused 16 deaths, we now have a phenomenon called the "Winter Vortex" that could be even more dangerous. Over the next 24 hours the Arctic blast is going to make temperatures plummet to below double digits below zero over the northern states and into the south. Also blizzards are happening again, and several states are under states of emergency just due to ice and cold. Is this extreme weather connected to global warming? Probably, yes. Is there anything we can do about it except bundle up and shake a fist at the sky? No.

US will soon learn meaning of “polar vortex” as record cold descends on Midwest Monday. http://t.co/nHR2UuUopE pic.twitter.com/o1jwgp0uGC

— Jim Roberts (@nycjim) January 4, 2014

From Time Magazine:

Meteorologists attribute the “polar vortex” to freezing air from the North Pole being pushed down to as far as the Gulf Coast of the U.S., the Associated Press reports. In Atlanta, temperatures will be in the mid-20s by Tuesday while a wintry mix of rain and snow are expected in parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, northern Arkansas, southern Ohio and southwestern Pennsylvania late into Sunday. The cold front will likely freeze large bodies of water, like the Great Lakes, meaning freezing temperatures could last through winter.

While still digging out from current snowfall, another winter storm will drop more snow and ice onto the the central Plains to the Great Lakes states this weekend. The biggest hit areas will include St. Louis, Indianapolis, Detroit, Cleveland and Buffalo.

Great graphic! MT @NWSTallahassee: Wind Chill Watch, Warning, or Advisory in effect for estimated 115 million ppl. pic.twitter.com/jGZmf7Vl8p

— Jim Cantore (@JimCantore) January 5, 2014

Chicago expected to approach all-time low-temperature mark of minus 11; wind chill may hit minus 45 - @chicagotribune http://t.co/wBDTcpbEfy

— Breaking News Storm (@breakingstorm) January 6, 2014

Documenting the End of Arctic Ice on our Planet

It's imperative to pay attention to the disappearance of ancient ice all over the world. It's not an academic question of "when" this will happen anymore. Global Warming is real. It is happening right now and the effects on our planet will be devastating as temperatures and oceans rise.

I saw parts of the movie "Chasing Ice" on PBS a few months ago, and it is amazing. What they are documenting is historic, awe-inspiring and undeniable. And real.

Earth Vision Trust on Facebook
James Balog on Twitter

We are so thrilled to announce that Chasing Ice will be showing at the United Nations later this month.... fb.me/NT8XELeq

— James Balog,EVT (@earthvisiontrst) December 2, 2012

"A lot of people have told me it's time to stop but I find myself with a profound committment to continuing to tell this story. I feel like I'm in the middle of the biggest story I could possibly ever be in the middle of as an environmental photographer. This is a monumental historic change in the natural landscape, happening in our time."
~ James Balog, "Chasing Ice" Photographer, on PBS News







From the Extreme Ice Survey Website

In 2005, internationally acclaimed nature photojournalist James Balog traveled to Iceland to photograph glaciers for The New Yorker. This led to a 2006 National Geographic assignment to document changing glaciers in various parts of the world. In the course of shooting that story (which became the June 2007 cover story, “The Big Thaw”), Balog, who in addition to being a photographer is a mountaineer with a graduate degree in geomorphology, recognized that extraordinary amounts of ice were vanishing with shocking speed. Features that took centuries to develop were being destroyed in just a few years or even just a few weeks. These changes are the most visually dramatic and immediate manifestations of climate change on our planet today.

Founded in 2007 by James Balog, the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS) is an innovative, long-term photography project that merges art and science to give a “visual voice” to the planet’s changing ecosystems. One aspect of EIS is an extensive portfolio of single-frame photos celebrating the beauty–the art and architecture–of ice. The other aspect of EIS is time-lapse photography; currently, 34 cameras are deployed at 16 glaciers in Greenland, Iceland, the Nepalese Himalaya, Alaska and the Rocky Mountains of the U.S. These cameras record changes in the glaciers every half hour, year-round during daylight, yielding approximately 8,000 frames per camera per year. We edit the time-lapse images into stunning videos that reveal how fast climate change is transforming large regions of the planet. Finally, EIS supplements the time-lapse record with episodic repeat photography in the French and Swiss Alps, Canada, Iceland, and Bolivia.

The President Tours NYC Hurricane Damage

The President visited Sandy-stricken Staten Island today in NYC. Obama would have been there sooner, except Mayor Bloomberg told him to stay away so his security wouldn't be a distraction right after the hurricane.

WSJ Transcript of the President's Remarks

And during difficult times like this, we’re reminded that we’re bound together and we have to look out for each other. And a lot of the things that seem important, the petty differences melt away, and we focus on what binds us together and that we as Americans are going to stand with each other in their hour of need.

Now, more specifically, we are now still in the process of recovery. As you can see, as you travel around parts of Staten Island, as we flew over parts of — other parts of the city and the region that had been impacted, there is still a lot of cleanup to do. People still need emergency help. They still need heat. They still need power. They still need food. They still need shelter. Kids are still trying to figure out where they’re going to school. So there’s a lot of short-term, immediate stuff that has to be dealt with. And we are going to make sure that we stay here as long as people need that immediate help. That’s FEMA’s primary task. And we’ll be coordinating closely with state and local governments to make sure folks are getting the short-term help.

But what we’ve also already heard is that there’s going to be some long-term rebuilding that’s required. You look at this block and you know that this is a community that is deeply rooted. Most of the folks that I met here have been here 20, 30, 50 years. They don’t want to see their community uprooted, but there’s got to be a plan for rebuilding, and that plan is going to have to be coordinated, and they’re going to need resources.



So what I’ve committed to doing is to work with the outstanding congressional delegation led by your Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, also working with Governor Christie and the Jersey delegation to try to come up with a game plan for how we’re going to be able to resource the rebuilding process.

And I’m confident, as Governor Cuomo said, that we’re going to be able to do it. But it’s going to require everybody focused on getting the job done. We’re going to have to put some of the turf battles aside. We’re going to have to make sure that everybody is focused on doing the job as opposed to worrying about who is getting the credit or who is getting the contracts or all that stuff that sometimes goes into the rebuilding process.

On the federal level, because this is going to be such a big job, I wanted to assign one particular person who would be in charge from our perspective, who would be our point person — because FEMA basically runs the recovery process, it doesn’t focus on the rebuilding. For that, we’ve got to have all government agencies involved. Janet Napolitano has done a great job with respect to DHS, but we thought it would be good to have a New Yorker who is going to be the point person. And so our outstanding HUD Secretary, Shaun Donovan, who used to be the head of the New York Housing Authority — so he knows a little bit about New York and building — is going to be our point person. And he’s going to be working with the mayor, the governor, the borough presidents, the county officials to make sure that we come up with a strong, effective plan. And then, I’ll be working with the members of Congress to do everything we can to get the resources needed to rebuild. And I have every confidence that Shaun is going to be doing a great job, and so people should feel some confidence about that.

Let me just close by saying this: I had the opportunity to give some hugs and communicate thoughts and prayers to the Moore family. They lost two young sons during the course of this tragedy. And obviously, I expressed to them — as a father, as a parent — my heartbreak over what they went through. And they’re still obviously a little shell-shocked.

Hurricane Sandy ~ Predictions Were Right and Science Saved Lives

Hindsight is always 20-20 especially when dealing with predicting the weather. But with Sandy, the forecasters got it all too right, even though many on Twitter and elsewhere made fun of the moniker "Frankenstorm," and CNN News supposedly banned the use of the name. Yet the hurricane really developed into the worst of the worst-case-scenarios and everyone's nightmare storm.

Luckily local officials listened to the scientists at NOAA and science saved lives.

What is a "Derecho" Anyway?

"The Line Storm," by John Steuart Curry, 1897-1946

Lately there have been several lines of devastating storms moving through the Ohio Valley, and meteorologists have been referring to them as a "derecho." I've lived in the U.S. all my life and never heard that term, even though we routinely get straight-line winds and severe weather here in the Southeast. They never mentioned it last year on the day of the April tornadoes, although that line of storms lasted for hundreds of miles, which makes me think that tornadoes trump derechos. Officially, the terrible line of storms that passed over the Northeast last week were not part of a derecho:

Pitch black now but 10 mins ago @twcbreaking @NewYorkology #derecho #NYC twitter.com/davidbrunonyc/…
— david bruno (@davidbrunonyc) July 26, 2012

LA Times Story

Joey Picca , a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said in a telephone interview with the Los Angeles Times from his office in Upton N.Y. on Long Island. “What we saw yesterday wasn’t a derecho in the traditional sense because it wasn’t widespread enough. Although we did see a large line of thunderstorms, it was lacking the true intensity you would like to see in a derecho.”
A derecho is defined as an event that has wind gusts of at least 58 mph and leaves a swath of damage for a minimum of 240 miles, according to the U.S. Storm Prediction Center.

So the phenomenon is actually rare, but with global warming raising the mercury it it could certainly happen again, so let's get educated by going directly to NOAA for the definition:

Definition of a derecho
A derecho (pronounced similar to "deh-REY-cho" in English, or pronounced phonetically as "") is a widespread, long-lived wind storm that is associated with a band of rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms. Although a derecho can produce destruction similar to that of tornadoes, the damage typically is directed in one direction along a relatively straight swath. As a result, the term "straight-line wind damage" sometimes is used to describe derecho damage. By definition, if the wind damage swath extends more than 240 miles (about 400 kilometers) and includes wind gusts of at least 58 mph (93 km/h) or greater along most of its length, then the event may be classified as a derecho.

Origin of the term "derecho"
The word "derecho" was coined by Dr. Gustavus Hinrichs, a physics professor at the University of Iowa, in a paper published in the American Meteorological Journal in 1888. A defining excerpt from the paper can be seen in this figure showing a derecho crossing Iowa on July 31, 1877. Hinrichs chose this terminology for thunderstorm-induced straight-line winds as an analog to the word tornado.

"Derecho" is a Spanish word that can be defined as "direct" or "straight ahead." (Click here to hear a pronounciation of the word "derecho"). In contrast, the word "tornado" is thought by some, including Hinrichs, to have been derived from the Spanish word "tornar," which means "to turn." Because derecho is a Spanish word, the plural term is "derechos;" there is no letter "e" after the letter "o."

A web page about Gustavus Hinrichs has been created by Ray Wolf of the Davenport, Iowa National Weather Service Forecast Office. The page provides information on Hinrichs' background, and on his development of the term "derecho" in the late 1800s. Wolf's page also briefly discusses how the term "derecho" has come into more common use in recent years.

Freaky Weather in Tennessee

We've been having a rather bad drought in the Chattanooga area, so everyone was happy when storms were forcast for Thursday. But it turned into a freaky weather situation that no one expected.

First we had severe storms with bad lightning and very little rain. Hail was reported but on my sidewalk it turned into giant raindrops that only lasted a few minutes.

An hour later, Chattanooga got squeezed between two more severe storms, and the outflow created a dry "Gust Front" wind that wreaked havoc over a wide area. I would have called it a "gustnado" because it was twisting trees first to the left then the right. This video captures it well - I'm glad no trees fell on this guy!




I have never seen waves like this on Lake Chickamauga, and for 8 years I lived right on the Tennessee River.




Unfortunately, a boat also overturned in the storm, killing a child and her grandmother.

In our neighborhood a power pole snapped in half and took down the lines. It was 24 hours later that we got our power restored, after my husband went directly to the power board building and reported it for the third time. Thank God because this afternoon the temperature inside our house at 5 p.m. was 90 degrees.

But I realize that what we have suffered for 24 hours is nothing compared to those up in Virginia and the Washington DC area this past week. I hope everyone gets the power back on soon.

Between the tornadoes over the past year, and this Gust Front, I can't even imagine what could be next. I don't want to know!