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Post by Admin on Jan 2, 2016 19:40:11 GMT
A powerful winter cyclone — the same storm that lead to two tornado outbreaks in the United States and disastrous river flooding — has driven the North Pole to the freezing point this week, 50 degrees above average for this time of year. From Tuesday evening to Wednesday morning, a mind-boggling pressure drop was recorded in Iceland: 54 millibars in just 18 hours. This triples the criteria for “bomb” cyclogenesis, which meteorologists use to describe a rapidly intensifying mid-latitude storm. A “bomb” cyclone is defined as dropping one millibar per hour for 24 hours.  "According to the center’s records, the all-time strongest storm in this area occurred on Dec. 15, 1986, and that had a minimum central pressure of 900 millibars,” Mashable’s Andrew Freedman reported on Tuesday. “The second-strongest storm occurred in January 1993, with a pressure of 916 millibars.” |
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Post by Admin on Jan 13, 2016 19:33:35 GMT
The essence of weather porn — clickbait — is giving scary numbers with little or no historical context, while describing them with vivid adjectives. The world is large and there are many ways to measure weather (e.g., temperature, precipitation, winds, barometric pressure) — records are brief for most metrics across most of the globe — so records are set frequently.  But the info is available, as in this from Ryan Maue of Weatherbell: 6-hourly GFS data for the North Pole: mean, maximum, and minimum temperatures for Decembers (i.e., satellite and available surface data input to model reanalysis). The December 30 temperatures were at the top of the range for 1979-now (a brief period as weather records go), but not extraordinary. The 1999 spike was almost identical (the uncertainty in these estimates is several tenths of a degree C).  Steven Cavallo (Asst Prof Meteorology, U OK) used NCEP CFSR (CFS reanalysis) data for North Pole during 1948-2014 to show a wider perspective (source). This dataset shows temperatures above freezing on 4-5 Dec 1959, 25 Dec 1990, and 1 Dec 2014.  Joe of Bastardi of WeatherBELL Analytics points to the Danish Meteorological Institute, who tracks the temperature of the Arctic area north of the 80th northern parallel back to 1958. They show that December had warmer spikes in 1984, 1985, 2000, and 2002. |
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