A Smorgasbord of Unique Weather Oddities

Only in Minnesota can you have brush fires, Alberta Clippers and humidity in the same 7-Day Outlook. My lawn (which is now mercifully visible) is now an enticing puke-green color. Until we green up statewide the risk of brush fires will be high, especially Red River Valley. Fires up north, river flooding for tributaries in southern Minnesota, as a massive flush of melting snow works its way downstream. Be glad it’s not raining much this week – that may have prevented much more serious problems on Minnesota’s rivers.

Meanwhile, a clipper-like wrinkle of chilly air aloft sparks a few PM showers today and Friday, with the best chance over Wisconsin. So please avoid Wisconsin until further notice.

A cool breeze gives way to a mellow, May-like atmosphere over the weekend with a shot at 70F Sunday. If thunderstorms give way to some sun on Monday, 80F isn’t out of the question.

Showers and T-storms Monday and Tuesday give way to a drier, cooler breeze the latter half of next week.

I think that’s it for the snow, but frost is possible right up through Mother’s Day. Progress!


Saint Paul to Close Water Street Due to Rising Mississippi Water Levels. The aptly-named Water Street. The City of St. Paul has details: “The City of Saint Paul is temporarily closing Water Street/Lilydale Road beginning Thursday, April 26, 2018 at 6 p.m., due to forecasted rising water levels of the Mississippi River. Water Street will be closed to vehicle traffic between Hwy 13 and Plato Boulevard. Both the Pool and Yacht Club and Harriet Island remain open to visitors at this time. “With more than 17 miles of Mississippi riverfront, we closely monitor river levels and National Weather Service forecasts,” said Public Works Director Kathy Lantry. “Closing Water Street is a preventative action for anticipated flooding. We will continue to monitor the spring melt and respond as needed…”


Melting Snow Causes Rivers to Rise Across Minnesota, Prompts Flood Warnings. Thank goodness it’s not raining much – that would have made the flood scenario much worse. Here’s a clip from KMSP-TV: “Melting snow is causing rivers to rise throughout Minnesota, leading to flood warnings and closures across the state. Slow no-wake rules are now in effect on the St. Croix River in Washington County as the river has reached 683 feet.  The Minnesota River Greenway in Burnsville, a paved regional trail along the Minnesota River, is temporarily closed due to flooding. The trail will remain closed from the Minnesota Riverfront Park Trailhead at the Interstate 35W bridge to the DNR boat landing under the Cedar Avenue Bridge until the floodwaters recede...”




Latest Flood Forecasts. For crest forecasts from the National Weather Service for specific towns across the state click here.


On the Minnesota River, Carver Awaits the Flood, And Pays Through the Nose. Flood insurance premiums continue to rise, as reported at City Pages: “...Issues with the flood insurance program are often spotlighted in coastal states like Florida and Texas, but Minnesotans have been feeling the effects too. The average flood insurance policy in Minnesota costs $500 a year, according to the Minnesota Department of Commerce. The Williamsons live in a high-risk area, so they pay around $3,000 a year. Those premiums have become a sinkhole for money they could’ve put towards their aging home. “We’re a hardworking, self-employed family with not a lot of excess money,” says Williamson, who owns an art studio in Carver. Her husband Andy owns a boat restoration business. They chose to live in Carver because they love the historic home and the small town…”

File photo credit: “The Minnesota River has flooded the town of Carver several times historically, including one in 1965 that damaged 50 homes, and another in 2014 that damaged city hall.” Star Tribune file.


A Milder Front. No hot fronts brewing, although I still think highs on Monday in the MSP metro area may approach 80F is the sun is out for a few hours. Saturday may get off to a frosty start; a good reminder that it’s not safe to plant annuals until after Mother’s Day. Especially this year. Graphic: WeatherBell.


Second Week of May: Warming Trend for USA (Expect Upper Midwest?) Confidence levels are low this far out, but NOAA’s GFS forecast for 500mb winds roughly 2 weeks from now suggests a warm pattern for much of the nation, with the (possible) exception of the Upper Midwest and Great Lakes.


Forecast Assessment For Historic April 13-16 Blizzard. The Twin Cities office of the National Weather Service assesses their own forecast performance: “A slow moving, large low pressure system with copious amounts of cold air and moisture provided multiple rounds of precipitation from the early morning hours of April 13th through the early morning hours of April 16th.  The precipitation began as showers and thunderstorms across southern Minnesota which lasted into the evening of April 13th.  Precipitation then turned to snow from north to south during the evening.  Light snow persisted into the early morning hours of the 14th, before much heavier snow developed by mid morning and continued into early on the 15th.  The combination of visibility being so poor due to the intensity of the snow and wind gusts exceeded 35 mph prompted our office to issue the first Blizzard Warning for Minneapolis and St. Paul since the Halloween Blizzard in 1991. The initial Winter Storm Watch was issued during the afternoon of April 11th.  Blizzard Warnings were issued in the afternoon of April 12th for portions of west central Minnesota, with Winter Storm Warnings issued further east during the evening of April 12th.  Blizzard Warnings were expanded eastward a few times, eventually reaching the Twin Cities area by early afternoon on April 14th…”



Do You Feel Spring in your Bones? It turns out many of us are walking, talking barometers. Here’s an excerpt from a timely story at Chicago’s Daily Herald Business Ledger: “…Most people attribute it to temperature, but it’s actually due to barometric pressure.” Barometric pressure is a measurement of the air from sea level to the upper edge of the earth’s atmosphere. The science of how changes in the barometric pressure affect our bodies is pretty iffy, with some people reporting pain when barometric pressure falls and others saying a rise aggravates their aches. One factor that makes evaluations tricky is that pain is subjective. An ache that one person says is awful might not register a complaint from someone for whom pain has become acceptable. One study suggested that people didn’t complain about their aches on sunny days, even though the pain probably was just as bad then as it was on a cold and rainy day...”


The Nation’s Weather and Oceans Agency Has Never Gone This Long Without a Confirmed Leader. Capital Weather Gang has the latest: “The agency charged with the critical missions of predicting the nation’s weather, monitoring its climate and protecting its coasts has lacked a permanent leader for one year and 95 days, since Donald Trump was elected president. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has never gone so long without a permanent, confirmed director following the installment of a new administration. Barry Myers, the chief executive of AccuWeather, is Trump’s pick to run NOAA, but more than six months have passed since he was nominated Oct. 16. Stymied by alleged conflicts of interest and lacking a formal science background, Myers’s ability to get the votes needed for approval in the Senate is unclear, several individuals familiar with his confirmation process said…”

Image credit: “AccuWeather chief executive Barry Myers, Trump’s pick to head NOAA, testifies at a House Science Committee hearing in June 2016.” (Image taken from a video on the hearing)


Oklahoma Hasn’t Seen a Single Tornado This Year. The Streak is About to Set a Record. Capital Weather Gang reports: “Across much of the Lower 48, winter just won’t quit. It’s about to be May, but temperatures are running as much as 20 degrees below normal, snow is still falling and plants are slow to come out of their wintertime slumber. The continued onslaught of wintry weather has kept spring things at bay — things like tornadoes. It has been so quiet, Oklahoma is about to set a record for the latest first tornado of the year. On average, about 12 tornadoes form in Oklahoma during April. It’s typically the state with the third most tornadoes annually, as well as home to some of the highest tornado odds per square mile. The longest Oklahoma has gone without a tornado was until April 26 in 1962. Since we’re not expecting severe thunderstorms in the Central United States anytime soon, this streak is all but certain to set a record…”

Preliminary Tornado Touchdown Map for 2018 courtesy of NOAA SPC.


Below Average Tornado Season Across the US. WDTN.com has more perspective on a quiet year so far: “…Both Oklahoma and Kansas have seen no tornadoes in 2018. According to climate data these areas usually see at least a dozen by this time of the year. Since 1950, Oklahoma has never seen a year where no tornadoes were reported. If Kansas doesn’t see a tornado at all in April – this would mark the fourth time since records began that no twisters have touched down. Here’s a look at the preliminary tornado count across the country.  About 227 tornadoes have touched down since January 1st.  That’s well below the 10 year average of 426 tornadoes...”


Photos: Devastating Tornado Scars Still Visible from Aerial Views Years After 2011 Super Outbreak. AccuWeather explains: “…This was one of four EF5 tornadoes during the outbreak and was powerful enough to debark trees and scour pavement from a road. This was also the deadliest tornado of the entire outbreak, leading to 72 fatalities in Alabama. Not only did the tornadoes during the Super Outbreak devastate communities, but they tore through hundreds of miles of fields and forests, stripping vegetation of its leaves and uprooting some trees. The scars left behind by the most powerful twisters are still able to be seen from aerial views to this day as the land continues to recover…”

Image credit: “On April 27, 2011, an EF4 tornado tracked through Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The satellite image on the left shows the area one month after the tornado hit. The satellite image on the right shows the area five years after the tornado hit.”


3 Ways Hurricane Forecasts Will Be Improved This Season: National Hurricane Center. NOLA.com has an informative post; here’s a clip: “…The center, a sub-agency within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), released a list of enhanced services it will use in the 2018 hurricane season to create more specific forecasting and give residents more preparation time.

  • Expect more warning and watch info than 2 days and up to 5 days in advance. The NHC’s formal advisory package, which includes warnings and watches for hazards such as storm surge and tornadoes, will routinely be released 72 hours in advance, as opposed to the previous 48-hour protocol. When conditions warrant, forecasts will be available as far as five days in advance.
  • The cone of uncertainty is shrinking. The “tropical cyclone track error cone” depicts the likely track of a storm over the course of twelve hour increments. It is the typical ice cream cone graphic that appears on television forecasts. This year, the NHC expects those cones to be a bit smaller and therefore more accurate...”

These “Dirty Thunderstorms” Fill the Sky With As Much Smoke as Volcanic Eruptions. LiveScience explains: “Wildfires can fuel “dirty” thunderstorms that fill the stratosphere with as much smoke as a volcanic eruption. That revelation comes from a study on the biggest fire-fueled thunderstorm event on record, which occurred on the night of Aug. 12, 2017, in British Columbia, Canada. Last year was a record breaker for wildfires in that region. And on that August evening, the heat from fires burning in relatively remote forests in British Columbia combined with the right atmospheric conditions to generate a series of four thunderstorms in a 5-hour period...”


The Trillion-Dollar Coastal Property Bubble is Ready to Burst, Per New Study. ThinkProgress has more perspective on the inevitable retreat from many coastal areas: “…A 2014 Reuters analysis of this “slow-motion disaster” calculated there’s almost $1.25 trillion in coastal property whose value is being propped up by the National Flood Insurance Program’s below-market rates. “The risk will rise as sea levels rise, and when that happens, you’d expect your property value to fall,” as Lloyd Dixon, the director of the RAND Center for Catastrophic Risk Management and Compensation, explained in October. “At some point, the property becomes worthless…”

File photo credit: 2010, Nags Head, North Carolina. John D. Simmons, Charlotte Observer.


Miami Housing Market May Soon Be Under Water, Research Says: More perspective from Climate Nexus: “Rising sea levels are already beginning to reshape the real estate market in Miami, a new study shows, with potential implications for other property markets across the country. The research, published Friday in the journal Environmental Research Letters, shows that the prices of single-family homes at lower elevations are rising more slowly than those at higher elevations, suggesting that buyers and sellers are weighing the implications of short-term flooding and long-term coastal change. Evidence that low-level homes are falling behind homes at higher elevations “is pretty shocking,” paper author Jesse Keenan told the Wall Street Journal, “because you can infer that this is a pricing signal from climate change.” (Wall Street Journal $, The Real Deal, Fortune)


Disasters Are Costing Us More. Why Aren’t We Insuring More? Bloomberg takes a look at the trends: “Last year was the second-costliest year for disasters since 1970, according to a new analysis from reinsurance firm Swiss Re AG. Global economic losses from these events reached $337 billion in 2017, behind only 2011’s total losses, and less than 40 percent were insured. A close look at Swiss Re’s data reveals several worrying trends. Losses from natural and man-made disasters are increasing, markets are not getting better at insuring them, and our own choices aren’t helping. First, the natural disaster losses. As I’ve written before, it’s hard not to notice the hurricane and flood years (Katrina in 2005; the Japan earthquake and tsunami and Thailand floods in 2011; Harvey, Irma and Maria in 2017)...”

Graphic credit: Swiss Re AG. “Note: “Economic losses” = sum of insured and uninsured losses, in 2017 dollars.”


Potential New 24-Hour USA Rainfall Record. Nearly 50″ of rain in 24 hours? NOAA has details here.


California’s Water Whiplash Is Only Going to Get Worse. WIRED.com has the story: “…Soil cores and climate models tell scientists that megafloods like this one have happened about once every 200 years. Which, if you’re doing the math, means the state is due. That’s not the bad news. The bad news is that by the middle of the century, a megaflood could be striking California every couple of decades. That’s according to a new study out today in Nature Climate Change, which predicts up to a 100 percent increase in extreme precipitation swings across California over the next seven decades. “A lot of people have done the version of the analysis where they look at the mean precipitation change, and find it’s close to zero or uncertain,” says Daniel Swain, a climate scientist and the study’s lead author. That makes it seem like things will stay about the same going forward…”

Image credit: “Precipitation whiplash events are expected to significantly increase in frequency across California in the coming decades.” Swain, et al., Nature Climate Change


Backed by Bill Gates, EarthNow Wants to Show Us Every Inch of our Planet, In Real-Time. ZDNet explains: “EarthNow has secured funding from Bill Gates and other prominent investors to develop and deploy a planet-wide web of satellites. The space imaging startup has closed its first round of funding, gaining the backing of not only Bill Gates, but also Airbus, the SoftBank Group, and OneWeb founder Greg Wyler. The financial details of the funding and amounts offered by each investor have not been disclosed. Through the creation and deployment of advanced imaging satellites supported by machine intelligence, EarthNow wants to show us our planet in “real time, all the time.” The Intellectual Ventures spinout, founded in 2017, hopes to offer continuous real-time video of Earth, both live and unfiltered...”


Trump Like Coal, But That Doesn’t Mean He’s Hostile to Wind. A story at AP caught my eye: “…The administration is looking to renewable energy sources to help create “energy dominance” that will guarantee America is a leading global energy exporter and can’t be held hostage by foreign energy-producing powers, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke says — even as Trump’s plan to expand offshore drilling has drawn harsh criticism from environmentalists and coastal state governors of both parties. “On designated federal lands and off-shore, this means an equal opportunity for all sources of responsible energy development, from fossil fuels to the full range of renewables,” Zinke said in a recent op-ed in The Boston Globe. “As we look to the future, wind energy — particularly offshore wind — will play a greater role in sustaining American energy dominance…”


RSF Index 2018: Hatred of Journalism Threatens Democracies. A story at Reporters Without Borders caught my eye – a cause for serious concern: “The 2018 World Press Freedom Index, compiled by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), reflects growing animosity towards journalists. Hostility towards the media, openly encouraged by political leaders, and the efforts of authoritarian regimes to export their vision of journalism pose a threat to democracies. The climate of hatred is steadily more visible in the Index, which evaluates the level of press freedom in 180 countries each year. Hostility towards the media from political leaders is no longer limited to authoritarian countries such as Turkey (down two at 157th) and Egypt (161st), where “media-phobia” is now so pronounced that journalists are routinely accused of terrorism and all those who don’t offer loyalty are arbitrarily imprisoned…”


People Voted for Trump Because They Were Anxious, Not Poor. The Atlantic explains: “…Less-educated whites were President Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters. But why, exactly? Was their vote some sort of cri de coeur about a changing economy that had left them behind? Or was the motivating sentiment something more complex and, frankly, something harder for policy makers to address? After analyzing in-depth survey data from 2012 and 2016, the University of Pennsylvania political scientist Diana C. Mutz argues that it’s the latter. In a new article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, she added her conclusion to the growing body of evidence that the 2016 election was not about economic hardship. “Instead,” she writes, “it was about dominant groups that felt threatened by change and a candidate who took advantage of that trend...”

Photo credit: “Counter-demonstrators and supporters of President Trump fight over a flag during a People 4 Trump rally in Berkeley, California, in 2017.” Stephen Lam / Reuters.


Why Social Connections Really Are a Matter of Life or Death. Big Think focuses on an epidemic of loneliness: “In the last few decades, the number of close friendships in America has dropped. Between 1985 and 2004, the General Social Survey reported that the average number of confidants Americans felt they could talk to about important matters in their lives fell from 2.94 to 2.08. Worse still, 25% of people surveyed responded with “zero”. Andrew Horn, CEO and co-founder of Tribute, calls this the connection crisis: “This dearth of relationships is not just making us sad, it’s literally making us sick,” he says. “There was a recent meta-analysis of 300,000 patients and it found that having weak social ties was as harmful to your health as being an alcoholic, and twice as harmful as having obesity…”


Competition is at the Heart of Facebook’s Privacy Problem. WIRED.com has the story: “…Our data are being turned against us. Data powers disinformation campaigns attacking democratic institutions. It is used to foment division and turn us against one another. Cambridge Analytica harvested the personal information of approximately 87 million Facebook users not just to target would-be voters with campaign ads but, as former Cambridge Analytica staffer Christopher Wylie put it to the New York Times, to “fight a culture war in America.” Consumers are trusting companies with vast amounts of intimate data and receiving very little assurance that it will be properly handled and secured. In turn, our data are used to power the connected services we use, and depending on the platform or app, are sold to advertisers…”

Image credit: “Until consumers can easily control their data, competitors to Facebook won’t thrive.” Hotlittlepotato.


Want to Feel Unique? Believe in the Reptile People. Because who doesn’t like a good conspiracy theory? Big Think has the post; here’s a clip: “…As Karl Popper noted in Conjectures and Refutations (1963), some people tend to attribute anything they dislike to the intentional design of a few influential ‘others’. While conspiracy theories have long existed, the internet has accelerated their circulation (like the circulation of all information). Who believes in conspiracies, and what might these people have in common? There are, of course, differences in the plausibility of any one conspiracy theory. In a 2013 poll, every second United States citizen questioned seemed convinced that there was some larger conspiracy at work in the assassination of the president John F Kennedy in 1963, while ‘only’ 4 per cent endorsed the notion that ‘shape-shifting reptilian people control our world by taking on human form and gaining power’. (Still a somewhat unnerving 12 million people.)...”

Photo credit: “Surveyor 3 with Apollo 12 lander in background.” Credit: Wikimedia, Moon landing conspiracy theories.


World Wine Output Falls to 60 Year Low. This should have been the lead story huh? Reuters has the horrific details: “Global wine output fell to its lowest level in 60 years in 2017 due to poor weather conditions in the European Union that slashed production in the bloc, international wine organisation OIV said. Wine production totaled 250 million hectoliters last year, down 8.6 percent from 2016, data from the Paris-based International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV) released on Tuesday showed. It is the lowest level since 1957, when it had fallen to 173.8 million hectoliters, the OIV told Reuters. A hectoliter represents 100 liters, or the equivalent of just over 133 standard 75 cl wine bottles. All top wine producers in the EU have been hit by harsh weather last year, which lead to an overall fall in the bloc of 14.6 percent to 141 million hectoliters...”


The Got Him What? A Look Into the Art of Presidential Gift-Giving. The Washington Post has a chuckle-inducing story: “…During a 2011 visit to Australia, President Barack Obama received crocodile insurance from the head of the Northern Territory. You know, in case the president got in a terrible accident while visiting the croc hot spot. “I have to admit, when we reformed health care in America, crocodile insurance is one thing we left out,” Obama said with a chuckle. President George W. Bush got a stuffed dead lion and leopard from Tanzania. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan received a baby elephant on the White House lawn dressed in traditional clothing when Sri Lanka’s president visited. While that may be over-the-top, the animal represented the friendship and similarities between the countries…”

Photo credit: “President Ronald Reagan, right, receives a baby elephant from the president of Sri Lanka, second from right, in 1984.” (Photo: National Archives and Records Administration).


Police Try to Unlock Dead Man’s Phone at Funeral. The New York Post has the discomforting story: “Florida authorities went to a funeral home and used a dead man’s finger to try to unlock his cellphone as part of their investigation. Thirty-year-old Linus Phillip was killed by a Largo police officer last month after authorities say he tried to drive away before an officer could search him. At the funeral home, two detectives held the man’s hands up to the phone’s fingerprint sensor but could not unlock it. Phillip’s fiancee Victoria Armstrong says she felt violated and disrespected. Legal experts mostly agree that what the detectives did was legal, but they question whether it was appropriate…”


61 F. maximum temperature yesterday in the Twin Cities

63 F. average high on April 25.

62 F. high on April 25, 2017.

April 26, 1954: Extremely heavy downpours occur in Mora, where nearly 7 inches of rain would fall in a little over 10 hours.



THURSDAY: Some sun, stray shower. Winds: NW 10-20. High: 61

THURSDAY NIGHT: Partly cloudy. Low: 39

FRIDAY: Sunny intervals, PM shower risk. Winds: N 10-20. High: near 60

SATURDAY: Blue sky, winds diminish. Winds: E 5-10. Wake-up: 38. High: 60

SUNDAY: Sunny and spectacular. Winds: S 10-20. Wake-up: 43. High: near 70

MONDAY: Humid with a few T-storms around. Winds: S 10-20. Wake-up: 54. High: 77

TUESDAY: Showers likely, few T-storms. Winds: W 10-15. Wake-up: 58. High: 72

WEDNESDAY: Partly sunny, slowly drying out. Winds: NW 7-12. Wake-up: 53. High: 63


Climate Stories…

After Pushing Bill to Abolish EPA, Rep. Matt Gaetz Joins Climate Solutions Caucus.  Pensacola News Journal has the details: “…But in an interview Friday with the News Journal, the Fort Walton Beach Republican said constituents and critics should not conflate his disdain for the federal government’s environmental regulatory agency with his views on if the planet’s temperature poses dangers for mankind. Earth, Gaetz asserted, is warming, and politicians should no longer waste time debating the validity of the issue. “We should be focused on solutions,” he said. While environmental advocates were complimentary of the lawmaker’s public position on global warming, they urged Gaetz to go further and affirm his stance through policy on Capitol Hill. Otherwise, they countered, his addition to the caucus is just politics as usual…”

Image credit: NASA.


Pipeline Protesters May Use Necessity Defense, MN Court Rules: Climate Nexus has details: “Anti-pipeline activists awaiting trial for shutting off a pipeline will be allowed to use climate change as a key part of their defense, a Minnesota court ruled Monday. The Minnesota Court of Appeals sided with four activists who turned emergency valves on two Enbridge Energy oil pipelines in 2016, ruling that the protesters may use a “necessity defense” in their upcoming criminal trial, including calling experts to testify on climate science and the consequences of climate inaction. “This is a big win for anyone who cares about climate change,” said Climate Defense Project attorney Kelsey Skaggs, who is on the activists’ defense team. “The climate necessity defense is an important tool for pushing back against efforts by the federal government and industry to silence opposition to the reckless development of fossil fuels.” AP, ThinkProgress


Latest Climate Threat for Coastal Cities: More Rich People. Because many low-income residents can’t afford to keep rebuilding. Bloomberg reports; here’s an excerpt: “…Irma was only the start of their troubles. The Florida Keys building code effectively prohibits replacing or substantially repairing damaged mobile homes because of their vulnerability to hurricanes. That leaves people living in one of the nearly 1,000 trailers and RVs damaged or destroyed by the storm with three options: find sturdier but more expensive accommodation, repair or replace the homes and hope code officials don’t notice, or leave the Keys. “There’s no place to live,” said Sharon Baron. Around the country, the government’s response to extreme weather is pushing lower-income people like the Barons away from the waterfront, often in the name of safety. Those homes, in turn, are often replaced with more costly houses, such as those built higher off the ground and are better able to withstand storms. Housing experts, economists and activists have coined the term “climate gentrification...”

Photo credit: Diane Gaffield. Photographer: Alicia Vera/Bloomberg.


Energy Department Predicts How Extreme Climate and Weather Will Disrupt US Energy Systems. Here’s a clip from Forbes: “The Department of Energy (DOE) has just released their state of the art model built to predict how climate change and weather will impact energy systems here in the United States. There is no other governmental agency more eager to understand how encroaching seas, category 5 hurricanes, and heat waves will impact energy consumption and potentially energy strain on the US energy system. In collaboration with several DOE National Laboratories, the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) has been released to the general public and broader scientific community after four years of development. The E3SM model was built to predict how climate and weather variability will impact the US energy systems in the decades to come...”

Image credit: E3SM Earth System Model.


NASA Baffled by Mysterious Ice Circles in the Arctic. The Washington Post has a head-scratcher of a story: “Add this to the ever-growing list of things you have to worry about: Somewhere in the Arctic sea ice, where the temperatures are typically below freezing on even the balmiest days, there is a random pattern of holes, and NASA — the rocket scientists who took us to the moon and want to take us to Mars — can’t figure out what they are. NASA has spent the past decade flying over Earth’s Arctic and Antarctic regions in an attempt to understand the connections between the world’s climate systems, and to look at global warming’s effect on some of the coldest places on Earth. The missions have a name straight out of a James Bond novel: Operation IceBridge…”

Photo credit: “NASA has no idea what is causing these ice holes in Arctic sea ice.” (NASA)


Weather Whiplash Set to Ramp Up in CA: Headlines and links from Climate Nexus: “Climate change will increase “weather whiplash” in California as the state will increasingly swing between intense wet and dry periods, according to new research. A study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change predicts that while the long-term average annual precipitation in the state won’t vary greatly, California may experience intense precipitation extremes in the future, as the frequency of whiplash events is set to double in Southern California by 2100. The study also finds that drastic events like the state’s megaflood of 1861-1862, which put much of the state underwater in a 43-day deluge, could become three times more likely as the planet warms.” (LA Times $, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, Wired, KQED, Earther, Mashable, CBS)