Joined: 06 Jul 2003
Posts: 7085
Location: Central CA
| Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2008 8:22 pm Post subject: Report Says Severe Weather to Increase as Earth Warms | |||
Of course our own resident meteorological experts have already told us that the reports of adverse effects from global warming are nothing but a crock but if you're interested in actual data and real information, you might want to consider this study by NOAA. 
I spent my career, which started 48 of those 50 years ago and spanned 33 years of it, in a profession that revolved around these exact same weather "patterns" and it wasn't hard to see when the regular succession of repetitive patterns started to break down. We knew damned well that things were changing when we started moving from 5-6 month fire seasons here in CA to today's norm of 10-11 months per year. According to Henry Diaz, who has been researching meteorological records in the West for NOAA since the l990s, temperatures in mountains across the Southwest have risen about two degrees Fahrenheit in the last 30 years. Snows in the high mountains are melting about two weeks earlier than in the past. At lower elevations, such as in Ventura County, the temperature rise has been less, but Diaz says that the Southwest has been in a drought since l999. Which NOT coincidentally is just about the same period in which we've seen the most massive increases in the number and intensity of large wildland fires that have severely taxed the ability of the state to respond adequately to these types of disasters. Other states have experienced similar increases in wildland fire occurrence , most notably Florida and Georgia, although their changes haven't been as pronounced as those in California due to the widely varying topography and other factors influencing weather here. The Rest Of The Story |
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Joined: 06 Jul 2003
Posts: 7085
Location: Central CA
| Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2008 1:08 am Post subject: | |||||||||||||||
Maybe some of our weather "experts" have an explanation... something Rush might have mentioned in the last couple of days or that they heard on Fox News... but in the 47 years since I first went to work fighting these things for a living , this has NOT happened before.
Not to say we've never HAD dry lightning busts... major ones usually occur on about a 4-6 year cycle in that part of the state. But NEVER have we had one of this intensity this early in the year. Hard to shrug off that there's something different about the emerging weather patterns.
I'm trying to remember if I EVER saw a major lightning bust in Northern CA originate from an offshore storm early enough in the year so as to deliver so little precip to the fuel bed.
While high temps, low humidities and upslope winds usually produce low fuel moistures during the hottest parts of the day, the kind of low average fuel moistures we're seeing right now are definitely not normal.
The Rest Of The Story Of course I know nothing compared to the "experts" but based on my personal experience, something is sure as hell different out there today. [/quote] |
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