“Connecting the Dots” in December, 2024

Thunderstorms Can Cause Air Turbulence Up To 55 Miles Away from the Source. Mental Floss has some breaking meteorological news; here’s an excerpt: “…Thunderstorms are a major cause of air turbulence. Recently, a team of meteorologists used a trove of data points to gauge how far from a storm one should expect some bumps. The answer: several miles farther away than pilots’ guidelines indicate, their research suggests. The team used more than 200 million turbulence reports collected from flights from 2009 to 2017 and crossed them with radar data to calculate the planes’ proximity to thunderstorms. Their findings, published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, indicate that an increased risk of turbulence starts 55 miles away from a storm. Risk doubles when compared to normal weather patterns, 43 miles from a storm…”

Hotter and Hotter. Why were 2023 and 2024 significantly hotter than climate models predicted – climate scientists seem perplexed about why temperatures are spiking even more than expected. The New Yorker explains: “… Scientists still can’t explain what’s causing the spike, which sits atop the steady ramp in temperature over the past few decades. As Schmidt said in an October interview with Elizabeth Kolbert, “it’s still pretty much, I would say, amateur hour in terms of assessing” what’s going on. The proffered explanations—the eruption of a submarine volcano in the South Pacific that put a lot of heat-trapping water vapor into the air, the phase-out of high-sulfur fuels in oceangoing ships that reduced heat-reflecting pollution—don’t seem large enough to account for what the thermometers are measuring; it’s possible that we may have tripped some switches we don’t understand in the global climate system…”

2024 continued the trend of warming temperatures, worldwide. Here is a recap from Climate Central:

• Heat-trapping pollution continues to warm our planet, pushing global temperatures to dangerous levels.

• 2023 was the hottest year on record, and 2024 is on track to be even hotter — and the first year when the average temperature will top 1.5°C warmer than the pre-industrial average.

• In response to climate warming, extreme weather and climate events are becoming more frequent and more intense — resulting in devastating losses.

• The U.S. has experienced 24 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters this year (through November), four fewer than the record 28 disasters in 2023. Hurricanes Helene and Milton are included in the tally, yet the total economic costs of these events are still being evaluated.

• Through November, the average time between billion-dollar disasters in 2024 was just 12 days — a striking decrease from an average of 82 days between disasters in the early 1980s.

“Bomb Cyclone” Adds to Growing Extreme Weather Trend. Many hurricanes, especially in the Gulf of Mexico, are intensifying rapidly right before landfall, a trend which may now be showing up with more conventional storms. Here’s an excerpt from The University of Miami: “…The expression itself—bomb cyclone—was originally a slang term used to describe an extratropical cyclone that strengthened quickly, a concept similar to a rapidly intensifying hurricane. “This term has been in use for about 80 years but was popularized and formalized 40 years ago when it entered the published literature,” said Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science. Authors of the paper “Synoptic-Dynamic Climatology of the ‘Bomb,’” which published in the October 1980 issue of the American Meteorological Society’s Monthly Weather Review, called the weather phenomenon a bomb because it develops “with a ferocity we rarely, if ever, see over land.”  “Another term used to describe this is explosive cyclogenesis—rapid formation and development of a cyclone,” McNoldy explained. “To officially qualify as a bomb, the central pressure of the low must fall at least 24 millibars in 24 hours at 60 degrees latitude, or 14 millibars in 24 hours at 30 degrees latitude...”

Mortgage Regulators are Shrugging Off Climate Risk. It Could Cost Taxpayers Billions. Weather extremes are trending more extreme in a warmer, wetter, more volatile environment, as reported by The New York Times. Here’s an excerpt: “As sea levels rise and natural disasters become more intense, homes in low-lying coastal areas or tinder-dry mountains are starting to lose value. That’s a problem for the finances of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises that back half of the nation’s outstanding mortgages — and keep the residential real estate market liquid by buying mortgages from banks and repackaging them into securities. In the first year of the Biden administration, financial regulators seemed to recognize the risk, identifying the mortgage market as one of the main channels through which climate change could destabilize the financial system. Since then, reports have been published, comments gathered and summits held. But when it comes to insulating the two enterprises and borrowers from climate-related catastrophe, the Federal Housing Finance Agency — which regulates Fannie and Freddie — has issued only vague guidance...”

Republicans Would Regret Letting Elon Musk Ax Weather Forecasting. Dr. Ryan Maue has an Op Ed at The New York Times explaining how in a time of rising climate-fueled weather disasters, dismantling NOAA is a very bad idea. Here’s an excerpt: “…With the rising costs of and vulnerability to extreme weather in a changing climate for the United States, dismantling or defunding NOAA would be a catastrophic error. Rather, there is a golden opportunity to modernize the agency by expanding its capacity for research and innovation. This would not only help Americans better prepare for and survive extreme weather but also keep NOAA from falling further behind similar agencies in Europe. While the incoming administration may want to take a sledgehammer to the federal government, there is broad, bipartisan support for NOAA in Congress. It is the job of the incoming Republican-controlled Congress to invest in its future…”

GenCast Predicts Weather and the Risks of Extreme Conditings with State-of-the Art Accuracy. Google DeepMind gives us a glimpse of what’s next; here’s an excerpt: “…Because a perfect weather forecast is not possible, scientists and weather agencies use probabilistic ensemble forecasts, where the model predicts a range of likely weather scenarios. Such ensemble forecasts are more useful than relying on a single forecast, as they provide decision makers with a fuller picture of possible weather conditions in the coming days and weeks and how likely each scenario is. Today, in a paper published in Nature, we present GenCast, our new high resolution (0.25°) AI ensemble model. GenCast provides better forecasts of both day-to-day weather and extreme events than the top operational system, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts’ (ECMWF) ENS, up to 15 days in advance. We’ll be releasing our model’s code, weights, and forecasts, to support the wider weather forecasting community...”

Google DeepMind’s New AI Model is the Best Yet at Weather Forecasting. I’m still a little skeptical of AI weather modeling, but it would be reckless to ignore the coming AI revolution. Here’s a clip from MIT Technology Review: “This is the second AI weather model that Google has launched in just the past few months. In July, it published details of NeuralGCM, a model that combined AI with physics-based methods like those used in existing forecasting tools. That model performed similarly to conventional methods but used less computing power. GenCast is different, as it relies on AI methods alone. It works sort of like ChatGPT, but instead of predicting the next most likely word in a sentence, it produces the next most likely weather condition. In training, it starts with random parameters, or weights, and compares that prediction with real weather data. Over the course of training, GenCast’s parameters begin to align with the actual weather…”

Google Says AI Weather Model Masters 15-Day Forecast. Using past weather to predict future weather may seem counterintuitive, but even though weather never identically repeats, it often rhymes. More perspective from Barron’s: …”We are progressing year by year,” she added. “Any new method that can enhance and accelerate this progress is extremely welcome in the context of the extreme societal pressures of climate change.” The model was trained on four decades of temperature, wind speed and air pressure data from 1979 to 2018 and can produce a 15-day forecast in just eight minutes — compared to the hours it currently takes. “GenCast provides better forecasts of both day-to-day weather and extreme events than the top operational system… up to 15 days in advance,” a DeepMind statement said…”

Why Can’t the Weather Apps on our Phones Get It Right? Great question. Most apps use a combination of different weather models, when in reality certain models work better in certain weather scenarios. Weather apps interpolate between points, which sadly doesn’t capture some of the nuance of weather patterns. They certainly serve a purpose, but apps can’t (yet) provide the analysis, context and perspective flesh and blood meteorologists provide. Here’s a clip from The Wall Street Journal: “…Models don’t do as well in areas with microclimates, distinctive weather patterns that vary between neighborhoods in places like San Francisco. They also struggle with large changes in elevation, such as mountain towns. The location your app uses (either zip code or city) might be an issue. Where zip codes are huge—like 89049 in Nevada, which covers some 10,000 square miles—typing in the city might produce a better result, Floehr said. Climate change makes the task more complex, forecasters say. Models have trouble predicting extreme weather outliers. “Those extremes seem to be occurring more frequently,” Floehr said, pointing to what are called thousand-year events, such as recent, deadly floods in Valencia, Spain…”

Extreme Heat Weakens Land’s Power to Absorb Carbon. The European Space Agency explains: “A new European Space Agency-backed study shows that the extreme heatwaves of 2023, which fuelled huge wildfires and severe droughts, also undermined the land’s capacity to soak up atmospheric carbon. This diminished carbon uptake drove atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to new highs, intensifying concerns about accelerating climate change. Measurements from Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory showed that atmospheric carbon concentrations surged by 86% in 2023 compared to the previous year, marking a record high since tracking began in 1958. Despite this sharp increase, fossil fuel emissions only rose by about 0.6%, suggesting that other factors, such as weakened carbon absorption by natural ecosystems, may have driven the spike…”

Hurricane Dorian Was Worthy of a Category 6 Rating. Here’s the intro to an eye-opening post at Scientific American: “Category 5 Atlantic hurricanes are rare. Only 7% of the 243 hurricanes observed since accurate satellite measurements began in 1983 have reached that catastrophic intensity. And it is truly exceptional to see a category 5 hurricane as strong as Hurricane Dorian, which powered ashore on Great Abaco Island in The Bahamas on September 1, 2019, with sustained winds of 185 mph and gusts up to 220 mph. Winds of this strength would make Dorian worthy of a category 6 rating, if it existed. (For those of you unfamiliar with me, know that there is already a Category 6—it’s the name of a blog I co-author with Bob Henson over at Weather Underground, specializing in daily updates of global tropical cyclone activity)...”

The 30-Year Mortgage Wasn’t Designed for Climate Chaos. A warmer, wetter, more volatile climate is already impacting where Americans can afford to live, with property/mortgage insurance top of mind. Bloomberg reports; here’s an excerpt: “…Most mortgages in the U.S. are backed by the federal government, including this loan, which was backed by the Department of Veteran Affairs. In a statement speaking generally about its lending program, a spokesperson for the department says the agency encourages “servicers of guaranteed loans in disaster areas to extend forbearance to borrowers in distress.” The agency says it has started collecting and analyzing data to understand the impact of climate risk on its home loan program, but that the analysis is still ongoing and the results are not yet available to the public...”

Insurers are Deserting Homeowners as Climate Shocks Worsen. The New York Times reports; here’s a clip: “…Since 2018, more than 1.9 million home insurance contracts nationwide have been dropped — “nonrenewed,” in the parlance of the industry. In more than 200 counties, the nonrenewal rate has tripled or more, according to the findings of a congressional investigation released Wednesday. As a warming planet delivers more wildfires, hurricanes and other threats, America’s once reliably boring home insurance market has become the place where climate shocks collide with everyday life...”