National Hurricane Center Loses All Credibility in Just a Single Storm
I know I previously stated I would have no more posts, but this one is important enough not to post - Irene was not a hurricane and I fear what may happen if a real hurricane takes the same path. Here's an email verbatim with the subject of "Irene Post-Mortem" that I sent a couple of weather friends after Irene had safely cleared the Mid-Atlantic on Sunday:
***
"I have to say I've lost all respect for the National Hurricane Center and they've now got zero credibility - Hurricane Irene was not a hurricane and was just a large tropical storm with a large wind field its entire lifetime after the center of circulation made landfall on the NC coast. For the entire duration of the event, I was looking for hurricane force wind reports somewhere and there were none. I wasn't the only one looking for them (a lot of people like me were online saying the same thing). While I feel it was definitely justified to issue hurricane warnings at the onset, these all should have been replaced with tropical storm warnings by the time the center was in eastern North Carolina.
One of the items the NHC was using (and others online coming into defense of the NHC) to justify hurricane warnings was the low central pressure - in the 950s, which historically equates to a category 3 hurricane. Except that in early 2010 the NHC dropped pressure and storm surge from the Saffir Simpson scale to make the scale only related to wind because factoring pressure and storm surge into the category rating made it an unreliable system for determining a tropical system's strength. This is why the Saffir Simpson scale is now officially called the "Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale." So, the NHC was breaking its own rules.
The NHC was also insisting it would be a hurricane well into New England and ignoring the obvious fact that it would probably start extra tropical transition when it was off the Mid Atlantic coast. The computer models that came into agreement Thursday evening (the Euro and GFS) that nailed the eventual track all stated transition would start off the Mid-Atlantic coast. It did and that's why it no longer even looked like a tropical system as it went by Ocean City, MD.
The most disturbing part is that the NHC kept it as a hurricane until this morning. Last night at the 11pm advisory was the last point where they could have downgraded it to a Tropical Storm and kept any shred of credibility in my mind. Instead, they have this in their discussion:
AN AIR FORCE RECONNAISSANCE AIRCRAFT INVESTIGATING THE HURRICANE THIS
EVENING HAS FOUND 700 MB FLIGHT-LEVEL WINDS OF 92 KT AND SFMR WINDS
OF 66 KT IN A SMALL AREA MORE THAN 100 NMI EAST OF THE CENTER.
BASED ON THIS INFORMATION...THE INTENSITY OF IRENE IS BEING
MAINTAINED AT 70 KT FOR THIS ADVISORY. IT SHOULD BE NOTED THAT THE
WIND FIELD GRAPHICS BASED ON THE FOUR-QUADRANT RADII WILL DEPICT AN
UNREALISTICALLY LARGE AREA OF HURRICANE-FORCE WINDS.
Never mind the BS of the "small area more than 100 NMI east of the center" of hurricane force winds (historically, this would have been attributed to indirect effects of the tropical system), they say their wind field graphics are unrealistic. Then why not correct them so as not to mislead people? GARBAGE.
In years past, the mainstream media has been entirely to blame for hype of tropical systems. With this one, the NHC is definitely responsible for fueling the fire. The one remaining question on my mind is, what happens if an Isabel-type storm (a real hurricane) forms from a Cape Verde system, marches across the Atlantic as a major hurricane, then comes up the coast sometime over the next few weeks? Oh wait, the Euro model (a reliable one and the one that was first to nail the track of Irene up the middle Atlantic) is predicting just that over the next ten days -http://wattsupwiththat.com/
Now, Cliff Mass, Principal Investigator of the University of Washington Mesoscale Analysis and Forecasting Group, effectively says the same thing: http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/
Going Offline
This blog is going offline for good on 12/31/10. I just don't feel like writing on it anymore. There is a distinct possibility I will start a technical blog in the new year. I will also be doing some much needed updates to my web site, www.colinbeaven.com.
Pumpkin Bumbo Update
The pumpkin that was the first ever pumpkin bumbo began to rapidly decompose after Sunday, the day I carved it. I only realized it on Tuesday when I went to check on it and found it had become pretty soft. At that time, I sprayed polyurethane on it to see if I could slow the decomposition process since I was hoping to take a few more photos this weekend. But it was too late and on Wednesday mold had started to grow on it. And by Thursday it looked as if it had been decomposing for weeks. So sadly, the pumpkin bumbo lives only now in the hearts and minds of the Beaven family and in photos of it. Here’s my ten favorite pumpkin bumbo photos cropped to an 8x10 size and a bonus photo which I’ve titled “Grumpkin.”
Click each photo for the large version.
Grumpkin:
As for baking the pumpkin meat, it took much longer than directions on the internet said and muffins made from it did not turn out that well. I don’t think this is too surprising, as there are probably specific pumpkin types that are good for baking and ours probably was not that type.
Pumpkin Bumbo Experiment is a Success
I got an idea when I looked at our bumbo a couple weeks ago after seeing pumpkins out and about. I thought that if I got a pumpkin about the size of a bumbo, I could carve it into the shape of a bumbo, then plop my daughter in it for a few autumn/fall/Halloween photos.
We visited Chapel Hills Nursery and Farm in Perry Hall a week ago and there I chose a pumpkin that I thought matched the approximate size of a bumbo. I was trying to error on the large side if possible, because I didn’t want to buy one, and then carve it only to see that my daughter couldn’t fit in it. The pumpkin was 29 pounds and at 59 cents a pound, that came out to just over 17 dollars – pretty pricey for a pumpkin. I was hoping the weight of it meant that it was thick.
I carved it today and I’m not one of those fancy pumpkin carvers and since this was an experiment, I just did a rudimentary carving with square cuts. I don’t have any before pictures because I didn’t think that I would be doing a blog post about it at the time I went to carve it. But I do have some after pictures of it and I think it shows I picked a pretty good size and that my thinking it was thick was right:
The pumpkin was drier than I’m used to and that was a good thing because it meant that my daughter wouldn’t get that messy. I don’t know for sure but I’m thinking larger pumpkins may not be as gooey and messy as the smaller ones.
It was a nice day so we took it out to the back yard to put her in it and see what happened. Finding a somewhat level spot in a good area was actually kind of difficult since my backyard slopes a little bit and is now weird, bumpy and undulating as a result of last winter’s blizzards. At first she didn’t know what to think probably because it wasn’t her normal bumbo. But after a couple of minutes she lightened up a little bit:
Click for the full size photo.
We had a bunch of pumpkin meat from the carving and we decided that we would bake it in an attempt to have real pumpkin for use in muffins and perhaps a pie. We’ll see how that turns out. But in the meantime, we discovered that some of the pumpkin carving trim pieces actually made a face:
I accidentally left it in the backyard for a couple of hours after I took the photos and ants proceeded to get on the pumpkin bumbo, but I cleaned them off and I put her in it on our deck for an evening photo shoot and she felt right at home from the start and had a good time:
Click for the full size photo.
A Very Wet End of September
The Baltimore area received boatloads of rain during the last week of September culminating in a 10”+ deluge for my immediate area on September 30. Here’s an image of Doppler radar estimated rainfall for the storm on the 30th:
It actually wasn’t one storm – it was two distinct low pressures moving north along a frontal boundary. The first half of the rain was being widely reported as being Tropical Storm Nicole by the local media. It wasn’t and it’s embarrassing that the media does this. Tropical Storm Nicole no longer existed at the point the first half of the rain fell on Baltimore and the remnant low of Nicole was still off of the coast of Florida at the time. The second half of the rain was the remnant low of Nicole which had strengthened as an extratropical storm (referred to as a “gale” in National Weather Service discussions).
Initially, weather forecasters were saying 1-2 inches of rain for the duration of the event. I found this curious, as near-identical setups in the past resulted in much more rain than that. A very similar setup on October 8, 2005 resulted in nine inches of rain at my place and my next door neighbor’s basement under four feet of water.
I predicted significantly more rain than what was being forecasted with friends, although I didn’t give exact accumulations since I knew it’s entirely dependent on where exactly the heavy rain bands setup.
But that was for the first half of the storm. Initially it appeared as though the remnant low of Nicole would dissipate as the first low pressure became the dominant low. But that changed that afternoon and indications were that the six inches my area received that day was really only going to be half of the total rainfall because the remnant low of Nicole was going to strengthen and go right over top of us.
At that time, again, the National Weather Service was only predicting an additional 1-2 inches of rain. They were clearly being conservative and I’m not sure why. The heavy rain ultimately stopped by 1:00 in the morning but not before a neighbor’s basement two doors down flooded.
The following day, the NWS had general flood warnings for entire counties, which is rare for the local National Weather Service. The State College, PA NWS does it all the time during big rain events instead of using flash flood warnings, but our NWS issues flash flood warnings during the rain events and flood warnings for rivers if necessary afterwards (which is the way it should be I believe). But this time around they had them up for general flooding area-wide.
The September 30th rain came after a big rain event on September 27th that produced several inches and two tornado warnings west of the Chesapeake.
Local UPS Store Out of Business
I found out today my Local UPS Store went out of business sometime fairly recently. I can’t say this surprises me all that much. Other local businesses seem to be in tough times too. But if you’re concerned about your job, don’t have a job, are underwater on your house, and/or don’t’ have much money in your retirement accounts, and are still seeing places go out of business, don’t worry because the NBER says the recession ended in June of last year. Guess everything’s fine then.
The NFL Continues Crappy Calls and Rules
It’s only the first Sunday of the season and I’ve already seen the NFL embarrass itself. This year appears as though it will be a repeat of the previous two seasons where multiple games will be decided by poor rules or controversial calls.
I was watching the Detroit Lions game live on the Red Zone channel and saw that they were down 19-14 with only 30 seconds or so left in the game. Then I saw the quarterback hit receiver Calvin Johnson in the end zone for a touchdown that would likely be the game winner. Then I saw the officials decide after a moment that it wasn’t a touchdown, and then I saw it get reviewed with a confirmation that it wasn’t a touchdown.
Rule changes last year stipulate that a player must maintain possession of a catch through to the ground. I took exception to a number of calls last year based on this rule, although none were perceived by me to be as poor as this one today. Johnson caught the ball, came down in the center of the end zone with both feet, fell backwards onto his butt and legs, then used the football in his hand to push into the ground to start the process of getting back up. It was an exceptionally obvious catch. The problem the officials (and the NFL by rule) apparently had with the play was that Johnson dropped the ball on the ground in the process of getting back up after the play was obviously over.
I’m not going to try to look up what the exact rule for this type of play is because as noted in 2008, the NFL constantly moves the goal posts (pun intended?) during the season with respect to rules. From what I can gather though, the rule as of today, 09/12/10, stipulates that a player has to catch the ball in the end zone, get both feet in bounds, maintain possession to the ground, maintain possession getting back up, and maintain possession into the locker room while sitting on the toilet after the game, while taking a shower, eating dinner, and then while dancing in the club with the ladies, then the officials are free to rule a catch and touchdown.
Whatever. I had ended my DirecTV NFL Sunday Ticket package earlier this year before even deciding to switch to Verizon FiOS where it isn’t available, but the Red Zone channel and NFL channel are. The only reason I’ve kept my current subscription level with FiOS is for some of the movie channels which have now grown stale. I’ll switch my subscription level this week which will end all of that and complete my promise of watching the NFL less and less.
Update 15 minutes later: I tried to look for a video of it, but none has been posted yet. But I did find this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGX2q_eer1g. Careful, there is not safe for work language in this as this person summarizes exactly what I said but in a far more excited manner.
Summer’s Over – Good Riddance
Meteorological summer ended when the clock struck midnight last night. As a winter and snow lover, I say good riddance. Standard operating procedure for weather and climate outlets is to state “record heat” whenever a heat wave hits and this year we had a lot of heat waves. I thought the entire summer, though, that it wasn’t as bad as the summers of 1988 and 1994. That’s not to say it wasn’t hot. It was.
As for doing some detailed direct data comparison for this summer versus some of the summers of the 1980s for Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, I can’t – daily temperature records are now behind a paywall at NOAA even though yours and my tax dollars already paid for them. Such are the hazards of other sane-minded weather and climate folks exposing anthropogenic global warming theory for the fraud it is, then going back through temperature data and discovering where it was adjusted.
Perhaps the best outlet for information on whether or not the Mid-Atlantic had a record breaking summer on some or many levels is the Capital Weather Gang. But given their very pro-AGW stance and seeing what other pro-AGW folks have done the past several years, I simply can’t trust them.
I’m looking forward to the fall and winter, even though last winter’s blizzards are still giving my immediate area problems. Not only have more patches of bare dirt formed in my neighborhood from where the piles of snow sat, a luna hibiscus plant that we had fully died after not doing well at all in the spring as a result of the blizzards, and my air conditioning / heat pump broke twice this summer after starting to make odd noises immediately after the blizzards. I had to get it replaced a couple weeks ago to the tune of several thousand dollars.
Given the amount of snow we had last winter, I think it could be ten years before we see another snowstorm though. 
Yo-yo
Meet Yo-yo. Yo-yo was a cat that lived primarily in the 1970s and this photo is one of only three photos known to exist of him, all of which were taken in April, 1970. Yo-yo was a family pet and was older and larger with a somewhat dumb look on his face by the time I was born, much like Elvis of the same time period, in the mid-70s.
Yo-yo was not known for his intelligence, rather he was known for his lack of intelligence. My mom reported that when he wanted to go outside and it was raining, he would go to the back door, which was a sliding glass door covered by a curtain, and then meow. When my mom would pull back the curtain to show him it was raining, he would get mad and stomp off to the front door and meow loudly to be let out as if rain would not be falling behind the front door.
When I was a toddler at two years old and came stomping into the room, the other two smarter cats in the family got out quickly. But due to Yo-yo’s lack of mental prowess, he stayed and allowed me to pet him, which was probably more like light smacks to his face and body. He didn’t mind so I liked him. Thus, Yo-yo would be considered my first pet even though there were three in the family at the time I was born. I lived on Falmouth Road at the time, which many people in my area pronounced “foul mouth.” That’s why my porn name is Yo-yo Foul Mouth, because the internet says that a person’s porn name is their first pet’s name followed by the street name they grew up on.
Sadly, Yo-yo died when I was still two years old.
It’s Official: Dr. Jeff Masters’ Blog is Now Unreadable
One of my favorite blogs to visit from time to time over the past five years and on a daily basis during hurricane season is Dr. Jeff Masters’ blog on Weather Underground. That is, until this year. Masters is a meteorologist and climate scientist and has focused on hurricanes for quite some time. One of his claims to fame (that he mentions on a regular basis) is nearly getting killed by Hurricane Hugo in a hurricane hunter flight in 1989.
Masters blog used to be quite informative about weather events and hurricanes. Now, it’s all about global warming alarmism and the comments section is full of idiocracy. I fall under what Masters refers to as a “contrarian," that is, I think the global warming talk coming from climate scientists is hysteria and (you guessed it) alarmism.
Last decade I had mixed opinions on the global warming issue and was what Anthony Watts (another meteorologist and blogger that Masters would describe as a “contrarian”) would describe as a “lukewarmer.” But as the decade went on, it became increasingly apparent that climate scientists had become activists, while politicians pushing global warming were using it for their own agendas, and the people that blindly followed the global warming alarmism were people that needed a religion to believe in. Actual scientific information on the subject became harder and harder to come by.
I was just about to declare global warming a complete fraud in my mind when the infamous climategate emails leak occurred last November. My jaw dropped as I read through the emails – everything the “contrarians” were saying for the past decade turned out to be true and they were vindicated. Ever since then, most climate scientists that were global warming alarmists throughout the last decade have doubled their efforts at alarmism I’m guessing as an attempt at damage control.
One of these is Masters. His latest blog entry begins with a roundup of what is going on in the tropics, switches to Arctic sea ice extent, switches to discussing the “contrarian” claim that Antarctic sea ice extent is at a record high (it is and he fails to mention that as a result, global sea ice extent is above average) and ends with a paragraph of activism (subtitled “commentary”). The part that disturbed me in this latest post is Masters’ copy and paste of a skepticalscience.com blog post explaining their thinking as to why Antarctic sea ice is increasing even though ocean temperatures in that region are increasing.
After the copy and paste job, Masters makes this statement:
This counter-intuitive result shows how complicated our climate system is.
To this, I say “Thanks, Captain Obvious.” While Masters gets wholly on the same page as me, there’s one very large problem with that statement from Masters – Alarmists like Masters for years (and some for decades) have claimed they know and understand the complexities of the climate system and that anthropogenic global warming is such a settled theory that they can accurately predict the Earth’s temperature and its effects on climate and weather 100 years from now (and they’ve done this while ignoring the fact that none of their short term predictions have come true.)
In the very next sentence of the post, Masters makes this statement:
Climate change contrarians are masters at obscuring the truth by taking counter-intuitive climate events like this out of context, and twisting them into a warped but believable non-scientific narrative.
Masters has had many statements in his blogs similar to this one since the climategate scandal broke. Each time I read one, I cringe at how badly Masters is embarrassing himself. There’s nothing masterful about what us “contrarians” are doing and is something an elementary school child could do – reporting of the facts. The only obscuring of the truth that I’ve seen since the climategate emails broke has been done by the global warming alarmists.
Masters Commentary section then spreads fire and brimstone doom and gloom about global warming and ends with this statement:
It is time to pay the big bucks and send out the fire engines, before the conflagration gets totally out of control. Consider the Great Russian Heat Wave of 2010 and the Pakistani floods of 2010 a warning. These sorts of extreme events will grow far more common in the decades to come, because of human-caused climate change.
There are two things to note about these ending sentences: 1) Masters performs the standard global warming alarmist practice of implying recent weather events that, while locally extreme, are within normal parameters for the Earth’s environment, are a result of global warming, and 2) Masters performs the standard global warming alarmist practice of switching to the phrase “climate change” at the end while previously using the term global warming since A) the type of global warming they raised the alarm about isn’t happening, and B) climate change happens all the time, has happened all the time throughout Earth’s history and is thus a catch-all phrase for anything that happens within the climate system.
Anyway, it’s now time to end my readership of Masters’ blog, as it has become a propaganda outlet for the global warming political party, their money grabbers and associated churchgoers and does not appear to be going back to anything based on reality, weather, climate, or science anytime soon.
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