Russian heat wave of 2010 due to natural causes: NOAA study
The deadliest heat wave in human history--the 2010 Russian heat wave, which killed approximately 56,000 people last summer--was due to a natural atmospheric phenomenon often associated with weather extremes, according to a new NOAA study. The study, titled "Was There a Basis for Anticipating the 2010 Russian Heat Wave?" was accepted for publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, and used observations and computer climate models to evaluate the possible roles of natural and human-caused climate influences on the severity of the heat wave.
Figure 1. Daily Moscow temperature record from November 1 2009 to October 31 2010. Red and blue shaded areas represent departures from the long-term average (smooth curve) in Moscow. Temperatures significantly above the long-term average scorched Moscow for much of July and August. Image credit: NOAA.
Here's the body of the NOAA Press Release on the study:
"Knowledge of prior regional climate trends and current levels of greenhouse gas concentrations would not have helped us anticipate the 2010 summer heat wave in Russia," said lead author Randall Dole, deputy director of research at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory, Physical Science Division and a fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES). "Nor did ocean temperatures or sea ice status in early summer of 2010 suggest what was to come in Russia."
Temperatures in the upper 90s to above 100°F scorched western Russia and surrounding areas from July through mid-August, 2010. In Moscow, the long-term daily average temperatures for July range from 65-67°F; in 2010, daily average July temperatures soared up to 87°. Daily average temperatures include the night. The exceptional heat over such a long duration, combined with poor air quality from wildfires increased deaths by at least 56,000 in Moscow and other parts of western Russia, according to Munich Reinsurance, and led to massive crop failures in the region.
While a contribution to the heat wave from climate change could not be entirely ruled out, if it was present, it played a much smaller role than naturally occurring meteorological processes in explaining this heat wave's intensity.
The researchers cautioned that this extreme event provides a glimpse into the region's future as greenhouse gases continue to increase, and the signal of a warming climate, even at this regional scale, begins to emerge more clearly from natural variability in coming decades. Climate models evaluated for the new study show a rapidly increasing risk of such heat waves in western Russia, from less than one percent in 2010, to 10 percent or more by the end of this century.
"It appears that parts of Russia are on the cusp of a period in which the risk of extreme heat events will increase rapidly," said co-author Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist, also from ESRL.
Dole called the intensity of this heat wave a "climate surprise," expected to occur only very rarely in Russia's current climate. With the possibility of more such events in the future, studying the Russian event better prepares scientists to understand climate phenomena that will affect the U.S. and other parts of the globe.
The team--led by Dole, Hoerling, and Judith Perlwitz from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado in Boulder--sifted through long-term observations and results from 22 global climate models, looking for trends that might help explain the extraordinarily high temperatures in western Russia during the 2010 summer. They also ran atmospheric models that used observed global sea surface temperatures, Arctic sea ice conditions and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations in 2010 to assess whether such factors might have contributed to the heat wave.
The heat wave was due primarily to a natural phenomenon called an atmospheric "blocking pattern," in which a strong high pressure system developed and remained stationary over western Russian, keeping summer storms and cool air from sweeping through the region and leading to the extreme hot and dry conditions. While the blocking pattern associated with the 2010 event was unusually intense and persistent, its major features were similar to atmospheric patterns associated with prior extreme heat wave events in the region since 1880, the researchers found.
They also found that western Russia has not experienced significant climate warming during the summer season over the 130 years from 1880-2009, despite significant warming of globally averaged temperatures during that time. Such a "warming hole" is not unique to that region and is not entirely unexpected, as the Earth is not uniformly warming and experiences distinct geographic areas that may be warmer or cooler than the average trend.
"We know that climate change is not taking place at the same rate everywhere on the globe," said Hoerling. "Western Russia is one of the parts of the world that has not seen a significant increase in summertime temperatures. The U.S. Midwest is another."
Dole compared his team's findings to trying to hear a quiet conversation underneath the roar of a noisy fan: a summertime signal due to climate change over western Russia was drowned out by the much larger climate "noise," or variability, resulting from natural processes.
Authors of the new paper, Was There a Basis for Anticipating the 2010 Russian Heat Wave? are Randall Dole1, Martin Hoerling1, Judith Perlwitz2, Jon Eischeid2, Philip Pegion2, Tao Zhang2, Xiao-Wei Quan2, Taiyi Xu2, and Donald Murray2. The team is part of a NOAA effort to better understand the underlying causes of high-impact weather and climate events, with the ultimate goal of better anticipating them.
NOAA Climate Attribution: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/csi/
Figure 2. Smoke from fires in Russia on August 4, 2010 covered an area over 3,000 km (1860 miles) across. If the smoke were in the United States, it would have extended from San Francisco to Chicago. Visibility in Moscow dropped to 20 meters (0.01 miles) on August 4, and health officials warned that everyone, including healthy people, needed to take preventative measures such as staying indoors or wearing a mask outdoors. Image credit: NASA.
Commentary
Climate change has fundamentally altered Earth's atmosphere in significant ways; the additional heat and moisture in the atmosphere alters global sea surface temperature and atmospheric circulation patterns, making it difficult to disentangle to what degree an extreme weather event may be natural. The new NOAA attribution study on the Russian Heat Wave of 2010 is a reminder that the atmosphere is capable of generating extreme events on its own, without the aid of climate change. Attribution studies are difficult and take many months or years to complete. When an extreme weather event such as a great flood or deadly heat wave occurs, all we can say at the time is that climate change is loading the dice in favor of such extreme events. At the time of the Russian heat wave, I suspected that human-caused climate change was likely a significant factor, since a study of the world's previous deadliest heat wave, the 2003 European heat wave (Stott et al., 2004), found that human-caused climate change had increased the odds of that event occurring by a factor of four.
An important question to ask is if this type of natural atmospheric blocking event--where the jet stream gets "stuck" in particular contorted shape that contributes to extreme weather events--will increase or decrease in a future warmer climate. I asked climate modeling expert Dr. Ricky Rood, who writes our Climate Change blog, what the models say. His view was, "the physical basis, process, and cause and effect of blocking events are poorly understood in theory and observations and less well understood in models. It is very difficult problem, where the state-of-the-art understanding is low." So, we don't really know what will happen to blocking events in the future climate. Barnes and Hartman (2010) found that the computer models used in the 2007 [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report generally showed a decrease in the frequency of blocking events in a future climate. This occurs because the jet stream moves poleward in a future warming climate, and the jet stream is less prone to getting "stuck" in a blocking event when it is closer to the pole. The paper summarizes previous studies on the subject thusly: "Previous studies have found evidence for blocking frequency to decrease with global warming, although they disagree on whether the duration of extreme blocking events will increase or decrease [Sillmann and Croci-Maspoli, 2009; Matsueda et al., 2009]." So, the models give us reason to hope that blocking events leading to extreme weather will decrease in the future, though the uncertainty in this prediction is high. However, the climate models used in 2010 Russian heat wave study showed a rapidly increasing risk of heat waves in western Russia, from less than one percent in 2010, to 10 percent or more by the end of this century. The authors conclude that warming attributable to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations "is very likely to produce more frequent and extreme heat waves later this century," a central finding of the 2007 IPCC report.
References
Barnes, E.A., and D.L., Hartmann, 2010, "Influence of eddy-driven jet latitude on North Atlantic jet persistence and
blocking frequency in CMIP3 integrations", GRL 37, L23802, doi:10.1029/2010GL045700, 2010
Stott, P.A. , D.A. Stone, and M.R. Allen, 2004: Human Contribution to the European heat wave of 2003. Nature, 432(7017), 610-614
I'll have a new post on Saturday at the latest.
Jeff Masters
Reader Comments
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True.
But Extreme Weather is most likely the result of badly calibrated instruments anyway.
Surely, we can fix that.
All is well...................
ESL by LSU
So...
We simply don't know? Seems as though this has similarities to the constantly moving target of more/less frequent and more/less intense hurricane prognostications.
Extended Range Forecast of Atlantic Seasonal Hurricane Activity and Landfall Strike Probability for 2011 - PDF Format
Philip J. Klotzbach and William M. Gray
8 December 2010
We foresee an above-average Atlantic basin tropical cyclone season in 2011 and anticipate an above-average probability of U.S. and Caribbean major hurricane landfall. This early seasonal forecast has less skill than our forecasts issued closer to the start of the hurricane season.
(as of 8 December 2010)
By Philip J. Klotzbach1 and William M. Gray
It's called not spamming nor soliciting on the board, for which I am sure many are thankful.
But since you asked (in your snide, very little way), what I was looking at was this: https://www.wxworx.com/water-data, which is the same as this: http://www.xmwxweather.com/xmwx-data/data-product s.php
Example plot:
And this:
And you can filter all clouds below different height levels with a click (and show only 40k-plus cloud tops, if you wish, simply). And constantly updated for CONUS in a data stream. Useful. (Some of you might recognize it as the broad radar coverage data source Wurman was using on that chaser show.)
We provide a significant portion of the data behind that product. Delivered by satellite, not attenuated by clouds (S-Band) from SE Alaska to Puerto Rico; Nova Scotia, to way, way off of Baja.
The odds don't increase (or decrease) whether you get impacted by a landfalling hurricane. The events are independent of each other.
Historically speaking,that is! The longer we go without a direct hit, I believe our chances increase,if you do the math. No?
Link
Link
Statistically speaking, no.
Think of it as a dice roll. For argument's sake, if you roll a 6, you get hit by a hurricane. You roll once per year. That means you have a 16.666666% chance of getting hit by a hurricane any year. If you roll a 6 the first year, your chances of rolling a 6 are the EXACT same as the year before. Still a 1-in-6 chance.
Your chances would only change year-upon-year if each time you rolled the die, you took that number off the dice. Since nature doesn't work that way... your chances don't change, regardless of how long it has been since an impact.
The link you clicked is taking you outside of Weather Underground.
Click okay only if you trust this link:
[http://dailybayonet.com/?p=7988]
Yeah,I see your point. I guess we could go 20 years without a strike,then the following year get slammed by 3.
what???!!! You mean it wasn't caused by Man Made Global Warming???!!! I feel so confused!!!!!!!!
Getting the ball rolling,hehe!!! Here they come!!!
Why are we NOT surprised.
LOL
Squawk one
Glad to see your coming around to the Factual side of things.
No "sir" needed though,,I was a Enlisted man.
Anthony Watts, also predictably, loudly trumpeted this headline on his anti-science site yesterday, and his flocks of loyal denialists immediately took off to fly far and wide delivering the news to those breathlessly awaiting something--anything--that would validate their, er, "skepticism". You know, kinda like those winged monkeys from The Wizard Of Oz. Of course, dear little Anthony spent most time on the headline, and didn't devote much to the crux of the remainder of the story--that is, that while no particular extreme event can be directly blamed on warming, that warming makes things like this far more likely, as has already been seen. No surprise there, either; the status quo is to be enforced and maintained at all costs...
Excellent entry, Dr. Masters. Your hard work disseminating the truth about anthropogenic climate disruption is duly noted, and very much appreciated by the science-minded. IOW: thanks!!!
That way the Global Masses can see where the Data came from.
Global Climate Change Indicators
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
National Climatic Data Center
- Due to a natural atmospheric phenomenon often associated with weather extremes%u201D and
- climate change %u2026..played a much smaller role than naturally occurring meteorological processes, and
- The heat wave was due primarily to a natural phenomenon called an atmospheric "blocking pattern... its major features were similar to atmospheric patterns associated with prior extreme heat wave events in the region since 1880, yet
- this extreme event provides a glimpse into the region's future as greenhouse gases continue to increase, and the signal of a warming climate, even at this regional scale, begins to emerge.
If evidence shows it was natural and similar to other events over the last 130 years, not due to global warming caused by CO2, then it can%u2019t really be a foretaste of global warming! Twisting themselves into pretzels to blame CO2 for THIS event.
Didnt comment Number 1 for this entry say the same?
Before the addendum ?
LOL
They never said AGW was directly to blame. They said that GW/CC/CO2 is more likely to cause similar incidences in the future.
Think of it this way - If you have bald tires on your car, you are more likely to get into an accident or hydroplane on wet roads. It doesn't mean that wet tires for sure will cause it (after all, there are a great many people out there who's driving skills leave a lot to be desired), but it means you have a higher chance.
What was your total rainfall in NOLA Pat?
What about his legions of minions?
Well, I can't speak for others, but you have certainly convinced me with your impeccable logic! ;-)
Yup.
$100.78 ▼$3.60
Oh, the places I could run with that comment...
I'm not worthy...
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