Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog |
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| Posted by: Dr. Jeff Masters, 2:56 PM GMT on November 14, 2011 | +23 |
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Jeff co-founded the Weather Underground in 1995 while working on his Ph.D. He flew with the NOAA Hurricane Hunters from 1986-1990.
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At work here in Texas City, just sprinkles, no rain, got rain at the house up the road, but this system was a joke, expected much more widespread rains than this.
traffic cam view at the intersection in front of my building
its better then nothin
just sayin
Hey atleast you are getting some rain. Better than what you had been getting.
LOL! That's exactly what I was saying. They also have more on the way this weekend.
More coming but this appears to be geared for C and N TX.
yayayayay
just hope it covers all of tx
Today the models are back to calling for that low to carve out an EC trough next week. That low should either be an Apps runner or EC hugger(northeast). Either way, somebodies gonna get some snow from this.
This same system should give us Floridians some nice chilly weather come Thanksgiving Weekend(yesterday, a few models had a blow-torch for the southeast. thank goodness they've all backed away from that)!
it seems you are passing this off more casually than the phenomena demands. i highly doubt it is simply air moving. i agree greatly with the analysis of it being an electrical field related issue (yes, resulting from explosive convection).
I read the article completely. The writer clearly has a bias, and I'd need to know more about the mining and agricultural history of the area before saying, with absolute certainty, that there was only one way for that chemical to get in the groundwater. Still, if the chemical is coming from fracking, that's one more good reason use natural gas.
I have no arguement that we need to develop less polluting and more effective forms of alternate power. However, hydrocarbon based fuel is the only reasonable alternative we have now and for at least the next few decades. The hardest thing to do is come up with an alternate fuel for vehicles. Even with electric cars, the source of electricity has to come from somewhere, and wind and solar are much too expensive right now to substitute for hydrocarbon-based fuel fire power plants. In addition, electric powered vehicles need batteries...and lots of them. If you want to see a real cesspool of dangerous chemicals, take a look at lead-acid battery construction. They last an average of two years in vehicle service, and then we have to dispose of them. It's like nuclear power. One of the biggest issues is how you get rid of the toxic waste.
Vehicles of all types consume about 65% of all our power. Natural gas, while not infinite, is available in supplies estimated to last for at least the next 200-300 years. This gives us some time to develop dependable and affordable alternate fuel sources while releasing us from slavery to nations that want to harm us. Natural gas is the cleanest burning hydrocarbon based fuel we have in abundance. Switching all vehicles and power plants to natural gas would cut the amount of CO2 we release in the atmosphere by more than half. As I said in my original post, there are dangers in using natural gas, just as there are in wind power or solar. There's no free lunch. However, we can either sit here and twiddle our thumbs waiting for a scientist to come up with the ultimate non-polluting power source or we can do something that will help immediately. Natural gas is the best alternative we have.
some of the words you said i did not understand.
O.o
Oh OK! I just didn't understand what you were getting at. Sorry.
I agree looks as if the blow torch has been turned down for the SE US next week but I wouldn't say chilly by any means either. More like 78 to 82 for highs maybe lower depending if the trough digs a little deeper along the east coast of the US.
:P
(sorry, cannot resist linguistic humor)
Natural gas is the better bridge to renewables, I agree there. But all this it's too expensive, we don't have the technology is bull. Big oil has bought & shelved the future & are suing the crap out of renewables if they hold out. Laws to keep all the power in a few hands have been arranged. Energy is being run by monopolies that want to keep us on something they can extract & sell. If we could sell extra electricity to the grid at a fair price & had plentiful USA manufactures of panels & such..we could be on our way to home owners getting a piece of the energy income. Germany has gone from 6.3% renewable energy sources in 2000 to 20% this year...we could have done that too. We are trailing at 14% this year & that includes ethanol which has too many depleting effect to be sustainable (enlarged gulf dead zone, causing rain to contain roundup which lowers yields of other crops & all the energy used to grow a fertilized, pesticided, herbicided crop).
We need to find something else besides oil and other carbon based fuels:
Energy Costs Will Rise Viciously - This article presses the need for atomic power usage and to get completely away from all hydrocarbon based fuels. ... Well, I am not certain that nuclear is a viable approach either but, that is another topic for discussion.
Should "fracking" pose a real threat to our drinking water, and I believe that it does based on what I have learned, then we need to avoid this as much as we need to avoid any carbon based energy source. What good does it do to have a 200 - 300 year natural gas supply if it contaminated our drinking waters within 100 - 150 years?
Alternative energy sources are going to become cost effective within a short time. This will be due to better and faster production methods, volume selling and because carbon based fuels will become very costly. Carbon fuels are already extremely costly when you weigh in their total costs across all aspects associated with using them.
Big Oil does not want renewable energy sources until they can control them. You can take that to the bank.
Darn! I killed the blog again!
you killed it again...
The main thread will probably always be the problem with alternatives for fueling transportation. In an ideal world a transition to renewable's would be simple but time consuming process, unfortunately with the vast and increasing number of vehicles on the worlds roads and the resistance to paying out beyond the minimum for a large proportion of people will in my opinion limit the number of vehicles using alternative energy to a very low percentage.
The only solution to this will be legislation which may in itself encounter insurmountable resistance from all sides with vested interests.
Again in my opinion the only way to convert to renewable's will be brought about by a fear of what will happen if we Don't.
Wait! There is still a sign of life! Clear! zap!
It's probably, artificial intelligence at this time of the day!
have a nice evening everyone...
JNTenn
Skye, I do indeed believe that EPA is not trustworthy. We lived about a quarter mile from a plant that made contact lenses. Over a period of twenty years, they contaminated the groundwater that we were drinking with all sorts of benzine compounds and derivatives. Both the state of California and the EPA minimized the problem and lied about the risks to the public. My late wife, who lived a very healthy lifestyle, including drinking lots of water, got acute myelogenous leukemia in 2003 and died of it in 2004, at the age of 58. She had no other risk factors except the contaminated drinking water. She has an identical twin sister. Her twin, who lives in Ohio, is still alive and in good health today, so an evironmental factor is the only explanation, the contaminated drinking water being the logical culprit. I still have pending complaints with California and the EPA over thier "science". The contact lense company just filed for bankruptcy when the leukemia outbreak occured, so they are off the hook. As you can see, I have good reason to doubt reports, especially from the EPA, and I'm certainly no supporter of any company deliberately fouling the enivironment.
Unfortunately, solar and wind power are still too expensive to be used on a wide scale. I'd be interested in how exactly Germany defined "renewables", since that can take in a lot of questionable items, but the big issue is still powering vehicles. Even if we went to 100% solar and wind for residental power, we'd only reduce our hydrocarbon use by about 18%. There are cheaper and more effective things we can do right now, and they can be done by executive order. As an example, if all houses built in the future were required to use 12 volt power for lighting and small appliances, and we gave tax incentives to people to convert their homes to 12 volt power, we could save almost as much hyrocarbon fuel use as using residental solar power, at its current cost. We could also mandate the use of natural gas in all future vehicles, which can be done at an added cost of only about $100 for a new vehicle. Again, we could use tax incentives to get people to convert their current vehicles to natural gas. Since natural gas works out to about $1.35 per gallon, the savings in what we pay for gas could be used to build out the infrastructure for natural gas refueling stations. Oil companies will sell anything they can make a profit on, and could care less if it's solar, natural gas, or oil. We need to get a coherent national energy plan and start moving people away from imported oil ASAP. Small changes are cheaper and have a better chance of working than a big revolution. Whatever we do, we need to start now, not at some hazy point in the future, when the magic bullet appears.
Sorry for your loss, lost a sister to the same..thanks to an AirForce Base..pollution kills..fracking is pollution.
Colorado law like most have a loop hoop with no disclosure required on what chemicals are being used for fracking. You can inject any waste chemical into the earth & call it a trade secret formula..anything goes in polluting fracking style.
em>The fact that natural gas is a bridge fuel to nowhere was first shown by the International Energy Agency in its big June report on gas %u2014 see IEA%u2019s %u201CGolden Age of Gas Scenario%u201D Leads to More Than 6°F Warming and Out-of-Control Climate Change. That study %u2014 which had both coal and oil consumption peaking in 2020 %u2014 made abundantly clear that if we want to avoid catastrophic warming, we need to start getting off of all fossil fuels.
You seem really caught up in pushing natural gas.
It's not all that & to say nothing will compete with it dollar for dollar..the day is coming sooner than you might think.
em>The best wind farms in the world are already competitive with coal, gas and nuclear plants. But over the next five years, continued performance improvements and cost reductions will bring the average onshore wind plant in line with cheap natural gas, even without a price on carbon, according analysis from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
As the article points out, natural gas is the only form of energy, other than nuclear, that meets the objective of reducing hydrocarbon emmisions while the demand for power continues to rise. By far, the cheapest and most accesible fuel is coal, and China burns about a half of the world's coal, since it is their largest source of hydrocarbons. I'm not aware of fracking being in widespread use for any other purpose than extracting oil or natural gas from coal methane beds, or CBM's. Most natural gas flows upward naturally from natural hydraulic fracturing. e.g, faults and vein structures. The biggest issue from natural gas extraction is the methane emmisons from drilling operations, but there are already operations under way that reduce methane emmisions from about 7% to 1%. Again, I'm not aware of any widespread incidents of natural gas extraction causing groundwater contamination, although I'm sure there are some. That can also be drastically reduced by better drilling methods and closer monitoring of the changes in groundwater supply chemicals. There are risks and benefits to using any energy source, and the ones that we'll use are the cheapest and easiest to get. As we reach the times of peak oil, other forms of energy will become competitive as oil prices rise. It's then we'll see a concerted move towards other forms of energy. Without draconian increases in taxes, there's no other way for alternatives to hydrocarbons being competitive in the near future.
Tropical Disturbance Summary
TROPICAL DISTURBANCE 01F
9:00 AM FST November 16 2011
======================================
At 21:00 PM UTC, Tropical Disturbance 01 (1006 hPa) located near 19.0S 179.5W is reported as moving southeast at 10 knots. Position fair based on multisatellite visible with animation and surface observations. Sea surface temperature is around 28C.
Organization remains poor. Convection has decreased significantly in the past 24 hours. Cyclonic circulation extends from surface up to 700 HPA. TD 01F lies under a 250 HPA diffluent region along a surface trough in a moderate to high sheared environment. The disturbance is being steered southeast by a weak northwesterly deep layer mean wind
Most models have picked up the system and slowly moves it southeast with slight intensification.
The potential for this tropical disturbance to form into a significant tropical cyclone within the next 24-48 hours is LOW.
Princeton researchers found for the first time that day-to-day weather conditions have become more erratic in the past generation. Days have increasingly fluctuated between sunny and dry, and cloudy and rainy with little in-between, which can have negative consequences for ecosystems, plants, solar-energy production and other factors that depend upon consistent weather. Green areas on this map indicate an increase in day-to-day solar radiation (sunshine) variability between 1984 and 2007; pink indicates a decrease. The portion over the Indian Ocean is voided due to a lack of consistent data. (Credit: Image courtesy of David Medvigy)
Our future lies with advanced technologies that rely on energy from the atom and gravity.
You never see civilizations relying on wind or solar for too much of their energy needs in science fiction and science fiction portends science fact.
Take your Whole Earth Catalogs and grey ponytails and wake up to reality.
What's up?
Since I have the next two days off, I'm busy furnishing my report on the hurricane season.
trollface.jpg?
i isnt a troll. im bored with no tropics stirring, lol. Just putting my opinion out there, if u doesnt like it tell me and i wont post it :)
I can't tell you not to post your opinion.
lol. well...thats curtious, but sometimes i need to be scolded xD
like before i knew hardly anything bout weather, i ws wishin for a Cat 4 to make landfall on NC coast so i could experience that. then i grew up have more sense now and think myself as a fool then LOL.
I see your into the GW morass.
What I want to know is where did all this DRY AIR come from that nobody forecasted and hindered the development of most systems this year?
I agree.. But we need to get off fossil fuel now, thermo, solar, wind & efficiency are a better bridge then Natural Gas but something more like fusion or like Tesla's Tower should take the cake. I've been following the laser fusion place east of San Fransisco. They'd hoped to have it by last summer & are now projecting by the end of this fiscal year. At one point their funding was very much threatened, big oil tried putting an end to it. Here's recent happening around the world with different types of fusion.
& how about that drought over much of S Africa, TX & the midwest..drought makes dry air.
It's true that at the moment alternative energy sources are behind. Way behind, even. But they are catching up, and rapidly. The biggest obstacles to progress toward our eventual move toward alternate energy are neither technological nor financial: they're political, and they're thrown up by those hoping to maintain the fossil fuel-only paradigm for as long as possible for the purpose of profit. They may momentarily stall the switch. But reality always wins. Always. And in not too many year from now, our descendants will look back on our generation's myopic fascination with fossil fuels the way we look back at those ancestors of ours who used to kill whales for lamp oil: in disbelief at the utterly illogical shortsightedness some humans are capable of displaying.
The longer we drag our feet and pretend that gas and oil and coal are unlimited and aren't contributing to the disruption of our bisophere, the worse the switch will be for us when it comes--which it will. It seems to me it's better to do it now while we have some say in the matter than later when we won't.
Meh. To me there is no shame in wanting to experience nature at its strongest. That shouldn't come at the expense of empathy, though.
I think it has a lot to do with the Saharan Air Layer.
What ever happened to hydrogen fuel.
Wasnt natural gas a step stone towards its viability?
Link
Meteorologist Joel Gratz offers an explanation:
The answer lies in this: ice crystals, especially long needles, tend to become aligned with the ambient electric field.
So what you are seeing is sunlight reflecting off ice crystal faces that are constantly being oriented by the developing electric field just above the [cumulonimbus] top. Then there is a discharge in the cloud, and the field collapses momentarily, and the crystals begin to realign again. Then this just keeps happening over and over.
Link posted by Sherwood cool; I've lived in Florida since 1984 and have never witnessed that.
I agree that was way cool.
And I actually understood the explanation.
Thanks Sherwood.
Precisely. Kinda like a giant LCD. And it's an awe-inspiring sight IRL.
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