Warmest January-April on record; new record Arctic sea ice minimum
April 2007 was the third warmest April for the globe on record, and the first four months of 2007 were the warmest ever, according to statistics released this week by the National Climatic Data Center. The global average temperature for April was 1.19�F/0.66�C above the 20th century mean. Over land, April global temperatures were the warmest ever measured. Ocean temperatures were a bit cooler (seventh warmest on record), thanks to the cooling associated with the disappearance of the winter El Ni�o event.
April temperatures were particularly warm across portions of Europe and Siberia, where readings of 5�C (9�F) above average were common (Figure 1). The UK recorded its warmest and driest April on record. In the U.S., April ranked near normal in temperature, but a record cold snap hit the eastern half of the country April 4-10, setting 900 daily low temperature records. The long duration of the cold outbreak, combined with the large number of hours that remained below freezing, and strong winds that occurred in many areas, contributed to crop losses that could reach into the billions of dollars. The damaging effects of the record cold were made worse by near-record warmth in March that helped induce an earlier spring blossom--in some cases two weeks prior to crop development in 2006. More than 2,500 daily record-high temperatures were set in the contiguous U.S. in March, and it was our second warmest March on record.
April's cold snap in the U.S. shows that although the globe as a whole may be warming, there is still plenty of natural variability capable of bringing very cold weather to local regions.
Figure 1. Temperature departure from average for April 2007. Image credit: National Climatic Data Center.
Arctio sea ice extent
After three months of not recording a record monthly minimum, sea ice extent in the Arctic recorded a new record low extent in April. The record warmth of the first four months of 2007, combined with the 8th lowest snow cover on record observed in winter 2006/2007, combined to produce the record low ice extent (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Arctic sea ice extent for April, for the years 1979-2007. April 2007 set a new record for the lowest Arctic sea ice extent measured. April sea ice coverage has declined about 9% since 1979. Image credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Atlantic storms
The computer models have been forecasting development of several low pressure systems along the East Coast over the next few days. All of these lows will be non-tropical in nature, due to the high levels of wind shear. The models are beginning to hint that wind shear could relax over the ocean waters north of Panama next week, and we may have to watch that area for tropical development if the shear does indeed relax as forecast.
Jeff Masters
Reader Comments
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Does anyone know of a blog that just discusses THE TROPICS & DOES NOT discuss GW? Some of us are new & just want to learn the basics about tropical weather.
Good question
This is supposed to be a weather blog but somehow the GW issue keeps rearing its head
I respect everyones opinion on the issue. I just don't want to hear it (read about it) Movin on... does anyone have a link for the model runs on this new low? thank you
Which new low ?
The low was analysed, probably from surface data and moored buoys
bbl
Link
Looks like a dang hurricane east of FL by 144h. Doubt that would actually happen, but it is an interesting run nonetheless!
The subject for today was the extreme warming of this world January through April 2007, picked by Dr. Masters. Anybody doesn't like Master's choice can leave. Nobody has a gun to your heads. The GW discussion will continue without you.
Natural Milankovitch Cycles which caused 5,000,000 years of ice ages and warmings is not related to today's warming. During those warm-cold oscillations there is not a speck of evidence that the CO2 in the air ever got much over 280 ppmv. Anybody who disputes these facts must come with credible evidence in their hands, not unsupported statements.
The latest count is 383 ppmv of CO2, and that is fundamentally different from the Milankovitch Cycles. We know where that surplus CO2 came from, your tailpipes (and mine).
CO2 is a proven greenhouse gas. It's qualities are abundantly confirmed. CO2 lasers burn off tattoos in doctor's offices, and cut steel in industry, using infrared emission energy. Aguments disputing this are fraud and spam. Infrared was discovered using prisms long ago. We use infrared here to view storms. Disputes about infrared being held in greenhouse gases are fraud and spam. They are intolerable on a blog that posts infrared photographs every day of the year.
We have night-vision scopes and heat-seeking missiles. Disputing the IR holding and emissions properties of CO2 are frauds and spam. We have provable reality on our side.
Spectroscopes are spread all over the world. We have fleets of satellites gleaning data in their flyby using infrared. The bogus arguments disputing infrared are kaput and have no place where people honor truth.
Ozone is a life-or-death gas in small but critical amounts. There were 4,000 CO2 molecules for every O3 molecule, but now there are 5,000 CO2 molecules. If you squashed all the ozone from the O3 layer into a film at surface level at normal air pressure the layer would be 1/4 inch thick, yet it stops enough of the dangerous levels of solar energy in it's absorption bands to make the difference whether we can exist on this planet or not.
CO2 is wrongly said to be insignificant in the air. One wavelength of infrared used by satellites is the 10.7 microns wavelength tuned to watch hurricanes and clouds. A sphere with a diameter of 10.7 microns is much smaller than the dot on the end of this sentence. Inside a sphere of 10.7 microns at normal air pressure and temperatures is over 6,000,000 molecules of CO2. That is NOT insignificant.
Because there is so much CO2 in the air, astronomers cannot use the CO2-IR wavebands to view the universe. The stars are blotted out by so much CO2 and IR at those frequencies, space-based Infrared astronomy at CO2-frequencies is all that is possible. None of this is new knowledge. It's a dereliction of social duty not to have educated yourselves deeply when you have been notified that there is an important issue requiring your attention. Earth-looking satellites don't have sensors to view the most important IR bands that CO2 emits because there would be nothing to see but an opaque fuzzy disk. There's enough close-by bands on satellites that you can tell the difference between day and night on the rainbow enhanced pictures by the heated ground in the afternoon in bright magenta color and pale blue at nights.
We know for an undisputed fact that noon is not the hottest part of the day and midnight is not the coldest part -- there's a time-delay caused by the IR saturation and emissions of greenhouse gases. We know the difference an atmosphere makes by looking to the moon with -250 degrees F nights and +250 degrees F days. Nobody can last a minute arguing that the atmosphere has no heat-buffering or heat holding attributes.
It is a sinister anti-social act to make accusation that scientists are corrupt as a group. Stop that right now! You owe your high standard of living, the computer you are looking at to read these words, upon the contributions science makes to the welfare of the planet. Furthermore, you are arguing that science is corrupt on a scientist's blog who has peers around the world. That is intolerable. Cease and desist.
Science MUST come to conclusions based on the evidence. Gravity exists, science concludes. More investigation and more research will never disprove gravity except in some bizarre circumstance impossible on Earth so far. There are no more disputes if gravity exists or does not exist. That debate is OVER. So too with Global Warming: humans are doing it, we know how, and the results will be civilization destroying if not human-extinction because of it left unchecked. That debate is over. Nobody is expected to have a crystal ball and predict the future with perfect accuracy. We ask only that they do their best. They have done their best and you have not done your best to understand them. The failure is your fault, not the scientists.
This week we learned that lightning activity levels in Africa over the Sahara is directly related to hurricanes that make landfall in the US, through spawning the Africa Easterly Waves (AEWs). Had you done your responsibility of learning the facts of Global Warming, including the CO2 laser proofs, you would know that the exact same ingredients that make a CO2 laser function (nitrogen, water vapor, CO2 and high voltage electricity) make the AEWs (lightning, H2O, N2 & CO2).
Failure to attend to your homework means that you lack the basic knowledge to appreciate what these two things have in common. Not only are you not doing what YOU demanded (more research on YOUR PART), but you are hindering the advance of knowledge by noise and clutter which should not even exist at this late date. More research is always needed until such a day that humans possess godlike omniscience. Meanwhile we MUST draw conclusions with the knowledge that we do have. We MUST act with prudence when the very people that we have hired to warn us of impending dangers deliver the warning they have been trained to observe.
That's steering winds up at the 250 mb level (from 850-250). This is usually where very intense hurricanes are steered from. It's also fairly close at representing the jetstream.
Thanks! :)
Though folks now have a love/hate relationship with global warming, i think it is important to keep up the commentary and to remember that warming air, warming water, melting sea ice and everything global warming related does have alot to do with our tropical outlook.
This sudden craze about GW scares me. I'm most afraid that, like tube socks, 'scrunchies', and the Toyota Prius, its being treated as a fad and not an important and very scary reality.
To all you fellow bloggers sorry about the GW slant, but I can't help it. Being both an environmentalist and a weather lover this blog suits me just fine. =)
PS Kudos to you H2PV, I want to print out your post and hand it to all the nay sayers I know. You say so well what I've tried to put in to words for years. Thank you.
the shear is just to strong nothing will develop for at least 5 days until this shear calms down... a high pressure system is forecast to build over that area in 120 hours...StormKat
Your unique signature after your somewhat abrasive comments reminds me of someone in the past...hmmm
EVERY single weather event has Global Warming in it. There is no physically possible way to segregate global warming out of any weather event. The Earth is one planetary weather machine. It's like links on a bicycle chain -- if even one link moves, every link on the chain moves too. The melting ice caps and glaciers have concealed a lot of Global Warming impacts for a long time. That's behind us now. Global warming has ascended to a dominant role of the planetary weather.
I am not going to explain the statement to you here and now, but I find you intelligent enough to learn the truth at your own pace, that 330 ppmv is the maximum level of CO2 that you want in the air, and you are at 383 ppmv right now, 50 ppmv way into the red danger zone. It's not enough to slow or halt it, you have a long exhausting road, all uphill for the next 20 years at least, to walk back out of the maw of hell. It was fun and easy going downhill, but the fun is over now and you are a dead duck if you don't go back.
I haven't seen a figure, I could guesstimate & probably come close myself, but I am too lazy to reinvent this wheel, does anyone have ready figures, or even an opinion, on whether or not the heat released by burning fossil fuels has any measurable effect on the global average temperature? I know the scales are vastly different, but if the system is in balance, could this added heat accumulating over time be enough to add to "GW"?
As an example, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_consumption
In 2004, the worldwide energy consumption of the human race was estimated at 446 Quadrillion BTUs, with 86.5% from burning fossil fuels.[1] This is equivalent to 131,400 TWh or 471,000 PJ (= 1015 J) per year. As shown by the difference between the first two images in this article, there is at least 10% uncertainty in the world's energy consumption. Not all of the world's economies track their energy consumption with the same rigor and the exact energy content of a barrel of oil or a ton of coal will vary with their quality.
The remaining worldwide energy resources are large, with the remaining fossil fuels totaling an estimated 400 ZJ and the available nuclear fuel such as uranium exceeding 2.5 YJ (1 YJ = 1024J). Mostly thanks to the Sun, the world also has a renewable usable energy flux that exceeds 120 PW.
What effect would that much (if we accept the figures as ballpark accurate) would that have on the balance of heat in the atmosphere?
Maybe because this is Dr. Jeff Master's blog and he decided to discuss extreme warming on it? Why don't you invite people to your blog where nobody ever bothers their pretty head about global warming and leave the topic of the day to be discussed here?
Go do your homework.
This guy isnt nearly as scathing as ST..
the new info that was just faxed to my office indicate when the high builds in their is a very good chance of a tropical depression forming in the nw caribbean sometime late next week....shear will be very light....something to keep a close eye on ..if it does form it will move nnw into the gulf...
someone faxed you weather info?Is that a joke?
We don't need to leave, cause we can talk tropics on the main blog anytime. We like the main blog and staying just gonna - the GW junk.
IMO----The topic of the blog is GW.I hate talking about GW,and I don't know why people don't discuss it on the GW blog instead of here,but they're right.We are allowed to talk about the topic of the blog entry which is...GW.
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