Early-season cold grips Chicago

 

Winter has come early to the Chicago area this weekend, with the coldest daytime temperatures since February and a chance of snow showers or snow through Sunday evening, according to forecasts.

High temperatures across the area were only in the high teens or low 20s, well below typical daytime highs of mid-30s for early December, meteorologists said.

The National Weather Service's hazardous weather outlook for north central Illinois, northwest Indiana and northeast Illinois including Cook, DuPage, Lake and McHenry counties includes a chance of lake effect snow showers that could produce half an inch of accumulation in northeast Cook and eastern Lake counties into Sunday.

The weather service predicts a chance of snow Sunday afternoon and evening in northeast Illinois, with accumulations of one to three inches possible, particularly north of the Interstate 88 corridor. The snow could change to freezing drizzle before the precipitation ends Sunday night, the weather service said.

The work week could begin with bitter cold: wind chills could drop to 15 degrees below zero in some areas Monday night into Tuesday. That could make for a very chilly "Monday Night Football" game between the Bears and Dallas Cowboys at Soldier Field.

On Saturday, the frigid temperatures didn't deter holiday shoppers in Chicago. After ducking inside a Michigan Avenue mall, 10-year-old Olivia Cagle quickly rubbed her gloved hands on her pants, trying to get warm.

"I can't feel my legs," she told her mother, Heidi Anderson, after walking nearly two miles from Union Station to The Shops at North Bridge.

The pair had traveled from Mequon, Wis., with Anderson's boyfriend, Ted Hagen, his children and others for a day of Christmas shopping. The unseasonably cold temperatures didn't stop the group from taking their planned outing.

"We can't let weather ruin it," Hagen said.

That mentality seemed common among shoppers determined to enjoy the city, even if some were a bit unprepared.

Laura Oyer and Gretchen Morningstar of Goshen, Ind., came with their husbands for the weekend. Among the first purchases? A hat for Oyer's husband and a coat for Morningstar's husband after realizing that what they had packed wouldn't cut it.

"We planned this awhile ago, and then we saw the forecast," Morningstar said. "We said we'd just deal with it. Then you step outside."

For some, the cold just enhanced the holiday season.

Shopper Janet Goodwin, 57, and her daughters Sterling Goodwin, 30, and Sara Goodwin, 27, came from Little Rock, Ark., for a girls' weekend trip. They planned the trip to a cold-weather location on purpose, not realizing their part of the country would have ice storms.

"We wanted to feel that Christmas weather," Janet Goodwin said. "We came prepared."

At the Chicago Park District's Polar Adventure Days on Northerly Island, visitors didn't seem fazed by the cold, but dressed warmly, held steaming cups of cocoa and were able to take a break from the cold inside a building. The indoor-outdoor event featured dog sledding demonstrations and other activities for children.

"It's not that bad when you're in the sun," said Patty Manzano of the Lakeview neighborhood, who brought her husband, 5-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter.

Yosemite Wildfire Update: Fire Cost $89 Million to Fight

 

SACRAMENTO, Calif. —  Scientists are assessing the damage from a massive wildfire burning around Yosemite National Park, laying plans to protect habitat and waterways as the fall rainy season approaches.

Members of the federal Burned Area Emergency Response team were hiking the rugged Sierra Nevada terrain Saturday even as thousands of firefighters still were battling the four-week-old blaze, now the third-largest wildfire in modern California history.

Federal officials have amassed a team of 50 scientists, more than twice what is usually deployed to assess wildfire damage. With so many people assigned to the job, they hope to have a preliminary report ready in two weeks so remediation can start before the first storms, Alex Janicki, the Stanislaus National Forest BAER response coordinator, said.

Team members are working to identify areas at the highest risk for erosion into streams, the Tuolumne River and the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, San Francisco's famously pure water supply.

The wildfire started in the Stanislaus National Forest on Aug. 17 when a hunter's illegal fire swept out of control and has burned 394 square miles of timber, meadows and sensitive wildlife habitat.

It has cost more than $89 million to fight, and officials say it will cost tens of millions of dollars more to repair the environmental damage alone.
http://www.weather.com/news/yosemite-wildfire-update-20130907

Study Links Warming to Some 2012 Wild Weather

A study of a dozen of 2012's wildest weather events found that man-made global warming increased the likelihood of about half of them, including Superstorm Sandy's devastating surge and the blistering U.S. summer heat.

The other half — including a record wet British summer and the U.S. drought last year — simply reflected the random freakiness of weather, researchers with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the British meteorological office concluded in a report issued Thursday.

The scientists conducted thousands of runs of different computer simulations that looked at various factors, such as moisture in the air, atmospheric flow, and sea temperature and level.

The approach represents an evolution in the field. Scientists used to say that individual weather events — a specific hurricane or flood, for example — cannot be attributed to climate change. But recently, researchers have used computer simulations to look at extreme events in a more nuanced way and measure the influence of climate change on their likelihood and magnitude.

This is the second year that NOAA and the British meteorology office have teamed up to look at the greenhouse gas connection to the previous year's unusual events.

"We've got some new evidence that human influence has changed the risk and has changed it enough that we can detect it," study lead author Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution for the British meteorological office, said at a news conference.

Georgia Institute of Technology professor Judith Curry, who often disagrees with mainstream scientists, said connecting shrinking sea ice to human activity was obvious, but as for Sandy and the rest: "I'm not buying it at all."

Thomas Karl, director of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, said the study provides "compelling evidence that human-caused change was a factor contributing to the extreme events."
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/half-2012-wild-weather-linked-climate-change-20165235

Midwest Heat Wave Update: Illinois Schools Close Early

 

LINCOLN, Neb.  -- An unusual, late-summer heat wave has enveloped much of the Midwest, putting schools and sports events on hold.

Schools in Illinois have announced they will close early Tuesday due to the extreme heat, including West Aurora, North Aurora, Montgomery, and Sugar Grove. On Monday Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin, the Dakotas and Illinois let out early as temperatures crept toward the mid-90s - beyond in some places. After-school sports practices and evening games were canceled in St. Paul, Minn., and misting stations were keeping people cool at the Minnesota State Fair, where about 90 fairgoers had been treated for heat-related illnesses over the weekend.

The heat wave is supposed to last through much of the week, the National Weather Service said. Heat of this magnitude is unusual for this time of year, but not unprecedented. In Des Moines, Iowa, for instance, temperatures on Aug. 26 have reached at least 100 degrees at least six times since 1881. School districts took precautions, not wanting to put students and teachers in sweaty - and possibly dangerous - situations.

In central Iowa, Marshalltown Community School District administrators canceled afternoon preschool classes on Monday and Tuesday and were planning to release other students two hours early. Parts of all 10 of district buildings have air conditioning, but some rooms aren't connected.

"The buildings can heat up pretty fast, especially when you have kids in there," district spokesman Jason Staker said. "It's not a good environment for students or teachers."

http://www.weather.com/news/midwest-heat-wave-closes-schools-early-20130827

New Global Warming Source: Oceans

The world's oceans absorb much of the carbon dioxide that humans pump into the atmosphere, which comes largely from the burning of fossil fuels. But soaking up all of that carbon is slowly changing the chemistry of the oceans, which could amplify the effects of global warming in decades to come.

That's the conclusion reached in a study released last week in the science journal Nature Climate Change, which found that as the oceans become more acidic, they cause tiny marine organisms to release less of a gas that helps protect Earth from the sun's radiation.

"On a global scale, a fall in DMS emissions due to acidification could have a major effect on climate, creating a positive-feedback loop and enhancing [global] warming," the journal Nature notes in a press release announcing the study.

If the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubles by 2100, as many models project, ocean acidification could contribute as much as 0.8 degrees to the expected rise in global temperatures by then of between 3.6 and 8.1 Fahrenheit degrees

 http://www.weather.com/news/science/environment/co2-bites-back-oceans-become-more-acidic-they-warm-planet-20130826