Extreme cold raises fears for 2 adults, 4 children missing in Nevada snow

 Frigid weather that gripped much of the United States created a crisis in northwest Nevada, where rescue teams have been searching a mountainous area for two adults and four children.

James Glanton, 34, and Christina MacIntee, 25, are missing, along with a 10-year-old, two 4-year-olds and a 3-year-old, the Pershing County Sheriff's Office said. The six set out Sunday for Seven Troughs mountain range and haven't been seen since.

Fears for their safety grew as the temperature was expected to hit 6 below zero Tuesday night.

Amanda Fitzpatrick, mother of the 10-year-old, Shelby Fitzpatrick, told CNN's Piers Morgan in a telephone interview that she'd joined the search. Rescue teams have tried to stay positive, she said.

"It's been extremely hard, probably the hardest 24 to 36 hours of my life," she said. "It's my baby girl."

The relationship between the two adults and the other children was unclear.

At least 15 people have died because of the weather, mostly in traffic accidents. Eight died in Oklahoma alone, including a 6-year-old who fell through ice on a creek in Tulsa and men who died in house fires in Westville and Tulsa, the state Department of Emergency Management reported on Monday.

Temperatures across the country are expected to stay very low, usually 10 to 20 degrees below normal, for the rest of the week in regions struggling after days of wintry weather, according to the National Weather Service.

Dallas is still trying to shake off the effects of a weekend ice storm and had about 20,000 customers without power on Monday, according to power company Oncor. Anchorage, Alaska, has been warmer than St. Louis and Denver.

"It's very unusual," CNN meteorologist Dave Hennen said. "This literally spreads across the entire U.S., and we're 12 days from the official start of winter."

Even if snow leaves, the cold will remain. More sleet, snow and freezing rain will smack Washington on Tuesday morning. The storm will move off the East Coast in the afternoon and night, the National Weather Service said, but the mercury won't rise above freezing until Friday. The forecast is about the same for Philadelphia and New York City, though those cities won't see temperatures above 32 until days later.

Portland, Oregon, should have more snow and freezing rain this week; Chicago, too.

The nation's airports appear to be getting back to normal. The website Flightaware.com says only 304 flights have been canceled for Tuesday, up from 1,700 on Monday and 2,600 on Sunday.

Florida is pretty much the only place in the country to escape the cold, with Punta Gorda, a town on the Gulf Coast, reporting Sunday's national high temperature of 87 degrees. Mimi Huddleston, a bartender at Harpoon Harry's, has a message for the rest the country, and to her credit, it's not "nyah nyah."

"We live in paradise," she said Monday. "Snowbirds" from the North who come in for a drink are always talking about the weather back home. "They say it's too cold for them and they like it here."

The country's coldest spot on Monday was Daniel, a community of about 150 people in western Wyoming. It registered 29 degrees.

Rachel Grimes of the Sublette County Chamber of Commerce said people are busy "recreating" on skis and snowmobiles. "We normally don't get cold weather like this until after the holidays," she said. "The wind is blowing today, so it feels colder."

Tuesday's storm in the East could drop up to 5 inches of snow in Virginia before moving out to sea, the National Weather Service said. Much of the Plains and Rocky Mountains will stay very cold through Wednesday, with the lowest temperatures probably found in the higher elevations of the Great Basin eastward through the Dakotas and into Minnesota.

Travel will remain hazardous in spots.

In Arizona, a Saturday night snowstorm stranded 300 vehicles along Interstate 15. Rigs jackknifed and passenger cars slid into rigs, causing chain-reaction crashes and an enormous backup, Arizona Department of Public Safety Officer Bart Graves said. Authorities shut the interstate for more than 12 hours to clear it.

"We had travelers running out of gas. They provided them food, water and blankets," Graves said.

Some residents in the Dallas suburb of Plano had to deal with an unusual danger: sheets of ice cascading from buildings to the sidewalks and streets.

"The apocalypse has started," one man said shortly before layers of ice fell onto cars.

Late Sunday night in New York, there was a 20-car pileup on the Bronx River Parkway. Forty people were injured, none seriously, authorities said.

Along Interstate 95 outside Stamford, Connecticut, Paul Lee captured frightening video of cars sliding and spinning across ice.

Freezing rain is expected to fall from central Virginia to southeast New York on Monday. Some parts could see up to a quarter-inch of ice.

Antarctica records unofficial coldest temperature ever

There's cold, and then there's Antarctica cold. ... How does a frosty reading of 135.8 degrees below zero sound?

Based on remote satellite measurements, scientists recently recorded that temperature at a desolate ice plateau in East Antarctica. It was the lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth, though it may not get that recognition in the official record book.

A NASA satellite measured that temperature in August 2010; on July 31 of this year, another bone-chilling temperature of -135.3 degrees was recorded.

"I've never been in conditions that cold, and I hope I never am," said ice scientist Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. "I am told that every breath is painful, and you have to be extremely careful not to freeze part of your throat or lungs when inhaling."

The -135.8-degree reading is "50 degrees colder than anything that has ever been seen in Alaska or Siberia or certainly North Dakota," he said.

"It's more like you'd see on Mars on a nice summer day in the poles," Scambos said from the American Geophysical Union scientific meeting in San Francisco on Monday, where he announced the data.

Winter in Antarctica occurs, as it does throughout the Southern Hemisphere, in the months of June, July and August, when the continent is in total darkness.

The official record, as measured by a thermometer, remains -128.6 degrees, set in Vostok, Antarctica, on July 21, 1983. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the official keepers of world weather records, recognizes only readings measured by thermometers on location, not remotely by satellite.

"Vostok is still the world's coldest recorded location," said Randy Cerveny, an Arizona State University professor of geography and the "rapporteur for climate extremes" at the WMO, via e-mail. "They are using remote sensing, not standard weather stations, so we at the World Meteorological Organization will not recognize that."

Cerveny noted that there is no way to determine the elevation of the remote-sensed value. Official temperature measurements must be made of the air about 7 feet above the ground, to prevent the ground temperature from impacting the air temperature.

Vostok is a Russian research station about 600 miles from the South Pole, where the highest temperature ever recorded was 4 degrees on a summer afternoon.

As for the USA's coldest mark on record, it's -80 degrees, set in Prospect Creek, Alaska, on Jan. 23, 1971, according to Christopher Burt, weather historian for the Weather Underground. Excluding Alaska, the lowest temperature was the -70-degree temperature recorded in Rogers Pass, Mont., in January 1954.

Regardless of whether or not the Antarctica mark is an "official" record, it's still unimaginably cold: "Thank God, I don't know how exactly it feels," Scambos said. He said scientists do routinely make naked 100-degree-below-zero dashes outside at the South Pole, so people can survive that temperature for about three minutes.

Scambos said that in East Antarctica, the air is dry, the ground chilly and the skies cloudless. Cold air swoops down off a dome and gets trapped in a chilly lower spot, "hugging the surface and sliding around."

The Antarctica measurements were made by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor on board NASA's Aqua satellite and by Landsat 8, a satellite launched early this year by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey.

The record for cold has little to do with global warming, because it is one spot in one place, said Waleed Abdalati, an ice scientist at the University of Colorado and NASA's former chief scientist.

Both Abdalati, who wasn't part of the measurement team, and Scambos said this is probably an unusual random reading in a place that hasn't been measured much and could have been colder or hotter in the past.

"It does speak to the range of conditions on this Earth, some of which we haven't been able to observe," Abdalati said.

Climate Council Warns Australia to Brace for More Raging Bushfires, Longer Heatwaves

The Climate Council has warned Australia to prepare for more frequent and intense bushfires. The council, which was formerly funded by the Australian government before Prime Minister Tony Abbott scrapped the body, will release its report concerning the risks of bushfires.

The Climate Council's chief Tim Flannery said that although bushfires in Australia are nothing new, there was a growing possibility that more will happen in the future. Mr Flannery said climate change will increase the risk of frequent bushfires.

He said many people have lost their lives. Property and infrastructure have been damaged because of bushfires. According to the Climate Council's report, people need to understand the risks of climate change to prepare for the future.

The report also revealed that southeast and southwest of Australia is getting hotter because of climate change. The Climate Council report also predicted sustained and frequent heat waves lasting through March and October in the coming years. Mr Flannery said Australia must prepare especially communities prone to bushfires, emergency service personnel and health workers.

Year 2013 declared one of the warmest years

The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has declared 2013 as among the top 10 warmest years on record since 1850. The rising sea levels due to climate change have aggravated the effect of strong cyclones like Typhoon Haiyan that left the Philippines overwhelmed and under a state of calamity.

According to WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud, the increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere meant warmer temperatures in the future and more extreme weather. In climate change talks with almost 200 representatives from nations around the world, he said the first nine months of 2013 tied with the first nine months of 2003 with average global land and ocean surface temperature of over 48 degrees Celsius.

Aside from Typhoon Haiyan, other extreme weather disturbances include the record-breaking heat waves in Australia, leading climate scientists to suspect recent NSW bushfires were enhanced by climate change. The floods experienced in Sudan to Europe were also believed to be aggravated by climate change and rising global temperatures, according to the WMO.

http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/528574/20131209/climate-council-australia-bushfires-heatwaves-change-global.htm#.UqZFtfRDvW8

UK weather: Hemsby residents see cliff top homes disappear into the sea

 Residents watched their cliff-top homes disappear into the sea as last night's tidal surge hit the east coast of Britain.

In Hemsby, Norfolk, seven bungalows fell into the water as the high tide eroded the cliff below.

^{Steven Connolly stands by what remains of his bungalow in Hemsby (PA)}

Former warehouse man Steven Connolly, 54, and his wife Jackie, 64, managed to rescue their three-month-old kittens Tom and Jerry before their home of seven years was destroyed.

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Only the patio doors and a rear window were left standing as the home was torn in two.

Dozens of residents formed a human chain to help salvage the possessions of those affected.

^{(AFP/Getty Images)}

Mr Connolly, who bought the two bedroom bungalow for £59,000, said: "We were in the pub when we heard the cliff was going so rushed to get what we could out.

"People we've never even met were helping out, it was amazing.

"Suddenly we heard a shout 'it's going, it's going' and we watched our kitchen get ripped apart. The whole house collapsed before our eyes.

"We're devastated at what we've lost but at least me, Jackie and the kittens are safe."

^{(AFP/Getty Images)}

The couple are being put up along with other residents at a nearby holiday park but it is unclear where they will live in the long term.

"Once the surge is over, they're going to sweep the beach and we may be able to recover some of our possessions from a skip," Mr Connolly added.

"When we bought the bungalow there was about seven feet separated us and the sea.

"We always knew it might be hit by erosion but never thought it could happen so suddenly.

"We can't even begin to think about what happens next."

^{(Stephen Pond/Getty Images)}

Ray Mooney, who was inside his home as the storm hit, told the BBC: "I heard a crash and whole back part of the floor caved in. Everything went down.

"This is my only asset," he said. "That's it, I haven't got anything else.

"I had just done the house up to sell but now I have nothing. I'm homeless."

The land on which the homes stood 30ft (9m) above the shore has vanished into the sea.

The seven families, who are all now homeless, have been provided with emergency accommodation.

Futher up the coast in Boston, Lincolnshire, where 250 homes were evacuated, people described their terror as a 3-ft wall of water hit the town.

Some had only 30 minutes warning before the water hit, and people ran screaming from their homes, residents said.

Jane McGeachy, 45, said she returned to find the waters had moved her furniture and knocked her fridge over.

She evacuated with her son Steve Clark, 20, on Thursday night, but were only told they would need to leave half an hour before the water became knee-high. They are unable to move back in until the electricity and gas is restored.

"One minute the water was trickling over the wall and the next it was like a tsunami," she said.

"It came pouring down the street in a surge. I had to grab the little boy from across the road and run up the street with him in my arms because he was panicking and so was his mum."

Floods kill 11 in northeastern Brazil

Brasilia: Authorities say 11 people have died and six are reported missing following a flood in the northeastern Bahia state. 

Officials with Bahia's Civil Defense emergency response agency say intense rains overnight Saturday to yesterday in the town of Lajedinho caused the floods, which also destroyed some 70 houses. Around 200 people have taken shelter in schools and a local gym. 

Emergency response personnel were searching the flooded buildings for survivors, the missing and other possible victims today. 

Brazil's northeast is in the grips of the worst drought in a century, so the sudden downpour was particularly unexpected. 

Lajedinho's Mayor Antonio Mario Lima says about 4.7 inches (12 centimeters) of rain fell in a few hours. That's the equivalent of two months of normal rainfall in the region. 

http://zeenews.india.com/news/world/floods-kill-11-in-northeastern-brazil_895597.html

Magnitude-4.5 Earthquake Rattles Central Oklahoma

A magnitude-4.5 earthquake in central Oklahoma shook residents Saturday, just weeks after the two-year anniversary of the strongest earthquake ever recorded in the Sooner state, and was followed by two smaller temblors later in the day.

The shaking is increasingly commonplace in the state, so after the initial surprise, customers at a central Oklahoma restaurant near the epicenter of the first quake returned their attention to an in-state college football rivalry game.

Marty Doepke, general manager of Pops Restaurant in Arcadia, near the epicenter of the first quake, said there was no damage at the restaurant that's known for its selection of some 600 soft drinks — hundreds of which are displayed in individual bottles along shelves.

"It shook a bit, that's for sure. Everybody just kind of stopped and looked around," Doepke said. "Everybody almost automatically knew what it was and then went back to watching the Bedlam game" — the Oklahoma State-Oklahoma football game.

The earthquake was centered near Arcadia, about 14 miles northeast of Oklahoma City, and was about 5 miles deep, the U.S. Geological Survey reported.

The agency reported that temblor was followed by a magnitude-2.8 earthquake at 1:26 p.m. about 10 miles northeast of Oklahoma City and a magnitude-3.1 tremor at 5:58 p.m. about 6 miles northeast of the city.

Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management spokeswoman Keli Cain said no injuries or damage were reported from any of the quakes.

Oklahoma is crisscrossed with fault lines that generate frequent small earthquakes, most too weak to be felt. But after decades of limited seismic activity in the region, earthquakes have become more common in the last several years.

The strongest earthquake on record in Oklahoma was a magnitude-5.6 earthquake on Nov. 5, 2011. That time, the football stadium in Stillwater, about 70 miles north of Oklahoma City, started shaking just after OSU defeated No. 17 Kansas State and left ESPN sports anchor Kirk Herbstreit wide-eyed during a postgame telecast.

That temblor also toppled castlelike turrets at St. Gregory's University in Shawnee, some 40 miles east of Oklahoma City.

Since 2009, more than 200 earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or greater have hit the state's midsection, according to the Geological Survey. Scientists are not sure why seismic activity has spiked, but one theory is that it could be related to wastewater from oil and gas drilling that is often discarded by injecting it deep into underground wells.

Saturday's magnitude-4.5 tremor was felt in the northern Oklahoma City suburb of Edmond, where Gabriella Devero, a University of Central Oklahoma student, was visiting her grandmother and experienced her first earthquake.

"My jaw was just wide open, 'Was I actually going through an earthquake?'" Devero said about her initial thoughts. "Then I was like, 'Yep this is actually an earthquake.'

She continued: "My grandma came into the room and was like 'Gabby are you OK,' and I was like, 'yes, I'm just terrified.'"

http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/u-s-world/45-earthquake-strikes-central-oklahoma

3.7-magnitude earthquake recorded near Mineral Wells

Update at 4 p.m.: SMU says seismologists will deploy seismic monitors in and around Azle to study the series of quakes that have been ratting that part of the Barnett Shale since the beginning of November.

In a release issued Monday, the university says the first batch will be deployed as early as this week. They will be installed “in private homes, businesses, public buildings and schools with an existing broadband connection to the Internet,” says the release. Data will be made available online, via the U.S. Geological Survey, which is providing four monitors.

More than a dozen other sensors will be set up at confidential locations in coming days.

“We are first going to focus in on where the earthquakes have been occurring — about a five- to six-mile area near Reno and Azle,” says associate professor of geophysics Heather DeShon, who will be leading the research team. “How long the monitors remain depends on continued seismicity. We’re thinking a few months.”

Original item posted at 7:30 a.m.: For a second straight morning, there has been another earthquake northwest of Fort Worth — the 25th since November 1.

This one was among the largest recorded since the beginning of this quake outbreak: a 3.7-magnitude tremor located about 11 miles northeast of Mineral Wells, where, at the end of November, there were back-to-back quakes registering 3.6 and 2.8, prompting the Tarrant Regional Water District to conduct daily inspections of the Eagle Mountain Reservoir.

This morning’s quake occurred at 3:23, and was felt from Fort Worth to Weatherford.

It follows a Sunday-morning tremor that yet again rattled Azle, which has had its fill of earthquakes in recent weeks. Yesterday’s was a 3.6 felt from Dallas to Oklahoma City.

It’s believed most, if not all, of the quakes are being caused by injection wells used to dispose of wastewater from gas drilling. The Texas Railroad Commission will neither confirm or deny that sentiment.

“Texas has a long history of safe operations of injection and disposal wells (RRC issued the first injection well permit in 1936, and statewide there are more than 33,000 injection and disposal wells), and staff has not identified a significant correlation between faulting and injection practices,”spokesperson Ramona Nye told us earlier this month.

But they’re looking into it: “When earthquakes are reported, our staff will determine if saltwater disposal wells are nearby and then inspect the facilities to ensure that they are in compliance with their Railroad Commission permit conditions. Please keep in mind, that some reported earthquake epicenters in Texas have not been near saltwater disposal or injection wells. Commission staff this week inspected one Azle-area disposal well after the reported seismic events and found this disposal well was in compliance with Commission rules.”

When reached this morning, Nye said via email that “at this time, Commission staff has no information about the causes of recent seismic events near Azle.”

Arctic Ice Melt Tied To Heat Waves And Downpours In U.S., Europe And Elsewhere, Study Suggests

A thaw of Arctic ice and snow is linked to worsening summer heatwaves and downpours thousands of miles south in Europe, the United States and other areas, underlying the scale of the threat posed by global warming, scientists said on Sunday.

Their report, which was dismissed as inconclusive by some other experts, warned of increasingly extreme weather across "much of North America and Eurasia where billions of people will be affected".

The study is part of a drive to work out how climate change affects the frequency of extreme weather, from droughts to floods. Governments want to know the trends to plan everything from water supplies to what crops to plant.

But the science of a warming Arctic is far from settled.

Writing in the journal Nature Climate Change, experts in China and the United States said they could not conclusively say the Arctic thaw caused more extreme weather, or vice versa.

But they said they had found evidence of a relationship between the two. Rising temperatures over thawing snow on land and sea ice in the Arctic were changing atmospheric pressure and winds, the report said.

The changes slowed the eastward movement of vast meandering weather systems and meant more time for extreme weather to develop - such as a heatwave in Russia in 2010, droughts in the United States and China in 2011 and 2012, or heavy summer rains that caused floods in Britain in 2012, the paper added.

"The study contributes to a growing body of evidence that ... the melting Arctic has wide-ranging implications for people living in the middle latitudes," lead author Qiuhong Tang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences told Reuters.


VANISHING ICE

Sea ice in the Arctic shrank to a record low in 2012 and the U.N.'s panel of climate scientists says it could almost vanish in summers by 2050 with rising greenhouse gas emissions.

But some scientists said other factors, including the usual vagaries of weather or changing sea temperatures, may explain some recent extremes rather than changes in the Arctic.

"The jury is still very much out," James Screen, an expert at Exeter University in England, said of efforts to see if there is a link between a melting Arctic and extremes further south in the northern hemisphere.

Some evidence in Sunday's study was "plausible ... but far from conclusive," he said, adding that some of the data were not statistically significant and might be random variations.

"For people on the streets, what really matters is whether the extremes are changing or not. But from the scientific perspective we want to understand why," he said. Better understanding is vital to make reliable predictions.

In September, the U.N.'s panel of climate scientists raised the probability that most global warming since 1950 has a human cause - mostly gases released by burning fossil fuels - to 95 percent from 90 in a previous assessment in 2007.

James Overland, of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said many extremes studied were in the past decade, too short to know for sure if they were enhanced by Arctic ice and snow melt or not.

"Sceptics remain unconvinced that Arctic/mid-latitude linkages are proven, and this work will do little to change their viewpoint," he wrote in a comment in Nature Climate Change.

Still, he said there was a high potential for an Arctic influence, given the outlook for a further thaw. (Reporting By Alister Doyle)

Drought over for half the state

For the first time in three years, less than half of Texas is in a drought. 

After near-normal rainfall during the spring and summer, this fall a number of drought-ending storm systems began to sweep across Texas, particularly the eastern half of the state.

“Drought conditions have ended in most of East and Southeast Texas,” said John Nielsen-Gammon, the state climatologist and a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University. “It's been a recovery for the part of the state along and east of I-35. The western half of the state is still for the most part mired in drought.”

Texas was last this free of drought at the end of November 2010. After that time, the state began feeling the effects of the great drought of 2011, which peaked in early October 2011. At the time 99 percent of the state was in a “severe” or worse drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

Today, about 20 percent of Texas is in a “severe” or worse drought, and 47 percent is in at least a “moderate” drought.

San Antonio and several neighboring counties are in the “abnormally dry” category, but some counties to the west are still in moderate or extreme drought.

The Edwards Aquifer, the main drinking water supply for San Antonio, has not recovered, hovering around 641 feet above sea level at the San Antonio J-17 well. That's about 27 feet below the historical average for this time of year.

Houston has been drought-free since late October. “The primary lingering effects of the drought are dead trees and damaged pastures,” Nielsen-Gammon said.

The 2011 drought was most intense one-year drought in Texas since at least 1895 when statewide weather records were first kept, according to Nielsen-Gammon.

Conditions were so dry in 2011 during the spring planting season across much of Texas that many crops never emerged from the ground, he said. By early fall, trees in Central and East Texas were showing widespread mortality, and dry and windy conditions allowed forest fires to burn intensely and spread rapidly in Bastrop and elsewhere.

The drought also took a toll on the state's water supply, with roughly 100 cubic kilometers of water, or 70 Lake Travises, lost to evaporation in 2011 alone, according to a study by theUniversity of Texas at Austin.

The images of wildfires and disappearing lakes had an impact on Texas voters. In November, they approved Proposition 6, which earmarks $2 billion of the state's rainy day fund for use in developing reservoirs, pipelines and other water resources. The measure to reduce borrowing costs for water projects in drought-afflicted Texas spawned strong feelings among voters.

Although the state saw some intermittent relief in 2012, continued dry weather into 2013 made the drought one of the three worst on record in terms of duration and intensity.

So is the drought that peaked in 2011 now waning for good?

It's not clear. With the El Niño region of the tropical Pacific expected to remain neutral this winter, there are no external factors driving our winter strongly wet or dry.

In fact, the bigger concern for much of Texas this winter is not drought but wildfires.

“The cold weather ... will kick all the vegetation into dormancy,” Nielsen-Gammon said.

“Since rain last spring and summer was near normal, there's plenty of new vegetation that will become fuel for wildfires. In a few weeks, Texas may, for the first time in over two years, need to face extreme fire danger conditions.”

Some freezing rain coming, but then we warm up

The cold snap that started December in Washington should give way this week to more-normal cloudy-rainy weather with a chance of light snow in places during the transition.

KING 5 Meteorologist Mary Lee says the Puget Sound area can expect a chance of light scattered snow showers, especially north of Seattle Monday, with highs in the low 30s. There will be a chance of freezing rain Monday afternoon and through the evening.

Tuesday could start with more freezing rain as temperatures fall into the 20s-to-low 30s, but it should change to rain with highs in the upper 30s. Temperatures are expected to move into the 40s for the rest of the week.

Some Western Washington schools reported delayed starts Monday. Oak Heights Elementary School in Edmonds was closed Monday after a water pipe burst. At least six classrooms were damaged. Sign up for school closure text alerts

Temperatures are expected to remain below freezing in Eastern Washington this week with a chance of snow or light freezing rain.
http://www.king5.com/news/local/freezing-rain-forecast-235068991.html

Cold wave brings respiratory problems

SAFAR shows low air quality; city's temperature dips to 6.9 degree celsius on Monday

People gather around a bonfire for warmth on Monday night - Snehil Sakhare/DNA

While the temperature in hill stations of the state like Mahabaleshwar is still above 10 degree celsius, Pune is shivering due to cold wave. Minimum temperature of the city was recorded at 6.9 degree celsius on Monday. With the prevalent cold wave conditions, the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) has issued health advisory stating citizens having respiratory problems may experience health issues due to cold conditions.
The city is witnessing drastic dip in the minimum temperature for the past couple of days. While in most of the parts, the minimum temperature is still above 10 degree celsius, cold wave conditions prevail in some parts of central Maharashtra. On Sunday, Pune recorded the lowest temperature in the state with mercury dipping down to 7.8 degree celsius.
Experts from Indian Meteorology Department (IMD) said that Northerly winds are taking cold waves towards south. The weather in some parts of Central Maharashtra is dry and the sky is clear due to which temperature has dropped considerably.
“The minimum temperature in the city on Monday was 4.5 degree below average minimum temperature. We can say cold wave conditions are prevailing in some parts of Central Maharashtra, though other parts of the state including hill stations like Mahabaleshwar are still above 10 degree Celsius,” IMD officials said.
As the temperature is dipping down in the city, it has affected the air quality of the city. The System of Air Quality Forecasting and Research (SAFAR) project of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), which measures the air quality of the city, has shown that air quality in most parts of the city is not good. The air quality in many parts is moderate while in Katraj and Hadapsar area the quality is poor which may cause respiratory problems for citizens.
Gufran Baig, the programme director of SAFAR project, said that the cold weather brings down the inversion layer in the atmosphere which restricts air pollution to go upwards due to which it spreads in the air and citizens face respiratory problems.
“The air pollution in the city is mainly due to the particulate matters and at areas like Hadapsar and Katraj the air quality is poor. In many parts of the city the air quality is moderate which may cause problems to the citizens having respiratory issues like ssthma, bronchitis,” Baig said.

http://www.dnaindia.com/pune/report-cold-wave-brings-respiratory-problems-1932417

Blame the scorching summers on shrinking Arctic sea ice

Thirty years of shrinking Arctic sea ice has boosted extreme summer weather, including heat waves and drought, in the United States and elsewhere, according to a study published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change. 

The new study — based on satellite tracking of sea ice, snow cover and weather trends since 1979 — links the Arctic's warming climate to shifting weather patterns in the Northern Hemisphere's midlatitudes.

"The results of our new study provide further support and evidence for rapid Arctic warming contributing to the observed increased frequency and intensity of heat waves," said study co-author Jennifer Francis, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey. [Images of Melt: Earth's Vanishing Ice]

Weakened jet streamChanges in the Arctic can perturb midlatitude weather in such regions as the United States, Europe and China because temperature differences between the two zones drive the jet stream, the fast-moving river of air that circles the Northern Hemisphere, explained lead study author Qiuhong Tang, an atmospheric scientist at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research in Beijing.

"As the high latitudes warm faster than the midlatitudes because of amplifying effects ofmelting ice, the west-to-east jet-stream wind is weakened," Tang told LiveScience in an email interview. "Consequently, the atmospheric circulation change tends to favor more persistent weather systems and a higher likelihood of summer weather extremes."

In the past 30 years, the amount of summer sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean shrank by 8 percent per decade. The total area of summer ice lost would cover 40 percent of the lower 48 U.S. states. The amount of high-latitude snow cover during June waned even more quickly, at almost 18 percent per decade. Ultimately, these two measures mean the Arctic is warmer when summer starts, because the open ocean and meltwater on ice absorb more of the sun's rays than ice does.

When the temperature difference between the Arctic and midlatitudes lessens, the jet stream starts to take swooping swings on its journey around the globe, like a river flowing over a flat plain, Francis said. The ridges and troughs in the jet stream create stagnating weather systems, such as high-pressure heat waves, that are stuck in the swoops. The Arctic sea ice effects were even blamed for Hurricane Sandy's swing toward the Mid-Atlantic Coast.

The new results add to earlier studies by Francis and her colleagues showing a similar link between Arctic climate change and extreme winter weather, also driven by a wild jet stream pattern.

"This study pounds another nail in the framework connecting human-caused climate change with more frequent extreme weather," Francis said in an email interview.

Climate debateHowever, Francis and Tang said that other factors, such as natural climate cycles like El Niño, could also contribute to the increasing numbers of devastating droughts, heat waves and bitter cold snaps plaguing the midlatitudes.

"The results of this study are based on statistical relationships; thus, (a) cause-and-effect (relationship) cannot be definitively identified," Francis said. "That said, the relationships we reveal are consistent with expectations and with the results of other recent studies, providing confidence that Arctic changes are contributing to increasing extreme weather events in midlatitudes."

Scientific opinion is still divided on whether the rollicking jet stream is truly linked to climate change or may simply be the result of natural variability, according to a commentary also published today in Nature Climate Change by James Overland, a climate scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. Part of the problem comes from the paucity of data, because scientists have only 30 years of Arctic observations to use in their analysis.

"Skeptics remain unconvinced that Arctic/midlatitude linkages are proven, and this work will do little to change their viewpoint," Overland wrote. "There is insufficient data to formally resolve the debate on whether these events are purely random or if their occurrence is enhanced by Arctic changes."

However, "the potential for an Arctic influence remains high, given the outlook for further declines in summer sea ice and snow cover over the next few decades, and Arctic amplification of global temperatures," Overland added. "Expected responses from Arctic impacts may be emerging."

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/you-can-blame-scorching-summers-shrinking-arctic-sea-ice-2D11716259

City in the grip of cold wave, records 7.8 deg C (India)

The city recorded the lowest minimum temperature in the state and lowest of the season till now on Sunday at 7.8 degrees Celsius, a dip of 3.6 degrees Celsius from normal. Very cold conditions prevailed in the the city in the early hours of Sunday and the minimum mercury mark is expected to remain around 8 degrees Celsius in the next 24 hours.

The temperature in Pune was even lower than popular hill station Mahabaleshwar, which recorded 11 degrees Celcius. The drop in temperature was attributed to cold waves in the north India. Cold conditions also prevailed in Konkan, central Maharashtra and Marathwada, where temperatures much lower than the average minimum were recorded on Sunday morning.

The India Meteorological Department (IMD) has said that a low pressure region was active on the sea from Lakshadweep to south Maharashtra. IMD said the atmosphere will be dry for coming 48 hours. Last week the city had recorded a significant rise in the minimum temperature due to cloudy conditions and rain. But the mercury started its downward movement since last three days.

The minimum temperature in Jalgaon was 11.3 degrees Celsius, Malegaon 11.3 and Satara 9.9 and Kolhapur 13.6. Aurangabad, Parbhani and Nanded recorded 10.5, 8.6 and 10 , respectively.