Beijing mudslide

Rescuers digging for victims of a massive landslide at a gold-mining site in Tibet found just one body yesterday, a day after 83 workers were buried by two million cubic metres of mud, rock and debris. The avalanche swept through the mine near the village of Gyama in Lhasa's Maizhokunggar district covering an area of one and a half square miles.

Beijing says the cause of the mudslide is yet to be fully investigated, although state media say it was the result of a "natural disaster", without giving specifics. The Chinese government claims the reason for the heavy mining activity, which increases the risk of landslides in the already precarious region, is to raise living standards and create economic growth. Many Tibetans vehemently disagree and claim any wealth created is channelled straight to Beijing.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/tibet-landslide-kills-scores-of-goldminers-8555245.html

Severe Threat in Southern Plains

The best chance for a few severe storms as we start the new week on Monday will be in portions of northwest Texas. Large hail and damaging winds will be the primary threats, however we cannot completely rule out a tornado. A few severe storms are also possible in far southeast Florida on Monday. 

The threat of scattered severe storms shifts to southern parts of Texas on Tuesday. After that, we will then watch the immediate Gulf Coast for the possibility of severe weather as we head through Wednesday and Thursday.

http://www.weather.com/news/weather-severe/severe-weather-tracker

Scientists link frozen spring to dramatic Arctic sea ice loss

Climate scientists have linked the massive snowstorms and bitter spring weather now being experienced across Britain and large parts of Europe and North America to the dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice.

Both the extent and the volume of the sea ice that forms and melts each year in the Arctic Ocean fell to an historic low last autumn, and satellite records published on Monday by the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado, show the ice extent is close to the minimum recorded for this time of year.

"The sea ice is going rapidly. It's 80% less than it was just 30 years ago. There has been a dramatic loss. This is a symptom of global warming and it contributes to enhanced warming of the Arctic," said Jennifer Francis, research professor with the Rutgers Institute of Coastal and Marine Science.

According to Francis and a growing body of other researchers, the Arctic ice loss adds heat to the ocean and atmosphere which shifts the position of the jet stream – the high-altitude river of air that steers storm systems and governs most weather in northern hemisphere.

"This is what is affecting the jet stream and leading to the extreme weather we are seeing in mid-latitudes," she said. "It allows the cold air from the Arctic to plunge much further south. The pattern can be slow to change because the [southern] wave of the jet stream is getting bigger. It's now at a near record position, so whatever weather you have now is going to stick around," she said.

Francis linked the Arctic temperature rises to extreme weather in mid latitudes last year and warned in September that 2012's record sea ice melt could lead to a cold winter in the UK and northern Europe.

She was backed by Vladimir Petoukhov, professor of Earth system analysis at Potsdam Institute in Germany, whose research suggests the loss of ice this year could be changing the direction of the jet stream.

"The ice was at a record low last year and is now exceptionally low in some parts of the Arctic like the Labrador and Greenland seas. This could be one reason why anticyclones are developing," he said.

The heavy snowfall and freezing temperatures which have marked March 2013 across the northern hemisphere are in stark contrast to March 2012 when many countries experienced their warmest ever springs. The hypothesis that wind patterns are being changed because melting Arctic sea ice has exposed huge swaths of normally frozen ocean to the atmosphere would explain both the extremes of heat and cold, say the scientists.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/mar/25/frozen-spring-arctic-sea-ice-loss

Bundle up for the five coldest cities in America

While relatively balmy conditions have prevailed across the USA the past few months, Old Man Winter is making a comeback - delighting skiers in snow-starved Lake Tahoe and elsewhere.

And for travelers eager to put those longjohns and fleece parkas to a real test, researchers at The Weather Channel have crunched the latest 30-year average annual temperature data from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center to come up with the five coldest cities in America.

To keep the ranking from being dominated by one or two states, The Weather Channel picked the coldest locations in each state and took the top five from that list. Locations were limited to cities with at least 5,000 residents, with one major exception: Winner Barrow, Alaska, which boasts an average temperature of just 11.7 degrees.

CAPTION

By EARL FINKLER, AP

Other bone-chilling cities included International Falls, Minnesota (whose average annual temperature of 37.8 degrees and all-time record low of 55 degrees below zero have earned it the nicknames "Frostbite Falls" and "Icebox of the Nation"), Gunnison, Colorado (where travelers can expect freezes almost every day of the year), and Jackson, Wyoming. Rounding out the top five: Caribou, Maine, which gets more than nine feet of snow each year and whose average temperature of 39.7 degrees is partially due to a "polar vortex" over Hudson Bay, which funnels frigid air from Canada into northern Maine.

http://travel.usatoday.com/destinations/dispatches/post/2012/01/bundle-up-for-the-five-coldest-cities-in-america/614610/1

It’s Move It or Lose It in Path of a Nor’easter

PLUM ISLAND, Mass. — Barbara Murray walked her dog past a ribbon of the police tape that wound its way around sections of this scenic barrier island, about an hour north of Boston, where she has lived for 50 years.She ascended a sandy driveway and watched three construction workers, one driving a construction scoop, stack concrete blocks and cover them with sand and plastic cloth — an effort to protect a recently built home here in the town of Newbury from waves that have been ravenously consuming the shoreline this winter.
“It’s not going to work,” Ms. Murray said. “You’re not going to stop the ocean. It’s too powerful.”


The winter storm, which unexpectedly missed Washington, sucked sand from the beach and dragged waves high up on the shore. Last week, six homes were demolished by construction crews, having been irreparably damaged in the storm. Seven more were too dangerous to be occupied.

An additional 24 homes are considered to be in imminent danger of being seriously damaged should there be another storm or an abnormally high tide, which means residents were warily watching a new winter storm expected to reach here on Monday night.

“We’ve had one horrendous winter since, really, Hurricane Sandy,” said Robert Connors, who owns a construction company and lives in a house raised above the sand on pilings. “Our beach and our dune system has been leaking, compromised, and now it’s just completely done.”

The storm damage was so serious that state officials made an exception to rules preventing what is known as hard coastal armoring along this coast, including the construction of bulkheads and concrete-block walls to protect against waves and erosion. They are allowing people whose houses are still standing to put up walls that they say are one of the only ways to protect the structures in the short term. But that is only for now.

“When the emergency conditions abate, we will be inspecting those properties,” said Kenneth L. Kimmell, the commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection. “And in all likelihood, those hard structures they’re putting in will have to be removed.”Many residents are frustrated that they have not been able to do more to shore up the coastline, but some officials are calling for a different strategy to face the reality of increasingly violent storms and rising seas.

The best solution, the officials say, would be to move some of the homes up and away from what they consider part of the fastest-shrinking coastline in Massachusetts.

Barrier islands are subject to the whims of wind and waves. Plum Island has lost about 100 feet of beach in the last 20 years, much of it in the last five. Meanwhile, shoreline development has increased, with the fisherman’s shacks that used to dot the coast replaced by homes and infrastructure.

http://www.dailynewscrunch.com/science/it-s-move-it-or-lose-it-in-path-of-a-nor-easter/

Sochi Organizers Are Stockpiling Snow, Just in Case

SOCHI, Russia — The biggest worry among organizers for next year’s Winter Olympics is not whether the sites will be in order, or that the 30-mile road and the new railroad tracks and the thousands of hotel rooms all being built from scratch will be complete, or that the stands will be full of fans despite this city’s remote location.

The biggest worry is the one the Russians cannot control: the weather.
And they have plenty of reasons to worry.

The last Winter Games, in Vancouver in 2010, were bedeviled by unseasonably mild temperatures in British Columbia. Alpine ski races were persistently postponed because of fog and slushy conditions. Hidden hay bales took the place of snow to build mounds for various courses. A lasting image of those Games is that of helicopters ferrying buckets of snow to the snowboarding site.

Sochi is more worrisome. This city of nearly 500,000, filled with palm trees and year-round flowers, hugs the shore of the Black Sea. Unlike Vancouver, where most of the outdoor mountain events were held 90 minutes away around Whistler, the venues in the Caucasus Mountains are about 30 minutes away, up a winding canyon.

There is a plan, and it does not include helicopters and hay bales. Sochi organizers, fully aware of the problems in Vancouver, have installed what they say is the biggest snowmaking operation in Europe. More than 400 snowmaking cannons, each looking a bit like a jet engine, are continually spitting streams of crystals for next year’s Olympics.

On the advice of a Finnish company called Snow Secure, the goal this season is to stockpile 500,000 cubic meters of snow into 10 shady pockets above the venues. The massive piles will be covered by insulated blankets, not unlike giant yoga mats, to protect them from the heat of summer.
Up to half of the saved snow may melt by next winter, but the site managers said they could conduct the Olympics even in the unlikely event that no natural snow falls next winter. The stockpiled snow can be shoved down the mountain with Sno-Cats or guided onto steep slides — pipes, a meter in diameter, cut in half — aimed at where the snow is most needed.

“Each venue in the mountains has its own peculiarities,” said Valeriy Lukjanov, whose job is to forecast the weather at the Sochi Games, perhaps the least appreciated task of them all. He sat in his office recently in the mountain valley where more than half of the events will take place.
“Last year, there was a meter of snow outside this window,” Lukjanov said.
One year from the start of the Sochi Games, there was none.

The places hosting the mountain competitions — not only the five Olympic sites, but also the ski resorts surrounding them — are mostly new, constructed since Russia was awarded the Games six years ago. Sochi has little experience in hosting world-class sports events, and little historical climate data is available to fully appreciate the weather possibilities.

With few exceptions, the weather stations have been in place only since 2010. What the Russians have learned since then is that the weather in the mountains above Sochi can be wildly unpredictable.
In February, World Cup snowboard cross and ski cross events were canceled because of a lack of snow, and other competitions at the Extreme Park were held amid criticism of slushy conditions.
Two years earlier, part of the European Cup Alpine skiing championships was canceled because of too much snow. Low clouds rearranged the schedule for last month’s Russian Alpine ski championships, an official test event. During the World Cup luge event in late February, it rained.

At the Olympics, unlike at test events, competitions cannot be canceled.
“During the Games, we will have more snow and we will have all the events,” Dmitry Chernyshenko, the president of the Sochi 2014 organizing committee, said in an interview last month. “We didn’t expect that the amount of snow we collected was not enough. So now we learned this lesson and paid the price.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/26/sports/olympics/with-weather-concerns-organizers-are-storing-snow-for-winter-olympics-in-sochi-russia.html?ref=weather&_r=0

Spring Delayed, Europe Shivers

LONDON — “When will this winter ever end?”
Thursday’s Plaintive headline in Britain’s Daily Telegraph was prompted by forecasts that the big freeze gripping much of Europe is likely to last well into April.
From Ireland to Romania, unseasonable snowfalls have caused travel chaos, power outages and serious losses to livestock farmers during the coldest March in almost half a century.

Sun-starved Germans have endured their gloomiest winter in at least 43 years, while Northern France is shivering in near-freezing temperatures more than a week after the official arrival of spring.
The cold weather phenomenon, which has also affected the parts of the United States, is being blamed on a slowing of the Atlantic jet stream that scientists say is paradoxically linked to global warming.
This time last year, northern Europe and the eastern United States were basking in a mini-heat wave that brought the warmest March on record in some areas.

It was one of the many examples of climate phenomena that made 2012 a record year for extreme weather events in some regions, as my colleague Christopher F. Schuetze reported in January.
Last year saw the start of an unusually harsh winter in China, record-breaking temperatures in Australia, summer floods in Britain, drought in the American Midwest, and a storm that devastated parts of New Jersey and New York in late October.

As my colleague Sarah Lyall has written, quoting Omar Baddour of the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, extreme weather events are increasing in intensity as well as frequency.
They are signs that climate change is not just about rising temperatures, but also about intense, anomalous weather events of all kinds, according to Mr. Baddour.

Europe’s freezing spring, far from reinforcing the arguments of climate change skeptics, is actually one of the consequences of man-made global warming, according to climate experts.

Scientists in the United States and elsewhere have explained that the loss of Arctic sea ice as a result of global warming is disrupting the course and strength of the westerly jet stream, resulting in longer winters in some years.

“The sea ice is going rapidly. It’s 80 percent less than it was just 30 years ago,” Jennifer Francis, a research professor with the Rutgers Institute of Coastal and Marine Science, Told the Guardian. “This is a symptom of global warming and it contributes to enhanced warming of the Arctic.”
Ms. Francis warned back in September that the phenomenon might bring a harsh winter to northern Europe.


http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/28/spring-delayed-europe-shivers/?ref=weather