This is the third installment from Dr. Czajkowski Last night, we had snow here in Colorado. In my front yard in Boulder, we had about 23 centimeters of snow. Three kilometers to the east, at Foothills Lab (close to the GLOBE offices), the “official” reading ws 17 centimeters — a six-centimeter difference of 3 kilometers. This difference is real — snowfall amounts are often greater closer to the mountains.

Hi All,

Things are continuing to go well with the surface temperature field campaign. As of December 8, 2008, there were 317 surface temperature observations from 31 schools were added to the GLOBE website.

Major Winter Storm in the United States

There is a major winter storm in the center of the United States this Tuesday, 9 December, 2008. This map is for 1:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time which is 1800 UTC. This low pressure system with its associated warm front and cold front is producing a lot of rain, “wintry mix” (rain and snow, pink shades in figure 1), and some snow in the Midwest. You can also see that there is a cold high pressure system in Nevada and Idaho.

Figure1: Surface weather map 9 December 2008, The radar shows snow in the blue shades and the heaviest rain is shown in black. Figure from http://www.rap.ucar.edu/

There have been some pretty extensive snowfall in the United States this fall and early winter. But, you can see from the figures below that there was actually more extensive snowfall cover in 2007. By the weekend the weather pattern in the United States is going to change to have a storm in the western United States and warm weather in the eastern United States. This storm should give significant snow out west and to the Rocky Mountains. This will make the weather in the Great Lakes warmer.

Figure 2: Snow cover and depth from NOAA for 9 December, 2008 .

Figure 3: Snow Cover in the United States for 8 December 2007 from NOAA.

Here are schools that have entered data so far in the field campaign:

More and more schools are participating and getting their data on the GLOBE website. Keep up the good work.

Roswell Kent Middle School, Akron, OH, US [9 rows]
Dalton High School, Dalton, OH, US [8 rows]
Chartiers-Houston Jr./Sr. High School, Houston, PA, US [2 rows]
Lakewood Middle School, Hebron, OH, US
The Morton Arboretum Youth Education Dept., Lisle, IL, US
Peebles High School, Peebles, OH, US [25 rows]
Gimnazjum No 7 Jana III Sobieskiego, Rzeszow, PL [6 rows]
Penta Career Center, Perrysburg, OH, US [3 rows]
Canaan Middle School, Plain City, OH, US [2 rows]
Mill Creek Middle School, Comstock Park, MI, US [8 rows]
Brazil High, Brazil Village, TT [9 rows]
Kilingi-Nomme Gymnasium, Parnumaa, EE [10 rows]
Swift Creek Middle School, Tallahassee, FL, US [3 rows]
National Presbyterian School, Washington, DC, US
Maumee High School, Maumee, OH, US [5 rows]
Whittier Elementary School, Toledo, OH, US [2 rows]
Huntington High School, Huntington, WV, US [8 rows]
Warrensville Heights High School, Warrensville Heights, OH, US
Bellefontaine High School, Bellefontaine, OH, US [6 rows]
Oak Glen High School, New Cumberland, WV, US [12 rows]
Nordonia Middle School, Northfield, OH, US [4 rows]
Orrville High School, Orrville, OH, US
Bowling Green Christian Academy, Bowling Green, OH, US [6 rows]
McTigue Middle School, Toledo, OH, US [3 rows]
Highlands Elementary School, Naperville, IL, US [2 rows]
South Suburban Montessori School, Brecksville, OH, US [3 rows]
John Marshall High School, Glendale, WV, US [30 rows]
Birchwood School, Cleveland, OH, US [9 rows]
Hudsonville High School, Hudsonville, MI, US [7 rows]
The University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, US [4 rows]
Main Street School, Norwalk, OH, US [16 rows]

Stay Dry.
Dr. C

A series of guest blog entries by Dr. Kevin Czakjowski on the 2008 Surface Temperature Field Campaign will be interleaved with the regular Chief Scientist blogs. See the Introduction to the Surface Temperature Field Campaign.

I’ve often written about clouds on this blog. They are so easy to observe. Today I’m writing about birds since they are easy to observe as well.

It’s fun to watch birds. Many people spend their lives counting how many birds they have seen over their lifetime. I started doing this recently as well. But I find the more interesting part of my “life list” tends to be notes about what the birds are doing. For example, “We saw a half-dozen Yellow-Headed Blackbirds foraging on a lawn in the middle of a blizzard,” or “The fledgling Kestrels were learning how to fly under the watchful eye of both parents,” or, “At sunrise, we watched the Crows fly from the foothills to the west into town for a day of feeding.”

Although a pair of binoculars helps in watching those birds that are small or far away, you can see an amazing amount close up. This is particularly so for tamer ducks or geese. In the United States, we often see Mallards or Canada Geese (Figure 1). And many are not too afraid of people, so you can watch them without disturbing them too much.

Figure 1. Male Mallards (right) swimming with a Canada Goose. Little Dixie Lake, Boone County, Missouri, U.S.A.

Mallards have an interesting way of feeding. Their front ends go under water and their back ends tip into the air. This is called “dabbling” (Figure 2). Mallards eat mostly plants – grains, seeds of some trees, bulrushes; but they also eat some animal matter as well, such as mollusks, insects, tadpoles, snails, and so on.

Figure 2. Dabbling Mallards. Also at Little Dixie Lake

Unlike watching clouds, you can “watch birds” without looking at them. When I was a teenager, I went birding with a blind man on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. He could tell what birds were around simply by their calls – and maybe a little bit from the noise the birds make as they move around, since some species sit in one place, and others flit around. He would describe to me what the bird looked like and point in the direction the sound came from. I met another birder who often observed birds from their sound. He starting doing this because he was a runner, and he didn’t want to have to stop and look. And knowing the bird sounds is useful when you simply can’t locate a bird hiding in a tree or bush. And you don’t need binoculars.

It’s important to stay far away from wild birds or their nests. During nesting seasons, many parks and nature reserves close nesting areas so that the birds can raise their young undisturbed. Also, you shouldn’t feed the birds in wild places. If you want to watch wild birds, you should keep your distance and use binoculars. Or watch them from a blind, or if you are lucky enough, through the window of your home or school.

Birds and the Seasons

The migration of birds in the spring and fall has thrilled people for centuries. In North America, we like to hear the honking of geese flying overhead during the spring and fall. The Canada Geese fly in large V-formations. This enables the geese to the rear to benefit from the air currents created by the geese in front. If you watch closely, you will see them change places once in a while.

Although you can enjoy birds any time of year, the best times to watch birds is in the spring, when the males are singing to attract mates. Each species has a different song, and the songs can vary from place to place. Or even, though less so, from bird to bird. At this time, it’s even more important to keep your distance and use binoculars to watch them.

Why do birds migrate? No one knows for sure, but it probably has to do with finding food and a safe place to make a nest. And this will vary, like migrations, with the type of bird. In the far north, for example, there are fewer predators that could survive through the harsh winters, so nesting there might be a bit safer for birds that nest on the ground during the summers. Insect-eating birds won’t want to spend much time in an area when the temperature is too cold for insects.

One interesting topic that scientists are studying now is how climate change affects bird populations. Many scientists have found that birds arrive earlier in the spring than they used to. Also, some birds are extending their ranges northward. In the GLOBE Seasons and Biomes/IPY Pole-to-Pole video conference (see March 2007 blog), one of the teachers noted that Magpies were reaching farther northward into Alaska, for example. Scientists continue to try to sort out the role of climate change in the changes of numbers of different types of birds. There are many other factors to consider, such as the number and type of predators, changes in land use, and the use of pesticides.

What birds are you seeing this season? Ask older members of your family if the types of birds are different now, or if their numbers have changed.

And, if you are interested in further information about observing hummingbirds, go to This Week at Hilton Pond.

I’m going to write a little bit more about a “climate misconception” to follow up on the blog I did a few weeks ago. This relates to how our cutting back on carbon production affects the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In the earlier blog, I stressed the long lifetime that carbon dioxide has in the atmosphere as being an important reason why it will take a long time to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.

But I missed an important misconception: many think that simply keeping the amount of carbon dioxide we release the same will keep the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the same. Similarly, many think that reducing the amount of carbon dioxide we release will reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

As recently discussed in a recent article in Science, there is a fundamental misconception. We forget that the total amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere relates to how much we release and how much nature (or, if you prefer, the Earth system) can absorb.

The article describes a question asked of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – a very smart bunch of people. The question went something like this:

Suppose we put twice as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the earth system can absorb. How will the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere change if we keep producing the same amount of carbon dioxide?

A surprisingly large number thought that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would stay the same if we didn’t change our habits at all.

Does that seem right to you? Perhaps it does, because we have seen reports of increased amounts of carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere by humans, and an increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So we might be led to think that if we keep putting in the same amount of carbon dioxide, then the amount of carbon dioxide in the air will stay the same. And we can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the air simply by reducing the amount we put into the air.

But let’s stop and think a minute. The question states that the earth system can absorb just half of what we are putting in.

Suppose we have a bathtub. We turn on the water faucet full blast and leave the drain open, so that the amount of water going into the bathtub is twice what is draining out.

Do you think that the level of water in the bathtub will remain the same? Or are you worried that the bathtub will overflow?

Let’s go through the bathtub problem step by step.

Start with an empty bathtub.

In one minute –10 liters of water comes out of the faucet, and we drain out five. (At least this is what happened when I did it.)

At the end of one minute, how much water is in the bathtub – five liters!

Figure 1. Putting water in a bathtub (well, a funny-looking bathtub) and draining it out.

And the end of the second minute, another 10 liters of water has come out of the faucet, and five have drained out.

How much water is in the bathtub? Five liters, plus the ten liters from the faucet, minus five liters that drained out – that’s 10 liters.

Figure 2. Filling up the same bathtub, after two and three minutes.

At the end of the third minute, another 10 liters of water has come out of the faucet, and five have drained out. How much water is in the bathtub now? Ten liters already there, plus the ten liters from the faucet, minus five liters that drained out … 15 liters!

I could continue on, but I think you have the idea – the bathtub is filling at the rate of 5 liters a minute.

Now let’s go back to the carbon dioxide? What do you think now? If you think that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will increase with time, even if we release the same amount into the atmosphere, you have the right answer!

Of course, our atmosphere (and people) are much more complicated than that. Different parts of the earth system – trees, grasses, the ocean – take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in different ways. And there could be other natural sources of carbon dioxide. We have a good idea about how things work, and what possibilities there are, but there is still much we don’t know. Thinking about the bathtub again, the drain might clog up a little bit or drain better, or water could be flowing from a second faucet.

This blog was inspired by the Policy Forum, by John D. Sterman in the 24 October 2008 issue of Science.

Since we’ve had another bad hurricane season for the United States and the islands in the Caribbean, this topic seemed timely.

Figure 1. Hurricane Ike over Western Cuba 9 September 14:45 UTC as seen from space. Source http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/flt/t4/vis-l.jpg. Ike later hit Galveston, Texas, and points northeast, causing widespread damage.

Tropical Cyclones in the United States are classified according to their wind speeds. For instance, a “Category 1″ (or Cat 1, for short) is a storm with sustained winds of 119-164 kilometers per hour (74-95 miles per hour). Yet a lot of the damage due to tropical cyclones is due to the heavy rain and storm surge as well.

What is a storm surge?

Put simply, the storm surge is the water that is blown onto the land by the wind. If you’ve watched the water level on the beach – even of a lake – you will see that the water reaches higher up the shore with onshore winds. I’ve seen this on Lake Michigan. You can make your own storm surge. Simply fill a shallow bowl or small cake pan with water, and blow across the surface of the water. The water on the opposite side of the dish becomes higher when you blow on it. (If you want to get fancy, you can even put a beach on the opposite side of the dish and see how hard you have to blow to cover it up with water. Maybe you can even get a friend to help.)

Storm surges are worse when the tides are high, because there is more water to work with. It’s like filling up your shallow bowl a little bit more.

Wind Damage.

The force due to wind increase as the square of the wind speed (wind speed times wind speed). So a 4 meter-per-second wind (8 miles per hour) will exert 16 times as much force on a tree, house, or you compared to a 1-meter-per-second wind. I’m told that the damage from a hurricane is a function of the “work” done by the wind – and that goes as the cube of the wind speed. In this case, a 4 meter-per-second wind will cause 64 times as much damage as a 1 meter-per-second wind. Again – this is just a rough estimate. The way the wind behaves – its steadiness or gustiness and its direction relative to a structure – will also affect damage patterns.

You can get a pretty good idea of the wind speed – at least for lighter winds – by watching the effects of wind on trees, smoke, and other things. Those of you interested in trying this should go to http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/conversion//beaufortland.html to get a complete chart.

The force also increases with the density of the air. One thing I was curious about was whether the rainfall also helped to push you (or a building) over in stronger winds. It turns out that the extra force due to the rain is not very big. The largest rainfall rate I could find was 304.8 mm in 42 minutes (Locatelli and Hobbs, Weather and Forecasting, 2005), and that is equivalent to about 15.1 grams of water in a cubic meter of air. Since air has a mass of about 1.2 kilograms per cubic meter, the raindrops increase the density by around 1.2 per cent. Not much at all!

Of course rainfall may have other effects, like weakening some structures or changing the way they interact with the wind.

Water Damage

Rain also leads to flooding. Slow-moving tropical cyclones like Hurricane Fay, which recently hit Florida, can dump lots of water onto land, creating widespread flooding. Rainfall totals from Fay reached around 700 millimeters in a few days.

Tornado Damage

If you want to make a tornado, you need to have (1) “unstable” air – (This simply means that the temperature and humidity of the air make it easy for strong updrafts to develop.) and (2) wind change with height. Hurricanes have both. So, many hurricanes lead to tornado outbreaks. Fortunately, the tornadoes tend to be weaker than those associated with severe thunderstorms in the U.S.

For storms like hurricanes and tornadoes, it is important to know the rules for being safe. Also, keep close track of updates when severe weather threatens.

Understanding something as complicated as climate change is really tough. So it’s easy to understand why people don’t always get things right. But it’s much easier to explain why the term “global warming” is misleading than it is to explain why some climate-change messages are only partially understood. So I put the “partial misconceptions” in a separate blog.

Partial Misconception: The greenhouse warming is due to carbon dioxide. Figure 4 shows that slightly over half of the warming near Earth’s surface is caused by carbon dioxide (CO2), with other gases – methane (CH4), Nitric oxide (N2O), halocarbons, and ozone in the lower atmosphere, accounting for the rest of the “forcing.” What is forcing? Forcing can be thought of as a “push” that warms (or cools) the Earth system.

The warming that results is actually larger then you might expect from an increase in these gases alone. This is because the warming surface and air leads to more water vapor, which is also a greenhouse gas. This leads us to the next partial misconception.

Figure 4. Effect of greenhouse gases and aerosols on surface air temperature warming, in terms of “forcings.” From 2007 report, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Misconception: Carbon dioxide is the most important greenhouse gas. Certainly this is what you might expect from a first glance of Figure 4. But where is water vapor? I was taught as an Atmospheric Science graduate student that water vapor was the primary greenhouse gas, but carbon dioxide was also important. Modeling studies with various degrees of simplification confirm this first impression. A nice summary can be found on the RealClimate blog.

Why, then, do so many people say that carbon dioxide is the “most important greenhouse gas.” It’s probably because of figures like Figure 4. Note a very important adjective at the bottom which is often ignored, “anthropogenic,” meaning “made by humans.” Humans of course affect water vapor as well, but it cycles through very fast, and the amount of water vapor in the air is basically controlled by the temperature of the air and surface. In a climate model, water vapor continuously adjusts to the conditions within the model, while anthropogenic greenhouse gases in Figure 4 are adjusted by those who run the model.

Put another way, water vapor doesn’t appear in the “forcing” terms for climate models, because it is “internal” to the system. It changes as the result of a “feedback” within the model. Thus external inputs like solar radiation, changes in ground cover, and gases introduced into the atmosphere by human activity are counted as “forcing” but water vapor as not.

In short, we can say that carbon dioxide is the most important greenhouse gas whose amount people are directly altering. Not just in models, but in real life.

Partial Misconception: The warming climate means more exposure to dangerous diseases. I say “partial misconception” because there are multiple factors that change our exposure to disease. Many articles in scientific journals and newspapers discuss increased exposure to malaria, for example, in a warming climate. But that is not the whole story. For example, in the United States, malaria was a real threat over much of the country in the 1700s and the 1800s, and even into the early 20th century. However, public health efforts such as mosquito control and changes in peoples’ habits (for example, using window screens to keep out mosquitoes or staying indoors from dusk to dawn) have largely removed the malaria threat. Similarly, world travel spreads germs, such as the West Nile virus, around the world. This is not a new phenomenon. Europeans coming to the Americas brought small pox with them, leading to the tragic death of countless Native Americans. And populations moving into new areas can expose themselves to new germs.

However, we cannot ignore the fact that vectors for existing diseases will migrate with their preferred climate. Thus at some time in the future, some diseases will show up in areas where they haven’t been before; and in other areas where they have been suppressed.

Partial misconception: The warming climate means more birds will die. Again, there are many factors involved. There are stories of bird populations suffering because food supplies (for example caterpillars) are no longer available when the birds need them, because the two species are responding differently to climate change. However, songbird populations have also suffered because the scarcity of predators like wolves has led to an increase in the number of animals (like raccoons) who eat birds’ eggs. Similarly, pesticides have done serious harm to bird populations. This contributed to a ban on the use of the insecticide DDT in many countries. Finally, the West Nile virus has led to the deaths of many birds (although the magpies and crows, which fell victim to West Nile, seem to be recovering here in Boulder).

Once again, we cannot ignore the impact of climate change. If climate changes continue at the predicted rates, then the entire ecosystem will have to adjust to a new seasonal cycle. This will not be a smooth process: different plants and animals will respond in different ways. And, as in the case of the birds and caterpillars, the food supply will be interrupted at critical times.

Partial Misconception: If we cut back on our production of greenhouse gases, global warming will “go away.” This is true only over a very long period of time. It will take hundreds of years to decrease the carbon dioxide content back to pre-industrial levels through natural processes (the lifetime of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is around 120 years). This does not mean we shouldn’t consider reducing carbon-dioxide emissions, because continuing the increase in carbon dioxide leads to even more warming than if we slow down the increase in carbon dioxide. One hopeful note is that not all greenhouse gases last as long as carbon dioxide, so reducing their release in the atmosphere might help on shorter time scales. Another hopeful note is that people are studying ways to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, but this is the subject of another blog.

So, when you read or hear about the effects of people on the environment, or try to figure out what you can do to help the environment, please remember that we affect our environments in many ways. Similarly, actions we take to help our environment can improve our environment in many ways. But responding to climate change will remain a challenge for years to come.