Snow there and snow here?

Our weather group, “Israeli Winter Weather” is a small group of persons somewhat obsessed with making it snow (myself, Yaakov Cantor, and Jonathan Hoffman). Our strong belief is that if we speak about it often enough it will happen, or so we wish. At times, certain members of our group have sworn off discussing any possible snow in the old country – due to the “Fear of Missing Out,” but this week has seen some crazy weather and forecasts for cities along the east coast of the United States, and it still isn’t clear what will be.

We have access to multiple global forecast models and their ensembles from many sites, eg., tropical tidbits, and forecasts have varied from about 20+ inches of snow for NYC to just an inch of snow. Such is the difficulty of forecasting, when certain weather streams must interact over the eastern United States to produce rapidly intensifying east coast storms.

Yet, we’d rather not live our weather vicariously, but would prefer an old-fashioned snow storm right here in even older Jerusalem. We wonder, could we get there?

After a warm up on Thursday, a southern stream storm will then hook up with a colder northern stream storm as the southern storm moves eastward across the Mediterranean.  This should bring showers and periods of rain from Friday into Sunday.

Another warm up is expected early next week, which will gradually amplify towards the end of this upcoming week. It is then that a very cold, northern stream storm is forecast to  dive southward from Siberia. This is quite a ways away. But, a number of ensemble members from different models are indicating a strong cold-air incursion and some of them are cold enough for snow late in the third or fourth week of January.

Of course, the world is warming and that means that it’s a bit “harder” for that atmosphere to get cold enough for snow, but there are those who say: “this is a good thing.” “Warming is good for the planet,” they say. Of course, these same people used to deny that there was any warming going on at all. For instance, they pointed to the “pause” in the rise in global temperatures in the first decade of this century and said: “see the models are wrong: no warming.” However, the global atmospheric temperatures oscillate over time due to internal variability associated with ocean circulations and their feedback on snow cover. So, the pause might have been a dip, if not for global warming. In fact, later on, it was shown that the pause was not even a pause.

But, is global warming really good for the planet? Will plants grow better because of higher concentrations of greenhouse gases, or will temperatures be too warm for optimal plant growth? Will global warming be good for the planet but bad for the people living on it?

Getting down to physics, it’s well know that the warmer the seas and ocean temperatures, the greater the potential for evaporation of moisture. In fact, the increase in evaporation is “exponential.”

Thunderstorms “need” water to form and intensify, and so do tropical storms. The more water vapor present, the greater the potential for intensification.

In fact, if atmospheric conditions are favorable for hurricane formation and development, warmer sea surface temperatures and corresponding moisture evaporation could lead to more intense rainstorms and hurricanes. But, are there more hurricanes and are they more intense?

Hurricanes are relatively rare and it can be difficult to intuit changes by a cursory examination of the data. Some years will have fewer and some years more, and some none. So, one wonders if we can we extract anything meaningful from the hurricane data for the Atlantic Ocean, for instance.

In the last 50 years, there were a  total of 125 Category 3 Hurricanes, and a total of 78 Category 4 Hurricanes in the Atlantic ocean. The range of wind speeds for each is explained here.

As you can see in the graph above, the numbers of each appear to be increasing from the 1970s until about now. Out of these storms, a cursory count reveals 16 Category 3 hurricanes made landfall in the US, while 8 category 4 hurricanes made landfall.

There is also other indirect evidence that a warmer world is leading to more climate related disasters. Insurance companies are most concerned when the risk of a devastating hurricane increases as well as other climate warming related disasters increase over time– and they are dropping coverage. Why? Because their payouts are increasing due to both building density and storm frequency and intensity.

So, has there been a significant change in tropical storm frequency of category 3 and 4 storms?  Based on the data I obtained here, the answer is yes.

So, is global warming good for the planet? The question makes no sense, but should be rephrased as: “is global warming good for humanity?”

Here are the details of the analysis, using a program written with the aid of ChatGTP. The data was obtained from the US National Center Hurricane repository.

Statistical Model: Poisson Regression

1. Purpose:
   • A Poisson regression was used for modeling the hurricane counted data, where the dependent variable (the data) represents the frequency of events (e.g., hurricanes per year).
   • It assumes that the count variable follows a Poisson distribution, which is appropriate for rare or discrete event data.

Trend Over Time:

Both Category 3 and Category 4 hurricanes are increasing in frequency, with Category 4 hurricanes showing a slightly steeper trend (2.42% per year vs. 1.9% per year).

So, the more intense storms are increasing at a faster rate than the less intense storms, although both are increasing in frequency.

Statistical Confidence:

Both trends are statistically significant, indicating real and measurable changes in hurricane frequency over time. In fact, there is a less than 0.5% chance that the results shown are due to random chance alone.

Implications:

The increasing frequency of higher-intensity storms (Category 4) aligns with climate change research, which links warmer sea surface temperatures and atmospheric changes to stronger tropical cyclones.  Not all hurricanes will encounter optimal or near optimal conditions to intensify, but when they do and they pass over warm sea or ocean temperatures, they can cause grave and expensive damage.