Renewed flooding in Sri Lanka kills 11, affects 1.05 million
Renewed flooding in Sri Lanka due to heavy monsoon rains has killed at least 11 people and inundated the homes of 1.05 million people over the past week. The floods occurred over the central, north, and east portions of the island, and have the potential to devastate the rice crop and cause hundreds of millions in damage. Many of the areas affected were also hard-hit by January's 100-year flood, which killed 43 people, affected over 1 million people, and did at least $500 million in damage. Those floods destroyed 21% of Sri Lanka's rice crop. Heavy rains from the annual northeastern monsoon are common in the region from December through February, but this year's rains have been enhanced by the strong La Niña event occurring in the Eastern Pacific. According to the United Nations, the rains in January in Sri Lanka were the heaviest in nearly 100 years of record keeping. The flood that resulted was a 1-in-100 year event, according to The U.N. Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System. Rainfall at Batticaloa, Sri Lanka, during the 42-day period December 1 - January 12 was 1606 mm (63"), which is about how much rain the station usually receives in an entire year (1651 mm, or 65".) Satellite estimates of rainfall over Sri Lanka for the first week of February show that up to 12 inches (300 mm) of rain has fallen. The latest rainfall forecast from the GFS model projects that a tropical disturbance (91B) near Sri Lanka will bring an additional 1 - 3 inches of rain to the flood area this week, so the flood waters will be slow to recede.
Figure 1. AP video of the latest flooding in Sri Lanka.
Jeff Masters
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POSITIVE NEWS Link
LEDs Light up Tanzania's Homes
Jan 31, 2011
Positive News Issue
Illumination, a company selling solar LED lamps, are on a mission to replace the paraffin lanterns in Tanzania's 1.5 million homes. If they reach their goal, it could reduce the country's greenhouse gas emissions by around 800,000 tonnes. It will also eradicate the huge number of burn injuries, and help prevent life-threatening diseases associated with fume inhalation, such as liver failure and chemical pneumonia.....
Another link PNN-Positive News Network
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We get them every year in DB. I once had to tell a family of European tourists not to touch them. The parents were letting their kids play with them!
Sorry about the game last night. Hope you're feeling better.
I hope they understood English! They probably thought you were looking for the umbrella stand.
Wv Das Loop
Actually, March and April are our least rainy months. It will be interesting to see if this changes this year.
Wie wissen Sie für sicher?
If I remember right, they were Dutch - so, of course, they spoke English.
Meine Deutschen saugt anscheinend Herrn General Grothar
Summer way down under
Low Drifting Snow
-46 F
Low Drifting Snow
Humidity: 37%
Dew Point: -55 F
It was just a dream. I think I'm really an Inn Keeper in Vermont.
Das ist Herr Oberstleutnant. LOL
DE-moted eh..
they forecasted 59 on January
Cory Doctorow at 7:51 AM Sunday, Feb 6, 2011
Popular Mechanics interviews Bill Nye the Science Guy on the state of US science education (Nye: "It's horrible."). He's anxious that science education ramps up too late ("Nearly every rocket scientist got interested in it before they were 10.") and, of course, that teachers are intimidated out of teaching the good science of evolution and other controversial subjects:
They're doing their job but they're under tremendous pressure. The 60 percent who are cautious--those are the people who are really up against it. They want to keep their job, and they love teaching science, and their children are really excited about it, and yet they've got some people insisting they can't teach the most fundamental idea in all of biology. There's the phrase "just a theory." Which shows you that I have failed. I'm a failure. When we have a theory in science, it's the greatest thing you can have. Relativity is a theory, and people test it every which way. They test it and test it and test it. Gravity is a theory. People have landed spacecraft on the moon within a few feet of accuracy because we understand gravity so well. People make flu vaccinations that stop people from getting sick. Farmers raise crops with science; they hybridize them and make them better with every generation. That's all evolution. Evolution is a theory, and it's a theory that you can test. We've tested evolution in many ways. You can't present good evidence that says evolution is not a fact.
It would be really nice if the sun would dip into a profoundly deep Maunder minimum for a decade or so to help offset the ongoing warming of the planet. Observations and modeling suggest that it would come nowhere close to reversing or stopping the warming, but even the little bit of heat retardation it would provide would be helpful so far as GW goes. Of course, once it would come back out of the minimum, we'd be in even more serious trouble than we are now. Yikes...
Very sad.
"Teaching creationism in public schools has consistently been ruled unconstitutional in federal courts, but according to a national survey of more than 900 public high school biology teachers, it continues to flourish in the nation’s classrooms...Researchers found that only 28 percent of biology teachers consistently follow the recommendations of the National Research Council to describe straightforwardly the evidence for evolution and explain the ways in which it is a unifying theme in all of biology. At the other extreme, 13 percent explicitly advocate creationism, and spend at least an hour of class time presenting it in a positive light."
And some wonder why Americans students continue to fall behind those in other nations? Progressive nations are teaching physics and advanced mathematics to their youth, while we're busy pretending that silly superstitions and mythologies created by backwards, technologically unsophisticated people a few thousand years ago have some bearing on who we are and where we came from. It's very depressing...
Here...
And here...
And here...
Al Gore - "In fact, scientists have been warning for at least two decades that global warming could make snowstorms more severe. Snow has two simple ingredients: cold and moisture. Warmer air collects moisture like a sponge until it hits a patch of cold air. When temperatures dip below freezing, a lot of moisture creates a lot of snow."
This quote comes from his blog.
Well, it's kind of funny how the winter so far has been much drier than normal in the eastern United States:
Dec 1st-Feb 4th Precipitable Water Anomalies:
If you're wondering about last winter, where the east coast received record annual amounts of snow, it was dry then too:
Dec 2009-Feb 2010 Precipitable Water Anomalies:
Of course, colder air means less moisture in general, so if you're wondering if atmospheric moisture is increasing on average around the eastern United States and contributing to increased snowfall, here's the NCEP reanalysis graph of DJF precipitable water over the eastern U.S. and the immediately surrounding Atlantic waters for the last 60 years.
Last year March and April were extremely wet, Florida is not immune to heavy rain in the driest months. Much of North and Central Florida had as much rain in March and April as what typically occurs in June and July.
Generally the dry season are either extremely dry(less than an inch). Or surprisingly wet, which averages out to around 2.50 inches.
I have to believe in evolution. I look at pictures of me 20 years ago and look at myself now, and say, "What have you evolved into???" It would be hard to think that the human race will never be more than it is now. That in itself is a horrible thought. We can do better than this.
That's very odd, because we have had periods of very high precipitable water over the last several weeks (anywhere from 1.50 to around 2.00 inches) which is way above normal for the dry season here. Which has resulted in periods of beneficial rain.
I have to believe in evolution also. If I refuted it and went with the Adam and Eve scenario, that would mean I would be related to you.
That would only work if we were the same species.
Not according to the operational analysis since January 15th. Where are you getting those anomalies?
Brilliant!
Amazon Drought
First Posted: 02/ 7/11 08:55 AM Updated: 02/ 7/11 09:24 AM
RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters/Stuart Grudgings) - A widespread drought in the Amazon rain forest last year was worse than the "once-in-a-century" dry spell in 2005 and may have a bigger impact on global warming than the United States does in a year, British and Brazilian scientists said on Thursday.
More frequent severe droughts like those in 2005 and 2010 risk turning the world's largest rain forest from a sponge that absorbs carbon emissions into a source of the gases, accelerating global warming, the report found.
Trees and other vegetation in the world's forests soak up heat-trapping carbon dioxide as they grow, helping cool the planet, but release it when they die and rot.
"If events like this happen more often, the Amazon rain forest would reach a point where it shifts from being a valuable carbon sink slowing climate change to a major source of greenhouse gases that could speed it up," said lead author Simon Lewis, an ecologist at the University of Leeds.
The study, published in the journal Science, found that last year's drought caused rainfall shortages over a 1.16 million square-mile (3 million square km) expanse of the forest, compared with 734,000 square miles (1.9 million square km) in the 2005 drought.
It was also more intense, causing higher tree mortality and having three major epicenters, whereas the 2005 drought was mainly focused in the southwestern Amazon.
As a result, the study predicted the Amazon forest would not absorb its usual 1.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in both 2010 and 2011. In addition, the dead and dying trees would release 5 billion metric tons of the gas in the coming years, making a total impact of about 8 billion metric tons, according to the study.
In comparison, the United States emitted 5.4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel use in 2009.
The combined emissions caused by the two droughts were probably enough to have canceled out the carbon absorbed by the forest over the past 10 years, the study found.
GREATER WEATHER EXTREMES
The widespread drought last year dried up major rivers in the Amazon and isolated thousands of people who depend on boat transportation, shocking climate scientists who had billed the 2005 drought as a once-in-a-century event.
The two intense dry spells fit predictions by some climate models that the forest will face greater weather extremes this century, with more intense droughts making it more vulnerable to fires, which in turn could damage its ability to recover.
Under the more extreme scenarios, large parts of the forest could turn into a savannah-like ecosystem by the middle of the century with much lower levels of animal and plant biodiversity. Although human-caused deforestation in Brazil has fallen sharply in recent years, scientists say the forest is still vulnerable.
A crucial question is whether the droughts are being driven by higher levels of greenhouse gases or are an anomaly, Lewis said. If they are driven by global warming, a vicious cycle of warmer temperatures and droughts could conceivably lead to a large-scale transformation of the forest over a period of decades.
"You could quite rapidly move to a much drier Amazon with less forest there," Lewis told Reuters.
The research was a collaboration among scientists at the University of Leeds and the University of Sheffield in Britain and Brazil's Amazon Environmental Research Institute.
(Editing by Will Dunham)
Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters.
Sadly, one has to read down to the bottom to find the part about the destruction of the forest cover there.
It is the Primary reason for the problem there, IMO.
Trees make rain.
As a matter of interest, the USA has 2% of it's original forest cover left...
No wonder I feel twisted-up, sometimes....
Imodium A-D works for me.
Come on, pot, we have vast forests left. See below.
No.
From the AMS Glossary:
"precipitable water (Or precipitable water vapor.) The total atmospheric water vapor contained in a vertical column of unit cross-sectional area extending between any two specified levels, commonly expressed in terms of the height to which that water substance would stand if completely condensed and collected in a vessel of the same unit cross section."
Another piece of the puzzle.
LOL best sitcom ending, ever.
Evening, folks.
Unknown source
Precipitable water is the depth of the amount of water in a column of the atmosphere if all the water in that column were precipitated as rain. As a depth, the precipitable water is measured in millimeters or inches.
Do we really need to go over the difference between weather and climate AGAIN.
Anyone who is directly attributing the past couple of winters worth of heavy snow events to global warming doesn't know what they are talking about. YOU CANNOT DO THIS. Nor are climate scientists doing it. They can speculate and hypothesize, but two years is not climatologically significant. Neither is five years, or even ten years. If in 20 years we see the 2010 decade as the start for more extreme weather, then we can say that these storms were INFLUENCED by climate change.
This is a point also made repeatedly by Dr. M. There is not enough data over the past ten years to definitively declare that extreme weather events are a result of global warming.
Also, Al Gore was making a general comment about what climate scientists expect to happen as the globe warms. He was not referring to the recent snow storms in particular.
I'm also pretty sure you know Levi, that you don't need continuous record moisture to generate a massive snow dump, anymore than you need it for big floods. If you usually get 6 inches of water equivalent precip in the winter, you could only get 4 inches and still wind up with 4 8"+ snow events. However, in order to get that you need an atmosphere capable of hanging on to that much moisture.
American Meteorological Society is an unknown source? And you really are gonna go with Wiki on this one?
We have Cypress Swamps to Pine Forest to Large Oaks Older than America easily..
and Xmas trees too.
Ka-Ching!
"PWAT
Precipitable Water - measure of the depth of liquid water at the surface that would result after precipitating all of the water vapor in a vertical column over a given location, usually extending from the surface to 300 mb."
Precipitating can mean any non-vapor form of water falling to the ground. I'm pretty sure I know my basic meteorological terms up and down.
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