7th November - Today's News

Lightning's NOx-ious impact on pollution, climate

Severe storm cuts of thousands in New South Wales

Ida drenches Central America, forecast to enter Gulf - indeed, it now looks like Ida could be closing in on Florida

Expanding cities contribute to global warming (well there's a surprise!) - the full paper - publicshed by the Royal Meteorological Society can be obtained via co-author Roger Pielke Sr's website

It concludes:

Our results suggest that for both non-changed and converted land types, agriculture, urbanization and barren soils offered the clearest patterns in terms of sign and magnitude of the OMR [observation minus reanalysis] trends. Conversion to agriculture resulted in a strong cooling. Conversely, all conversions of agricultural lands resulted in warming. Urbanization and conversion to bare soils were also mostly associated with warming. We conclude that these LULC [land use land cover change] types constitute strong drivers of temperature change. Deforestation generally resulted in warming (with the exception of a shift from forest to agriculture) but no clear picture emerged for afforestation. Within each land use conversion type, a great variation of warming/cooling was observed, as attested by relatively large standard deviations. In addition, our analysis shows that there is not always a straightforward relationship between the different types of conversions: for example, (1) both conversion of urban to barren and the opposite resulted in slightly negative OMRs; (2) there was a weak warming of areas that shifted from bare soils to grassland/shrubland and for the opposite as well and (3) both conversion from forest to grassland/shrubland and the opposite were associated with a weak warming.

Copyright 2009 Royal Meteorological Society

Antimatter signature detected in lightning

Storm triggered landslide kills 13 in Vietnam

And finally how could I not link to this article in Friday's Independent by my friend Tom Choularton? Can we really control the weather? His conclusions are very much the same as my own thoughts on the subject:

So does cloud seeding work? Well our studies indicate that in many clouds that produce lots of snow it does not seem to, because there is plently of natural ice already. However, I don’t completely dismiss it as a method – I do believe it’s possible it can be effective in some clouds in the right conditions and at the right temperature. Nevertheless, I feel some of the stronger claims made recently need further verification, before we herald this as a breakthrough in scientists’ ability to manipulate natural weather cycles.