9-16-2019
By Michael Raffety
No measurable rain in August, though a passing cloud briefly sent a few raindrops, only enough to dirty our vehicles’ windshields. Same thing happened overnight earlier this month, again with the dirty windshield.
Temperatures for August averaged 93.5 during the day and 66 degrees overnight. That resulted in an 18-year average of 92.5 daytime and 62 degrees overnight. August is within the general band of expectations for the month.
The outlook for September is cooler. The 17-year average is for a high of 86.7 and a low of 57.9. September began with six days in the mid-to-high 90s, but it has been steadily cooling down.
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Hurricanes are not indicative of global warming. They actually start in Africa with hot dry air from the Sahara Desert.
“The role the Sahara Desert plays in hurricane development is related to the easterly winds (coming from the east) generated from the differences between the hot, dry desert in north Africa and the cooler, wetter, and forested coastal environment directly south and surrounding the Gulf of Guinea in west Africa,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
An easterly jet stream carries this air toward the Gulf of Mexico, but in late summer and early fall the easterly jet breaks down and moist air off Africa’s Cape Verde rises and tropical cyclones can form and move across the Atlantic. Not all tropical storms become hurricanes and not all hurricanes make landfall in the U.S. What really give hurricanes strength are the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
It’s a case of thermodynamics on an atmospheric level. The Sahara Desert is 10 percent of the African Continent. That’s a lot. With an average of 3 inches of rain it is the second largest desert, the biggest being Antarctica.
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Local temperature and rainfall measurements only produce an historical record. The historical record produces averages over an extended period of time that allow someone to make a guess about the month ahead in temperatures but rainfall predictions are a total roulette wheel. One has to rely on scientists measuring ocean temperatures and general wind directions across the Pacific Ocean to come up with an El Nino and La Nina predictions, which may or may not produce a lot of rain. La Ninas tend to be fickle but El Ninos are generally prodigious rainmakers.
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In a 2015 (updated in 2019) Huntsville Real-Time News interview of Professor of Meteorology, John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville, he said the following: “Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. When you put more of it in the atmosphere, the radiation budget will respond appropriately. It’s just that what we found with the real data is that the way the earth responds is to shed a lot of that heat, not keep it in, which climate models do. So I’d rather base policy on observations than on climate models.”
John Christy and Roy Spencer have been doing satellite measurements of temperatures since 1979.
“The real world is not going along with rapid warming. The models need to go back to the drawing board,” Christy said in 2016.
“Carbon dioxide makes things grow. The world used to have five times as much carbon dioxide as it does now. Plants love this stuff. It creates more food. CO2 is not the problem .… There is absolutely no question that carbon energy provides with longer and better lives. There is no question about that,” Christy said on 2015.
michaelraffety 