Yarmy

It's not all bad news!

Well, you referenced my “rational responses” which was in relation to an American woman who suggested that a plane carrying US evacuees from China should be shot down.

You agree with Jesicca (sic) that we should be shooting down airliners?

A time for cool heads and considered rational responses:

Ocean circulation causes the largest freshening event for 120 years in WWW.NATURE.COM The Atlantic Ocean overturning circulation is important to the global climate system. Here the authors show that eastern subpolar North Atlantic underwent extreme freshening during 2012 to 2016, with a...

Update from the WHO: WHO, China leaders discuss next steps in battle against coronavirus outbreak WWW.WHO.INT The Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, today met President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing. They shared the latest... They still haven't yet reconvened the emergency committee though, so this has still not officially been declared a PHEIC (which it clearly is). Presumably, that will change in the next day or so, otherwise you have to ask what they are doing.

That's just Spaceweather's data feed screwing up. It's correct here: ...and the SIDC count here: SILSO | World Data Center for the production, preservation and dissemination of the international sunspot number SIDC.OMA.BE World Data Center for the production, preservation and dissemination of the international sunspot number.

That's last night's 12z though. It hasn't updated for this morning's 0z yet.

Listening to actual experts is so last century.

There's been a sunspot group traversing the NH for the past couple of days: Interestingly, it belongs to SC24. Life in the old dog yet.

Twitter MOBILE.TWITTER.COM Building a thousand bed hospital in 2 weeks. Just imagine trying to do that here. The NHS is already struggling, especially at this time of year. A large scale outbreak doesn’t bear thinking about.

Very true. I got flu along with my wife a couple of years ago before Christmas. Jesus wept, I’ve never known anything like it. Ate literally nothing for 4 straight days, and my wife got her friend to take to A&E in the middle of the night as she thought she was going to die. I’ve paid for the vaccine ever since, and despite what people say it *is* designed to be effective against multiple strains.

That’s a bold statement, but I hope it’s true. The lack of widespread travel didn’t stop the spread of the plague or the Spanish flu epidemic in the early 20th century. We are better prepared and equipped in these times, but there’s no room for complacency.

True. I mentioned way back in the thread that all the SC24 max predictions (45 or so) taken together more or less formed a normal distribution. In other words, about what you'd get if you asked 45 people to pick a number between 80 and 160. Having said that, the predictions based on physical methods (e.g. polar magnetic field strength during minimum) performed better, as can be seen here: Solar Cycle 24 USERS.TELENET.BE Een site met informatie over de zon, de zonneactiviteit, de aarde en het ruimteweer Most predictions I've seen so far have been for another weak cycle.

The cosmic ray influx (of which the Neutron count is a proxy) increases during solar minimum because the Sun's magnetic field influence on Earth weakens. These cosmic rays collide with particles in the atmosphere in disintegrate into muons and other sub-atomic particles. The gist of the idea is that these form cloud condensation nuclei which then increase cloudiness in the troposphere which in turn has a cooling effect. It's all very speculative though (the increased cloud part, anyway) and there's not a lot of evidence for it as far as I can tell.

Peaks at start of Jan, then downhill form there. You can see here (climatology is the black line): (Source: H Attard) Edit: Don't know why the PNG thumbnail isn't rendering, but clicking the link will show the image.

Nasty looking storm for Ireland and Scotland at the back end of next week: ECM had it as a near miss to the north this morning, so will be interesting to see what this evening brings. ...and another a couple of days later:

The QBO is in the easterly descending phase, and all looks fairly normal: Source: For Our Colleagues ACD-EXT.GSFC.NASA.GOV Scientific and technical content intended for our scientific colleagues The usual single figure quoted for the QBO index is the zonal mean at 30hPa. That number peaked quite high in May/June, but not excessively or unusually so. As others have alluded to, I suspect the Pacific profile and the +IOD are the more likely culprits for the lack of any meaningful amplification so far this winter.

So while Australia burns, this was The Australian's front page this morning:

Perhaps better for a few’s health if they didn’t oscillate between unrestrained euphoria and abject despair.

There is so much confusion on the distribution of energy in the Atlantic early on, how it's separated, the path of individual depressions etc. Just look at the differences between T114 on the 6z and T120 on the 0z of the GFS: T114 6z T120 0z This run could see pressure build behind the storm to our south-west later in the run, but it's hard to believe any of it.

Skov mentions a brief spot in the video above. SIDC usually go back and review at month end, so maybe the spotless streak will get broken retrospectively?

Meteociel archives the major models, e.g. GFS: WWW.METEOCIEL.FR Meteociel propose des cartes du modèle americain de GFS

GFS op edging toward the Euros run by run: 0z T174: 6z T168: 12z T162: