Lake Travis at 630.6 feet elevation in 2013. Today, Travis is at 631.2. Lake Travis: Record Low? Despite the rains, Lake Travis’ water elevation of 631.1 feet elevation is only two and a half feet higher than it’s low pf 628.5 feet in October. And this is only 11 feet higher than the low during…
Image: Crayons on a driveway of a friend, 103 degrees. Note how the white crayons hardy melted. How Much Hotter Is It Because of Climate Change? One of the things I tell folks these days about the heat is that the absolute temperature in Austin is not really that much warmer than in the past….
Ice Storm Mara Debris Pickup Winter Storm Mara Greenhouse Gas Emissions Austin Resource Recovery has picked up enough storm debris to fill Q2 Stadium four times. The Texas A&M Forest Service says 10.5 million trees were damaged in the Austin area by the storm. At just 400 pounds biomass lost per tree, at 50 percent…
In 1834 and 1850, two European scientists (Clausius and Clapeyron) developed scientific principles that told us that warmer air holds more water. In the 1960s and 70s the computer models that first simulated our climate showed that more atmospheric CO2 would increase Earth’s temperature, relative humidity, and total precipitation because of the Clausius–Clapeyron principles. In the…
Increasing extreme storms are a big deal. Our civil infrastructure design is based on our old climate. Meteorologist across the country have been evaluating the historic record to see exactly how much change has already taken place. Climate modeling is still advancing towards being able to robustly understand exactly how much the most extreme storms will increase in the…
Already, with just a single degree Fahrenheit of warming, the most extreme rain events have increased 40 percent across the Central U.S. including Texas. It’s not just our imaginations; it’s not natural cycles. Interestingly, some of it may be caused, or enhanced by, agricultural practices. Groisman et al. emphasizes that their work did not evaluate…
Screen et al., Amplified mid-latitude planetary waves favour particular regional weather extremes, Nature Climate Change, June 22, 2014. Recent publications tell us that a warmer planet will have more cold extremes over high latitudes and a little south of there (the Great Lakes and northward in the US). This is because of Polar Amplification where…
The polar jet stream normally runs around the roof of the world like the Siberian express. It spins around the top of the world and keeps Arctic cold bottled up and has been called the “polar vortex” ever since we have understood how different facets of Earth’s jet streams influence global weather. There is one…
Research from last March tells us that Superstorm Sandy was directly caused by climate change. I won’t bore you with more quotes from Governors Cuomo or Christie, or the latest “speculation” in the media about whether or not Superstorm Sandy was or was not “influenced” by climate change. I’ll not repeat the list of stunning…
Across the northern hemisphere, extreme heat that once happened across 0.1 to 0.2 percent of the Northern Hemisphere now happens across ten percent–every year. The most extreme events are happening nearly 5,000 times more often than normal. April 14, 2012: In Just the Last 30 Years, Climate Extremes Have Increased 10 to 100 Times— Dr….
More than 175 have been killed. Let’s put this into perspective. In 1936, the U.S. population was about 128 million. Today it has almost tripled to 308 million. Supposing that the population density has remained the same (it has not, many more people live in the cities now than they did in the ’30s) we…
