Good news about blizzards

Investigating the occurrence of blizzard events over the contiguous United States using observations and climate projections
Browne and Chen
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ad0449
Abstract:
Over previous decades, the United States has been plagued by severe winter storms or blizzards, which caused millions of dollars in damages. However, the historical trend of blizzard events and the possible impacts of future global climate change on blizzard occurrences remain unclear. In this study, we analyzed historical blizzard occurrences using the observed storm event database, which shows that the Northern Plains, such as North Dakota, South Dakota, and Minnesota, had the most blizzard activities over the past 25 years. No significant trend in blizzard occurrence is found in those regions. When considering blizzards as compound events of strong wind and extreme snowfall, we estimated blizzard occurrences based on wind speed and snowfall in climate datasets, including Automated Surface Observing Systems wind speed, national gridded snowfall analysis, ERA5 reanalysis and historical simulations of 19 models in Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6), which show a good agreement with the observations with respect to the climatology of blizzard occurrence.

In the near-term and long-term future under two emission scenarios, CMIP6 projections suggest decreases in both strong wind and extreme snowfall events, eventually leading to a significantly reduced frequency of compound events. Significant decreases in blizzard occurrence are found in the Northern Plains and Upper Midwest, suggesting potentially reducing the risk of winter hazards over those regions in a warming climate.

DB2

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Good grief!

The Captain

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Why are they assuming this is a good thing? Don’t they know how important snowfall is to the area? Replenished aquifers, keeps things moisterized (if that’s the word for it) unlike rain which just runs off quickly. Odd that they found something good about global warming…? Would this be a Right Wing affiliated concern?

More importantly they are rigging their research. Blizzards by definition require no large amount of snowfall. Here they redefined blizzard as requiring large amounts of snowfall.

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They project decreases in strong winds. This may be due to the fact that the Arctic is warming faster than the mid-latitudes (which are warming faster than the tropics). Since the atmosphere is a large thermodynamic heat engine, transferring heat toward the poles, a lower temperature gradient decreases the Carnot cycle.

DB2

Moisturized with a ā€˜U.’

The Dictionary

Metro Detroit has a record amount of precipitation in January. It was mostly rain, not snow.

Regardless, I’m sure the media will continue it’s daily ā€œSEVERE WEATHER!!!ā€ hysteria.

Steve

The word you want is probably damp. Maybe also has a high water content (usually meaning the ground, even if frozen), has absorbed, or contains, a lot of the water available to it.

In spite of the lack of snow in both January and February, when I set up my step ladder to replace an exterior flood light, I put boards under the legs of the ladder, so the ladder would not sink into the ground. Yup, plenty of soil moisture around here.

Steve