Newsgroups: lter.ced Path: LTERnet!news From: bph@virginia.edu Subject: CED 2.9 Message-Id: <9312032057.AA01704@envsci.evsc.Virginia.EDU> Sender: news@lternet.washington.edu Organization: Long Term Ecological Research Date: Fri, 29 Oct 93 12:27:23 -0500 ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *********** *********** ********** *** *** * * * * *** *** * * * * *** *** * * * * *** *** * ********* * * *** *** * * * * *** *** * * * * *** *** * * * * *** *** * * * * *** *** *********** *********** ********** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** Vol.2 No.9 :::::: file name:CED2.9 :::::: November 1, 1993 ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** CED METADATA ---- CED is the Climate/Ecosystem Dynamics bulletin board ofthe LTER network. In CED, you will find exchanges of ideas, information, data, bibliographies, literature discussions, and a place to find experts withinthe LTER community. We are interested in both climate controls on ecosystems and ecosystem controls on climate. As this is an inter-disciplinaryactivity, we hope to provide things that you might not come across in your work atyour LTER site. CED is a product of the LTER climate committee and contributions to CED for general e-mail release may be sent to either David Greenland of Andrews LTER [Greenlan@oregon.uoregon.edu] or to Bruce Hayden of the Virginia Coast Reserve LTER [bph@envsci.evsc.virginia.edu]. We expect that the scope of CED will evolve and reflect the interests of the contributors and users of this service. CED will be issued as the preparation work gets done (usually monthly). Back-issus of CED may be requested from Daniel Pommert [daniel@lternet.washington.edu] by the file name given in the masthead. Daniel can also add people to the CED mailing list. Feedback on CED from LTER scientists is welcome (non-$$$$ contributions also welcome.) For example, please forward citations of climate & ecosystem publications on your site. We are keeping a LTER wide bibliography on Climate/Ecosystem Dynamics that we pass on via E-mail. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** 10/25/93 NOAA NEWS FROM MINI-MAX *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** College Park, Maryland -- The first night-time warming conference was attended by 37 scientists from 10 nations [When it comes to consensus science you have to state who the head-nodders are.]. They came to discuss observations. DOE and NOAA co-sponsored, with green-backs, this little gathering. Tom Karl (NCDC), sometimes mentioned in our little CED, and George Kukla of Columbia, someday to be mentioned, published the observations on nighttime warming that caused the need for this conference to discuss the observarions. When observations and models clash -- check your observations. CED readers have long been in the know about THE-warming-has-been-in-the-dark-of-night problem. The news release [It is how we do science in the 90s.] notes that the global warming has not been global but, where it has happened, like over the continents, the warming has been at night. And worth quoting. "Contrary to most climate model expectations (read GCMs), no significant nighttime warming was observed in polar regions." Nighttime in polar regions means winter. Nighttime (winter) warming is the signal put out by the GCMs forced by 2XCO2. Only New Zealnad and some Pacific islands show a history of equal day and night warmings. Mini-max people noted the historical trend toward increased cloud cover could explain the nighttime warmings. CED readers have known this for some months now. Of those GCM models with a day-night cycle in them, some have "suggested" a slightly greater nighttime warming than in the daytime. However, the observations of nighttime warming are "substantially" larger than offered by these models. The potential benefits of nighttime warming, e.g. fewer HDDs, longer growing seasons, more crops, and fewer killing frosts, in view of the need for a climate doomsday being ever present, were said to be maybe offset by increased pests infestations, smaller crop-growing areas, and higher human heat-related mortality. It was not clear how nighttime warming would do all these things but a panel member noted that even if all the global warming were at night "adverse effects could still be expected." Thank goodness for that. Another MINI-MAX TID-BIT is that the north-south temperature contrast has become a bit steeper in recent decades. Now if it warms in the north more than it warms in the south, the latitude temperature contrast should get smaller. It is doing just the opposite. We can't find the warming in the high latitudes and the middle latitudes are getting a bit warmer due to nighttime warming. So the thermal contrast is getting larger. Perspective: 1) The thermal contrast is great in winter and slight in summer, 2) the westerly winds aloft and the jet stream in particular are fast when the thermal contrast is great and slower when the contrast is less. Anyway, the MINI-MAX goings-ons would suggest that if the just-around-the-corner global warming is to be found, we better look around for a very, very broad corner that will take some decades to navigate. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** LMER Hu? = 0.052 #!!@$&^ @#*! *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** The question mark in the title of this piece is to help facilitate the pronunciation of Hu. With the ? (interrogative) the pronunciation of Hu becomes Huh! Hu stands for the Hobbie Unit. #!!@$&^ @#*! on the other hand is a Pacific Northwest peculiarity. Some explanation is obviously required. The Hobbie Unit is measured in radians and was determined at the 1993 LMER annual meeting to be 0.052 radians. This yet-to-be-proved constant is one-half of the difference in baseball cap sizes required by John Hobbie when he is 1) thinking hard and when he is 2) thinking about LMER administrative stuff. It is a measure of radial deformation and is equal to one post unit in a Portland Trail Blazers baseball cap. The Portland Trail Blazers are not a baseball team. CED readers of my writings on cephlomorphometrics at the All Scientist Meeting in Estes Park will recall that some LTER participants refused to wear the University of North Carolina baseball cap I used in that cranial survey. The reasons had to do with hubris and chauvinism and Duke's recent national championships in basketball. At the LMER annual meeting in Seaside, Oregon (that is near Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia River) there was concern about wearing any baseball cap at all. It didn't matter what logo rested above the brim. In Ecotopia the baseball cap has become very not-PC! Apparently, loggers has been seen wearing them! In Ecotopia it is not green to be seen wearing our national hat. The greener-than-Thou types in Ecotopia call our national hat the #!!@$&^ @#*! (Cryptographers. The last "! " is real, a punctuation mark, while the first two stand for letters used by literate people in constructing words). For non-cryptographers, Stephanie Martin, Si Simenstad and all the Columbia River LMER graduate students know the solution to this little puzzle because they found the time, wearing arn't-we-bad grins, to tell me about the lexicon of this homegrown Ecotopian bigotry. It was my good luck that the actual cranium-fitting and size-recording took place in the basement of the Shilo Hotel at Seaside and LMER participants from the northwest were not likely to be seen wearing the national hat. John Hobbie, who commissioned this cephlomorphometry, on setting his eyes on the Portland Trail Blazer baseball cap and contemplating his own fitting, said, "This isn't going to be big enough." It was. John's head was 0.1560 Hu? smaller than he thought it was. I continued my work. Measurements were taken, statistics were calculated, overheads were made and an after-dinner cephlo-talk given. A good time was had by all at the Hobbie Roast. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** LMER Hu? vs LTER Hu? *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** The Carolina and Blazers hats were subject to the tape measure and caliper and were cross-calibrated. The Blazers Hu? of 0.052 was matched against a Carolinian Hu? of 0.055. Hobbie in the Blazers cap locked in on the third post. My records indicate that Hobbie in Carolina locked in on the 5th post. With these constants I converted LTER Estes Park truth into LMER Shilo truth. I have been contacted by the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, N. J. to submit this math-teaser for the 1994 edition of the SAT. Any of you have juniors in High School this year? LTER graduate students had on average 0.01265 Hu? smaller heads than PIs. LMER graduate students also showed pinheadedness relative to their PIs. Our best data is for the Columbia LMER site. They were the home team and brought lots of van-driving graduate students. These upstarts were a big 0.1040 Hu? smaller than their mentors! No LTER had such a cap-gap for the student-mentor chasm. It seem clear that there is a yet-to-be-consumated brain-filling marathon needed in Spotted Owl country. The Andrews LTER site was the most fatheaded of all the LTER sites and were deemed obvious candidates to fill Washington NSF posts where they would feel at home. LMER's fatheads were the folks at the Columbia River site. The Pacific Northwest is clearly the home of the fatheads. Andrews graduate students came in at a 0.0760 Hu?, a significant but not worrisome cap-gap. CPR's LTER won the pointed contest for most pinheaded among sites with 0.0183 Hu? smaller crainal deformation than the next most small-minded of sites Arctic Tundra. Please remember that these numbers are relative to John Hobbie's head. It is sort of a departure from Hobbieness. Two LMERs were locked in a dead, pinhead heat: Chesapeake Bay and Waquiot Bay both came in 0.0728 Hu? smaller than John Hobbie. It should be noted that John Hobbie was only 0.0208 Hu? more fatheaded than the average 120 guests sampled at the Estes Park All Scientist meeting. This means that LMER heads relative to LTERites, with the exception of the Columbia River site, could audition for Saturday Night Live Cone-Head skits. This pinheadedness of LMERhood can only mean that streamlining is selected-for at marine sites. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** THE CLIMATE OF LAWNS *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** Slip a NCDC CD into your PC and see what the climate of a lawns is at your site. It is hard to face up to it but, that is the climate you get when you get National Weather Service collected data. At our lab in Oyster, Virginia our met station is on a lawn. We are comparable. We measure lawn climate. Our Hog Island met station is in a wonderful waist high grassland. This peculiarity of climate data dawned on me when I was in Arizona on a road trip. We pulled into a Farm Bureau or COOP type utility store and gas station. Off to the side was the weather station. It had a nice well kept green lawn about 12m square with the classic white lattice instrument box. The whole thing was in the middle of a classical southwestern desert. Well, so what! Who cares? What's the big deal? Well, unless you are at KBS's turf farm, it does matter. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** LITTLE WOODS AND NEGLECTED LAWNS *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** I just went outside and put one of my thermometers on my Crozet, Virginia lawn and one off in a small, still-in-leaf woods about 50 meters away. The time is 9:28 p.m. EST, October 22, 1993. My thermometers are electronic and quick. I shop at Radio Shack. My lawn temperature is 3.9 C. In my little woods it is 7.6 C! The difference of 3.7 C (6.7 F) is about the same as the mean global temperature difference between the 1XCO2 GCM temperature and the 2XCO2 GCM temperature. Gosh, it was toasty in my little woods! Hold on, the night is still young. We have a chance of frost by morning. [I better move my frost sensitive plants into my little forest where the growing season is longer.] I have not mowed my lawn in about 3 weeks. It is now a nice mower-choking 4.5 inches high. A good National Weather Service station is probably trim and even. Who says a watched-pot never boils. It is 10:02 p.m. EST, 26 minutes in to my odyssey and it is 6.1 C in the woods and 3.0 C over the lawn: by using a minus sign we get a 3.1 C (5.6 F) difference! It is getting colder faster over the lawn than in my little woods. It is a clear night in Virginia. Our air was over KBS turf yesterday and over the North Woods the day before. During the Civil War (see the PBS mini-series on this little misunderstanding between brothers) most of Virginia was sort of a crop-lawn. The forests had been hewed and the blues and the grays could get good beads on each other. Today Virginia is more like a forest than a lawn. The armed men in our woods today are either blaze-oranged turkey hunters, Mary Jane farmers defending their crop, grim-faced morel gathers, or exporting ginseng-pullers. Well, Virginia's climate must have changed since the 1860s. Climate must change during succession. FORET forest stand models go from bare ground to ancient forests in a couple hundred model years. The modelers usually stick in the number growing degree days. The chance of success of various candidate species depends on this specified growing degree days. Our little lawn-woods experiment indicates that growing degree days in these models should be a function of the state of the stand. I will have to pester my colleague Shugart until he tries this little trick. I will check my thermometers again at 10:28 p.m. -- the one hour mark. 9:28 p.m. 7.6 C in my little woods 3.9 C on my neglected lawn. 10:02 p.m. 6.1 C in my little woods 3.0 C on my neglected lawn. 10:28 p.m. 5.6 C in my little woods 2.5 C on my neglected lawn. 11:02 p.m. 5.1 C in my little woods 2.2 C on my neglected lawn. GOOD MORNING 7:02 a.m. 1.5 C in my little woods -1.5 C on my neglected lawn. 7:28 a.m. 1.4 C in my little woods -1.9 C on my neglected lawn. SUNRISE 8:02 a.m. 1.6 C in my little woods -1.3 C on my neglected lawn. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** FROST FREE IN 93 -- SO FAR *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** Frost on the lawn! The frost-free growing season continues in my little woods. In October in Virginia if you miss a frost the usual time to the next shot at killing cold is about 14 days! A little frost protection gets you a significantly longer growing season. National Weather Service weather stations, in their grassy glory, underestimate the length of the frost free season except perhaps at CPR. Even with this bias Prairies in the U.S. have much shorter NWS growing seasons than adjacent forest & field regions immediately to the east. If we didn't just measure lawn temperatures, the difference between forests and grassland growing seasons would be even greater. Well, my little woods didn't have a killing frost last night and has yet to have a killing frost even though we had our first frost on the lawn almost three weeks ago (it was early this year). Now it is not likely that I will have my first frost in my little woods until sometime in the first week in November. It might not happen even then! I put my house plants out in my little woods for the summer and bring them in when a hard frost is predicted. If they tell me it is going to get down to -4 C then I think about bringing in the house plants. I also park my car under a nice pecan tree until the leaves fall and then under a hemlock. When the sky is clear and low temperatures are predicted and when I remember, I park under one of the trees overnight and my car windows are frost free in the morning. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** THOMAS JEFFERSON'S LITTLE CALCULATION *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** Heating degree days (HDD) are calculated in a way similar to Thomas Jeffersons original method. HDD = 65 F - (Tmax - Tmin)/2. HDD is calculated for each day and all the daily HDDs in the year are totaled up. Days when (Tmax -Tmin)/2 is larger than 65 F are counted as 0. Well, in our little experiment we know Tmin. It was 3.5 C or 6.3 F warmer in my little woods than on my neglected lawn. Now not knowing just yet how warm it will get today our HDD for the day has the prospects of being 3.15 HDDs lower on the lawn than the woods. Back of the envelope = 180 days with average temperatures below 65 F; half of those cloudy; 3.15 x 90 days = 283.5 potential HDD more on the lawn relative to the little woods. Bring on treed-suburbia! Conserve home heating fuel! Help Bill curb CO2 release! Forests sequester carbon and help us curb our domicile respiration. The forest-HDD saved amounts to 7% over open grassy spots. By the way, my neighbor a couple of generations removed (Tom Jefferson) developed the HDD method so he could calculate how many cords of wood he would need at his several properties. He was a whiz with his 4th of July Thermometer. What a joy to get your first thermometer from a Philadelphia merchant on Independence Day! Merchants usually close-up on Independence Day! What luck Tom had. Now, if my little woods turns out to be cooler than my neglected lawn at mid-day, we might get another 283.5 HDD saved! It might be nice to have your house in the middle of your nut farm! Besides, walnut wood is prized and is likely to have this walnut-carbon sequestered in someone's gun stock, chest of drawers, or hutch. If a little craftsmanship is applied, it could be out of carbon cycle for centuries. "Live in a forest; sequester carbon; and, respire less!" An ecoclimatologist's slogan to run on. Even if this doesn't stop global warming dead in its yet-to-be-seen tracks, what hubris you could get in just doing it and gee, talk about one-ups-manship you can weigh in with among like-minded people. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** MORNING AND MORE READINGS *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** 8:28 a.m. 5.4 C in my little woods 2.4 C on my neglected lawn. 9:02 a.m. 6.8 C in my little woods 6.6 C on my neglected lawn. 9:28 a.m. 10.8 C in my little woods 11.3 C on my neglected lawn. HOUSE CLEANING, GROCERIES & MINUTIA It is now cooler in my little woods than on my neglected lawn. If all goes well this trend will continue to the warmest part of the day. It looks like you will need to pump less FREON if you live in the woods. So, forests get you both fewer HDD and fewer CDD (cooling degree days). It is the best of both worlds. If the warmerness of night and the coolerness of day are equal, the average temperature [(Tmax -Tmin)/2] for the day could be the same on lawn and in woods. Averages are great at concealing physics, propagating ignorance, and fostering misunderstanding. 11:02 a.m. 13.3 C in my little woods 13.3 C on my neglected lawn. OLD MOTHER WESTWIND'S MERRY LITTLE BREEZES 11:28 a.m. 15.3 C in my BIG woods 16.0 C on my neglected lawn. FRICTION RULES! ONLY ANTITRIPITIC WINDS FLOW By 11:02 the wind had kicked-up to about 2 m/s. The air on my neglected lawn is now well mixed with the air in my little woods. Perhaps after lunch the winds will still and we can get a first look at conditions during the warmest part of the day. About 50 meters into my BIG woods (0.3 m DBH Beech and Oak mostly) about 400 meters from my lawn, the merry little breezes had not yet penetrated and stirred things up. The warmed air over the lawns had not yet mixed with the air in the BIG woods like it had in the little patch of woods near my lawn. The lawn has heated up 0.7 C relative to my BIG woods. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** ANTITRIPTIC WINDS *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** Antitriptic winds, in case you are not in the know, have to do with friction. In the free air, the pressure gradient acceleration on the wind is balanced by the Coriolis acceleration (equal and opposite and to the right of the wind in the Northern Hemisphere) and the winds flow parallel to the isobars. If we get some drag on the wind, like from vegetation, the winds slow, the Coriolis acceleration gets smaller and can no longer balance the pressure gradient acceleration and the winds are deflected to the left (in our hemisphere). That means the winds turn to the left. The more the friction the more the turn to the left. Max-out friction and the winds flow perpendicular to the isobars, i.e. downhill toward low pressure. That is the way it is in the depths of the forest. Winds are slight and perpendicular to the winds above the forest in the free air. The NWS weather station lawn-wind data don't help much when the winds are antitriptic. Both speed and direction are inappropriate. 3:02 p.m. 18.5 C in my little woods 20.0 C on my neglected lawn. Even on this breezy day my little woods ended up cooler than the air over my neglected lawn. If it had been still, the difference would have been bigger. If the leaves had been in full fettle, fine little ET pumps, and not wondrous yellow and orange flutterlings that suck people out of the cities in October, the temperature difference would have been bigger. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** LANDUSE CHANGE = CLIMATE CHANGE *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** Most LTER sites are landscape moasics. Most are not very much like a NWS lawns. Lots of people these days are saying that land use change will produce changes in climate bigger than global warming. Why not, I think it has in the past. Unfortunately, our national archives of climate data is not so hot for study of such things. Lawns remain lawns. What is the climate of the native vegetation at LTER sites? This could be a nice, low cost LTER network intersite project. Is your site met-station representative of your site vegetation? What is the habitat and thus climate diversity at your site? HOBOs would be ideal for such projects. HOBOs are matchbook-size mini-weather stations. You can get HOBOs that measure and record temperature, humidity and pressure. In the little matchbook-sized box is a little circuit board, a 1 kilobite storage memory and a sensor. They run about $200. The battery lasts about 2 years. At one sample per hour you would need to data dump on to a laptop about once every 3 months. These little beauties are ideal for recon, gradient analysis and all-prupose record keeping. We are using the pressure HOBO to measure water tables in wells and sea levels. Temperature HOBOs would permit LTER sites to get ahead of the curve on the climate implications of landuse change. Nobody else is doing this kind of work. For $2500 per site we could make a dent in the problem. *************** *************** Someone requested the Brubaker reference on recycled rain: Here it is. K. L. Brubaker, D. Entekhabi, and P. S. Eagleson. (1993). Estimation of Continental Precipitation Recycling. Journal of Climate. 6:1077-1089. ----------------------------------------------------- | Bruce P. Hayden | | VRIGINIA COAST RESERVE LTER | | 101 Clark Hall | | Department of Environmental Sciences | | University of Virginia | | Charlottesville, VA 22903 | | (804) 924-0545 | | bph@viginiia.edu | | bph@lternet.edu | | CED| ------------------------------------------------------ .....................................................