Newsgroups: lter.ced Path: LTERnet!news From: "Bruce P. Hayden" Subject: CED 1.6 Message-ID: <1992Jul29.184914.9198@lternet.washington.edu> Sender: news@lternet.washington.edu Organization: Long Term Ecological Research Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1992 18:39:53 GMT ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *********** *********** ********** *** *** * * * * *** *** * * * * *** *** * * * * *** *** * ********* * * *** *** * * * * *** *** * * * * *** *** * * * * *** *** * * * * *** *** *********** *********** ********** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** Vol.1 No.6 :::::: file name:CED1.6 :::::: Aug. 1, 1992 ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** CED is the Climate/Ecosystem Dynamics bulletin board of the LTER network. In CED you will find exchanges of ideas, information, data, bibliographies, literature discussions and a place to get to experts within the LTER community. We are interested in both climate controls on ecosystems and ecosystem controls on climate. As this is an inter-disciplinary activity, we hope to provide things that you might not come across in your work at your 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 (monthly?). Back-releases of CED may be requested from Hayden by the file name given in the masthead. 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 will keep a LTER wide bibliography on Climate/Ecosystem Dynamics that we pass on via E-mail. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** CED READERS: Thanks! *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** Over the last several months I have had lots of responses from you-all out there (Virginia is in the South you-all know! Your recommended readings have been great. You will see them passed on in subsequent CEDs. We have had our share of graphics problems. So far the best solution is editing at your end. Someday graphics over e-mail will be no problem. At CED we take new ideas seriously but not ourselves. Gripes welcome. Thanks for your kind notes. CED is going to press with press of getting it done before I go to the CC meeting in Alaska (in two days). Sorry if this issue is a bit rougher than rough ones you have had in the past. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** FORESTS & AIRMASS THUNDERSTORMS ! *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** Ferdinand Colombo, the son of Christopher Columbus, translated his father's ship logs and published them. You can find them in translation in your library under Benjamin Keen, "The life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by his son, Ferdinand. Rutgers Univ. Press. 1959. In his travels to Jamaica he noted that "The sky, air, and climate were just the same as in other places; every afternoon there was a rain squall that lasted for about an hour. The Admiral writes that he attributes this to the great forest of that land; he knew from experience that formerly this also occurred in the Canary, Madeira, and Azore Islands, but since the removal of forests that once covered those islands, they do not have so much mist and rain as before." Well, Chris was being modest about the Iberians felling all the trees on those islands. Iberian settlers also felled all the native citizens of said same islands but unlike the trees, doing away with the indigenous peoples had little to do with the desertification of the islands. The notion that the forests bring rain has persisted, to this day. CED readers want to know: Do the forests bring rain? The best mechanistic study so far is by Alfred J. Garrett in 1982. A Parameter Study of Interactions Between Convective Clouds, the Convective Boundary Layer, and a Forested Surface. Monthly Weather Review 110:1041-1959. Paper titles are not always exciting. Garrett concludes his paper with this: "The simulations also suggest that surface parameters such as soil moisture, forest coverage and transpiration, and surface roughness may affect the formation of convective clouds and rainfall through their effect on boundary-layer growth." Garrett's goal was to predict air mass thunderstorms and rain. An air mass thunderstorm is one that pops up unrelated to proximity to fronts or to orographic processes. Think, if you will, of the dog days of summer at Coweeta [90 F + daily maxima, 73 F dewpoint temperature]. No this is not Devil's Island. The Bermuda Highs have "backed in" off the subtropical Atlantic. High pressure rules the day and the day after and the day after, etc. Frontal systems, which are wimps in summer, except in this grand and glorious year of 1992, are nowhere to be found. Moist maritime tropical air comes ashore. The forests load more water into the air. The forests load hydrocarbons into the air as well. Those hazy, crazy days of summer are here! Pocohontas must surely have known these hazy days as well. In this world of hazy, stable air, eyes scan the late afternoon sky for thunderstorms, rain and relief. If you get one it is an air mass thunderstorm. These are the systems Garrett wanted to predict. Garrett used a numerical weather forecasting model and put into it a surface biosphere part to the model. A weather forecasting model with a living surface! Across the Southeast of the U.S. vegetation type was parameterized, a vegetation which could flux mass [H2O] and energy [latent and sensible] into the atmosphere. Forest vegetation coverage ran from 0 to 100% but Garrett only ran his simulations with cover ranging from 40 to 70%. It was a grasslands or forest kind of partitioning of the surface biosphere. Also numerically in his model were stomatal resistance, soil moisture and roughness length. Garrett found that his weather forecasting model with a biosphere out-preforemed the forest-free forecasting model used by the National Weather Service in predicting the amount, location and timing of thunderstorms. Thunderstorms over areas with extensive forests occur later in the day (about 3 hours delayed over grass land cover type). Garrett's model is a hypothesis that the kind and condition of surface vegetation makes a difference in the weather realized. He accepts the hypothesis on the basis that his model with vegetation had much higher forecast skill than his model without surface vegetation. That's the way these weather geeks do things. They get in trouble when they try to do manipulative experiments on your and my weather! Without true experiments the call observation programs experiments and predictions hypothesis testing. Better living through better prediction. CED will visit the subjectd of vegetation and weather prediction from time to time. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** HAZE, WARM MORNINGS AND UVB *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** The industrial revolution has long been blamed for as many things as the every-several-years El Nino was in the 1980s. CED though it might be interesting to look into the climate changes during the time of taller smoke stacks, child labor and wealth generation. In terms of air pollution and combustion for the human good, history shows a trend toward cleaner and cleaner energy production: wood, peat, brown coal, soft coal, hard coal, fuel oil, natural gas, and PI (i.e. politically incorrect) Nuclear and the hasn't happened yet hydrogen fusion. From the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society [1948, Vol. 11, p. 14] we have a little piece on New York City, the Big Apple, and the transition from soft coal to hard coal during the early years of the 20th century. Rather than using modern PC terminology, such as pre-Robber Baron days, the Bulletin looked at the pre- and post-soft coal days in the Big Apple. Soft coal via soot, fly ash and hydrocarbon production may well have prevented outgoing radiation and kept warmth in according to the Bulletin. Here is the data. Soft coal era = 1911-1915 and Post-soft coal era = 1928-1932. Minimum Temperatures in (F). Winter = Dec. 1 to March 1. Winters Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Mean _________________________________________________________________________ 1911-1915 26.7 26.3 25.8 25.8 25.8 26.5 26.6 26.2 1928-1932 27.4 28.7 29.0 29.4 30.5 31.0 28.8 29.3 _________________________________________________________________________ In pre-soft coal times there was little difference from day to day and weekday to weekend in minimum temperatures. In the dirty post-soft coal days, work-week mornings were on average 3.6 F warmer than week-end day off mornings. The would-be commuter could look skyward at the pall and say at least it cuts his heating bills. The bulletin then mused on this voodoo economics. "... it would be interesting to speculate on the economic value of the smoke cloud, on on how many tons of coal in furnaces are saved by a ton suspended in the air." Now talk about PI science! Now some up to date stuff, Urban air pollution has long been known to result in a reduction UVB at street level. Liu J. of Geopohysical Research Letters December 1991] made estimates for New Your City today compared to pre-industrial times in the Big Apple. New Yorkers get 20 to 30% less UVB than in those poor, retched louts of pre-Robber Baron times. Sun Protection Factor #15 cuts UVB penetration in to the skin by 66%! Maybe they ought to call the Big Apple's Gothic gray sky "ozone hole sun screen." Liu also notes that haze in rural areas, which he assumed to be man made, reduces UVB 5 to 18%. The hydrocarbons which make haze in rural areas comes from vegetation (90%) and from human sources (10%). In spite of the reductions in ozone of some 3% since 1969, UVB levels at the ground have gone down not up. Haze? Perhaps some? What else? Clouds! Evidence indicates that cloudiness over Northern Hemisphere lands has increased dramatically this century and there is also evidence of increases in clouds over the oceans as well. (Are there ecosystem consequences for the observed 17% increase in cloud cover for North America this century? Inquiring minds want to know or is temperature the only variable of climate change with merit?) Clouds are, next to a good baseball cap, great UVB blockers. All of this begs the question regarding the cause of the INCREASE in stratospheric ozone between the mid 1950s and 1969. Ozone in the stratosphere may go through natural as well as personkind caused variations. 6% up then 3% down (Elsasser, 1979). If we just look at clear sky days (1975-1990) [see the Smithsonian's David L. Correll and a long list of friends in J. Geophy. Res. Vol 97(D7):7579-7591] UVB at the surface in Washington DC has increased in the 1980s perhaps due to less stratospheric ozone. So cloudy days and the trend in this century toward more cloudiness should be considered to be implicated in our reduced UVB load at the surface and the increasing difficulty in getting a tan. Cut back your use of your UVB blocker to sun screen #14! Correll, however attributes the variation in UVB at the surface to ozone variations modulated by the solar sunspot cycle not to CFCs at all. Oh, if in our world causality was always univariate one [Time magazine level stuff], how easy our scientific life would be. The old Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society article goes on: "Clean air with its full value of health-giving ultraviolet light must be furnished to all the people just as clean milk and water are now available, insisted Dr. Fred O. Tonney of the Chicago Health Department, in his address before the American Public Health Association in Washington D.C.." Tonney also suggested that supplying clean air might become a "function of government!" Those guys were ahead of their time or could see the future clearly through the pall of the robber barons detritus. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** SO WHERE IS THE GLOBAL WARMING *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** You know the missing global warming is becoming a bother when the big players (for example Jim Hansen of NASA Goddard GCM GISS model fame, Tom Wigley of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, MacArthur award winner Stephen Schneider) in the 1980s greenhouse bandwagon come out in print and tell us why the just-around-the-corner warming isn't in the observational record. They have searched their mechanistic minds and have concluded that climate may change because of things other than the CO2 molecule. Anthropogenic and volcanic sulfates and biomass burning and deforestation are the fashion right now. CED is making a list the whys it hasn't warmed as promised and will tabulate it on the pages of CED in issues ahead. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** GLOBAL WARMING PIMPLE PLAGUE *** *** Warning from Top Skin Doctor *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** A few years ago a single case of bubonic plague in southern California, where else, was blamed on El Nino. This yeara bone-thin seals on the California coast are due to El Nino. In the early 1980s El Nino was the casual scapegoat of choice for every interest group. Now Global Warming has pushed El Nino aside as the explanation of choice for every bio-wrong that had the misfortune of happening in an El Nino year. One of our Vice Presidential candidates [no names plese], writing in the Forum section of the July/August 1992 issue of National Parks magazine, says that the rabbits in southern Chile are at risk because they are easy to catch because they are "sight impaired" due to the ozone hole! Leave it to the Veep candidates to have slip-of-the-tongue problems. Readers should review CED 1.5 for the skinny on blind sheep in the Chile. It seems that politicians will repeat anything a scientist or pseudo-scientist might mouth. That brings us to this little item on predicted global warming pimple plague. Dr. Evan Mueller at the Institute of Dermatological Research in Geneva, Switzerland notes "these higher temperatures are going to make a child's life a living hell." Dr. Evan's predictions broke in the Weekly World News [July 21, 1992]. I thought we learned our lessons from Fleishman and Pons. Oh, well! Lets get on with release before publication bashing. WWN also carried the blind sheep and at-risk rabbit stories that the Veep candidate mouthed as true. On the acne front, the news notes, "Every teenager in the world will be faced with their worst nightmare. In the coming years, their faces will be covered with "hundreds of zits." And "there won't be a thing they can do about it because it'll be caused by the Greenhouse Effect, or global warming." "By the year 2000, nine out of 10 youths will have such severe acne that they'll be embarrassed to go out in public." Dr. Evan extrapolates from the dermatological principle -- "It is a known fact that hot and humid conditions cause the skin to be more susceptible to acne." As a graduate student I roomed with a dermatologist-to-be and he was fond of saying the that the first principle of dermatology was -- "If it is wet, dry it and if it is dry, wet it!" Well it looks like the dermatologists office will be full with supplicants in search of drying cream prescriptions! The-blame-it-on-the-greenhouse-effect cottage industry is strong and growing. We all need to remember that sticking a Dr.in front of a release to the press doesn't make a scientific pontifications true nor should it merit groveling supplicants, politicians or otherwise! ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** IPCC's 0.15 C FASTER GLOBAL WARMING *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** IPCC Report Temperature Curve Confusion Update CED readers will recall our last issue asked how the global temperature curve in the most recent IPCC Report had a 33% higher rate of global warming than the earlier IPCC Report. The report implicated Mr. Christopher Fallon as the "adjuster of the curve." Telephone conversations by interested parties at the National Climate Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina indicate that Mr. Fallon did no adjusting of the Wigley (University of East Anglia) global temperature data set. All of the adjustment took place in Wigley's shop itself. No documentation of what they did is at hand. Cynics have related to this reporter that the global cooling between 1940 and the late 1970s will be gone from the record is the data strokers can have just a few more yars. The periodic publications of the Wigley data used by the IPCC team are just different. The data are now colder in the early days (1800s) of the record and getting less colder as today is approached. Since the 1860s the adjustment has added a .15 C warming to the previously reported .45 C rise in temperatures to the present. There is no indication in the publications of the Climate Research Center at the University of East Anglia of the methods applied to transform the data. Intrepid investigators continue to probe. Stay tuned. Tom Karl [NCDC at Asheville, NC] is in the process of doing their own global temperature curve with documentation of everything that will be done to the data. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** EL NINO & EL TER *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** At the Trout Lake CC meeting interest was expressed in putting together a working group on EL NINO / ecosystem effects. On behalf of the Climate Committee I volunteered to provide long histories of storminess for the various LTER sites as a basis for a common assessment of an EL NINO signature at all sites. The data base for this work was transferred to NETWORK CENTRAL in Seattle and all site may get the data as needed. ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** EL NINO & SEASONALITY *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** Recently I put a student (John Walsh)to take a look at the Key West, Florida precipitation record for an El Nino signature. There was a slight increase in rainfall in El Nino years over non-El Nino years. But, not enough write home about. You know. Statistically significant but with little predictive power. Just as in the Hunt for Red October we didn't give up. We set out to look at the seasonality of rainfall in El Nino and non-El Nino years. the relationship we found was a strong one and the rule of thumb is as follows: The stronger the El Nino the earlier in the calendar year one find the month of maximum precipitation at Key West. In non-El Nino years it is in August. With a strong El Nino in progress the rainfall maximum shifts to March and April! Such changes in the wet and dry season may have significant ecosystem responses. Yes there was more rain in El Nino years but not a lot. There was less rainfall in the normally wettest time of the year and more rainfall in the drier earlier months ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** GLOBAL WARMING AND DEAD PLANTS *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** One David Maddox of the Nature Conservancy in Arlington, Virginia, in a report to the AP [6/29/92], assumed a 5 C warming by 2100 and concluded that 21% of all US plant life would be destroyed and that 50% of all rare plant species would croak. Death by too rapid global warming means the "envelope" for the species is no longer available. There is no word if the temperature in question is average temperature, minimum temperature or maximum temperature. Mark Schwartz of the Illinois Natural History Survey says the work of Maddox is a good starting point to identify vulnerable species, but to "say they are goners" is going a bit far. He notes beech trees are happy in Florida and Georgia as they were at the end of the last ice age. This reporter views the problem differently. CED readers are aware that all the warming thus far (cause unknown) is nocturnal warming with daily maximum temperatures unchanged over the period of record. It is not at all clear that daily maximum temperatures are in any way set by greenhouse gasses. Sunlight with latitude, time of day and time of year variations, evapotranspiration rates and cloud cover seem to explain variation in daily temperature maxima. Greenhouse gases retard night-time cooling. Without them our night-time temperatures would average around 255 K (-18 C). Most studies of vegetation response to global warming use average temperatures. They kick it up and see who doesn't make it. The literature on vegetation control by average temperature is sparse and literature on physiological control sparcer-yet. Low temperature control, photoperiod, water sufficiency, growing season length and growing degree days all seem important. Temperature maxima are important in setting the vapor pressure deficits and evapotranspiration losses but the evidence that maximum temperatures are set by greenhouse gases. Well, what about average temperature? how do you get it to change? First we need to define average temperature: (Tmax + Tmin)/2 = Tave! You can get Tave to increase by 1) increasing Tmax, 2) increasing Tmin, 3) increasing both Tmax and Tmin, or having either Tmax or Tmin increase a greater amount than Tmin or Tmax decreases. Clearly, increasing T-average as the GCM models tells is the response to increasing CO2 can happen in a number of ways! The odds of it happening by method 3) above is most people assume is low as different physics control Tmin and Tmax. CED has proselytized for some issues now for ecologists to not blindly accept the symposium volume scenarios of global warming! I see the following scenario as more likely and still consistent with 2XCO2 GCM output statistics: higher minimum temperatures, unchanged daily maximum temperatures, higher atmospheric water content, higher precipitation, more water to transpire (might mean cooler day-time temperature maxima), cloudier (maybe cooler day time max temperatures), earlier start and later end of the frost-free season, a longer growing season, more growing degree days and reduction of extremes both seasonally and daily. Now lets talk about which plants are going to be goners! ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** *** *** *** *** *** BENNETT ISLAND CLOUD *** *** *** *** *** ***************************************************************** ***************************************************************** Bennett Island is in the East Siberian Sea for all our CED readers who did not pass the National Geographic Society's geography test. For years there has been a mysterious plume, a cloud from the island! [Science News 6/27/92] With the end of the Cold War, the people's republic couldn't be the focus of a red-under-every-bed blame. The cloud still comes from the island. Guess what is blamed now. Right. It is global warming. The warming melts the surface and methane escapes and cause the cloud. Theory sans testing makes it into the news so easy these days. Enter biogenic ice nuclei specialist Russell C. Schnell (see CED 1.4 and 1.5). He hired a Russian airplane (they are cheap right now) and went and sampled the plume. No methane above ambient! To get no methane, you don't need to melt the surface and you don't need global warming to blame. Schnell thinks the clouds are water vapor clouds orographically produced over the mountains on the island. Radical! ----------------+--------------------------------+------------------------- Bruce P. Hayden | Dept. Environmental Sciences | bph@virginia.EDU (804) 924-0545 | Clark Hall, Univ. of Virginia | bph@virginia.BITNET (804) 924-7761 | Charlottesville, VA 22903 | (804) 982-2137(fax) ----------------+--------------------------------+-------------------------