Heavy Midweek Rains – First Weekend of Autumn May Feel like July

September 21, 1994: 1/2 inch hail in Blue Earth County resulted in $6 million in crop damages.
September 21, 1924: Windstorm with a peak gust of 64 mph in Duluth.

Perpetual Summer?
Winter Is Coming – In Theory

“Weather forecast for tonight: dark” said George Carlin’s Hippy Dippy Weatherman. He nailed that one. Meteorology 001 teaches the seasons, days of the week, how to recognize all 50 states on a map and which finger to use while pointing at a green screen.

Which is why I’m puzzled this morning. The sun is as high in the sky as it was on March 22. It SHOULD be cooling down; more vigorous puffs of frosty air pushing out of Canada.

But the map, the configuration of the jet stream, resembles something you might see in mid or late August: a string of sticky warm fronts into the first week of October. Once again the pattern is sluggish; “stuck”. Temperatures will trend 10-15F warmer than average the next 2 weeks; 70s as a rule, with a few spurts of 80s from time to time.

T-storms will pop up Tuesday into Thursday, but next weekend looks sunny, warm and dry with 80s. You might just want to leave the boat in the water through the first week of October this year. Wow.

ECMWF (European) guidance hints at a tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico in 10 days. We’re long overdue for a storm.

* Image credit here.

Heavy Midweek Rains? Models are hinting at some 1-2″ rains for portions of Minnesota later this week; right now Wednesday appears to be the wettest day of the week. Source: Aeris Enterprise.

Accumulated Rainfall for MSP. Internal Models show a strong likelihood of some 1-2″ rains, especially late Tuesday into Wednesday. Watering optional again this week. Source: Aeris Enterprise.

August Flashback Next Weekend? Daytime highs nudge 80F today, but climb well into the 80s next weekend; as much as 15F warmer than average. The maps sure don’t look like late September. Source: Climate Reanalyzer.

Mild Bias Into Early October. Long range GFS guidance continues to show unusually warm weather spilling over into at least the first week of October, at least east of the Rockies. 500 mph winds are relatively weak and sluggish over the USA, the core of the jet unusually far south on Sunday evening, October 4.

“College” Football Has Almost Nothing To Do With Collage at All. The Atlantic reports; here’s a snippet that got my attention: “…But, as Gilbert M. Gaul, who has won Pulitzer Prizes for his coverage of blood banks and the American coal industry, explains in his new book Billion Dollar Ball: A Journey Through the Big-Money Culture of College Football, there’s nothing scrappy or amateurish about the sport’s business side. As Gaul explains, most college-football programs have come to operate more or less independently from the universities that chartered them, and money has become their raison d’etre. TV contracts, corporate sponsors, and “seat donations”—in which elite teams charge their fans above and beyond the price of a season ticket for the privilege of securing a seat—are just three reasons why a program such as the University of Texas’s could go from making $18.7 million in 1999 to $104 million in 2012...”

Photo credit above: USA Today Sports.

Ultimate Travel List: Lonely Planet’s Top 10 Sights in the World. They actually have 500 mapped out, but this is the Top 10. How many of these have you seen? Here’s an excerpt from Lonely Planet: “Is the list of places you’d like to visit becoming a little unwieldy? Ours was – which is why we’ve whittled them down from thousands to a definitive rundown of the planet’s most unforgettable sights. Not only that, we’ve made the bold move of ranking them in order of brilliance, based on a highly complex formula of expert recommendations, community feedback and oracle-like intuition…”

Photo credit above: #1 on the list: Temples of Angkor, Cambodia. “Monks wandering through the temple ruins of Ta Prohm.” Image by Mark Read, Lonely Planet

Climate Stories….

Are GOP Candidates Finally Getting It on Climate Change? Here’s the intro to a story at Huffington Post: “The Republican presidential candidates’ answers to a climate change question during their Wednesday debate represented progress — sort of. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who had previously said he didn’t believe humans are causing climate change, now says he’s not a skeptic. Rubio, a Catholic, has softened his stance somewhat since the pope’s encyclical on the environment. During the debate, he focused his remarks on his dislike of the Obama administration’s regulatory measures and argued that U.S. efforts to reduce emissions would do little to curb climate change because “America is not a planet…”

Photo credit above: “MARK J. TERRILL/ASSOCIATED PRESS. “Candidates at Wednesday night’s debate were modestly better on climate change — at least those who addressed it at all.”
 

What Exxon Knew About Climate Change. Here’s additional perspective from The New Yorker. The intro: “Wednesday morning, journalists at InsideClimate News, a web site that has won the Pulitzer Price for its reporting on oil spills, published the first installment of a multi-part expose that will be appearing over the next month. The documents they have compiled and the interviews they have conducted with retired employees and officials show that, as early as 1977, Exxon (now ExxonMobile, one of the world’s largest oil companies) knew that its main product would heat up the planet disastrously. This did not prevent the company from then spending decades helping to organize the campaigns of disinformation and denial that have slowed – perhaps fatally – the planet’s response to global warming….”

Former Department of Justice Official Says Exxon News Worsens Liability Picture. This is tobacco times a thousand, and a law firm will rise that launches the Mother of All Class Action Lawsuits. It’s a matter of when, not if. Here’s an excerpt from Climate Investigations Center: “The former Department of Justice lawyer who led the watershed lawsuit against tobacco companies, says that the news out today about oil giant ExxonMobil knowing as early as 1981 about the threat posed by climate change could worsen the fossil fuel industry’s liability picture. Not only the media are buzzing over the revelation today that Exxon executives knew as early as 1981 of the significance of climate change and the dangers of carbon dioxide emissions, yet continued to fund scientists and a global misinformation campaign to sow doubt about whether global warming is real for another 27 years...”