Northeast U.S. Snowfall

Here in Maine we had a lot of snowfall today. It wasn’t very cold — well within the normal range for this time of year as far as temperature is concerned — but the snowfall was very heavy, nearly a foot of snow on the 1st of April. No, this is not an “April fool’s” post.

There is an interesting post at Climate Central on snow in the northeast U.S. It touches briefly on the trends which might be present, and those we might expect in the future (over the next century). It also presents a nice graphical access to data for total winter season snowfall from 98 northeastern stations with complete or near-complete coverage from 1980 to 2010, with those few cases of missing data infilled by interpolating nearby stations. The data they use can be found here, and originate from the Northeast Regional Climate Center.

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Richard Muller Love-Fest

Those who deny the reality, human causation, and/or danger of global warming absolutely love Dr. Richard Muller. He has been outspoken in his criticism of paleoclimate research (the “hockey stick”) and is a member of a team at Berkeley who intend to create a new, “definitive” estimate of global temperature based on meteorological station data. Those who don’t want global warming to be true, fully expected the Berkeley effort to refute the most oft-used global temperature data sets (NASA GISS, HadCRU, NOAA/NCDC), showing just how mistaken, misguided, even fraudulent, all those nasty climate scientists are.

Now that Muller has testified before a house committee, he has fulfilled their wildest dreams. The preliminary results from the Berkeley team completely refute the existing data sets. As a result, the so-called “skeptics” are delighted, thrilled, ecstatic even! And they love Richard Muller even more than they did before, heralding his praises from every corner of the internet.

April fool!

When it comes to Muller, the criticism has begun. It looks rather more like a pack of angry wolves on the attack, than a love-fest. How dare Muller imply that in all likelihood, GISS, HadCRU, and NOAA got it right?

Imagine that.