Global warming alert for Fort Lauderdale, FL!!!

redrumloa

redrumloa

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Or should I say lack thereof? Weather.com says it is 50F (zip code 33317), here is reality.

http://i48.tinypic.com/2194cwh.jpg

Hmm... 35F in South Florida?

I know this post will angry your blood. I know it is even colder where you are, so consider the blood boiling a new year's gift :wink:
 
Florida Jan 4, 2010.
Local farmers, particularly strawberry growers and tropical fish operators, are facing their longest work week in decades as a prolonged cold snap threatens to bring major damage.

http://www.theledger.com/article/201001 ... Week-Ahead

The worst previous freezes in 1977 and 1989 killed more than half of the local tropical fish stocks because overcast skies during the day mitigated the greenhouse effect, he said.

"If it stays like this (cloudy skies) for seven days with temperatures in the 30s, it could get that bad (as 1977 or 1989)," Quillen said.
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And the sun was the most active in Dec and now than it was over the last 2 years. So much for the theory that the sun warms the planet. :lol:
 
Coldest Orange Bowl ever for Iowa-GaTech

http://www.miamiherald.com/sports/break ... 10984.html

MIAMI -- The Orange Bowl is chilled.

Tuesday night's matchup between Iowa and Georgia Tech is the coldest Orange Bowl ever, with the kickoff temperature 49 degrees and a northwest wind making it feel seven degrees cooler.

Forecasters at the National Weather Service say wind chills across South Florida will be in the 30s by game's end, part of the region's worst cold snap in a decade. Temperatures across the region have been about 20 degrees colder than normal for several days.

The previous Orange Bowl low was 57 degrees, set two years ago for the matchup between Kansas and Virginia Tech.
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Actually the Orange Bowl is now player at Landshark Stadium (aka Dolphins Stadium), which is not technically Miami and is about ~6 miles from my house. 49 at kickoff seems high as it is already dipping into the upper 30's here. If I remember, I will check the bird bath to see if it ices over. If it ices over, it will break the record in 1956.

http://weblogs.sun-sentinel.com/news/we ... night.html

The record low for Jan. 6 in West Palm Beach is 37 degrees, set in 1967; in Fort Lauderdale, 34 degrees set in 1956 and in Miami, 40 degrees, set in 1919.
 
Last I heard they are calling the official low for last night for Fort Lauderdale 39F. I have to call bullshit here.


f1cf4.jpg



Looks a good 10-11 degrees off from reality to me! But wait, that cheap thermometer may not be accurate. We should just believe what the news is telling us, right? This crossed my mind when the bird feeder was not frozen over, but my car windshield told a different story.


2ptsak3.jpg



Last I heard, water doesn't freeze above 32F. Period. So golly gee wally, why would the official low be off by at least 7 degrees and more realistically by 11? Could there be a problem with test locations? Fort Lauderdale International Air Port is likely where the Fort Lauderdale data is culled from (which is about 3 miles from me). Gee, nothing to artificially skew data there! Or are we just being lied to? Incompetence or hoax, take your pick.

My thermometer says we touched the all time low in Fort Lauderdale of 28F. The last time it hit this record temp, the Nuremberg Trials were still ongoing. Of course the record book is now getting fake data, so 2009 will not be recognized as very abnormal.
 
Well then maybe you should start taking hourly temperature readings and posting them on your website so everyone knows the real temperature. And a few years from now you can then put all the numbers into a spread sheet on your shiny new x1000 and render us a graph (in 3D and in real time of course) of how the temperatures have increased over the years. Sounds like a fun project and I trust you won't fudge the data too much.
 
Red if you are serious about this stuff you need to get rid of the $5 circular thermometer. I'd recommend some quality equipment and hooking up with Wunderground.

And your 32F limit? It's true to an extent. Living in a land of cold there's some interesting things. I've seen snow near 40 degrees and rain at 30 degrees. The upper atmosphere and it's conditions play a role is precipitation.
 
faethor said:
Red if you are serious about this stuff you need to get rid of the $5 circular thermometer. I'd recommend some quality equipment and hooking up with Wunderground.

And your 32F limit? It's true to an extent. Living in a land of cold there's some interesting things. I've seen snow near 40 degrees and rain at 30 degrees. The upper atmosphere and it's conditions play a role is precipitation.
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I started this thread initially just having a laugh. Each night was getting colder, but the forecast kept calling for a warm up to follow. I wasn't expecting freezing when I first posted, so the cheapo thermometer did the trick for a laugh. Each day the forecast quietly got revised down, to the point we approached freezing. I took the opprtunity to fill the bird bath knowing there is a hard limit for freezing of 32F. It did not freeze over (too much volume, not enough time below 32F I guess), but unexpectedly dew on the car windshield did. Frozen water test is good for calibrating or testing termometers, so it proves the cheapo termometer can be off by 3-4 degrees maximum.

The upper atmosphere certainly is what causing different precipitation, but that is not at play here. South Florida is very humid, so dew on the car windshield in morning is common. The temperature at play is just ground level. Speaking to a friend this morning it seems the same thing happened to him in Tamarac (a neighboring city, official low of ~40) and an associate of his in Miami (offical low of 42 AFAIK). This is a good representation of all of South Florida, which at least hit 32F. Kind of makes you wonder why the official numbers are so far off.

I am broke as a joke, so I won't be buying any high end temperature sensing equipment any time soon :(
 
I took the opprtunity to fill the bird bath knowing there is a hard limit for freezing of 32F. It did not freeze over (too much volume, not enough time below 32F I guess), but unexpectedly dew on the car windshield did. Frozen water test is good for calibrating or testing termometers, so it proves the cheapo termometer can be off by 3-4 degrees maximum.
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Actually you have the clues here but perhaps lack a bit of background? Pure water freezes at sea level at 32F. There's a variety of factors that may be at play here, which you'd have to weed out.

Pressure plays a role. During the cold spell perhaps the atmosphereic pressure was changed in such a way it enabled water to freeze at a slightly higher temperature.

Contaminents can play a role. Even if you 'cleaned' your window the night before you would have dirt or lint on the windsheild. Again perhaps the right combo to bump the freezing up slightly.

And yes amount of water can play a role. Water is densest at about 39 degrees. Microscopically ice crystals can begin forming as the density changes with the drop to 38. If you have a very slight amount of water, windshield vs bird bath, you might possibly find a thin layer of ice.

Another effect possibly at play is supercooled water. Water can remain a liquid down to about 29 degrees. If you have a rain drop or two hit your windshield the energy imparted to the rest of the water may be enough to freeze it instantly. Freezing rain is an example of this.

The other thing that can happen is that colder air is more dense and closer to the ground. If it's a calm night the earth may radiate heat in to the atmosphere as the cold air settles closer to the surface. If one thermometer is in a valley and the other on a hill the will read 2 different temps, and both be correct. This effect leads to conditions that surfaces, car window is a good one, will lose heat quickly and actually be colder than the amosphere.

Any, or all, of these might be possible. If you want to know why, why not call one of the weathermen up and ask? I know our Public Radio Station takes questions for the weatherman whose actual job is working for the University of Minnesota.

Here's a decent read I found (tried to use Google to find this effect)
http://www.wral.com/weather/blogpost/1183613/
 
faethor said:
And the sun was the most active in Dec and now than it was over the last 2 years. So much for the theory that the sun warms the planet. :lol:
Click to expand...

:slingshot: FAIL!
f10.gif

sunspot.gif

the solar peak was 2001-02, The sun has been in a solar minimum for the last 3 yrs!!
and that NASA prediction curve of an upcycle just keeps getting pushed further into the future.

:axe: FAIL!
New measurements from a NASA satellite show a dramatic cooling in the upper atmosphere that correlates with the declining activity of the current solar cycle.
 
faethor said:
Actually you have the clues here but perhaps lack a bit of background? Pure water freezes at sea level at 32F. There's a variety of factors that may be at play here, which you'd have to weed out.
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I'm game. As for sea level, you don't get get much closer to sea level than Fort Lauderdale. My house is approximately 8 feet above sea level iirc. God help South Florida is there was eve a tsunami. I think this qualifies as a reasonably close to sea level.

Pressure plays a role. During the cold spell perhaps the atmosphereic pressure was changed in such a way it enabled water to freeze at a slightly higher temperature.
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Higher in fractions of a degree or multiple degree?

Contaminents can play a role. Even if you 'cleaned' your window the night before you would have dirt or lint on the windsheild. Again perhaps the right combo to bump the freezing up slightly.
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While possible, I doubt it. What road contaminant would raise the freezing point significantly? Keep in mind my house is about ~8 miles from the beach, so we have salt in the air. Not a terribly high amount, but enough that the corrosive effects to metals are evident over time to things like A/C coils.

And yes amount of water can play a role. Water is densest at about 39 degrees. Microscopically ice crystals can begin forming as the density changes with the drop to 38. If you have a very slight amount of water, windshield vs bird bath, you might possibly find a thin layer of ice.
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At 38F?

The other thing that can happen is that colder air is more dense and closer to the ground. If it's a calm night the earth may radiate heat in to the atmosphere as the cold air settles closer to the surface. If one thermometer is in a valley and the other on a hill the will read 2 different temps, and both be correct. This effect leads to conditions that surfaces, car window is a good one, will lose heat quickly and actually be colder than the amosphere.
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Again, one fact that is probably not known unles syou live here is South Florida is completely flat and within 10 feet or so above or below sea level. No natural hills, no valleys.

If you want to know why, why not call one of the weathermen up and ask? I know our Public Radio Station takes questions for the weatherman whose actual job is working for the University of Minnesota.
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I doubt they'd respond down here, but maybe worth a try.

What is the highest you would expect to see freezing at sea level and within 10 miles of the ocean? I'd say 33F is stretching it but am no scientist. I should have tested the bird bath water surface temp with my BBQ food thermometer ;-)
 
You know the weather of a particular place doesn't mean much. Last summer Winnipeg had an unusually cool summer. However places way up North had a much warmer summer. On average the country had a warmer summer even though most populated areas along the southern border with the US felt cooler. And really, the polar areas are the most important areas as temperature fluctuations there are more telling of the global weather trend. So I know you guys are getting a kick out of all this weird weather in Florida, but you can't use it to form an argument about global weather trends as Florida isn't a good indicator.

And as they predict 2 more weeks for Europe's deep freeze, they're predicting well above normal temps for us here in Winnipeg: 14 Day Trend
 
Well, it's kind of an interesting science question, isn't it? We're always taught water freezes at 32F. But certainly, from anecdotal evidence, we often see light glass frost on mornings where proper thermometers report up to almost 40F.

One hypothesis might be that this is caused by temperature variations within wind gusts. Wind is caused by pressure variations in the atmosphere. These pressure variations are caused by temperature variations. The moving air (wind) at low altitudes is actually colder than the ambient temperature. (I'm not talking Wind Chill which is just a made up number, but the actual air inside a wind gust is colder than the air it is moving through.) A particularly cold gust may drop a glass temperature to 32F which will freeze some very small droplets of water on it. The ambient temperature is not high enough to completely melt the droplets that froze, so you end up with "ice" at above 32F ambient.
 
@Redrumloa

Again, one fact that is probably not known unles syou live here is South Florida is completely flat and within 10 feet or so above or below sea level. No natural hills, no valleys.
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Sorry to confuse you with the hill example. It was a larger distance to show how cold air sinks closer to the ground. The same effect can be at work in a few meters. Example -- it can be 38F at 6' where the thermometer is but at 2' off the ground be 32F.

Net -- there's a combination of possibilities here. We just can't assume it was 32F outside as water can freeze under conditions of warmer ambient temps. Being the bird bath didn't show signs of ice I think the explaination from the meterologist I posted as a link has a high enough probability until you completely weed out those factors it should be kept as an option. If your read the link I posted it discusses how water can freeze at an ambient air temp of 38F.

Again living in a cold area I can tell you we do see frost on items when the weather is in the mid to high 30s. It doesn't mean it hit 32F outside. Overall it's an interesting question of how these sorts of events can occur.
 
ilwrath said:
One hypothesis might be that this is caused by temperature variations within wind gusts. Wind is caused by pressure variations in the atmosphere. These pressure variations are caused by temperature variations. The moving air (wind) at low altitudes is actually colder than the ambient temperature. (I'm not talking Wind Chill which is just a made up number, but the actual air inside a wind gust is colder than the air it is moving through.) A particularly cold gust may drop a glass temperature to 32F which will freeze some very small droplets of water on it. The ambient temperature is not high enough to completely melt the droplets that froze, so you end up with "ice" at above 32F ambient.
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Red had Window frost form on the car windshield when the air temperature inside the car dropped to 32 deg (heat loss to radiation) and the windshield was exposed to slightly higher temperature moist air on the outside.

Wind can form frost also when there is a very cold dry wind blowing across a warmer moist air layer above a surface causing evaporative freezing.
 
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