Rutgers University snow cover plotted by season with, mean and +/- two standard deviations. All on the same scale.
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/table_area.php?ui_set=1
Rutgers University snow cover plotted by season with, mean and +/- two standard deviations. All on the same scale.
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/table_area.php?ui_set=1
Yes, very good. Now plot a mathematically precise linear trend from 50 down to 6 over the same time period (i.e. declining by 1 per year). The mean is 28, and the standard deviation is 13.13393, meaning that every value falls within 2 s.d. of the mean despite a perfect linear correlation and an almost total loss of snow cover.
Naively looking at standard deviations is simply not the right way to determine whether there is a trend or not.
There is a lot more information in the graphs than just the standard deviations.
With a know variation over longer periods of time throws your claims of a significant trend out the window. Any time shorter than a known oscillation in a specific region or combination of oscillations for a larger region such as the Northern Hemisphere is just long term weather patterns.
If you wanted to discuss trends in Boston You would want to consider the AMO, AO, MOC, and throw in a slight influence of the PDO. When you determine the recurrence interval of specific interaction patterns and have observations over a number of “Cycles” (10 to 20 thousand years might do) Then you might find a significant trend.
Long term records show the trend is cooling towards the next Glacial Maximum in about 60 to 80 thousand years!
Of course Peter knows all this full well.
Here Peter, see if this is more to your liking.
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=98hy12&s=7
No sign of spring in the Baltic yet.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2011/03/year-of-icebreaker.html
That is because of Global Warming!!!!
If people have to look thru a magnifying glass and try to imagine a trend, this hardly seems like a looming catrastrophe.
lol, well Peter doesn’t like it like this, but it works for me. I’m perfectly happy with snow decline in the summer, so, we can graph it in any manner they wish.
Peter, perhaps, prefers this graph…..
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_seasonal.php?ui_set=nhland&ui_season=2
However, it should be pointed out, if one were to graph the last twenty years…….. well, we’d have a significantly different trend line.
Andy:
If you take the highest measure of the Winter and “Trend” to the lowest measure of the Summer it is an obvious catastrophe! At the current rate of melt acceleration there will be no snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere in only a couple of years. The melt rate will accelerate faster than it did last Fall so it is worse that was predicted.