Chinook Winds

http://www.eol.ucar.edu/

Yesterday at NCAR in Boulder, temperatures shot up 15 degrees in a matter of a few minutes. This was due to the arrival of Chinook winds. When the wind blows out of the west, the air compresses as it falls down the Front Range of the Rockies, and heats at the adiabatic lapse rate of 10C per kilometer. This is independent of the amount of GHG (water vapor) in the atmosphere on that day.

There really is not an easy way to explain chinook winds without getting into some pretty technical meteorology, but no discussion of Black Hills weather would be complete without mentioning the chinook. The reason is that the Black Hills of South Dakota are home to the world’s fastest recorded rise in temperature, a record that has held for nearly six decades.
On January 22, 1943, the northern and eastern slopes of the Black Hills were at the western edge of an Arctic airmass and under a temperature inversion. A layer of shallow Arctic air hugged the ground from Spearfish to Rapid City. At about 7:30am MST, the temperature in Spearfish was -4 degrees Fahrenheit. The chinook kicked in, and two minutes later the temperature was 45 degrees above zero. The 49 degree rise in two minutes set a world record that is still on the books. By 9:00am, the temperature had risen to 54 degrees. Suddenly, the chinook died down and the temperature tumbled back to -4 degrees. The 58 degree drop took only 27 minutes.

http://www.blackhillsweather.com/chinook.html

About Tony Heller

Just having fun
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8 Responses to Chinook Winds

  1. LOL in Oregon says:

    No, I think you’re confused.
    It must have been the CO2 spewing from the Gorical that caused the temperature rise.
    He paid (got paid?) his penance (held his breath until he turned blue?) and so the temperature fell back to “normal”.
    (just because he was born in 1948 doesn’t mean he didn’t do it in 1943!)
    LOL in Oregon

  2. Lance says:

    Can we import your chinook to southern alberta and warm us up…

  3. pwl says:

    Having lived in Edmonton for almost a decade during the cold 1970’s and having – for god knows why – visited Calgary on occasion I really question whether the alleged record Chinook they had is really a record.

    This type of rapid rise and fall in temperature, aka Chinook, takes place at Hansen’s favorite isolated temperature station in Eureka up in the Great White North. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/24/inside-the-eureka-weather-station. That must really mess up Hansen’s attempts to statistically fabricate the new world order of temperatures.

  4. Robert Austin says:

    Talk about hot flashes! Gaia must be in menopause.

  5. Luke of the D says:

    Nope, its not silly Canadian thing… clearly this is a result of global wa… climate disr… climate cha… whatever its called now. Clearly only the devil himself (i.e. that evil-evil CO2 devil!) can cause something like this to occur.

  6. DERise says:

    I lived in the Black Hills, 3 miles from a Ski area. Went skiing one day with temps well below freezing. A Chinook came in, the snow was melting away during the drive. Temps made it into the 70s within about an hour. Within 2 hours, the Mountain was almost stripped of snow. That was in the mid 70’s I think.

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