Tornadoes are not unheard of in Massachusetts, or in the Capital Region. Federal weather records listed on Tornadohistoryproject.com, show that prior to the Springfield tornado, there had been more than 150 recorded tornadoes in the Bay State since 1953, which had killed a total of 90 people.
you can say that some events, like more intense storms from more moisture in the atmosphere, are what we would expect in a changing climate. We are seeing in the Northeast that 100-year storms are no longer 100-year storms. They seem to be 60-year storms.”
For example, the northeastern cities of Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Binghamton, and Burlington all had their wettest Aprils and Mays combined this year, the center reported this week. On the now-flooded Lake Champlain, Burlington had more than 16.5 inches of rain, shattering the old record by almost four inches. In contrast, the middle Atlantic states are getting much less rain than normal.
If you have 3000 cities, and an historical record which now only goes back to 1953, you would expect 60 cities have their wettest Aprils and Mays combined.
Climate change advocacy invariably has a an underlying element of stark raving stupidity. And this new game of ignoring everything prior to 1953 is simply fraudulent.
It used to be global warming. Now it’s every weather event and every weather record of any kind, all the fault of CO2. Hopefully, people aren’t stupid enough to buy the reconstituted snake oil they are trying to sell.
now they are trying to call it weather weirding
and just as fraudulent to call them 100 year anythings……
Like there’s some kind of clock
There is no such thing as a 100 year weather event……
Just wondering how you’d calculate this:
Taking 58 years from 1953 to 2011 – assuming a 1 in 58 chance of this April/May being the wettest for any given city. Now times by 3000 cities:
So 1/58 * 3000 = 52 cities likely to have their wettest April/May this year.
Is this correct or have I missed a trick?
Yes, that is more precise. I was rounding to a 50 year long database.
(NB I have only the foggiest grasp of statistics, really)
What is the formula for an arbitrary two month period out of those 58 years? I could manage to extrapolate for fixed sextiles of years to 1/(58*6) *3000 = (okay, I’m mildly intoxicated, but that reduces to 1/29 * 250, or slightly fewer than 10. I should really open /usr/local/bin/xcalc, but I’m too lazy) but that doesn’t take into account the overlapping nature of the beast (am I overthinking this?), but we’ve had 700 discrete two month periods since Jan 1953, which would give us 1/700 * 3000 = 4.3 or so.
But is that right? I know I shouldn’t drink & math.
It doesn’t make any difference what the length of period being compared is, as long as it is precisely constrained – like April/May.
We might recall that our friend Katherine Heyhoe stated :-
“An upsurge in heavy rainstorms in the United States has coincided with prolonged drought, sometimes in the same location, she said, noting that west Texas has seen a record-length dry period over the last five years, even as there have been two 100-year rain events.”
According to USHCN records there have been 13 rain events in West Texas of the same magnitude or greater between 1930 and 2009.
Perhaps we should club together and buy her a new calculator.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/broker?id=418201&_PROGRAM=prog.gplot_clim_jd2009.sas&_SERVICE=default¶m=PRCP&minyear=++++++++1930&maxyear=++++++++2009