by "Audistein" (Audistein)
Published 06/20/2017 at 23:45
by "Audistein" (Audistein)
Published 06/20/2017 at 23:45
Tags: Weather
; Phoenix
; Front Page
; Jalopnik
; Arizona
; Climate Change
STARS: 0
So I know this is more just Front Page-related that car-related, but I sort of fell into a bit of a wormhole on weather data in Phoenix, AZ after seeing the article on Jalopnik and I wanted to share some of what I found.
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Lets start with the question: Is it normal for it to be 119°F in Phoenix? In a word, no. While it may get even hotter than that out in the desert, the fact is 119 is the fourth highest temperature ever recorded in Phoenix. Now, to preface the following averages, I was looking at the last 20 years of data, so 1997 to 2017. The average temperature for the entire month of June in Phoenix is a balmy 91.7 degrees. Of course that doesn’t tell the whole story because it includes the temperate a night and spikes during the day and averages it all out. Now, the average daily high for the month of June is a toasty 104.5°. That may seem hot to most of us, but a 119 degree day is not only one of the hottest on record, it’s also 15 degrees hotter than the average high temp for a day in Phoenix in June. So this was nearly a record-setting day and is certainly way above average.
But what about very hot days in general, how uncommon are they? Well, there are two answers to the question and they depend on whether you mean historically or recently. Of all the years between 1895 and 2017, in thirty-three of those years has a temperature greater than 115°F been recorded. This suggests that about one in every four years the temperature exceeds that, and usually then for only one day. Again, this statistic would mean a day over 115 is quite uncommon occurance, especially considering that most days in June or July it doesn’t pass 105.
However, 15 of those years on record with these high temps were between 1987 and now. This means that in the last 30 years, half have seen the temperature exceed 115° at least once. Moreover, 8 of the last 10 years have seen temperatures reach that high, including every year since 2011. So while it is not normal for any one day to be that hot in Phoenix, it is increasingly common.
Looking more into it, in most years with a recorded temperature that high, it is usually only on one day. Years with two or more days recording over 115° include 1989, 1990, 1994, 1995, 1998, 2003, 2006, 2011, 2013, 2016, and 2017. Meanwhile, there are only 3 years with more than one day over that temp in the near 100 years of records before that.
Also incase you were wondering, the hottest day on record was June 26 1990 at a scalding 122°F.
Also this is almost unrelated, but someone also asked the hottest nights (the max lowest temp for any given 24 hour period) in Phoenix, so I dug info up on that as well. From my comment:
So it seems like average maximum low temperature taking every year from 2000-2017 is 93. So basically the lowest temp recorded on the hottest night of each year from 2000-2017 averages to 93. The hottest low on record was July 15, 2003 and the lowest temp for that day was 96°F! There isn’t any record from 1900-2017 of the overnight low ever being over 100 degrees.
Now I’m sure it’s maybe hotter or colder than that out in dessert or at an some random air force base or something, but this is just in Phoenix we’re talking here.
Now more interstingly, when you factor in historical data, it does paint a picture of very hot nights being increasingly more common and hotter than ever. The average hottest low temp per year from 1900 to 1999 is only 87 degrees, so 6 degrees cooler than the average for the hottest nights in the last 17 years! A year with a nightly low over 90° used to come around only once per decade for most of the 20th century, but now its done that every year since 1991. What was once an extreme oddity, a night where it never drops below 90° in Phoenix, is now something that happens up to several times every year.
I don’t know if any of you found this as interesting as I did, but I’m still playing with the weather data. Usually with climate science its hard to see change in maximum and minimum temperature data because it can be all over the place, so I guess it can be interesting to be able to identify trends in anything but slowly moving averages. I’m sure a full statistical analysis could be done on the hottest days and hottest nights in Phoenix, but I’ve already spent enough time just casually perusing the data. Since I picked a specific cutoff for my “very hot day” criteria, that method of selection isn’t entirely statistically sound. If someone is insistent on analyzing hottest days by year, what would be better is if the yearly max temps were placed on a bell curve (just glancing at the data I’m sure it’s some multiple of a standard deviation) and the deviations of more recent years were compared to every historical hottest day. I’m not going to take the time to do that...also the raw data from the source I was using isn’t downloadable as an excel spreadsheet.
Full disclaimer, I suppose I’m not technically a scientist and I’m definitely not a climate scientist. It’s safe to say I knew what I was doing and I knew what I wasn’t doing though.
Here’s the source for everything: http://w2.weather.gov/climate/xmacis.php?wfo=psr
And here’s some very, very hot Lamborghini exhaust flames:
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"Nibbles" (nibbles)
06/21/2017 at 00:10, STARS: 1
It was 96 in Denver today. 96. In Denver. In June.
I moved here from NM to get away from the heat. Boy is there egg on my face
"Wacko" (wacko--)
06/21/2017 at 00:25, STARS: 0
It was about 60 here in northern Quebec.
"ttyymmnn" (ttyymmnn)
06/21/2017 at 00:29, STARS: 2
So, here’s a question, and before I ask it, let me say that I firmly believe that human activity is fucking up the climate, and, even if it isn’t, we’d be fools not to at least try to do something about it.
We all know that the Earth has been around for a very, very long time (about 4.5 billion years, unless you’re a hardcore creationist, in which case the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, but I digress). In any event, we all remember the exercise in grade school where the teacher held out a yard stick and said that, if this were the entire history of the Earth, humanity would take up something like an 8th of an inch of it, if that much. So, when we talk about weather records, we’re talking about records that have been kept for about 150 years out of a Geological Era that is 66 million years old (the Cenozoic Era). How can we be certain that large temperature fluctuations like these didn’t happen, say, 5,000 years ago? How can we be certain that that this is, in fact, global warming and not a peak in a cycle that is many thousand years long?
This all sounds like a fantastic argument for a climate skeptic, and believe me, I’m not one. But it is a question that I would like to have answered by a proper scientist, or at least someone who is smarter about these things than I am.
"Highlander-Datsuns are Forever" (jamesbowland)
06/21/2017 at 00:29, STARS: 0
I went to Phoenix once for three days in June of 98. I hated every minute. 107 high and 85 low. Was hot 24/7. I was so glad to get back to the air pollution in San Bernardino.
"Dusty Ventures" (dustyventures)
06/21/2017 at 00:50, STARS: 4
There’s actually a number of ways that people can figure out climate data from thousands and even millions of years ago. I’m not a true expert on this, but the methods I know of include animal migration, the types of plants that were prevalent (and where they spread), water levels, glacial levels, and ocean salinity (which can be figured out based on the types of sealife that were thriving). As for this being just a standard temperature fluctuation,
this XKCD graphic,
which shows trends over the last 20,000 years, shows just how abnormally rapid the temperature change we’re experiencing now is. Basically the scale of the temperature shift we’ve seen over the past century usually takes at least 1,000 years.
"SilentButNotReallyDeadly...killed by G/O Media" (silentbutnotreallydeadly)
06/21/2017 at 01:02, STARS: 3
Examples include: Ice cores from Antarctica, Greenland and Patagonia have been handy for checking out the compositional mix of the air over time; Sediment cores from lakes in the tundra and the taiga and many other places have been used to determine pollen mix of the surrounding vegetation which implies the ecological setting and therefore likely prevailing climate based on current vegetation’s ecological preferences; Growth rings and isotopic analysis of cave formations which implies prevailing rainfall (and therefore climate)....plenty more as well. And they all add up.
Climate variation is a natural part of the picture but the big difference with this one is the prevailing rate of change (faster) and the scale (some indicators of which are now greater than in any time since the human species first arose). The planet will be fine but for the ecology and the people in it...it’s an undiscovered country and the outlook is foggy. I take heart from the fact that after some fog we usually get sunshine.
"Shoop" (shoopdawoop993)
06/21/2017 at 01:20, STARS: 0
Why would live in Phoenix willingly is the question
"190octane" (admiralcb)
06/21/2017 at 01:53, STARS: 1
http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/vef/climate/LasVegasClimateBook/JulyTempRecords.pdf
I was in Vegas on the 17th, 18th, and 19th in ‘05 when it was 117 and there are 3 things I remember.
1. Walking from my car to the Sam’s club the heat radiating off the black top made me feel like I was melting.
2. Picking my car up out of valet and burning the shit out of my hand on the chrome knob shifter in my IS300.
3. The reading inside the parking structure at McCarran on my IS300's thermometer was 122 and that thing was normally pretty damn accurate.
"415s30 W123TSXWaggoIIIIIIo ( •_•))°)" (415s30)
06/21/2017 at 01:57, STARS: 3
Well based on all the data we are due for a shift, the Vikings sailed the north seas with considerably less ice. But hoomans are doing a great deal, whatever the shift, we will effect it. I started as an archeology major of all things at Penn State. Like Dusty says, there are many ways to measure the climate of the past, layers with huge amounts of vegetation point to a tropical climate etc... all kinds of ways, even what people ate and farmed, seeds we find that they stored. So many ways. Science is not a liberal conspiracy!! It’s a fact finding mission that can change with new data. I have no time for people who won’t take the best known route to the truth.
"Audistein" (Audistein)
06/21/2017 at 05:51, STARS: 2
The “short” answer? Some ways of looking at historical temperatures include ice boreholes in rock, ice cores, mineral deposits in caves, coral reefs and coral fossils, fauna (so animal bones and fossils), fire history (charcoal in sediment among other things), trace gasses and aerosols in the atmosphere, historical anecdotes and artifacts from humans going back thousands of years, insects and their fossils, lake and bog sediment, estimates of lake water levels based on many factors, Loess and Eolian dust, paleo oceanography (which in itself is a massive, massive field), plant microfossils, pollen in lake sediment and rock samples, tree rings, and of course finally paleo computer modeling and climate reconstructions. That list is nowhere near comprehensive. And on top of that people in all these fields are all working together to determine temperatures in the past.
What you’re describing is an entire field of research which some call “paleoclimatology”. There are many ways to determine temperatures in the past and
Here’s the NOAA overview of the field, though there are many resources availble on this subject all over the world. https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/paleoclimatology-data
Additionally, the NOAA has an excellent breakdown of 18 different ways in which scientists estimate temperatures from the past. These 18 are just a sample of the work done by climatologists who work in this field.
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/paleoclimatology-data/datasets
If you click on the tiles there are concise, if not perhaps too abbreviated descriptions of the methods of data collection presented there. That’s where I got the list above.
What’s amazing is they even let you search through this data and find studies. For example, there are over 1000 papers in their database just on rock boreholes, and that’s only what was directly published by the NOAA, which is a fraction of the journals actually working on rock boreholes especially if you consider all university funded journals, and then all of the scientists in other countries on top of that. And even then thats just rock boreholes, there are people working on all the other fields as well.
Data collected from different sources is also constantly being analyzed and compared by scientists and students who don’t work in the field. We’re talking about tons of data being collected and lots of people all collecting, publishing, and comparing data.
I would suggest that if any of those data collection methods interest you (like ice cores, Loess dust layers, or plant microfossils etc.), just google them and read a little on wikipedia or something about them. Even hop over to google scholar if you’re up to it to see some scientific literature.
"Lokiparts" (lokiparts)
06/21/2017 at 08:57, STARS: 0
As someone who will be heading there for a conference the first week of August, thanks for this. I think I’ll just go ahead and light myself on fire now and get it over with.
Although I will say I’m glad I booked my hotel back in January because I was able to get a room in the hotel across the street from the conference location. I do not envy anyone who had to find a place more than a block or two away because they are not authorizing rental cars for this trip.
Last year the conference was in DC in August and I had to walk a little over a mile to the conference location. That was bad enough in high 80's low 90's (with swamp-like humidity) But there was no way I was doing that in Phoenix.
"TahoeSTi" (tahoesti)
06/21/2017 at 10:11, STARS: 0
Human development in the area is responsible. Graph the development of Phoniex with the heat and then look at the data.
When people blame things on global warming with out looking at the entire data set and regional developments they are doing more harm to science then the global warming deniers.
The better Stance is Global homeostasis. We should build tech to maintain our current environment so we can protect against warming and cooling, and suffocation.
"TahoeSTi" (tahoesti)
06/21/2017 at 10:15, STARS: 0
80 in the sierra nevadas....but we dont have near the development you have in denver. Go down the hill a bit to Reno at it’s 100 but it’s also almost all pavement.
"wiffleballtony" (wiffleballtony)
06/21/2017 at 14:48, STARS: 0
As a Phoenix metro area resident since 2001, hitting close to 120 usually happened sometime during the summer isn’t uncommon. However usually June is relatively mild. Also I’ve noticed a lot less storm activity during the summer.