Thursday, December 5, 2019

Sea-Level Rise from Antarctic Ice Shelves Might Be Overestimated, Study Find

Study finds even the tallest ice cliffs should support their own weight rather than collapsing catastrophically.
Read this at MIT News
Antarctica’s ice sheet spans close to twice the area of the contiguous United States, and its land boundary is buttressed by massive, floating ice shelves extending hundreds of miles out over the frigid waters of the Southern Ocean. When these ice shelves collapse into the ocean, they expose towering cliffs of ice along Antarctica’s edge.
Scientists have assumed that ice cliffs taller than 90 meters (about the height of the Statue of Liberty) would rapidly collapse under their own weight, contributing to more than 6 feet of sea-level rise by the end of the century — enough to completely flood Boston and other coastal cities. But now MIT researchers have found that this particular prediction may be overestimated.
In a paper published today in Geophysical Research Letters, the team reports that in order for a 90-meter ice cliff to collapse entirely, the ice shelves supporting the cliff would have to break apart  extremely quickly, within a matter of hours — a rate of ice loss that has not been observed in the modern record.
“Ice shelves are about a kilometer thick, and some are the size of Texas,” says MIT graduate student Fiona Clerc. “To get into catastrophic failures of really tall ice cliffs, you would have to remove these ice shelves within hours, which seems unlikely no matter what the climate-change scenario.”
If a supporting ice shelf were to melt away over a longer period of days or weeks, rather than hours, the researchers found that the remaining ice cliff wouldn’t suddenly crack and collapse under its own weight, but instead would slowly flow out, like a mountain of cold honey that’s been released from a dam.
“The current worst-case scenario of sea-level rise from Antarctica is based on the idea that cliffs higher than 90 meters would fail catastrophically,” Brent Minchew, assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. “We’re saying that scenario, based on cliff failure, is probably not going to play out. That’s something of a silver lining. That said, we have to be careful about breathing a sigh of relief. There are plenty of other ways to get rapid sea-level rise.”
Clerc is the lead author of the new paper, along with Minchew, and Mark Behn of Boston College.
Silly putty-like behavior
In a warming climate, as Antarctica’s ice shelves collapse into the ocean, they expose towering cliffs of grounded ice, or ice over land. Without the buttressing support of ice shelves, scientists have assumed that the continent’s very tall ice cliffs would collapse, calving into the ocean, to expose even taller cliffs further inland, which would themselves fail and collapse, initiating a runaway ice-sheet retreat.  
Today, there are no ice cliffs on Earth that are taller than 90 meters, and scientists assumed this is because cliffs any taller than that would be unable to support their own weight.
Clerc, Minchew, and Behn took on this assumption, wondering whether and under what conditions ice cliffs 90 meters and taller would physically collapse. To answer this, they developed a simple simulation of a rectangular block of ice to represent an idealized ice sheet (ice over land) supported initially by an equally tall ice shelf (ice over water). They ran the simulation forward by shrinking the ice shelf at different rates and seeing how the exposed ice cliff responds over time.
In their simulation, they set the mechanical properties, or behavior of ice, according to Maxwell’s model for viscoelasticity, which describes the way a material can transition from an elastic, rubbery response, to a viscous, honey-like behavior depending on whether it is quickly or slowly loaded. A classic example of viscoelasticity is silly putty: If you leave a ball of silly putty on a table, it slowly slumps into a puddle, like a viscous liquid; if you quickly pull it apart, it tears like an elastic solid.
As it turns out, ice is also a viscoelastic material, and the researchers incorporated Maxwell viscoelasticity into their simulation. They varied the rate at which the buttressing ice shelf was removed, and predicted whether the ice cliff would fracture and collapse like an elastic material or flow like a viscous liquid.
They model the effects of various starting heights, or thicknesses of ice, from 0 to 1,000 meters, along with various timescales of ice shelf collapse. In the end, they found that when a 90-meter cliff is exposed, it will quickly collapse in brittle chunks only if the supporting ice shelf has been removed quickly, over a period of hours. In fact, they found that this behavior holds true for cliffs as tall as 500 meters. If ice shelves are removed over longer periods of days or weeks, ice cliffs as tall as 500 meters will not collapse under their own weight, but instead will slowly slough away, like cold honey.
A realistic picture
The results suggest that the Earth’s tallest ice cliffs are unlikely to collapse catastrophically and trigger a runaway ice sheet retreat. That’s because the fastest rate at which ice shelves are disappearing, at least as documented in the modern record, is on the order of weeks, not hours, as scientists observed in 2002, when they captured satellite imagery of the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf — a chunk of ice as large as Rhode Island that broke away from Antarctica, shattering into thousands of icebergs over the span of two weeks.
“When Larsen B collapsed, that was quite an extreme event that occurred over two weeks, and that is a tiny ice shelf compared to the ones that we would be particularly worried about,” Clerc says. “So our work shows that cliff failure is probably not the mechanism by which we would get a lot of sea level rise in the near future.”
This research is supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation.https://eapsweb.mit.edu/news/2019/antarctic-ice-cliffs-may-not-contribute-sea-level-rise-much-predicted

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

Venice Is On Its Knees': Mayor Blames Worst Flood Tide In 50 Years On Global Warming? Tides, And The Pull Of The Moon And Sun


In most places, but not everywhere, there are two high tides and two low tides a day. The difference in height between high and low tides varies, as the moon waxes and wanes from new to full and back to new again. The moon and sun are primarily responsible for the rising and falling of ocean tides. However, for any particular spot on Earth’s surface, the height of the tides and their fluctuation in time also depend on the shape of your specific beach and the the angle of the seabed leading up to your beach, plus your larger coastline and the prevailing ocean currents and winds.
All of that said – in the day or two following the February 19 supermoon, which happens to be 2019’s biggest supermoon (the full moon closest to perigee this year) – you can expect higher-than-usual tides.
Sun, moons at opposite sides of earth, straight line between objects with stretched ocean.
Around each new moon and full moon – when the sun, Earth, and moon are located more or less on a line in space – the range between high and low tides is greatest. These are the spring tides. Image via physicalgeography.net.
Some background. What are spring tides? Around each new moon and full moon, the sun, Earth, and moon arrange themselves more or less along a line in space. Then the pull on the tides increases, because the gravity of the sun reinforces the moon’s gravity. In fact, the height of the average solar tide is about 50 percent of the average lunar tide.
Thus, at new moon or full moon, the tide’s range is at its maximum. This is the spring tide: the highest (and lowest) tide. Spring tides are not named for the season. This is spring in the sense of jump, burst forth, rise.
So spring tides bring the most extreme high and low tides every month, and they always happen – every month – around full and new moon.
Photo, big full moon.
The 1st full moon of 2018 was also 2018’s closest supermoon. Here it is – at 99.9% illumination – as captured from Karachi, Pakistan, by Talha Zia.
Why does a supermoon cause more extreme tides? When the new moon or full moon closely aligns with perigee – closest point to Earth in the moon’s orbit – then we have a supermoon and extra-large spring tides. Some call these perigean spring tides. But since, in recent years, these close new or full moons have come to be called supermoons, it’s also likely some are already calling them supermoon tides, and we’ve also heard the term king tides.
In 2018, the January 1-2 full moon closely aligned with perigee to bring forth especially high tides. As it happened, on the day after the January 1-2 supermoon, Storm Eleanor hit Europe with winds of up to 100 mph (160 km/h). The wind and extra-high tides caused flooding, hampered travel, injured and killed people, left tens of thousands of homes without power across the U.K., Ireland and other parts of Europe. No doubt the extra-high tides contributed to the severity of the storm. Read more: High tides and winter storms
Why are the tides at their strongest around supermoons? It’s simply because the moon is at its closest to Earth, and thus the Earth’s oceans are feeling the pull of the moon’s gravity most powerfully.
Should you expect these extra-high tides on the exact day of a supermoon? Probably not. The highest tides tend to follow the supermoon (or any full moon) by a day or two.
Do the most extreme high tides – high tides bringing floods – always occur at supermoons? Not necessarily. It’s when a spring tide coincides with a time of heavy winds and rain – flooding due to a weather extreme – that the most extreme flooding occurs.
Full moon poised at top point of tall, shiny glass tower, another all glass building to the side.
Gary Peltz in Seattle, Washington, caught these beautiful sunset reflections and the nearly full moon on December 31, 2017.
What part does the sun play, in early 2019? Not only the moon, but also the sun plays a role in Earth’s tides. You might see that – when Earth is closest to the sun, as it is every early January – the pull on Earth’s tides by the sun is strongest. We reached Earth’s closest point to the sun for 2019 on January 3, at 5:20 UTC. Astronomers call this special point in our orbit perihelion, from the Greek roots peri meaning near and helios meaning sun.
It’s February now, and we’re getting slightly farther from the sun each day. Still, we’re closer to the sun now than we will be in July (when Earth reaches aphelion, its farthest point). The closer-than-usual sun and closer-than-usual full moon in February 2019 will almost surely increase the height of high tides.
Around each first quarter moon and last quarter moon – when the sun and moon are at a right angle to Earth – the range between high and low tides is least. These are the neap tides. Image via physicalgeography.net.
What are neap tides? There’s about a seven-day interval between spring tides and neap tides, when the tide’s range is at its minimum. Neap tides occur halfway between each new and full moon – at the first quarter and last quarter moon phase – when the sun and moon are at right angles as seen from Earth. Then the sun’s gravity is working against the gravity of the moon, as the moon pulls on the sea. Neap tides happen approximately twice a month, once around first quarter moon and once around last quarter moon.
Drawing of Earth with stretched ocean.
Earth has two tidal bulges, one on the side of Earth nearest the moon (where the moon’s gravity pulls hardest), and the other on the side of Earth farthest from the moon (where the moon’s gravity pulls least).
Why are there two high tides and two low tides each day? If the moon is primarily responsible for the tides, why are there two high tides and two low tides each day in most places, for example, the U.S. eastern seaboard? It seems as if there should just be one. If you picture the part of Earth closest to the moon, it’s easy to see that the ocean is drawn toward the moon. That’s because gravity depends in part on how close two objects are.
But then why – on the opposite side of Earth – is there another tidal bulge, in the direction opposite the moon? It seems counterintuitive, until you realize that this second bulge happens at the part of Earth where the moon’s gravity is pulling the least.
Earth spins once every 24 hours. So a given location on Earth will pass “through” both bulges of water each day. Of course, the bulges don’t stay fixed in time. They move at the slow rate of about 13.1 degrees per day – the same rate as the monthly motion of the moon relative to the stars. Other factors, including the shape of coastlines, etc., also influence the time of the tides, which is why people who live near coastlines like to have a good tide almanac.
Bottom line: The sun, the moon, the shape of a beach and larger coastline, the angle of a seabed leading up to land, and the prevailing ocean currents and winds all affect the height of the tides. Expect higher-than-usual tides for a few days following the February 19, 2019, full supermoon.

Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Al Gore Climate Science’s Decade Of Deception

16 Aug 2011 Image result for al gore polar bear population

A recent Rasmussen U.S. poll found that 69 per cent of 1,000 respondents believed it at least “somewhat likely” that climate scientists had falsified their research data to support the case for catastrophic human-caused global warming (CAGW). A full 40 per cent of respondents said falsification of research data was “very likely.” Only 22 per cent were confident that climate scientists wouldn’t falsify data.(2)
This is an astonishing poll result. Is it possible that, in their passion for the CAGW hypothesis, prominent climate scientists would knowingly fudge their data to mislead the public? Surely the 69 per cent in the Rasmussen poll were innocent dupes of what global-warming activists call the “denial industry.”
Unhappily, as I discovered during more than two years of research for my book False Alarm: Global Warming—Facts Versus Fears, the 69 per cent have got it right. Over the past decade alarmist climate scientists—including the top figures in the field—have been deliberately misleading the public on many climate issues. One might even say alarmist climate scientists have developed a culture of deception, a culture that is very clear in the “Climategate” emails.

Blatant dishonesty


Among many deceptions—too many to deal with here—one is particularly blatant. For more than a decade, the public has been bombarded by claims that the planet was not just warming but experiencing “accelerated”, “unequivocal,” “unprecedented” and “dangerous” warming. Yet the actual temperature record shows that during the past decade, on average, there has been little or no warming.
Only recently, faced with a gap between the climate reality  and alarmist theory that was too great to ignore, has official climate science begun to admit the facts to the public.
And so, in June, the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published a peer-reviewed article that began: “Data for global surface temperature indicate little warming between 1998 and 2008. Furthermore, global surface temperature declines 0.2 °C between 2005 and 2008.”(3) (As we will see below, the cooling trend has continued past 2008 despite a warm, El Nino-influenced 2010.)
Early in August, a press release from the British Meteorological Office admitted there had been no warming—the Met delicately called it “a pause in the warming”—in the upper 700 metres of the world’s oceans since, get this, 2003.(4) Yet, for the past eight years, the Met has warned the public about a dangerous heating up of the oceans.
One more example: A recent paper in Science found that 5,000 years ago, at the end of the Holocene Optimum warming, there was 50 per cent less Arctic ice than today.(5) Somehow, the planet and polar bears survived. And yet, official climatology tells the public that today’s Arctic melting is “unprecedented” and that polar bears—despite the largest populations ever recorded—are endangered (for details, click here).

No warming for a more than a decade


What is the climate truth for the past decade and more? Figure 1 shows the temperature data from the four major climate monitoring agencies from 1998, when warming began to slow down, to 2011.(6)
Figure 1: Temperature trend 1998-2011. Source: woodfortrees.org
Only one—the U.S.’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (gistemp)—shows appreciable warming, about 0.175°C for this period. But, then, GISS is known for “adjusting” its temperature data upward to support the extreme warming claims of its director, James Hansen (see GISS: Rewriting history for a better future).
Of the other three, the British Hadley Climate Centre (Hadcrut) shows no average warming at all for 1998-2011; the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) shows a small .05°C of warming; Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) has the planet cooling slightly (about .02°C). Overall: if there is warming, it is slight, and far short of the 0.2°C-0.45°C/decade predicted by the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Decade ends with cooling trend


Furthermore, both GISS and Hadley tip toward cooling as the decade progressed (Figure 2 shows the temperature record from 2005-2011), while UAH and RSS are basically flat. And some climate scientists even predict the cooling could continue for decades (for one cooling prediction, click here).
Figure 2: Temperature trend 2005-2011. Source: woodfortrees.org

Keeping the public scared about warming


But over the decade, while the planet stopped warming and even tipped toward cooling, what did the public hear, usually through the mass media, from the alarmist climate agencies and the IPCC?
The 2007 IPCC report warned: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal as is now evident from increases in global average air and ocean temperatures.”(7) [emphasis added] These increases, the IPCC writers must have known at the time, were not “unequivocal”—by 2007 they were non-existent.
The head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, told an Australian audience in 2008: “We’re at a stage where warming is taking place at a much faster rate [than before].”(8) [emphasis added] Yet, by 2008, surely the director of the IPCC must have known the trend was toward cooling.
Vicky Pope, a spokesperson for the Hadley Centre, said in February 2010, “If anything, the world is warming even more quickly than we had thought.”(9) [emphasis added] However, in November, a mere nine months later, Pope told reporters the complete opposite: “There’s a very clear warming trend but it’s not as rapid as it was before.”(10) [emphasis added]
University of Victoria climate computer modeler Andrew Weaver simply ignores the air and ocean temperature data in telling a Victoria magazine interviewer this summer: “The allegation that annual global mean temperatures stopped increasing during the past decade has no basis in reality.”(11)

Keeping the hypothesis alive

Yet, even though the truth is now being made public, alarmist climate science is still trying desperately to keep the CAGW hypothesis alive. For example, alarmists claim that even if the air and oceans aren’t warming as predicted, the warming is only being “masked,” or  that we are just experiencing a “plateau” or a “pause” in warming—this often at the same time as they have asserted that warming was “accelerating.”
If the warming is “accelerating,” even though there’s no acceleration in the air or temperature record, where is the warming going? Some say warming has migrated to the deeper ocean levels and is just waiting to leap out at us when the “pause” ends. Therefore, they say, we shouldn’t pay too much attention to the non-warming surface and ocean temperature records. In saying this, alarmists want to have their cake and eat it too: they readily cite the air and ocean temperature record when the record shows warming, and want us to ignore it when it doesn’t. That said, so far there is no evidence that the deeper oceans are taking up the excess heat, a lack of evidence that Kevin Trenberth called a “travesty” in one of his Climategate emails.
And the alarmists dismiss out of hand the suggestion, in a paper by Roy Spencer and William Braswell, that the excess heat is simply radiating out to space. This hypothesis makes sense if the atmospheric band that traps carbon dioxide warmth is saturated, which it almost certainly is.

Hiding the truth

By the middle of the last decade, and almost certainly several years earlier, climate scientists like Phil Jones, the head of East Anglia University’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), knew the planet wasn’t warming the way the models said it should. They were then faced with a dilemma: tell the public the truth, with the risk that lay people would lose faith in the CAGW hypothesis; or, to preserve that faith as long as possible, keep this information within the scientific community in hopes the planet would start warming again.
In one of his “Climategate” emails dated July 5, 2005, Jones was quite explicit about his decision to withhold the truth from the public: “The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only seven years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.” This email raises two questions: first, why wouldn’t an ethical scientist reveal that the world had cooled, if that was what the evidence showed? And second, why would other scientists object if that’s what the data showed?
In the same email, Jones wrote: “If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences.” In other words, if climate science could just keep the public in the dark a bit longer—if they could just, in Jones’s signature phrase, “hide the decline” long enough(12)— the climate would surely start to warm again and the CAGW hypothesis would be vindicated.
Of course, it’s not scientifically unethical to prefer a particular hypothesis, even if the empirical evidence isn’t there to support it. Alfred Wegener believed the continents moved, but it wasn’t until the mid-20th century that geological evidence proved him right. It’s possible, in other words, that the catastrophe theorists are correct even though the evidence is currently against them.

A failure of scientific ethics


But here’s the bottom line: It is not ethical—it violates all the principles of scientific honesty—to withhold from the public evidence that doesn’t support the hypothesis to avoid creating “doubt.” We expect some shading of the truth from professions like the law or politics, but scientists have a sacred obligation to report the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
In this vein, GISS’s James Hansen has written, “In order for a democracy to function well, the public needs to be honestly informed.” And, similarly, physicist Richard Feynman, wrote:
You should not fool the layman when you’re talking as a scientist. … I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is … bending over backwards to show how you are maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.(13)
Unfortunately for the credibility of climate science, alarmist scientists did not show that “specific, extra type of integrity” over the past decade.
It would be nice to believe that most—certainly not all!—climate scientists are honest and would not deliberately mislead the public. Perhaps this failure of honesty and integrity occurred because, as biologist Peter Medawar wrote of Teilhard de Chardin, before climate scientists deceived the public, they had taken great pains to deceive themselves. Or perhaps they believed the end justified a dishonest means.
Whatever their reasons, many if not most leading alarmist scientists, like Jones, preferred the approach made notorious by the late Stephen Schneider to get public support: “We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.”(14)
And so, over the decade, alarmist climate scientists tried to fool the public by stonewalling (“it’s the warmest decade on record,” which doesn’t mean the decade was warming), denying the facts (“the allegation that annual global mean temperatures stopped increasing during the past decade has no basis in reality”), or outright lying (“the world is warming even more quickly than we had thought”).

What we now know


It’s difficult for non-scientists to assess the truth or falsehood of scientific claims. However, with enough evidence, we can assess in hindsight whether what we were told was accurate and truthful, or not.
As the Rasmussen poll shows, and particularly thanks to the Climategate emails, a growing majority of the public is now fairly certain that alarmist climate scientists falsified or distorted research data to support the CAGW hypothesis (which they did, e.g., Keith Briffa, from the Climategate emails: “I tried hard to balance the needs of the science and the IPCC, which were not always the same”(15)).
The public can be completely certain that many leading alarmist climate scientists deliberately distorted the facts in communicating with the public over the decade (e.g., “accelerated” warming when there was none). And this failure to be honest with the public about the past decade’s non-warming is only the tip of a very large iceberg of deceptions, including the claim that climate science is “settled” and “certain.”
The climate will eventually warm again—“stable” climate is an alarmist myth—and alarmist climate scientists will no doubt beat their doomsday drums even harder, while continuing to exaggerate the facts in what they tell the public to win support for the CAGW hypothesis. But after a decade of deception, who will believe them in the future? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Sources and Notes

1. James E. Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our last Chance to Save Humanity. New York: Bloomsbury, 2009, p. 112.
2. Rasmussen Reports, “69% Say It’s Likely Scientists Have Falsified Global Warming Research.” August 03, 2011.
3. Robert K. Kaufmann, at al., “Reconciling anthropogenic climate change with observed temperature 19982008.” PNAS, June 2, 2011.
4. “Pause in upper ocean warming explained,” British Meteorological Office, Aug. 4, 2011.
5. Svend Funder, et al., “A 10,000-Year Record of Arctic Ocean Sea-Ice Variability—View from the Beach.” Science, Aug. 5, 2011, pp. 747-750.
6. This data is available though the woodfortrees.org website, which puts the climate temperature data into graph format. NOAA also has a gadget that allows browsers to check temperature trends for the continental United States: the URL is http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/na.html. For 1998-2011, the NOAA site shows major cooling of 0.5°C.
7. IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers, p. 5.
8. Michael Duffy, “Truly inconvenient truths about climate change being ignored.” Sydney Morning Herald, Nov. 8, 2008.
9. Jonathan Leake, “World may not be warming, say scientists.” Times Online, Feb. 14, 2010.
10. Alex Morales, “World May Post Warmest Year as U.K. Met Office Adjusts Past Decade of Data.” Bloomberg, Nov. 26, 2010.
11. Amy Reiswig, “Tunnelling through the Wall of Hate.” Focus, July/August 2011, pp. 34-35.
12. Jones was referring to the cooling shown by tree ring proxies after the 1960s, rather than the surface temperature record. Nonetheless, “hide the decline” is the right term for official climate science over the past decade.
13. Richard P. Feynman, “Cargo cult science: The 1974 Caltech Commencement Address,” in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman. Cambridge, MA: Persius Books, 1999, p. 212.
14. Schneider is quoted in Jonathan Schell, “Our Fragile Earth.” Discover, October, 1989, pp. 45-48. See also Stephen Schneider, “Don’t Bet All Environmental Changes Will Be Beneficial,” APS (American Physical Society) News, August/September 1996, p. 5.
15. Keith Briffa email to Michael Mann, April 29, 2007.

Hey Al Gore You Hear About The Arctic Blast To Bring 'Major Cold Air' To Midwest, Northeast, Setting Up 'Measurable Snow' Chances< Yup! And Al Gore And Friend's Will Blame This All On Global Warming

Image result for global warming alarm

Better make sure to get your warm coat out of the closet, because temperatures are about to drop straight into winter.
The National Weather Service said an arctic-sourced airmass will be sweeping across the eastern two-thirds of the U.S. during the next few days, bringing heavy rain across the southern Plains on Wednesday before moderate and heavy snow is forecast over interior New England by Thursday.
"So this is our first storm system but I have to tell you, we have major cold air coming in Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and that will be a setup for measurable snow perhaps next week along the I-95 corridor," Fox News Senior Meteorologist Janice Dean said on "Fox & Friends." "You have been warned."
The NWS' Weather Prediction Center said light snow is forecast to develop over the Upper Midwest through Wednesday night, bringing the hazard of slippery roads before moving into the Great Lakes.
A storm system is bringing heavy rain across the southern Plains and snow into parts of the Northeast.
A storm system is bringing heavy rain across the southern Plains and snow into parts of the Northeast. (Fox News)
Up to four inches of snow could fall in parts of Wisconsin and Michigan before the system moves into the Northeast by Thursday night into Friday morning. Snow was already falling in Green Bay, Wisc,. on Wednesday morning as Lambeau Field, home of the Green Bay Packers, shared images and video on Twitter of the heavy frozen precipitation coming down.
Parts of interior New England, especially Maine, may see over six inches of snow before the storm moves out Friday night.
Several inches of snow is forecast across parts of the Northeast through Friday night.
Several inches of snow is forecast across parts of the Northeast through Friday night. (Fox News)
"Along the coast, it's going to be too warm for snow," Dean said Wednesday, later adding "So this system is going to bring some measurable snow across some of these areas, but I am concerned with perhaps a system next week that could bring measurable snow along the coast."
Once the cold front and associated storm pass, arctic air will rush in and "dominate much of the eastern two-thirds of the country except Florida and the central High Plains," according to the WPC.
Temperatures are forecast to be more than 20 degrees below normal for large portions of the Midwest, Northeast and Mid-Atlantic.
A major blast of arctic air is forecast to move over the Midwest into the Northeast starting this weekend.
A major blast of arctic air is forecast to move over the Midwest into the Northeast starting this weekend. (Fox News)
"Actual low temperatures are expected to dip into the single digits across the northern Plains by Sunday morning," the WPC said. "The arctic air will also promote the possibility of heavy lake-effect snow over the central Great Lakes by next Tuesday."
The NWS Twin cities that the air mass may bring temperatures to Minnesota that could break records set decades ago, in November 1986.
The cold air in place combined with another possible storm system may bring the chance for measurable snow to the Northeast again next week, but this time for the major cities on the Interstate 95 corridor, according to Dean.
A possible coastal storm may bring snow to the major cities in the Northeast by early next week.
A possible coastal storm may bring snow to the major cities in the Northeast by early next week. (Fox News)
While winter doesn't officially begin until Dec. 21, government forecasters have advised there may be some "large swings" due to volatile weather patterns. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in its winter outlook that warmer-than-average temperatures are forecast for much of the U.S. this winter, with a wetter-than-normal season from December through February across the northern parts of the country.
But forecasters admitted that global climate patterns that typically influence winter weather patterns are weak this year, leading to complicated forecasts.
The Farmers' Almanac, which says it bases its long-range forecast "on a mathematical and astronomical formula developed in 1818," has said "bitterly cold winter conditions" will be in place from areas east of the Rockies all the way to the Appalachians, with the coldest outbreak of the season arriving during the final week of January and lasting through the beginning of February.
The Farmer's Almanac said that this upcoming winter will be "filled with so many ups and downs on the thermometer, it may remind you of a 'Polar Coaster.'"