Slashdot Mirror

KPHX Average Temperatures

June 2012
Avg Max: 106F
Avg Mean: 94F

June 2013
Avg Max: 108F
Avg Mean: 95F

July 2012
Avg Max: 105F
Avg Mean: 94F

July 2013
Avg Max: 106F
Avg Mean: 96F

Source: http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KPHX/2012/7/1/MonthlyHistory.html/

Apparently your electricity bill is not a good indicator of the weather.

Yes
Yes
Yes

It is a port town. That means it is next to (both vertically and horizontally) the ocean. It would be a pretty crappy port if it was not next to the ocean. When you live within a couple feet of the normal high tide position and you are looking at a storm surge of a couple feet, the results are pretty predictable.

They then went and dug these handy tunnels all over the city that are... below the city.

Pretty much the only terrorist groups I can think of that avoid civilian casualties are the anti-corporate flavor (Weather Underground).

Wow, these folks do look pretty serious...

There’s a short documentary film about this new (old) Death Valley record called Dead Heat: Overturning the World’s Hottest Temperature , from Wunderground in association with Mitchell Film Company.

There’s a short documentary film about this new (old) Death Valley record called Dead Heat: Overturning the World’s Hottest Temperature , from Wunderground in association with Mitchell Film Company.

It's never been about doomsday for the whole planet. It's about poverty, war, and general misery for billions. But Slashdot Libertarians are still stuck in their echo chamber where anything less than a massive asteroid strike is preferably to a tax increase. Didn't you know that the suffering of poor people is really just a plot to take away your money?

Some new arid areas are expected to appear in the south of N. America, South Africa and Mediterranean countries. Overall, hardly a doomsday scenario.

Oh, just some "new arid areas". No big deal. If you have no idea what the fuck you are talking about. Maybe you should read a bit about the massive drought that hit Texas last year. Or the many, many wildfires due to our entire state being a tinderbox. August in Houston was extra fun, with 29 out of 31 days reaching highs over 100 degrees F, with all-time highs of 109 F being reached on four separate days. Maybe you'd rather see some pictures, if that's your thing -- look, I Googled it for you! You know it's bad when people are hoping for a hurricane to bring drought relief.

Let me make this simple for you: no water = no agriculture, no cities, few people, lots of fires. Texas has 25 million people. That's a lot of misery you can spread around. A lot of potential refugees moving to your neighborhoods. But clearly letting my state be destroyed is preferable to allowing TEH EVIL (nonexistent) MARXISTS enact their EVIL (nonexistent) SOCIALIST AGENDA! (Which everyone in the world except Slashdot Libertarians is in on, of course.) Those evil socialists just hate the obvious solution of having billions of people and most of our agriculture pack up and move. But not Slashdot Libertarians! In addition to being IT administrators, they're *also* the worldwide experts in the economics of relocating entire populations, and can tell you with 100% certainty that it's super-cheap and mostly painless as long as we let the free market work its magic! Unlike carbon taxes which will instantly destroy the world economy! Because Cambodia!

(I really heard someone here compare fighting climate change to Cambodian communism once. Incidentally, Cambodian communism was all about forcibly relocating large populations, but if you want to be a good Slashdot Libertarian, you don't sweat the details.)

We don't know how to solve such problems.

This is a lie. We DO know how to solve such problems for the same reason we know how to predict such problems- we do science.

The only part of this problem we don't know how to solve is the denier part.

The extent we can do with our current political technology is to become increasingly centralized to implement and enforce consistent policies. Which is a much bigger nightmare than global warming

This is a distressingly ignorant statement . We, the nations of the world, acted in a coordinated fashion to turn back the VERY highly lethal threat of CFC's which were putting a hole in the ozone.

Partially because we averted this disaster people don't know how serious it was. If left unchecked - which is what industry and today's climate change deniers like Fred Singer:

http://www.wunderground.com/resources/climate/ozone_skeptics.asp

counseled humanity to do, the the hole in the ozone would have let enough high energy emissions through in the 40-290 nm spectrum to literally disassemble the DNA - which absorbs at 280nm - and proteins - which absorb at 260nm.

Maybe we could have adapted.

The fact that we did this and are continuing to do it means we can act in a coordinated and intelligent way if policies are guided by scientific facts.

Water shortages aren't making headlines

where you live. Just because you are not aware of something does not mean it's not happening. Just saying.

BTW, a drought is something like a water shortage, ain't it?

From Dr. Jeff Masters blog at wunderground.com:
April 5, 2012 - "Expect one of the quietest Atlantic hurricane seasons since 1995 this year, say the hurricane forecasting team of Dr. Phil Klotzbach and Dr. Bill Gray of Colorado State University (CSU) in their latest seasonal forecast issued April 4. They call for an Atlantic hurricane season with below-average activity"

I don't know where you live - but here on Planet Earth, nobody rational calls a storm with 100mph winds and an 11 foot storm surge, "weak". Not to mention, this storm was considerably more severe than is "normal" for that area.

I heard 90MPH gusts...and most of those readings were higher off than ground level....which when you get to the 20th floor of a building..the winds are MUCH higher than on the ground.

Aside from some high gusts..sustained winds from what I saw last night....were only in the 50-60 mph range.

I saw reporters out on the streets whose windbreakers apparently had no wind to break.

As for where I live...I live in the New Orleans area...I've been through more than my share of storms on the level of intensity that NYC got, and I do know what they are like.

Sure it causes damage....but it isn't that bad. The sustained winds weren't that bad, it didn't stay and dump a horrible amount of rain (I've seen a foot of water in a hour, I don't think they get that much did they?).

And...like I mentioned, that area better get used to these storms happening more regularly. They've gotten lulled into complacency due to the cycle being in the low side, but it appears that it is about to start kicking up again. Decades ago, that area did get landfall storms like this with more regularity. NYC has a doomsday scenario, just like NOLA does...it didn't happen last night, but it could.

People need to understand that and prepare for that. And realize...this wasn't THAT bad of a storm.

11 ft is a good storm surge...but not catastrophic, and not unheard of for a weak Cat 1 storm.

At least you didn't beat the recent record of 27.8 ft and have a whole city pretty much removed from the map.

Again...these things come in cycles...that area had better start preparing for a "new" normal.

Until a few years ago, tornadoes were a rare event in New York City, something that happened once in a while and made big news.

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/images-frequency-make-nyc-twisters-notable-17195890 :

"Most people wouldn't say New York and tornado in the same breath.

But two twisters that touched down in the nation's biggest city on Saturday are the latest of about 60 small tornadoes that have hit the area in the past half-century, the years for which complete data are available. Saturday's pair brings to 10 the total number of tornadoes since 2007 in New York City, according to the National Weather Service.

To some, the tornadoes of the past few years might appear to be an uptick in the trend. Not so fast, said meteorologist David Stark of the weather service.

"In the past five years, there's been a slight increase in the number of tornadoes in the area, but it's too short a period of time to say it's a growing trend," said Stark."

http://www.wunderground.com/climate/extreme.asp :

"We currently do not know how tornadoes and severe thunderstorms may be changing due to changes in the climate, nor is there hope that we will be able to do so in the foreseeable future. Preliminary research using climate models suggests that we may see an increase in the number of severe storms capable of producing tornadoes late this century. However, this research is just beginning, and much more study is needed to confirm these findings. The lack of an increase in violent EF4 and EF5 tornadoes in recent decades implies that climate change has not yet increased tornado activity."

But seriously, California is a "hotbed" for ONE single reason: The weather is nice pretty much all year long. Anyone who lives there and tries to sell you on something else is lying to themselves.

Bull! SOUTHERN California has nice weather*... Northern California (where Silicon Valley is actually located) can easily rival Brittan for cold and rain and fog.

In the same way Brittan benefits from Atlantic currents, warming it up to livable temperatures, while being at the same latitude as Canada... Northern California gets the cold Pacific currents, coming down from the Arctic, making for cold weather even in summer, and a comfy and hospitable home for great white sharks.

Hell, this week's forecast temperatures for London and San Fran are practically IDENTICAL:

http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/hdfForecast?query=San+Francisco,CA

http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/hdfForecast?query=London,England

If you want wonderful weather, take Florida, where it never gets down to freezing... Or ANYWHERE in the tropics. They sure don't have their own silicon valleys, despite the superior weather.

But seriously, California is a "hotbed" for ONE single reason: The weather is nice pretty much all year long. Anyone who lives there and tries to sell you on something else is lying to themselves.

Bull! SOUTHERN California has nice weather*... Northern California (where Silicon Valley is actually located) can easily rival Brittan for cold and rain and fog.

In the same way Brittan benefits from Atlantic currents, warming it up to livable temperatures, while being at the same latitude as Canada... Northern California gets the cold Pacific currents, coming down from the Arctic, making for cold weather even in summer, and a comfy and hospitable home for great white sharks.

Hell, this week's forecast temperatures for London and San Fran are practically IDENTICAL:

http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/hdfForecast?query=San+Francisco,CA

http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/hdfForecast?query=London,England

If you want wonderful weather, take Florida, where it never gets down to freezing... Or ANYWHERE in the tropics. They sure don't have their own silicon valleys, despite the superior weather.

Oh I sure hope these little robots don't make fun flights like these unnecessary!

I'm a big fan of wunderground's Wundermap.

I don't think you either read or understood Hansen's paper. The argument isn't that these events are individually impossible to occur. They all fall within the bounds of possibility for the baseline climate of 1951-1980. The argument put forward in the paper is that together they are each "once in a century" events, which means we should not get 3 of them in less than a single decade. The reason we do get them is because global warming is "weighting the dice", changing the probability distribution so that once in a century hot events occur once a decade on average, and once in century cold events occur once in a millennia. That's a rough description of the paper, you really should read the original.

In short, the claim about Russia is false. The claim about the European summer of 2003 is also debunked. (I am not familiar with Texas.)

Sorry, but the evidence you cited doesn't actually conflict with Hansen's paper. Each of the papers claim the events were "low predictability" events. Additionally, there's new research which contradicts the papers you cited that you cited, and points towards Arctic sea ice loss (driven by global warming) as the reason for the "low predictability" of those events.

And why does Hansen not mention extreme cold recently in Alaska?—is that also due to global warming?

Actually, it is. The same block pattern that's been keeping warm air (and record high temperatures) over much of the U.S. is keeping cold air (and cold temperatures) over Alaska. The ice loss appears to have weakened the air currents that would normally break up the blocking patterns.

Bad weather has always existed.

Indeed it has, however, Hansen's paper says the bad weather is biased hot now. It's like taking a 6 sided die, and changing the 1 to a 7. You won't get the same results you used to get.

Karlsruhe, germany

Normal for July 3rd Max 72F Min 53F

Houston, Texas

Normal Max 93F Min 73F

Now here is a place where it's normal not to have AC.
Buffalo, NY

Normal Max 79F Min 61F

Karlsruhe, germany

Normal for July 3rd Max 72F Min 53F

Houston, Texas

Normal Max 93F Min 73F

Now here is a place where it's normal not to have AC.
Buffalo, NY

Normal Max 79F Min 61F

Karlsruhe, germany

Normal for July 3rd Max 72F Min 53F

Houston, Texas

Normal Max 93F Min 73F

Now here is a place where it's normal not to have AC.
Buffalo, NY

Normal Max 79F Min 61F

Where in Europe, if I may ask?

While I was in eastern France, Italy and even Germany, I saw plenty of power lines on poles in rural areas, so I doubt this is an American problem.England, less so, but mostly because I never left London.

For instance, storms last year brought down a lot of trees in northern France that caused massive power outages as well.

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/weatherhistorian/comment.html?entrynum=54

I think this is less a case of "dilapidated infrastructure" and more a case of EURO vs USA put downs. I should point out that I've never seen a news report here in the US blaming European incompetence when a storm knocks out power.

We have the good sense to blame the storm. A storm in this particular situation was way under-estimated.

You're right about the heat island, but you're still overstating it quite a bit. 110 is not the typical high during the summer, and 100 is not the typical low, not even last year. The highest it got last year was 114, and the average high temp June-August was 106. The average low temp was 83. I'm not positive, but I think the NOAA station is at SkyHarbor which would be pretty accurate for temperatures downtown.

Check it yourself.

If it were "proof" the poster (me) would not have said "it just presents the data." Not including "contiguous" or "continental" in the summary was an unfortunate oversight on my part, but it's very clear in the article (just count the number of times it says "contiguous" or look at the big map in Figure 3). Nonetheless, I suspect that people in the continental U.S. would find it interesting that the past year has been the warmest ever recorded overall.

There is an article that is global by the same author, but it is several months old (hence why I didn't post it as "news"). Also, it draws more conclusions, though at he indicates his sources, provides reasoning, and presents opposing viewpoints.

It is interesting to note that the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide may have been as much as 20 times higher as it is today at points in Earth's geologic past. Of course, you wouldn't want to live there :)

Sometimes people compare today's warming with the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum.

Looking at a weather page for Boston it agrees with the windmap. Are you sure you know which way a westerly wind blows?

More amazing anomalies here.

And yet last year saw some of the coldest temperatures we've had in a very long time. But I didn't see people screaming OMG GLOBAL FREEZING!!1!!1! back then.

Several years ago, when the changes were starting to get wide attention, people realized that it was extreme weather on both ends and changed the description from "warming" to "climate change". We've had several unusual winters, it's obvious that the phenomenon is not limited to higher temperatures.

And last year I do remember news stories on the unusual winter where people questioned if the global climate change was responsible.

The root of the problem is that global average temperatures are increasing, but since that also contributes to unusual cold snaps then it doesn't help the discussion to call it global warming if every idiot who gets cold uses that as evidence that global warming is not happening. Extreme weather changes on both ends are both symptoms of global warming. You only need to look at a graph of global average temperature over a long period to figure out that it is currently spiking.

A leading meteorologist disagrees with you: http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2022

My best chance to see a perfectly dark sky came about 8 years ago. (I'm in Cleveland) The sky was pretty clear and ALL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003/ the lights were out, but around 9:46pm an almost full moon rose and ruined the whole thing... http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KBKL/2003/8/13/DailyHistory.html?req_city=Cleveland&req_state=OH&req_statename=Ohio/

Well, I'll admit to being something of an interface Luddite -- most of my favorite web sites looked better, IMO, 10+ years ago. If we could have 20th-century interface simplicity with 21st-century connectivity, I'd be a happy camper. I have no idea if this is a majority opinion or not.

If the majority of users of a site I frequent prefer a new interface, as long as the content's good, I'll generally go along with it. What bugs me, like I said, is the combination of change-for-change's-sake with the patronizing way such changes are usually presented, including vague claims of "users love our new interface" when it's obvious that user preference runs strongly against it. Three of my favorite sites (Slashdot, Salon.com, and Weather Underground -- at least http://classic.wunderground.com/ is still available in the last instance) have done this fairly recently, so I'm kind of twitchy about it.

It was a Nature article. The Weather Underground has a thoughtful discussion.

You mean aside from their many-times-a-day global photographs of the weather of the world, available on almost any weather site?

For example: http://classic.wunderground.com/tropical/ and scroll down to the latest atlantic still photograph. If you wait too long, BTW, you'll get infrared by default -- you only get clouds per se during daylight so that you can see them.

Or then, there are the many military satellites that can take amazingly high resolution pictures of the surface almost anywhere, to the point where sunbathing nude in your back yard is a chancy proposition if you really don't want anybody to see your ass...

There are, however, ways for even amateurs to get a camera "into space". The traditional one is to buy a weather balloon and use it to haul your camera to 20+ miles, at which point the earth looks pretty much like "earth from space" -- black sky, curvature, clouds. There are some lovely pictures that have been taken this way if you google for them.

rgb

Mod this up. I have a link below to Jeff Master's blog, too, in which he clearly states that winds of 90 MPH were measured at the Cedar Island Ferry terminal (NC Outer Banks). If you want the actual blog entry:

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=1906

If this Cliff Mass guy is incapable of doing basic research, perhaps his opinions shouldn't be taken very seriously.

One link that I read religiously when there's a storm: http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/show.html

Masters used to fly with the Hurricane Hunters, and his blog is one of the best. Go back and look over his assessment of the storm. Jeff was *never* that worried about the wind, and he explains what apparently has the news media baffled: Irene began an eyewall replacement cycle just before hitting NC, and never recovered.

When an eyewall replacement begins, the storm typically expands. In this case, it meant that Irene had a *HUGE* field of tropical storm-force winds, but only a small pocket of hurricane-force winds on the east side of the storm. Yes, it was a hurricane; just because dood can't find any buoys that support that doesn't mean that it isn't so. The hurricane hunters measured winds > 74 MPH, so it was a hurricane. The fact that winds > 74 MPH weren't recorded as having much land impact has nothing to do with the classification of the storm.

Now, I think the NHC kept the "hurricane" classification a bit longer than was justified, but they possibly did that because they KNOW that most people (especially the news media) focus on winds, instead of the REAL danger from a hurricane: flooding. Even if Irene had completely dissipated to little more than a weak tropical depression by the time it hit New Jersey, you'd still have major damage, power outages and loss of life just from the flooding.

The news media has NEVER understood that. They will invariably put some moron out in the wind with a camera, hoping to get an image of the guy being blown all over the beach. But the primary danger from Irene was flooding, as Masters points out repeatedly in his blog.

Here's some data Cliff Mass must have overlooked:

Here's a helpful map with data:
http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/at201109.asp

Here are the National Hurricane Center reports:
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/archive/2011/refresh/IRENE+shtml/120913.shtml?
  * Note the Wind Speed Probability reports

They also provide this:
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_at4+shtml/085722.shtml?swath

The Wikpedia article is well-footnoted:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Hurricane_Irene

But the record highs are considerably below +50 C. See here.

Not quite. The relative humidity ranges from 37 to 80% over the course of the day. It's easy to think of Cairo as being in the desert, but there's a giant river running right through it that provides quite a bit of humidity. A similar situation happens in Qatar and Dubai, although there the humidity comes from the Gulf.

This is really about "how do you cool a giant all-stone no-shade plaza".

Jeff Master's most recent blog post details how extraordinary the year 2010 was, weather-wise. A very very good read. I hope it goes viral - people need to know the facts; we ignore them at our peril.

You can read about the whole debacle here: http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=341&tstamp=200604

lolll..thanks, but I get my weather from Wunderground on their sidebar gadget and from Forecast Fox in Firefox.

Don't figure I need alerts to my cell, 'cuz when I'm dependent upon it I'm out in the weather.

This could be done as a public/private partnership. If NASA provides the reference designs, server space and software, it could be an interesting project for volunteers all over the world, not only the US. The prices, resolution and quality of optics of regular, off-the-shelf weather resistant digital cameras can make this doable at a reasonable cost. I'm thinking something similar to what you can get today using networked weather stations to provide very accurate conditions and forecasting.

There are a lot of people out there that would be willing to contribute in projects like this, and NASA as well as NSF and other public Science organizations should really look more closely at this model in general.

N. Japan is not tropical and wind speeds currently 1.6 km/h with gusts up to 6.4 km/h. There have been winds up to 26 km/h today, but even so, that would be a 9-10 hour journey if it blew at 26 constantly (which it did not).

http://www.wunderground.com/global/stations/47671.html

This all kind of stupid anyway. Reactors #2 and #3 have probably breached and there is no containment on the storage pools. If you insist on suggesting that only noble gasses and no cesium or iodine have been released, well, have at it and enjoy the acid trip.

Yet the winter in the Northeast Canadian Arctic and in Greenland has been exceptionally warm.

On New Years Day Nuuk, Greenland set a new all time high of 44 degrees Fahrenheit. The normal high is 20 F. The previous record high was 39 F set 5 or 6 years ago.

On the 6th of January Coral Harbour, Nanavut, Canada at the northwest corner of Hudson Bay had a low temperature for the day of -3.7 degrees Celsius. That sounds cold but the normal low for the date is -34 C so the temperature was 30 C (54 F) above the normal daily low for January. A couple of other factoids:

After New Year’s Day, the town went 11 days without getting down to its average daily high (-26 C).

On both the 5th and 6th, Coral Harbor inched above the freezing mark. Before this year, temperatures above 0C (32F) had never been recorded in the entire three months of January, February, and March.

There's a balance there with your cold.

A subset of what you want may be available on Weather Underground http://www.wunderground.com/ . I don't think they use Java but worth a peek. (I'm just a user, not affiliated etc)

Earl got awful close this year.

Asian websites seem to reflect pictures of downtown areas of major asian cities - Tokyo, Hong Kong, parts of Beijing, Vietnam, etc. Shockingly, their major cities don't look terribly different from western megalopolises like NYC and London. Their colorful ads just happen to have asian character sets, which have a lot more lines and end up looking more busy to the western eye. Have you looked at yahoo.com/ or amazon.com lately? I mean, Yahoo has cleaned up their image some, but it's still very cluttered and messy. I can only imagine what Google News.jp or .cn looks like, or heaven forbid, the japanese translated version of Wunderground.com?? Just add some purple and yellow rounded corner rectangles in the background and it looks like every other stereotypical asian website out there.
 
Anyways, my point is, websites are driven by advertising. Websites of local languages are going to look similar to the Times Squares and Piccadilly Circuses of the world, in their local languages and alphabets. Certain color combinations might make certain alphabets stand out better. Helveltica (and all the child fonts it's spawned over the years) happens to look really good in Red, White or Blue on a White or dark colored background, which is probably why western advertising all looks the same for the most part. People tend to use more asian color schemes for party invitiations when using Comic Sans, and that font everyone loves to hate, Papyrus, tends to look best Black on white on tan.

We have had a bit more warmth, just not so much over CONUS lately. Asia has been setting records lately. (Scroll down the the Extreme heat wave in Africa and Asia continues to set all-time high temperature records heading.}

Check out Dr. Jeff Masters Blog at wunderground.com, especially the "Resources for the BP oil disaster" section at the end of each new blog entry. His My post on what oil might do to a hurricane" entry concludes:

Unfortunately, there is a decent chance that we'll get a real-world opportunity to see what will happen. June tropical storms tend to form in the Gulf of Mexico, and we've been averaging one June storm every two years since 1995. This year, the odds of a June Gulf of Mexico storm are probably a little lower than usual, shear from our lingering El Niño may bring wind shear levels a bit above average. I expect there is a 20% chance that we'll see a June tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico that would interact with the oil spill.

Also, we now have TD1 which might make it to the GOMEX and has tropical storm / hurricane potential; and it's only June.

Check out Dr. Jeff Masters Blog at wunderground.com, especially the "Resources for the BP oil disaster" section at the end of each new blog entry. His My post on what oil might do to a hurricane" entry concludes:

Unfortunately, there is a decent chance that we'll get a real-world opportunity to see what will happen. June tropical storms tend to form in the Gulf of Mexico, and we've been averaging one June storm every two years since 1995. This year, the odds of a June Gulf of Mexico storm are probably a little lower than usual, shear from our lingering El Niño may bring wind shear levels a bit above average. I expect there is a 20% chance that we'll see a June tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico that would interact with the oil spill.

Also, we now have TD1 which might make it to the GOMEX and has tropical storm / hurricane potential; and it's only June.

Check out Dr. Jeff Masters Blog at wunderground.com, especially the "Resources for the BP oil disaster" section at the end of each new blog entry. His My post on what oil might do to a hurricane" entry concludes:

Unfortunately, there is a decent chance that we'll get a real-world opportunity to see what will happen. June tropical storms tend to form in the Gulf of Mexico, and we've been averaging one June storm every two years since 1995. This year, the odds of a June Gulf of Mexico storm are probably a little lower than usual, shear from our lingering El Niño may bring wind shear levels a bit above average. I expect there is a 20% chance that we'll see a June tropical storm in the Gulf of Mexico that would interact with the oil spill.

Also, we now have TD1 which might make it to the GOMEX and has tropical storm / hurricane potential; and it's only June.

They also don't specify what "80 mph" means. Is that indicated air speed or true ? If the top speed is 80mph true at 20000 that would mean less than 60mph near the ground.

More importantly if you consider that 80mph = 70 kts so this thing would do well to stay away from the jetstream if it wants to stay in one place, even at full power
http://www.wunderground.com/Aviation_Maps/Winds_Aloft/FL200-24.html#a_topad