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Cities Influence Their Own Weather
CalamityJones writes "In the 'Well, DUH!' department,
this story from the AP
shrieks 'Cities May Make Their Own Weather.' As if anyone with half a brain could possibly have missed this point."
Not having a weather supercomputer to crunch the numbers, it wasn't quite that obvious to me, but then what do I know. Living in Michigan I'm used to the lake effect - if I lived east of some major asphalt, I guess I'd get the L.A. effect.
On a local news (KNBC (L.A.) if I remember correctly), there was a story about how this guy found a way to minimize tornados. I think he had these white powder stuff that you drop onto a tornado. Supposedly, he was going to test his theory later on with a plane.
:)
Did anyone hear about that? I wonder if it would work.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
So, Redmond DOES control the weather! You Linux conspiracy people were right...scary stuff, I tell ya, scary.
Dan?
But in Atlanta, the new research showed storms popping up around the city on otherwise clear days.
There is an explanation for this.
It is called the John Rocker effect.
(Sue me, I'm a baseball fan.)
I come from a very rural part of Canada--the smallest province in fact, and on Prince Edward Island we have lots of trees, and not much in the way of urban sprawl.
My first experience in the big city came quite a few years back when I moved to Calgary, Alberta, and in retrospect I feel very lucky. Calgary has an imense amount of greenspace within it's limits--heck we still see deer and get the occasional bear in the 'berbs.
However, coming from the countryside as I do, I have to say I do miss the trees. If I lived in a larger or more urban city, I'd likley have worse bouts of homesickness :)
People who grow up in cities often don't see nature the same way I do. Parks are very organized in comparison to raw Canadian wilderness. That said, I'd love to see more green in the urban landscape--and there does seem to be a larger move towards this kind of 'greening of the urban jungle.'
I remember a report several years back about a high-tech company in Toronto adding an atrium to their front lobby--one that was essentially a giant watershed (read swamp). A fascinating concept--no less than the idea of planting trees and creating parks on the roof's of office buildings.
I guess what I'm saying is that it's nice to see everyone--urban pesant and country hick living in the big city, see the benefits of greening our cities.
Maybe one more would be weather moderation. With the thunderstorm raging outside my window right now, that would be a welcome change :)
Beware the Whyte Wolf.
With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels...
The problem with doing this sort of research is the tremendous amount of variables (it's why we can't forecast the weather more than a few days in advance); how exactly it changes seem to differ from region to region. Some industrial cities in Britain show cool islands, presumably from the water released by industrial processes. Cities in western desert areas often have lower temperatures due to increased vegetation and surface water (though the increased humidity often makes it more uncomfortable). If you have access to a good library, Robert Balling is probably the best known researcher working on it today; for fundamentals on urban climate, anything by Helmut Landsberg on the subject would probably be informative.
The problem is really, what are we going to do about this? A few storms are one thing, but a lot of cities are probably going to be running out of water in a few decades due to the fact that nobody wants to tell people things they don't want to hear; things like maybe the environmental health of a region is more important than having a really nice lawn or golf course, or that just because you've had a constant supply of water for the past 100 years, that it's going to continue. There's a very good reason that only recently have desert areas started attracting real estate development; through most of history they haven't been sustainable. And just because we have better plumbing and air conditioning that didn't exist a hundred years ago doesn't mean the environment has gotten better for us on an environmental level.
I guess I'm seriously off-topic, but I sometimes obsess with this subject the way some people obsess with the GPL license or open source...
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
When I came here from Cali, the first year I was here (1991, fresh outta high school), we had an awe inspiring monsoon season. That was the last good monsoon I remember (though there was one a couple of years later that literally turned the street in front of my employer's office into a river, but a I digress).
I remember extreme thunder and lightning, and super heavy rains for many days straight (not constant rain, just rain that when it came down, it came down HARD) - the kind of storm where you turn out the lights, go outside, and watch.
At the time, I was living downtown. There wasn't a whole huge amount of development around the city like there is today. This year, I moved to a house north of the city - out in the more desert area (you know, we have like - coyotes, rabbits, ground squirrels, bats, birds by the ton - and saguaros in the front yard). This season hasn't been any better. Sure, it has been cooler (we are in our monsoon season right now), but it hasn't been rainy. On the days where it seems like it would rain, the clouds appear to part, and go "around" the city.
I blame it on all of the development - the leveling of desert to put in homes (the house I am in is close to 30 years old - when it was built, the desert was all around it, and the edge of Phoenix was a good 10 miles or more away), getting rid of foliage and scrub, leaving pavement, and a kind of "designed" desert area (where all the saguaroes are "just so" - and things are arranged "just right" - and no cholla allowed, lest someone get hurt!) - none of which helps to prevent what I think of as a "heat bubble" effect - which the clouds drift around.
Only on days where the cloud buildup has happenned in the previous night do we have any chance of a good rain during the monsoon. Even then, it is only a trickle...
I want my thunder and lightning back - dammit! (hey, I got UPS's on my system - come and get me!)...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
While the local effects of cities on area weather patterns is interesting, especiaaly to it's residents, we should all be thinking about the global weather and what are collective cities are doing to change the way the planet functions. On that note I would like to put a plug in for The Casino-21 experiment they are hoping to use spare cycles; like Seti@Home or distributed.net to do global climate simulations. They are still in the preliminary stages, however it is a very noble goal. Last I knew they were looking for help coding some of the tools and applications neccessary; and I know that many of the /. readers are well versed in writing code, and many are kind enough to donate their services to projects like this.
Call me when they learn to distinguish which city features cause what weather effects.
I can't believe the knee-jerk reaction displayed by the guy suggesting naive policy changes to hopefully minimize the effects, the it's-caused-by-humans-it-must-be-bad attitude.
There's no point in wasting money on implementing policy changes when you don't know what those changes will cause.
Are you sure that the ozone is being "pushed down?". It's almost impossible for gas to move from the stratoshpere into the troposhere... A more likely explanation would be that ozone is created at ground level by electrical sparking. Since ozone is just O3, any electrical discharge in an O2 "rich" area (ie, the atmosphere) will generate ozone. You know when you can "smell" static electricity? That's ozone. If you have a particularly strong thermal inversion, O3 can be prevented from floating up... however in those cases you almost invariably get high levels of H2S04 and that's usually a bigger concern (no shit!).
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I think if you look back even to ancient times, any large human habitation was going to have a major effect on the weather locally.
The reason is simple: the need to burn combustible materials as fuel for various purposes. After all, when you have to burn lots of wood, coal, peat, dried dung, etc. for cooking, metalsmithing, providing heat in winter, etc., that will create climatic changes caused by the residue of such activities--namely various forms of air pollution.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Everytime a sparrow shits the weather changes a little bit so it would seem obvious to me that when you clump massive changes together you'll get a domino effect. Is this anything to worry about? Hardly. The idea that we as humans shouldn't change the world is foolish. All other species change the world and so do we. We just happen to be better at it. Not that it isn't a good idea to protect the enviroment and such but we shouldn't try to keep things the same. That just defeats the point of evolution. So we should learn from our mistakes but we shouldn't go nuts trying to freeze time. What do they want us to do, build a green strip between every building so that the average city is 1000 miles wide? That'd just cause more gasoline to be burned causing even worse effects.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
The built-up area of cities produces 'islands' of higher temperatures, for a number of reasons, among which are:
Manmade materials like concrete, asphalt, bricks, etc. absorb solar energy much more readily than vegetation.
Water almost completely runs off because there's so much concrete everywhere, instead of standing around and slowly evaporating. Evaporation can make a significant contribution to cooling.
Waste heat from vehicles, residences, etc. doesn't help the situation.
Urban heat islands are pretty well understood. You can get nice images of them--temperature contrasts, that is--from AVHRR (Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer) remotely-sensed imagery.
cf. W.B. Myer, "Urban heat island and urban health: Early American perspective", Professional Geographer 43, 1991, p. 38 if yer curious for a little more.
Throw more heat up into moist summertime air and that's a good prescription for thunderstorms.
Of course, it's not offical unless it happens at the airport (MSP, for you travellers).
I've noticed our own version of this every time tornado weather approaches the cores. As the storm tracks to the east, they pretty consistently are driven northeast through Forest Lake or further.
This week, when 40,000 eastern suburbanites lost power, we in downtown St. Paul just had a nice (loud) rainstorm. Guess that big number one is good for something.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
I think it may be obvious only depending on the focus of your education. I realized it when I studied Daisy World several years ago (and was pleased to see it mentioned in the Ender's Game series, by my nick, obviously one of my fav. series of books...I digress)
Daisy world is a thought experiment where a planet is covered only with two types of daisies: black and white. Black absorb heat (like asphault) and white daisies reflect heat (like water as I understand it). So, if you set the temperature sensitivities of the black and right species just right, you can create a stable system. When the temperatures are colder, black daisies thrive and raise the ambient temperature of the world. When temperatures are hot, the white daisies reflect sunlight away and cool the system.
I read about this when I was pretty young, I'd say around 11, if memory serves, and then realized that all the asphault in a large city raised temperatures. I was exposed to it early on, so it was "obvious" to me. However, it doesn't surprise me that it wasn't for others.
Sorry if this post is redundant or a bit muddled, as I am dead tired and skimmed everything.
"My religion is to live --and die-- without regret." -- Milarepa
hmmm... ground-level o3 does tend to occupy the top-bit of inverted thermal domes... a good thing as it tends to keep it out of our lungs. In theory though, ozone should only be a problem if you have:
1. the thermal inversiona from hell
2. A much-bigger-than-normal amount being produced.. ie, 250 vand de graff generators running a street level.
I vote for number 1 since if there were 250 van de graff generators being run at street level anywhere cmdrTaco would have run it as a story... viz:
posted by cmdrTaco on Monday July 10 @04:22AM
from the It-makes-my-hair-stand-on-end-but-in-a-good-way dept.
BozoTheClown writes "The Mayfield Daily Blatt has this story about an high school science teacher who is trying for the Guiness record for "largest baloon stuck to wall with static electricity". He has a full size replica of the Hindenberg (no, not hydrogen filled, thank god) and, get this, 250 full-sized van de graff generators... better than rubbing the blimp on your head!" 250? Wow, that's like a Beowulf cluster of van de graff generators!!
(Read More... | 2 of 1045 comments | Stunts )
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One thing that I read somewhere is that global warming is not really global, but simply an "mesurment error" because more thermometers are placed inside cities. I even recall a research wich showed that in rural (is that the correct term?) warming is hardly noticable. But then of course that article could have been sponsored by the car industry. :>
J.
I continue to be amazed by the utter lack of thoughtful commentary on modern science here. There are many pure science-related stories here (a good thing) and when the topic if fusion or nano-tech or any of a raft of pie-in-the-shy technologies, the tone is generally positive. But slashdotters still scoff at meteorologists and their attempts to better understand our environment.
Meteorology is at it's heart a combination of some of the most difficult problems in physics, chemistry, mathematics and computer science. It is also one of very few modern sciences that affect everyone every day. It is complex and complicated and not something one can easily isolate in the lab to study. Weather kills a great many people every day, and the fact of the matter is that we don't understand it.
Take Global Warming. Does it exist? Right now, it certainly seems that way. Is it long-term or short? Does it reflect some sort of impact mankind has on the planet? No one knows. Can't know. Some think yes, some think no, but there's no sure way to tell until about 1000 years from now, maybe more. Should we care? Um, yeah. (See earlier note about affects everyone...)
Pure science often involves proving using the scientific method that which many people take for granted or assume or is taken as a "rule." This is very important information, and these people deserve credit for doing useful scientific work.
Wish we suffered from the Santa Barbara effect. The San Francisco effect, on the other hand, is not so pleasant. Cold in spring, summer, autumn and winter. The obvious question is: "Was it like this before the city was built?"
--
-- SIGFPE
d'oh! I had a bad feeling about that one but figgured I'd just see if it would slide.....
English-speaking-as-first-langauge people tend to have bad spelling in general because we are taught early on that spelling is almost entirely arbitrary and that any rule has enough exceptions to make it not worthy of remembering (double letters, of which I am guilty in this case, is one of the worst). Secondly, the concept of "non-English" words gets pretty blurry since English itself is little more than a jumble of other languages. While the French and to a lesser extent the Germans and Spaniards locked down their language several hundred years ago, the English-speaking world is notorious for absorbing new words (and grammatical forms even, viz. the gerund). Of course the "recent" trend is now to exporting English. Ack! Who in their right mind would volunatily accept linguistic influence from a language with three present tenses! Talk about bad design...
2 1337 4 u!
When the CAFE standards were introduced by Carter, the transport and particularly the agricultural lobbies pushed the hardest for truck exemptions. The rationale was that an agricultural vehicle would become deprecated through rigourous use and be tossed aside before the savings of increased fuel efficiency had the chance to offset the greater sticker price of a fuel-efficient vehicle. In canada we're stuck with the CAFE standards since we have no national car-maker and even further complicate the problem by massively subsidizing agricultural-use gasoline (so-called "purple gas" as it is dyed purple as a way of enforcing it for farm-only use... when you get pulled over at a check stop in rural Alberta they give you a breathalyzer and do a dip test on your gas tank!)
I heard that Gore is campaigning (a bit) on tightening up CAFE. With the OPEC scene right now and Iraq still being fresh in the collective memory and companies like Toyota coming out with functional and (semi) affordable hybrids he might get away with it...
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hey sundiata,
While I agree with you in general and thank you for the fuel cell link can I ask you if you are from new york or live there right now? cause yeah we all take the subway, but it's a nightmare, even though I care about the environment quite a bit I would drive if I could because the subway is horrible, hot, crowded, packed with maniacs, there are certain trains that one can be pretty sure of a nice dose of TB at the end of it. Think cattle cars. The US and america has a long way to go before we have pleasant and efficient public transport, thanks mostly to the efforts of the big auto companies. It seems to me that alot of the envoronmentalism and good design of PT and urban planning should be sold as a matter of convenience and comfort. (ie live this way because in a few short years it could be 10 degrees cooler and your energy bill will be 30% less than it is now, as opposed to live this way because we have a moral duty to mother earth.) wadda ya think?
Don't expect science from the EPA or Ralph Nader and his minions.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I only moved to the north valley (roughly cave creek rd and the 101) at the beginning of this year, the past 8 years I lived in the central Phoenix area (mostly Biltmore area). When I first came to the Valley, I was living over off of 16th and Indian School. Anyhow, during those past 8 years, the monsoon hasn't been the same as the way it was when I first moved here. Sure, it is cooler right now with the moisture (esp at night), but I want the storms, too!
Oh well, enough complaining...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon