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Airplanes May Affect Weather Patterns
blankmange writes "Wired is carrying an interesting piece: '...for three days starting last Sept. 11, meteorological researchers were presented with just such an opportunity when the FAA grounded commercial flights nationwide for three days following the terrorist air attacks. And now it has emerged that the American climate was indeed noticeably different during those three days without air travel.' Seems that what we do on the planet may have more effect than we may ever know."
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Seems that what we do on the planet may have more effect than we may ever know.
Of course we have an effect. The question is, is that effect positive, negative, or chaotic. I suspect it's chaotic. Three days worth of data is surely not enough to do anything but convince everyone that what they originally suspected was already correct.
Also, in the summer almost all of the buildings have A/C running full throttle. I think all of the waste heat that is blasted outside ends up raising the temperature an appreciable amount.
Also, the city is filthy. There are rats and cockroaches everywhere, and people are so mean.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Granted Air travel probably has some effect on he environment but do we really have an alternative?
I recall a similar debate about Supersonic passenger planes with the idea that jet engines especially supersonic jets damage the troposphere with the result that the Concorde flies on limited routes (Not that it stops the military from making hundreds of supersonic jet flights every day)
Even if we thought maybe the commuter flights could be replaced with high sped trains what about long distance flights? I recently flew from Cyprus to Toronto and God how I wished they had a faster plane. With a 10 hour stopover at Frankfurt and trips to and from the airport I was travelling for over 30 hrs! (In coach !!!)
Faced with that most people dont give a damn if the aircrafts damage the atmosphere as long as they get them there FAST!
Coming back to the trains option though it works very well in Europe and Japan ; I dont know how well it would work in the States where people are used to doing things there own way and not handing over control. I say this because with trains it really is not economical to have competition- trains are feasible if u have only one set of tracks in a route and everyone uses it. In order to avoid a monopoly it would have to be run by the Fed Govt. and I dont know how many people will like that.
Just a few thoughts....
**Life is too short to be serious**
You Tool. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/3 0/211247&mode=nested&tid=134
Paul Lenhart writes words!
Either stop posting this environmentalist propaganda crap, or I stop reading Slashdot.
Sounds like win-win to me.
Scientists have been pretty busy with studying the effect vulcano-eruptions have on the climate. Couldn't it be possible all the dust and smoke of the WTC, Pentagon and crashed plane have a similar effect to a lesser extent?
You do not exist. Go away.
This really isn't anything new.
Besides the fact that 3 days is too little to check, it has been studied and theorized how butterflies in Africa, or bats in Brazil can cause chaotic effects on the weather.
Mountains, trees, ducks, all cause effects on the weather. There are a lot more birds and bats in this world than planes. They probably have a larger effect on the weather than planes do.
If we really wanted to see how planes effect weather patterns, we can always try to go to another planet (Mars, is a good choice) and study their weather. Mind you, trying to get air planes to Mars would be a real pain to test this theory.
Because that should really decrease the load on the butterflies.
Liberty uber alles.
When you stop reading slashdot, you probably won't have use for that computer any longer.
Please remember to dispose of it through recycling, don't just drop it in a landfill where it will damage the health of uncounted future generations.
I thought that guy was crazy when he blamed weird weather on planes. He said, "The weather was a lot better around here before they started flying all those damn planes everywhere!"
Wow, what a genius.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
Living in Minnesota( The evil fridge of the US ) you quickly learn that the winter temp drops less at night when it is cloudy.
So you would guess that artificial coulds( Contrails ) would do the same thing.
Still an interesting opertunity. Lets hope we don't have the opertunity to study this agian.
Yeah right.... .2% error only...
No really, we do have very precise weather models...
That supercomputer we made you buy not only gave us a 280 fps boost at Q3A, but it also allows us to predict rain, temperatures very precisely anywhere on the globe for the next 20 years to come with
We can even predict where lightnings will strike and when...
It's those damn planes that invalidate everything...
Of course, we did include them in the model, but neither TWA nor any other airline respects its schedule.. that makes our task much harder...
Perhaps with an even more powerful supercomputer...
Correlation != Causality
Just because two events occur at the same time doesn't mean one is the cause of the other.
- Changing Global Cloudiness
Clouds are visible collections of small particles of water or ice, or both,
suspended in the atmosphere. They are one of the most obvious and
influential features of Earth's climate system. They are also one of its
most variable components.
there's also a good page on how ship tracks affect climateAerosols and Climate Change Aerosols are tiny particles suspended in the air. Taken as a whole these particles tend to cool Earth's atmosphere, and are an important factor in global change.
Clouds and Radiation The study of clouds, where they occur, and their characteristics, play a key role in the understanding of climate change. Whether a given cloud will heat or cool the surface of the Earth depends on several factors.
oh yeah, the NASA press release about the contrail study...
.:: proud supporter of dc united
Maybe just the idea that humans have an effect on the weather is too much for some people.
What the article didn't even mention is the possiblity of changing airline routes to intentinally effect the weather. Seems like a great idea, even an environmentalist like me.
'SBEMAIL!' is better than a goat!!
... and a very poorly understood one, at that. Urban areas do tend to create what one might consider shallow, localized fronts.
It's well known that any atmospheric boundary can have effects on a storm, both in motion and intensity. It's also well-known that urban areas do have localized differences compared to their environment.
But it's not well-known what the overall effects might be. Severe thunderstorms are creatures that require moisture and the energy condensing it provides. In an urban heat island situation, the temperature is often higher, but the amount of moisture is only marginally higher. This actually tends to reduce the CAPE (Convective Available Potential Energy) of the urban area compared to its immediate environment. Also, the boundary of the urban heat island may act as a sort of "guide" for the storm to propogate on, much like fronts and outflow boundaries (cold, moist air from previous thunderstorms) often act.
But, the storm is also affected by the upper air steering flow. There's a certain slaving between the upper and lower levels that is beneficial to storm development and intensification. An urban heat island may modify this enough to make a difference... that much is possible.
However, in the case of your storm switching direction, that's actually a pretty common feature of tornadic storms, i.e. to change direction and move to the right of their previous movement vector. The dynamics of right-moving supercells (as they are called) are fairly well understood and widely accepted. So, to say that the storm turned strictly because of the city, in this case, is a little hard to believe. But, it's something that bears watching.
And I have noticed that "effect" of cities before. It does seem to be relatively common, as a sort of informal survey... but I'm not aware of any study that's fully addressed it yet.
-Jellisky
First of all, my biggest pet peeve: the difference between weather and climate. Yes, believe it or not, climate and weather are two very different terms. They should not be used interchangably, thankyouverymuch. Three days does not a climate make.
Now, to continue on that thought, it's interesting to think about the consequences of this "study". (The quotation marks are supposed to be there.) I cannot say what I really think of this "study" since I haven't read their results, but I cannot be that easily convinced that three days worth of data compared to years worth of data has any possible statistical significance, especially in something like diurnal ranges, which are 15-30 degrees C anyways. Show me three months and I might be convinced of a trend. I can name at least 10 different three-day weather features that could cause such a blip and that's just off the top of my head.
Next, IF this is true, then it only highlights something which has bothered me about climate modeling from the frickin' beginning: the role of clouds and how terribly they are handled in these (and all) models. Of course, this isn't the only problem I have with these modeling studies, but we won't enter that debate right now.
The type of cloud present has an effect on the net change in radiative flux. Deep, thick clouds (like cumulus) have a net positive change while thin clouds (like cirrus) have a net negative change. The thing, though, is that in balance calculations like these, there tend to be two effects, which are approximately equal and opposite in sign. So, you end up wondering how much of it is really real. (For example, the two terms might be 220 and -218, leading to 2 change... but if you're off by a little bit, those numbers might actually be 219 and -220, leading to a -1.) This is further compounded by the way models handle clouds, which is often routinely terrible (with respect to resolution, the actual physics involved in the cloud which can affect all the results, and many other factors).
To further put all this in perspective, let's assume the albedo (the amount of solar radiation reflected back to space by the earth which is largely a function of the cloudiness) of the earth increases by 1%. (It's currently around 30% in a climatological sense... even that number has an error bar of measurement around +/- 3%.) On average, that would mean that the earth would get 3.4 W/m^2 less radiation. (Daily and spacial average of solar radiation is about 340 W/m^2, again largish errors on this measurement.) This number is comparable to the change by doubling CO2 (about 4 W/m^2) and, as you can notice, opposite in sign. Of course, there's a huge extra batch of physics here that isn't even being considered like the change of the absorption of IR radiation from the earth by the clouds or the release of latent heat by the clouds or the feedback between warmer surface temperatures and clouds (which is barely understood since it's almost as complex a problem as the original)... Kind of makes your head spin to think about all these effects, doesn't it? And all of them are about the same order of magnitude by itself, i.e. about 0.5-5 W/m^2, both positive and negative. Let's also not forget that local effects, like all those new urban heat islands that have popped up around all our temperature recording stations that could very well explain that temperature rise in the last century or whatever, and that these effects are not put into these models...
Complex problem? You bet. Possible to understand? Eventually, I don't see why not. But, we can't sit back and keep using these antiquated ideas in these state-of-the-art models. As the old saying goes, "Garbage in, Garbage out." The effects of these contrails may be important, yes. I cannot debate that. However, to claim that off of whatever insignificant sample this is, or using any of the ideas we currently have, is ludicrous at best. Any imbecile with a computer nowadays can run a correlation analysis on data. But, to interpret it and explain WHY things are happening that way... that's the vital connection between statistical tomfoolery and real science. Then, to explain the dynamics and theory behind it all... that's the step to making a full fledged theory.
-Jellisky
Was anyone reminded of the suggestion that a single butterfly could change weather patterns when they read this?
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
OTOH, I imagine that the air traffic, in, say, the US varies quite a bit from day-to-day. For example, the day before Tgiving is berzerk, and there's probably some days where noone travels. Anyway, one way to get more data on this theory would be to correlate, over a long time, the cloud (or whatever) variables with the number of planes in the air. Do this every day for about a year, and see what you get.
One thing to note is that although these three days are not much data, it's actually very strong, in the sense that nothing flew those days. So it's the strongest data you could get over any three-day period. I'm sure we'll see more stuff coming out soon.
Come on, give it up, that's
how is this environmentalist propaganda? slashdot's motto... "news for nerds, stuff that matters"... i'd say the climate falls under "stuff that matters" since humans have a direct effect on it. it's important. maybe now they'll work on cleaning up the emissions of airplanes since it is showing to have an effect on the weather. automobiles have become cleaner because it's necessary, why not airplanes and other forms of transportation?
and how much cleaner is coal burner? last i knew coal did not burn cleanly and emitted lots of pollution (nox, sox, particulates, etc, etc, etc) which are hazardous to anyone's health, especially people that live near the power plant. an entire town in ohio got a power company to basically purchase the town (buy all the land and houses in the town) so they don't get slapped with a lawsuit for all the emissions. this way the people that way to move can do it and the plant doesn't have to deal with forking out all the money for lawyers and individual settlements. basically saying "yes, we put out lots of emissions which are hazardous to human health, but we don't want to pay to have that changed". coal is not any different, the power plants are different. they use means of keeping the emissions to a minimum, but those means are costly and affect the efficiency of the plant. nuclear power is much cleaner and probably safer for health reasons, i agree with you there. the coal statement is just wrong. coal has not changed, it's the plants that change their ways. and most plants will very reluctantly put those means to use, and even the bare minimum environmentally-friendly standards aren't the greatest. they should be much stricter. there are currently 6 power plants in my state (CT) that are under scrutiny because of their emissions.
don't be shocked if you see more of this "environmetalist propoganda" on slashdot again. what used to be environmentalist has become much more crucial to human health and the life on this planet. yes i was a bio major. yes, my degree is in ecology. does that make me a tree-hugging hippie? no. but i think that we as inhabitants of this planet need to keep it cleaner than we have been. i hate this "it's my land, i can do whatever i want with it". that's a load of crap. walk the streets of new york city on a hot summer day... then walk through central park. you'll notice a temperature and humidity difference. central park is much more pleasant because there are trees. a big reason there have been more droughts lately has to do with the increased development of land. the less trees and plant life, the drier and hotter the climate.
please me, have no regrets.