Weird Stuff on Radar

Perhaps I'm just suffering from jet lag, but I could use an assist from a radar guru out there to help decipher this morning's radar loop.

As shown in the loop below, things this morning start innocently enough with wide spread clear-air returns.  As the morning progresses, however, some blobs of high returns persist, in some cases generate over the Great Salt Lake, and move downstream with the large-scale flow.

What are these blobs?  I doubt they are meteorological as there is nothing to be seen on satellite.  Dust or birds?  I've looked at the some of the additional fields provided by the polarimetric radar, including correlation coefficient, and nothing obvious jumped out at me, although I confess my experience examining bugs and insects with radars is limited.

Any thoughts?

European Tidbits

After a weekend of sightseeing, I'm back in the US, but not quite back to Salt Lake City.  For my students who are reading this, yes, I should be back in time to teach class.  For the rest of you, here are a few photos.

Bicycles are everywhere.  The photo below was taken at the train station in Salzburg.

Surprisingly, few people wear helmets.  I think that's one custom I won't adopt.  

Speaking of alternate forms of transport, I'm sure this horse is grateful for the waterproof and breathable hard shell.  

Austria: Where the meat is meat and the vegetables are wrapped in bacon.

Schnee!  Yup, winter is coming. 

Our travel to Munich followed the main corridor of refugee migration to Germany.  Mrs. Powder Professor was able to lend a hand to one extremely polite Syrian family.

On the train to Munich, I saw one refugee in tears.  Heartbreaking.

Our train in Munich was met by the Polizei, who segregated the refugees into a different area.  All was peaceful and this process occurred without incident.  Their future, however, remains uncertain.

Syrian Refugees

This morning we saw initial Red Cross preparations in the Salzburg train station for the influx of Syrian refugees that is now moving through Austria to Germany and (perhaps) other portions of western Europe.

These are reminders of just how fortunate we are and just how tragic and desperate circumstances in portions of the Middle East have become.

Alpine Snow

There's little reason to watch the tube while in Europe, except for the panorama feed, which provides live images from the various mountain resorts.  It's hard not to turn this on in the morning and sometimes they can be quite useful for planning daily excursions.

On Thursday morning, I was given the special treat of turning on the panorama feed and seeing snow.

The image was from 3212 m above the Senales Valley in the South Tirol of northern Italy, just south of the border with Austria.  Never been there, but I'll add it to the growing list of places to visit in the Alps.  

This Conference Is a "Drag"

I've been to perhaps 50 major scientific conferences in my career and the one I'm attending in Innsbruck this week is one of the best for both professional and personal reasons.  The quality of the science has been very high, and the area provides beautiful views and great brews for late-night discussions.  In addition, I've had an opportunity to see some excellent presentations covering new results in areas that interest me but lie outside my core research area.

One of these areas is something known as gravity wave drag.  Most of us are familiar with gravity waves, which include waves on the ocean, as well as so-called hydraulics generated by river flow over rocks.  Similarly, gravity waves are generated in the atmosphere by flow over mountains.  Under the right conditions, these waves can propagate to jet stream level and even into the stratosphere and mesosphere further aloft.  In some instances these waves break (the water analog is waves crashing on the beach), resulting in gravity wave drag, a deceleration of the flow at upper levels.

Source: The COMET Program

It turns out that these breaking waves are a major problem for weather and climate modeling.  The models lack the resolution to fully account for the effects of major mountain barriers (e.g., Andes, Rockies, New Zealand Alps, Alps, etc.).  The resulting underprediction of mountain-induced gravity waves and associated wave breaking leads to an overprediction of the flow at jet-stream level, which ultimately affects forecasts of the strength and timing of weather systems.  

This has been know for a few decades, and techniques have been developed to artificially add gravity wave drag to both weather and climate models.  However, these techniques make numerous assumptions and sometimes work well over one mountain range, but not another.

During the southern hemisphere winter of 2014, a major field program called DeepWave examined gravity waves generated over the New Zealand Alps that produce gravity wave drag and significant changes to the circulation of the upper atmosphere.  Early results from this field program are now coming to fruition and are guiding the development of new techniques to deal with gravity wave drag, as discussed during several talks this week.

Yup, this conference is most definitely a drag, but hopefully that will yield better forecasts in the future.

Massive Loss of North Cascades Glacial Ice This Summer

Foss Glacier, North Cascades, Summer 2015.  Source: http://blogs.agu.org/fromaglaciersperspective/2015/08/20/disastrous-year-for-north-cascade-glacier-mass-balance-snowice-economy/

Although I'm in Europe, here's some disturbing news from the U.S.

In a recent post for the AGU Blogosphere entitled Disastrous Year for North Cascade Glacier Mass Balance, Mauri Pelto, Professor of Environmental Science at Nichols College, reports on the massive loss of glacial ice in the North Cascades this year.  Assuming normal loss for the rest of the summer, the North Cascades will lose an astounding 5-7% of its glacial ice in just one year.  The sad thing about this is that it takes a long time to build up glacial ice.  This ice is gone and it's not coming back.
Click on the link above for more info.