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Science

Cities Influence Their Own Weather 119

Posted by jamie from the low-pressure-tactics dept.
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.
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Cities Influence Their Own Weather More

Cities Influence Their Own Weather

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  • if you read the article and searcheda round for more, its not that obvious
  • And if you live where I live, I get the Santa Barbara effect. Always nice and sunny and never too hot or cold ; )

    same rule applies to the beer here too.
    ain't college grand?


    Double J. Strictly for the . . .
  • 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. :)

  • So, Redmond DOES control the weather! You Linux conspiracy people were right...scary stuff, I tell ya, scary.

    Dan?

  • An explanation ... (Score:3)

    by Jim Tyre ( 100017 ) on Sunday July 09, 2000 @07:53PM (#946757) Homepage
    The story sez:

    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.)

  • Haiku (Score:1)

    by psm ( 105737 )
    Cities make weather
    Slashdot readers make chatter
    Redmond makes blue screens

  • Urban Greenspace (Score:4)

    by Whyte Wolf ( 149388 ) on Sunday July 09, 2000 @07:58PM (#946759) Homepage
    A major contributing factor is that developers recklessly chop down trees to make room for suburbs, the scientists said. Trees provide shade from the heat and absorb many of the sun's harmful rays. Without them, the effect is a sort of urban desert.

    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 :)

  • here in colorado lately, because of these heatwaves, we've been having ozone warnings. Basically, the heat, mixed with other effects have actually pushed the ozone down to ground level (that's 5280 feet for those without altimiters). There have been warnings to stay inside because it's harmful to breathe ozone. Just another frightening trend in the science of the global horking of our mother earth


    FluX
    After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
  • Here in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, there is a fair amount of variety in the weather. The southesat suburb of Eagan supposedly got 8.5 inches of rain in one night (and had severe flooding), while Minneapolis (where I live) supposedly got only half an inch. I beg to differ on the latter stat, because I was up when the storm started. I had the blinds open, some smoke in my hand, and Pink Floyd turned waaay up -- there was more than half an inch of rain.

    It's just an example of how most storms and are far from uniform here. St. Paul has a HUGE heat plume, thanks to the hot air being blown by mayor Norm Coleman, governor Jesse "The (ahem) Mind" Ventura, and the state Legislature...

    --

  • SURE! (Score:1)

    by ghoul ( 157158 )
    Sure cities make their weather,they make their own complete environment They even make their own environmental disaster and hell even their own laws for environment protectation. Not that any of these are predictable except for maybe the laws which fail to work on a very reliable and regular basis in factt 100% of the time
  • ...so I can put an end to this heat. There are some unincorporated areas of my county I could buy.

    Or maybe I should just petition the city council?

  • As a windsurfer, finding more wind is always the problem. One of my local beaches suposedly has a slightly stronger sea breeze because of all the car parks near it.

    I've got no idea if it really does anything, but when every knot counts, i'd like to believe it.

  • Definition:
    Michigan weather is defined to be lake effect. This is one of the rarer english language definitions. Michigan weather is defined as such because of lack of another definition. Snow in July and 80 degrees F. in January are all aspects of Michigan weather. This is hardly weather as other people know it, hence the word 'lake effect' is used.

  • obvious? (Score:3)

    by nomadic ( 141991 ) <nomadicworld.gmail@com> on Sunday July 09, 2000 @08:05PM (#946766) Homepage
    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 [aapg.org] 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...

  • 10,000 years of sheep (Score:4)

    by Perdo ( 151843 ) on Sunday July 09, 2000 @08:10PM (#946767) Homepage Journal
    Cities are a minor effect on the weather when it comes to man made alterations. The weather is "critically dependent on initial conditions" (chaos theory) So, to find the things that man has done you need to look far into the past and find the event with the greatest impact in its time. I believe it is sheep grazing. In Kuwait the US Army has a firing range where no Bedouin shepherds are allowed. The Impact area is verdant and lush. It looks a lot like the great plains (USA) do. Outside of the impact area sheep over graze, ripping vegetation out by the roots, leaving baked dust and sand. This has gone on for thousands of years. Kuwait is very near the Tigris and Euphrates rives, the cradle of civilization. The entire middle east is man (domestic sheep) made desert. About the time god cast man out of Eden he also decided that being a shepherd was better than being a farmer(Cain and Able). I speculate that early man even in Africa domesticated animals and possible even created the Sahara. The loss of Eden was not from god, but man destroying Eden. Cities are recent have a small effect compared to the thousands of years man made deserts have had to work their magic on the environment.

  • There seems to be lots of evidence in Oklahoma that manmade stuff effects the weather. For example tornados will follow highways. A picture taken on the founding day of Ponca City shows no trees at all. The land was thick grass at the time (the bufflo had not been clearing it for years) but that was cleared to farm. The result was the dustbowl. The solution to that problem was lots of trees. In Kansas now you can see lines of trees along the edge of the farms on the section line roads. Its amazing how well a few trees stop the wind from building up. The large number of man made lakes in Oklahoma have also increased the rainfall in the area.

    As far as dropping something from a plane into a tornado, I don't like the idea of that. The tops of the cloud cells that make tornados in Oklahoma are offten 50,000 ft and have large amounts of windsheer. Flying in a huracane is one thing but a tornado is just too intense. When the F15s get retired nasa may try to adapt one to radio control for just this theory but I think the current plans involve the plane not getting back.
  • What's the point? If a lake has a noticeable impact on weather, it's not very surprising a city of similar or bigger size does influence weather, too.
  • I am not a scientist, but from what I remember, tornadoes are way too quick to have time to get on a plane (thats can withstand the winds), fly to it, and dump some powdery crap into it or whatever. You would have a better chance at survival by flying into the eye of the tornado in a helicopter, there is virtually no wind there, so you can fly in, move around a bit, and fly back out with no problem.

  • Phoenix, AZ (Score:3)

    by cr0sh ( 43134 ) on Sunday July 09, 2000 @08:19PM (#946771) Homepage
    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!)...
  • What creates the strongest tornadoes? Hot ground combined with a cold front (cold air). What color is good top soil? Black. What color are all the farmers trying to make their topsoil? Black. What color absorbs light and heat best? Black. After the dustbowl of the '20s and '30s we learned all sorts of soil conservation and enrichment techniques. Now all the soil is black and the ground is hotter. You can start growing earlier and harvest later in hot black soil. You can also make the best tornado formation zones the planet has ever seen.

  • I learned this stuff in school, (geo and english being the only subs I stayed awake in) here is what they taught me:
    • The higher polution efects in cities tend to cause more frequent localised rain - but in small ammounts.
    • It is nothing strange for the city center to be as much as 10 Degrees (C) warmer than the surrounding suburbs
    • Cities tend to develop heat "domes" that trap polution, which is why cities often have dark smog clouds over them, while nearby rural areas still have fresh air.
    • The skyscrapers tend to prevent normal wind-flow from occuring, with the expected resulsts
    South-Africa is notorious for it's outdated school system (Read CompSci uses dos) so If I learned this in school, how did it reach a newspaper, and jeez what's it doing getting /.'ed

  • 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 [rl.ac.uk] they are hoping to use spare cycles; like Seti@Home [berkeley.edu] or distributed.net [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.
  • I'm with you. I live outside of Philly, PA (USA), in the burbs. There are still some small areas of woods around but they are being sold off and developed. Thankfully we have a few semi-large county and state parks around here that are nice and wooded. I'd hate to see this area turn out like most of Philly. Nothing but urbin sprall as far as the eye can see (there are a few nice areas of Philly but I mean most of it). I'd love to see that front lobby atrium. I wish more companys would do it.
  • This is just another facet to the huge and now (justly) cliche'd problem of how we wreckless humans are upsetting the natural environment. It's usually discussed on a macroscopic scale (e.g. scientists say that we are going to increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere enough during the next 75 years to increase the average temperature of the Earth's surface to a level that can melt the polar ice caps, and inundate coastal cities like Los Angeles - that'll sure keep 'em from influencing the weather) Hopefully technology will break through the sticky web of bureaucracy soon enough to defeat this, either that or we'll use up all of the fossil fuels and leave no choice but to make rapid technological advances in favor of (hopefully) cleaner energy sources.
  • i may have just imagined it, but i think i saw in a movie/videogame/dream a world in which cities had domes over them to protect them from the harsh weather of the planet. I know it would be expensive, but as somewhat of a final resort i think cities would do this for protection, to control atmosphere, or to create the ultimate vacation resort. (yes, i think i saw this on The Truman Show)

    is this not possible? or is it? i would sure like to live in a city that rains a lot. or ill just move to Seattle and forget my domed wonders.

    the next sentence is now void

  • Basically, the heat, mixed with other effects have actually pushed the ozone down to ground level

    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!).

  • The article states:

    Forecasters have known for decades that big cities trap the sun's rays, holding the heat in asphalt and concrete and staying consistently warmer than their suburbs.

    It isn't just talking about how a city might make things warmer/colder in the area around the city. That may obvious.

    But the new study suggests that cities "can actually create weather, churning out thunderstorms that dump rain hundreds of miles away." Which I don't think is so obvious.

  • 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.
  • topsoil's okay, but asphalt's way better.
  • Why does it always rain in Redmond? Maybe Seattle is also just suffering ill effects from the large vacuum hole...
  • 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.

    If it doesn't involved building a ring of trailerparks around the city you're trying to prevent them in, I'm very doubtful that it'll work :)

    Simon
  • Hmmm, you say the guy has these crazy ideas? And a supply of mysterious white powder?

    . . . nah, couldn't be . . .

    ---------///----------

  • 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.
  • Oh yeah. We got more than half an inch that night. And 2.5" last night...I watched from my porch at 3 AM...saw lightning hit something for the first time in my life! I bet the Witch's Hat up on Tower Hill got hit too.

    Eagan got between 10" and 12", depending on where exactly you were. Insane.

  • All the farms in ventura county (southern california) seem to be divided by eucalyptus trees. Excellent wind breaks, and they grow fast.

    Going 60 miles from Burbank to Fillmore on a hot day in southern california will definitely convince you of the effect of asphalt on weather. Fillmore is somewhere between suburbs and "near city rural". Burbank is surounded on all sides by 50 miles of asphalt (okay, it's only about 25 miles inland).

    I worked in burbank one fall. It alternated between blast furnace and sauna. Makes what passes for hot in the bay area quite comfortable.
  • F-15E's have enough power to accelerate while flying straight up, but I still wouldn't send one into a tornado. ;) Above it, maybe. How high to you have to get to escape the winds and flying cows? I don't think it would require a low orbiter...

    Hmph. :\ Why should we try to control the weather? I think that's awfully arrogant. If science acheives this, we're just asking for nature to bitchslap us; think "Titanic", but with reprecussions affecting more than a few hundred rich tourists (and Leonardo Dicaprio, of course).

    ---------///----------

  • Wow. Are you sure you stayed awake in English class?

    ---------///----------

  • 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.

  • sure humans influence the weather - the government does it all the time. what do you think a trailer park is? a tornado-trap!

    a little-known program started in the 50's to place trailer parks around all major cities, thus shielding the cities from tornadoes.

    don't tell me you never thought of it ;)
  • 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.
  • If cities can have such an impact on weather, I wonder just what changes have been brought about by the man-made Lake Kariba [africa-insites.com], a 220×40 km huge lake at the border between Zambia [cia.gov] and Zimbabwe [cia.gov]. The lake was created in an otherwise arid area and the enormous amounts of water must certainly have influenced the climate in the region. Does anyone know of climatical studies concerning Lake Kariba?

    // Mutende
    --

  • Don't feel bad, Jamie; CalamityJones was just trying to sound smart. He ends up reminding me of the BOFH lusers. "And you'll need to manually transmogrify the resonance capicators." "Well, duh!" If it were really such a "Duh"-type thing, AP wouldn't have covered it. (I hope.) And if CalamityJones is so fucking intelligent, s/he should be out saving the world, instead of trolling Slashdot.

    Thank you.

    ---------///----------

  • Not to me, since it was covered on the BBC news site, in the science section, months ago...
  • 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.
  • ... I believe is actually due to the mountains containing the smog in a sort of air basin. Thus you don't get any flushing effects and the haze persists for many many days until a serious storm comes along. Some nice pictures [uiuc.edu] and a brief explanation [uiuc.edu] give the somewhat reassuring claim that LA will meet federal standards by 2010. For those doubtful of the effectiveness of federal institutions and national standards testing, this is probably enough incentive to start emmigration procedures :-).

    Actually, it is a rather interesting scientific question as to how far you have to alter the landscape before local micro-climate effects become significant and broadly measureable. Claims that cutting down rainforests affecting the tight ground-moisture cycle (e.g. leaves breaking up the water to reduce flash run-offs + erosion) tend to be rather hot points of discussion but certainly humans can alter ground effects such as vegetation, heat distributions, evaporation rates, etc which can lead to a discernable regional effect on the local weather patterns. However, exactly how much impact we have on the wider global cycles taking into account natural decadal variability is still a major topic of research

    LL

  • Lots of people here are pricks. I'm usually a nice prick but that still makes me a prick. : )


    Double J. Strictly for the . . .

  • Re:weird stuff... (Score:3)

    by Frymaster ( 171343 ) on Sunday July 09, 2000 @10:09PM (#946800) Homepage Journal
    He might mean it's being pushed down from 'Brown Cloud' level to street level.

    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 [example.com] 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 [example.com] 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... [example.com] | 2 [example.com] of 1045 [example.com] comments | Stunts [example.com] )

  • but remember...the brown cloud only gets bad in the winter. I get a great view of it from littleton. On days like today it's just a beautiful khaki.


    FluX
    After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
  • Yes that butterfly flapping its wings in China has an effect on the thunderstorms a month later in New York.

    yup
  • ground level ozone is made from sunlight "cooking" smog. it is most often a problem on hot, sunny, wind-less days in major cities.
    from the epa [epa.gov]:
    Ground-level ozone is formed by a chemical reaction between VOCs and oxides of nitrogen (NOx) in the presence of sunlight.
  • Last year I was reading (somewhere) that Melbourne averages 0.5 degrees Celsius higher temperature on weekdays than weekends. The researchers attributed this to traffic and industrial pollution acting like a mini-greenhouse zone, rather than increased heat output. :)

    Given that Melbourne is a very widespread city with only 4 million or so people, it's hardly surprising that a city like LA, that equals Australia's entire population generates some sort of meteorological effect.

  • For your spelling information, it is "van de Graaf". I still fail to understand why English speaking people are completely unable to remember the spelling of non-English names like the rest of the world does.
  • Working in London, I'm convinced of this theory, that London has it's own weather system. On most days, there is a very large grey cloud over the city, which I'm pretty sure does at least two things: 1) Increases the temperature/humidity (not pleasant). 2) Increases the chances of thunderstorms. (We're getting quite a few here now) I actually live about 70miles north of London, and the weather is *totally* different there. It's consistently reasonable. Rain is fairly infrequent, but then again, if it did rain a lot, we'd probably disappear off the map (it's all fairly low, flat land). I'm sure that the London temperature is about 2 degrees higher than other places in a 100 mile radius. I for one would like to see more green measures being taken in London. The excess vehicles without a doubt are contributing to increased temperatures and smog (after just two hours in the city, I find my nose going black - cyclists have to wear masks). The problem is that the current tube (or Subway system, if you want to call it that) has so many passengers it's going to croak (I think it's near the 1BN passengers/yr mark..). Air conditioning, whilst nice, is a pretty ungreen thing to have - if you pump all that heat outside, what's going to happen to it ? And, of course, you used energy to get it there..... M.
  • Powder can be used to minimise tornados? Cool. So if I get hit by one, I'll make sure to have a bottle of talcum in my hand. And obviously Bill Gates controls the weather.
  • Yes I am, I can spell, I just don't care anymore, for the record I got an A+ for english in my senior year, in fact getting the highest score in the history of my school at 98%
    And I was the first person in 13 years to get distinctions for more than 3 Creative Writing tasks consecutively. As it were however my linguistic ability became poetry as a hobby, and poets have poetic freedomn, in other words I Shell Spall howefer baddddly I wont

  • Well it's a step further than just doing what's been done over and over isn't it? You don't have to be able to predict your whole future, you can't. However, you sure as hell should try figuring it out, or face the consequences.

    - Steeltoe
  • 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.
  • Found a link that points to a very similar piece of research at the Earth Sciences department of the University of Melbourne, [unimelb.edu.au] although this researcher is talking about the Urban Heat Island, discussed elsewhere in this thread. Such heat islands may be up to 10 degrees celsius at midnight - it that can't cause local weather patterns, what can?

    I wish Slashdot had an "Edit Post" option...

  • Now I +really+ wish /. had an edit post option!

    Try here [smh.com.au] for a newspaper article, probably the one I remembered reading, or here [uwyo.edu] for a short paper with a few references that looks to have been written from that article. Gotta lova plagia^H^H research!

  • A policy change is not needed to affect the way environmental resources respond. Education is paramount. Wait and see time should be over. That the world as a whole requires a change in attitude about what is important is evident. Who is going to make the first sacrificial step in diminished quality of life, or personal comfort if you will, is the question to be addressed. You can bet your bippy it sure wont be people with monetary resources available (read, us ugly Americans).
  • Not only did sheep help to create deserts, but deforestation played a role in this as well. We know from the deforestation in the rain forests of South America, the soil is very poor and sandy. This is due to the most of the mineral and nutrients in the soil being stripped by the massive trees. When those trees are slashed and burned, only a small percentage of the mineral and nutients actually permeate the soil. The soil is so sandy, most of it just washes through. When the farmers try to farm the now cleared land, they might get two to three seasons until the fields become barren deserts. These are abandonded and the farmers move to the next cleared patch. This is not only happening in SA but in Africa as well. It also happened in eastern US but thankfully no desert was formed. The land was found basically unsuitable for farming and then the midwest became very attractive. Thankfully we now have a Second and third generation Eastern Decidious Forest in the US. Such a fate is not what will befall the rain forests. They will turn to deserts if current practices continue. Talk about changing the weather! Kirch
  • Try here [unimelb.edu.au] for a recent PhD graduate at the University of Melbourne who has investigated exactly that possbility.

    There are other posts from me elsewhere in this thread that have a few more links, as well.

  • Everyone knows (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Cities don't create there own weather, it's the EVIL GENUISES with their weather machines! How can you all be so blind to the truth?
  • ...Call me when they learn to distinguish which city features cause what weather effects.
    Pavement, especially dark pavement, absorbs heat and reradiates it.

    Yes, a lot of unknowns still exist, but ignoring the data that does exist when you make policy decisions is just foolish. Industrial processes generate heat, as well as water vapor, carbon dioxide, and various pollutants.

    Vegetation cover causes cooler temperatures as energy from the sun is used in evapotranspiration.

    "Urban Canyons" change wind patterns, and often can increase wind speed.

  • 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.
  • Fixing sprawl is easy: just ease up on the zoning ordnances that mandate low population density. It never ceases to amaze me how the anti-sprawl and anti-growth advocates never get this cause-and-effect. We've actually got zoning ordnances mandating 10 acre lots in some areas! If developers were permitted to build 50-story buildings in downtown neighborhoods (where they're appropriate) rather than having to fight tooth-and-nail with bureaucrats to build 7 story buildings, we'd make vastly more efficient use of space, make public transportation (aka car-free lifestyle) far more plausible, make more efficient use of city services, and take pressure off the housing demand (and inflating cost) in the surrounding suburban neighborhoods.

    Concrete vs. asphalt: we've been thru this locally. Concrete costs 10% more, so under the usual lowest-bidder rules it loses. But it lasts twice as long, so they spec'd it when rebuilding one of the major roads last year. Works great. Highly recommended.
  • It's pretty indisputable that temperatures have been rising over the inhabited portions (not just urban) of the planet for some time now.
    It is not entirely valid to generalize this to the planet as a whole. Naturally we have better data on the inhabited parts of the planet.

    That means we need remote sensing -- satellites.

    The satellite data didn't clearly corroborate a global increase in temperature. This lead many people to conclude that global warming (as opposed to local warming of inhabited areas) wasn't happening, although others suspected problems with the sat data. Subsequently the satellite instruments were shown to be oversensitive to temperatures at altitudes above where the posited greenhouse effect was happening. Adjusting for this bias brings the satellite data into agreement with the ground and sea based temperature measurements.

    So, right now it looks like global temperature increases are pretty well scientifically established.

    However "global warming" as a public policy phenomenon subsumes four assumptions:

    (1) The temperature of the planet is increasing (very well corroborated these days).

    (2) This is a bad thing (it seems pretty likely to be on balance bad for most people, although some Russians have understandably shown some enthusiasm for global warming).

    (3) This change is anthropogenic (somewhat questionable to my mind -- it at least superficially fits the original greenhouse gas phenomenon but it may have been a lucky coincidence).

    (4) Therefore, people can stop it (very questionable to my mind even if the trend is anthropogenic -- once trends in dynamic systems get a head of steam they're very hard to stop).

    If we negate assumptions 3 and 4, we still have some tremendous challenges. We have a society which is predicated on the stability of the environment, an even greater assumption that underlies all of these other ones.
  • Although inital conditions are important for the initiation of tornadic thunderstorms. Most of the energy for these storms comes from an upper atmosphereic condition that is set up due to TERRAIN, not soil color or extra lakes or roads, Warm moist air moves out of the gulf of mexico Northward while warm dry air flows NE from the Mexican Plateu. This creates a atmospheric setup with southerly wet air under westerly warm dry air. This is inherently unstable. When the air on the ground is warmed by the sun it rises to the level of the inversion. When it is warmed significanlty it can "punch" through the inversion and release enery by condenstation all the way to 200mb producing a thunderstorm. This thunder storm does not in itself produce a tornado, but rather the turning of the winds from SE/SSE to W/NW creates a slowly spinning mass. Then rapidly rising air can accelerate this mass into a tornadic thunderstorm, through conservation of angular momentum and other forces (specifically the rotation of horizontal vorticity into the vertical). For more explaination see http:// www.nssl.noaa.gov [noaa.gov] As you can see. Inital conditons at the ground are only a minor consideration in the process. Important yes the whole story not even close. Most of the process is an accumulation of many other things that occur very far away.
  • I'll take a million Norm Colemans before I'd take a single mealy-mouthed retard named Sharon Sayles Belton. I am no fan of Norm either. During the stupid ballpart debates, he refered to a crowd I was a part of as "Probably not from St.Paul." I yelled back "Let's compare birth certificates, Norm." He didn't say anyhting after that.
  • 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?"
    --
  • I can't recall enough to provide a cite, but the only thing I've read recently about this involves beaming microwave power from LEO into tornados to disrupt them. (Haven't heard anything about 'white powder") (Wherever) I read this, it was in the last few days.
  • I don't know if this is what you're talking about, but that was part of the terraforming of Mars in the Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy, protecting the cities and generally keping the air in and so on.

    Good books, I think.
  • You shouldn't hate yourself so much.
  • We can have the thermal inversions from hell, particularly in front of the Front Range, when it's hot at 6000 ft but there's still plenty of cold air flowing down off the snow mass up on the continental divide. One of the best times to see the brown cloud is to be a few hundred feet up the front range on a bright winter's day. It shows up really well against the snow covered plains. But what we also have are a boom economy, plenty of outdoor recreation opportunities, and way too many SUVs. SUVs (as you may well know) are not required to have clean emissions cuz car manufacturers payed Washington politicians to have them legally classified as trucks. As in, SUVs have truck sub-frames, therefore are 'trucks,' therefore can put far more CO/CO2 etc. into the air then they should. Boulder, for instance, despite all its pretensions to being a liberal-greeny type of place, is fast becoming an upper middle class wealth ghetto where the downtown streets are now so clogged with late-model wagons and SUVs as to resemble Jeep and Toyota dealerships, and the air quality quite literally sucks.

    *Cough, cough.* That feels better. $0.02.

  • A few things. I would swear I listened to an NPR program on this, but I can't seem to find a link for it. Anyhow, here's what I remember them saying:

    Trees (with leaves during summer), even small ones, create their own micro-climate around and in the trees. They've recommended that by having a few good shade trees very near to your home or apartment, you can significantly reduce your electricity bill (from your air conditioning).

    IIRC, the program mentioned that there was once a movement to begin planting gardens on the rooftops of all sorts of city buildings in Chicago. As people above have noted, the temperatures remain quite high in areas covered with asphalt, and alsphalt roofing is no exception, which motivated this garden-rooftop idea. The program mentioned that even if a few neighboring buildings planted some rooftop gardens (covering the majority of the rooftop), they could affect the overall temperature in that area as a result of their own rooftop-garden micro-climate.

    Does this ring a bell? Anybody have more insight on this? It was actually very fascinating...


    Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
  • There was a hell of a lot research done on weather control in Russia. Just a while ago I've heard that Moscow's mayor is routinely using some sort of chemical dropped from planes to clear up clouds before important events... Can anyone validate this?
  • Google has an interesting collection of links on "urban climate." http://directory.google.com/alpha/Top/Science/Eart h_Sciences/Meteorology/Urban_Climat e/ [google.com].
  • Good call there, slick...

    ---------------
  • Having lived all of my life in Chicago (and a year Michigan), the Lake Effect _is_ weather as I know it. And let me be the first to say, it really blows in the winter...
  • I will use my giant "LA-SER" to turn your city into a rainy HELL, spoiling every picnic and barbecue for miles, unless you pay me ...

    ONE ... MEELION .... DOLLARS!

    (stage direction: pinky at corner of mouth)
    MUHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAA!

  • I can't say definitively if this (or the previous post) is true or not, but, to my eyes, it looks like a 1950's era urban legend.

  • Considering that most tornados occur in Oklahoma, and secondly that a large portion of Oklahoma contains red dirt, not black, I'm thinking your diagnosis is incorrect.

    JB
  • This may be a bad question to ask on Slashdot, but why did NASA, of all people, fund this research?

    NASA stands for National Air and Space Administration. They were founded to explore the boundaries of Air and Space research- that is, develop technology to expand mankind's reach into space and areas of flight which pose significant technological difficulties to engineers in the aerospace industry. NASA is supposed to launch probes to explore the solar system, build research vehicles to expand our knowledge of unusual aerodynamic flight regimes, and develop technology for launch vehicles. NASA's charter is to accomplish experimental research that is too expensive for private industry to accomplish at this time.

    I'm not saying that NASA is bad, or that the research done in this study was superfluous or redundant. I just think that a more appropriate source would have been the EPA, the University of Colorado, or Ralph Nader and his acolytes.

    Can anyone answer this?

    Rev Neh
  • Geez you non-californians, the only reason you call it brown cloud or other junk is because 'only LA has smog'. You guys have smog too and perhaps far worse than los angeles.
  • Well, having lived in Atlanta for almost 20 years, just watching the weather radar makes it pretty obvious that the city (and Lake Lanier close by to the north) is affecting the weather.

    For example, when you see popcorn thunderstorms repeatedly popping up only over Lake Lanier and the heavily populated parts of the city, consistently, over nearly two decades, it doesn't exactly require Fellini to figure out that the city and the lake are having an effect. I'm not saying that's enough to figure out the details of the effect or its reasons, but it's surely enough to see the correlation.

  • Absolutely correct about Boulder. I live in Boulder also and most people would choke if they saw the number of SUVs here. Walking along side the street makes you feel quesy from the fumes released from those horrible SUVs. At least there are still many biker and pedestrian routes away from all the cars areas. I think every city needs things like the creek path.

    It is a path that follows the boulder creek with lots of trees and the creek. It really cools off the area near it a lot. The air there also smells cleaner. It is also faster to get some places by bike or walking then by car since this path goes under some roads. The environment gains and so do people and it is good exercise.
  • So if a butterfly flaps its wings in China, it rains in New York. If I fart in New York, does it snow in Beijing?
  • Nope! Wrong-O

    National Aeronautics and Space Administration

    Weather falls squarely in the Aeronautics part; didn't you ever hear about their "Mission to Planet Earth?"

    Before NASA was NACA; their focus was on research into aircraft design. I've got a great book at home, "Theory of Wing Sections," that was published by some people from NACA. It also catalogs their four- and five-digit airfoils.

    Perhaps you're thinking of the National Air and Space museum, which is part of the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.

    Jeff

  • Sheep actually don't do as much damage as goats; one of the big advances in human history was that, when we started using wool, we started keeping sheep instead of goats. Goats rip grass out and eat the roots; sheep graze it to a couple of inches, normally.

    The sheep are the solution; goats were the problem.
  • > How high to you have to get to escape the winds and flying cows?

    Not quite so high as low orbit, but high enough to make it interesting. The part of the tornado that we see, as big and impressive as it is, is only about 10% of the full vortex. Most of the heavier debris stays down below that 10%, but lighter things can go all the way up. When they come back down, they're miles away from where they were picked up.

    My mind is sorta foggy on it, but I remember a story about a town that got rained on by frogs, with an otherwise clear sky, because a tornado some miles away went over a river full of them, picked them up, and chucked them from over 10,000 feet up. Somebody else probably remembers it better than I am, so don't call me on accuracy. :)
  • For your spelling information, it is "van de Graaf"

    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...

  • I just admire the fact that you site both biblical fables and chaos theory in your argument. Also while its a given that goats are more harmfull then sheep, everyone knows that not even 60 goats could afflict the destruction of that by just one of Kool Keith's amphibious halfshark-alligator men. And you know this, MAN.
  • SUVs (as you may well know) are not required to have clean emissions cuz car manufacturers payed Washington politicians to have them legally classified as trucks

    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...

  • Actually, it's cool air that causes thunderstorms. Warm air will raise the water capacity of the air and lower the humidity (clouds disperse). Cool air lowers the water capacity and raises humidity. When the humidity passes 100%, its much more likely to rain. That's why cold fronts in the summer cause nasty thunderstorms.

  • And to think you Canadians have it pretty good as far as urban greenspace goes. So far, every major Canadian city I've been in has tons of greenspace interspercing developments. Most American cities in contrast, just sprawl. Can anyone comment on the differing urban planning policies in both countries. Most Canadian cities seem to me to be planned to some degree. I'm curious as to how such philosophies differ between our countries.

  • 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?
  • NASA does a lot of research and development on remote sensing from aircraft and satellites. This is closely tied to weather and climate research. It isn't much of a jump.

    Don't expect science from the EPA or Ralph Nader and his minions.

  • Hardly. The idea that we as humans shouldn't change the world is foolish. All other species change the world and so do we.

    The effects we are talking about here are harmful to humans and probably other species as well. Even if you don't believe that altering nature or harming other species is of concern, the fact that it harms humans as well should get your attention.

    Every work day for the past two weeks, I have seen an ambulance responding to someone who has passed out from the heat/humidity (Downtown Atlanta). I'm pretty sure that a 5 degree reduction in temperature would help with that problem.

    Every year starting in June, all sorts of watering bans go into effect due to inability to treat enough water to meet demand. Some of that would be alleviated if the artificial drought over the city and areas just E were not present.

    The people who live near a creek or river would probably appreciate an end to the feast or famine effect the city has on rainfall in surrounding areas. They can't be blamed for living in a flood area, it wasn't a flood area when they moved there.

    Purely on a standard of living issue, I would appreciate if the first breath of outside air I get in the morning smelled more like it did 10-20 years ago and less like it does now. It must be bad if a confirmed smoker such as myself notices it enough to be annoyed.

    A final note, after the '96 Olympics here in Atlanta, I returned to work and noticed that the air in town smelled unusual in a pleasant way. Then I realised that it was because traffic had been very light during the games and some of the pollution had dispersed.

  • 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...

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