by T. Fazi, July 18, 2023 in UnHerd
As I write this, in my favourite local café in Rome, the temperature outside is close to 40°C. So yes, it’s hot. Yet, thanks to a relatively old invention — air conditioning — I’m able to work in comfort. The 10-minute bike ride back home will be tougher than usual, but it won’t kill me. Like most people here, I consider these temperatures to be a nuisance — but that’s about it.
According to the news, however, I should be terribly concerned — terrified, in fact. Everyone’s running headline stories about the “extreme”, “record-breaking” and “deadly” hot weather sweeping across Asia, the US and, most notably, Europe. Here, the heatwave was unofficially named Cerberus, the multi-headed dog that guards the gates of Hades, before being replaced by Charon, the man who ferries the dead there. Rome is being called the “infernal city”. To be honest, I can think of several much more hellish places around the world at the moment — cities plagued by poverty, terrorism and war. And yet we are told that the current heat waves are a taste of the “hell” that awaits us as a result of climate change.
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by P. Homewood, Jul 18, 2023 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
BEIJING, July 17 (Reuters) – A remote township in China’s arid northwest endured temperatures of more than 52 Celsius (126 Fahrenheit) on Sunday, state media reported, setting a record for a country that was battling minus 50C weather just six months ago.
Temperatures at Sanbao township in Xinjiang’s Turpan Depression soared as high as 52.2C on Sunday, state-run Xinjiang Daily reported on Monday, with the record heat expected to persist at least another five days.
The Sunday temperature broke a previous record of 50.3C, measured in 2015 near Ayding in the depression, a vast basin of sand dunes and dried-up lakes more than 150 m (492 ft) below sea level.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-logs-522-celsius-extreme-weather-rewrites-records-2023-07-17/
I can’t see the heatwave in Beijing particularly affecting that family crossing the road! Looks like they’re having a nice day out.
But back to Sanbao, which sits in the Turpan Depression that is as much as 150m below sea level. According to Wikipedia, the Turpan has a harsh desert climate, and is counted as one of the Furnaces of China. It is believed to be the second or third deepest depression on Earth. it is also the hottest and driest area in China during the summer.
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by W. Eschenbach, Jul 16 , 2023 in WUWT
So I was wandering through the marvelous KNMI website, and I came across data for the Palmer Self-Correcting Drought Severity Index. This is an index that measures the drought conditions in some given area. The source website says:
The scPDSI (self-correcting Palmer Drought Severity Index) is a variant on the original PDSI of Palmer (1965), with the aim to make results from different climate regimes more comparable. As with the PDSI, the scPDSI is calculated from time series of precipitation and temperature, together with fixed parameters related to the soil/surface characteristics at each location.
Now, the KNMI site only offers linear trends of data. But if you look at the bottom of the KNMI page linked above, or other pages at that level of inquiry, you’ll find that there is an option to download the NetCDF version of the data. As in this case, this NetCDF data is often gridded.
And using that NetCDF gridded file lets me make a graphic showing the average scPDSI for the globe.
Figure 1. Yes, indeed, Australia is a dry country
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La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
