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I went to boarding school in the same State I now live in. I have seen the climate change. Even in the decade since my retirement, the climate has changed.

It's had an interesting effect in that the summer hasn't had many hot days, but the average is higher. This year, I only had a couple of days go above 90 deg f. My winter has fewer longer cold snaps, but some pretty steep cold snaps (-48 deg f this past year was the record). My snow totals have actually increased from area historical norms. I've been able to get the historical data and have a weather station that logs my local conditions.

There's also a bit of microclimate effect going on here. I'm not a climate scientist, so I am really only capable of comparing the results.

If it wasn't so damaging, I'd be all for it. I love snow and hate when it goes above 90. I don't get grumpy until it goes below -20. It's too bad that it's going to cause lots of damage for other people.

Sort of related: You can get the data and run the models yourself. I used to model traffic and there are some similarities. It seemed like a good thing to learn a bit about, so I spent a couple of years poking at it in my free time.

I live in Michigan and it's blatantly obvious here too.

Apart from lake effect on the west side of the state, we hardly get snow anymore, because it's barely dropped below freezing. The last few winters have been incredibly mild apart from the "polar vortex" events where dry cold air blows down from the north. Since it's so dry, these don't really generate a lot of snowfall, it just snaps cold. These polar vortexes are a new weather pattern for us.

This fall we've been getting literal monsoon weather from the remains of hurricanes coming up the east coast. Each storm turns into days of warm drizzling and fog, which is much more typical weather for the spring, not October. Another atypical weather pattern.

That's just on a local scale. Then you look at how we're now getting multiple extreme hurricanes per year, one after another, multiple 100-year floods, and it's just insane that people could possibly deny the reality of climate change when it's literally happening over a span of just a few years, right before their very eyes. The weather we had ten years ago is not the weather we have today.

Trump has taken office at a very unfortunate time, because we urgently need to mitigate both carbon emissions and the direct impacts of the weather right now. But instead we're going to spend the next 3-7 years going backwards during one of the most critical junctures. At least he's so utterly incompetent that he's mostly just stalling out his agenda - going nowhere does beat going backwards at least. Just kinda sucks for the people most directly in the line of fire for climate change, because it's very obvious that no relief is going to be forthcoming for the parts of America that have been devastated over the last few months.

Maine, here. I'm not far from Mt. Washington, as the crow flies.

I was first here in the 1970s and the records confirm my recollection of cold snaps where it would go below 0 deg f and not come back above 0 for 5 to 7 days.

I've not had any stretch longer than 72 hours where the temperature didn't go above 0, in the past nine years.

At the same time, there have been some very, very cold days. My car wasn't in the garage the night we hit -48 and rear view mirror cracked. I can only guess that it was due to the cold.

I don't have very accurate wind speeds. However, I have near constant wind and the windy storms seem more frequent. Mother Nature has a fondness for taking my weather stations away from me. (Mt. Washington holds the land wind speed record of 231 MPH, I get some serious wind here but not that bad.) Even when hooked to a pole embedded in concrete, Mother Nature loves taking my stuff.

As for the politics, I do what I can as an individual. I offer no opinion on Trump.

I wonder how much these sorts of accounts are attributable to the beat of the Climate Doom drum combined with human recollection which is notoriously unreliable, malleable, and open to suggestion.

The US has just exited a period of a record setting "hurricane drought," so maybe the hurricane remnant weather seems unusual because no such storms have made landfall in the US for the past decade plus.

That this year had a cluster of large storms isn't really indicative of anything in and of itself. Most things appear to happen in clusters. Things aren't perfectly evenly distributed.

https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/major-hurricane-us...!

One of the challenges when it comes to assessing the full impact of anthropogenic climate change is that while it does drive extreme weather, it's far from the only input into such events. Combined with the limited number of such events, it makes it easy to dismiss them as ancedotes instead of data.

Scientific American has a good overview of this: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/yes-some-extreme-...

You can also do a google search for graphs on the frequency of extreme climate events.

I suppose you could rephrase 'Trump has taken office' to 'America elected Trump' to make the responsibility for his election clearer.

In areas that typically get cold enough for snow, increased snow totals are an expected outcome of global warming. Global warming causes more moisture to get into the air in general, and moisture in the air eventually returns to earth in the form of precipitation. During cold winters, this means more snow.

Yup, it's the expected outcome. Some of the models predict what I'm seeing with the lack of extremes in the summer, as well.

I'm not a climate scientist and only got into it to win an Internet Argument. It was very important, at the time. ;-)

Basically, I'd worked with modeling large data sets in a chaotic system (traffic) and knew that 'adjusting the data' was legitimate. This was when people were complaining about the scientists changing the data they used in their models.

So, I started poking. I spent about two years poking at it. I also learned that the rumors seemed to be untrue. I was able to email and get unadjusted data - even without credentials. I say 'seemed' because this was after the email disclosures.

If you just want a copy of a paper and you don't feel like paying for it or hitting up your local university library, you can even just email one of the authors. I did that a couple of times and have had nothing but cooperation.

If you just want a copy of a paper

If you search the title or visit the author's homepage you can sometimes find a copy hosted, and these days there is of course sci-hub.

That is also true, though I'm not sure I knew of sci-hub back then, or if it existed. I 'finished' a few years back.

I do still pay passing attention but my quasi-scholastic approach has settled down.

One benefit of contacting them directly is you can often get copies of more than just the paper. I've had them send me zipped copies of their research and, in one case, even sent me a couple of DVDs full of stuff.

On a whole, the community was very approachable and I simply explained what I was doing and why. There weren't any negative responses and I was clear that I'm a mathematician and not a climate scientist. It was very unlike how I'd been led to believe, as far as uncooperative responses.

>> I'm curious to see if I, as a local, can identify some weather patterns here that outside meteorologists haven't noticed yet. reply

It's almost inevitable that some local would be able to identify extreme local patterns.

To generalise the result though, a problem you'd have, if you turn out to be one such local, is figuring out the extent to which your experience is common, or just down to unfortunate local factors.

I'm talking about connecting specific factors with specific outcomes.

When it's raining hard and I want to assess slide risk for my own sake, I look at a few factors: total rainfall over a short time period; average wind speeds and gusts; and how quickly the rivers are rising. I think I might have a sense of a signature of these three factors that predict a higher chance of slide activity.

I want to run a more careful analysis of those factors, and see if I can come up with an actionable signature for slide risk. Even if it works for just this town, it will be really helpful. But I know enough not to say much about that locally unless I have a concrete proposal.

I see. Over the years, there's been a lot of similar research into localised earthquake prediction. Results are not actionable yet.

I am not at all informed on the subject, but hours-since-last-slide(s), their proximity and magnitude would be some additional factors you might consider using.

If historical weather and geo-tagged slide data is available for the whole region, you could use it to train and test models.

I want to funnel my Bay Area salary into some land out in Alaska for family retreats and off periods in between work.

How is it living out there?

Here in Sitka, land is really expensive because most of the flat and easily buildable land has already been claimed and developed. That's contributing to the seriousness of the landslide threat.

There's an interesting project going on outside of Valdez. A couple people are setting up to do their tech work up here. They call themselves Geeks in the Woods [0]; I haven't followed their work other than keeping an eye on their instagram account [1].

I've often thought of trying to host a tech gathering up here at some point in the future. It's a great location for doing good tech focused work, and then disconnecting fully to regain perspective, then going back to your tech work. It's a great place for remote work, there's just very little networking with others in tech here.

As for a really specific answer to your question, Alaska is so varied that you have to ask about a specific part of the state. Any particular area you're interested in?

[0] https://www.geekwire.com/2017/drop-tune-seattle-mobile-analy...

[1] https://www.instagram.com/geeksinthewoods/

What exactly does it mean to set up a "tech hub" of two people, in a town of 4000, in rural Alaska?

I'm not sure I get the core concept there. Full disclosure: I was born and raised in Valdez.

Not Bay Area, but I'm also interested. Where/how do you start looking?

> try to correlate it with slide events

Interesting idea, have you though about how you plan on making the correlation?

Two thoughts I just wanted to throw out there:

-As slopes fail, I think they tend to stabilize themselves, so it might be that only increasingly intense periods of rainfall would cause further slides.

-Slope stability depends on pore water pressure, which is more akin to ground water saturation, rather than rainfall. The two can probably be related, but its going to depend on the rainfall intensity minus the losses from permeability of the soil (together, they introduce time into the equation)

I alluded to this in another comment, but I'll be a little more specific. When it's raining hard and I want to assess slide risk for my own sake, I look at several factors: - what's the total rainfall over the last ~6 hours; - what are the average wind speeds, and gusts? - how quickly are the rivers rising, and how much have they risen overall?

I think there's a signature in here, where if all these factors are above critical values then a slide is much more likely to occur. I need to test this by identifying how often this set of critical values have been reached over the last xx years, and then see if that correlates to known slide activity.

I think the river gauge is an indirect measure of ground water saturation. If the river gauge is rising at maximum steepness, that's an indication that the ground is fully saturated. If it's raining hard and the river gauge is not rising at maximum steepness, then the ground isn't fully saturated. That's why the river gauge is a key part of this slide risk signature. Fortunately we've had a river gauge in place since before the recent spate of slides.

These discussions are motivating me to take the next steps on this analysis. I think I'll do some analysis tonight, and see how far I can get.

> As slopes fail, I think they tend to stabilize themselves, so it might be that only increasingly intense periods of rainfall would cause further slides.

That's an interesting thought. There's lots of steep land, so there's plenty of land that hasn't slid for a long time but could slide under the right conditions. Repeated slides probably won't release as much material, but then again slides remove what vegetation was holding a slope together. So if a slide doesn't fully unload a slope, I wonder how stable the remaining debris might be.

I'm curious to see if I, as a local, can identify some weather patterns here that outside meteorologists haven't noticed yet.

If you start a blog or spread sheet or other means to track local slides events, you may be able to develop some data of your own. This could give you an advantage.

IIRC, the best info we have on Krakatoa is from the journal of a woman who was fascinated by the lead up events without realizing what it portended.

>When I get a lull between my various projects I'm going to do some analysis of our long-term weather data, and try to correlate it with slide events. I'm curious to see if the rainfall patterns are changing over time, beyond just total amounts each year. I'm curious to see if I, as a local, can identify some weather patterns here that outside meteorologists haven't noticed yet.

I would recommend starting with a literature search first. It's likely that people have already studied this. There is already a well understood relationship between rainfall and landslides, so I'm curious as to what you're looking for exactly. Remember, you're unlikely to stumble upon something in a few hours that people spend their entire lives looking at.