Glacier projections

Graham Cogley (2012) regularized a number of projections of glacier wastage in a recent book (so that all numbers include the glaciers peripheral to the ice sheets, and cover the entire 21st century).

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Ice sheets and Semi-empirical models

Here I demonstrate that a very simpleĀ Semi-empirical modelĀ (SEM) can approximate the historical contribution to sea level rise from Greenland as estimated by Box and Colgan (2013). IĀ start with a very simple SEM model where ice wastage is proportional to Greenland temperatures from Vinther et al.

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Hurricane surges in tide gauges

The hurricane surge index was constructed by extracting the hurricane surge signal from tide gauge records. This involved some pre-filtering of the tide gauge data. This page illustrates a number of these steps on a short section of the 2005 data recorded at the Pensacola tide gauge.

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Changing Sea level budget and Semi-Empirical models

It is expected that the balance of the sea level budget will change in the future as the slow giants of the ice sheets awaken. This has been leveled as a criticism of semi-empirical models. For that reason people sometimesĀ (wrongly)Ā argueĀ that “the data used to derive the model, do not contain the effect of the processes, which we expect in the future to dominate”. Here I demonstrate that this argument is flawed using an extremely simplified conceptual model.

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Linear response of ice sheets?

Bamber & Aspinall 2012 made an expert elicitation of ice sheet experts. They shows this table in their supplementary information:

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Trends in extreme hurricane damage

I have downloaded the ICAT damage estimates of normalized hurricane damages(/losses) and looked at the trends in the data. This series is often used to argue that there is no significant trend in hurricane damage.

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Can process models close the sea level budget?

Before we can trust the projected models of sea level rise then it is reasonable to demand that these models can match the record of global mean sea level rise. Gregory et al. (2012) writes: Ā “_Conļ¬dence in projections of global-mean sea level rise (GMSLR) depends on an ability to account for GMSLRĀ during the twentieth century”.

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Return period of Boulder 2013 extreme rain

!Several media stories on the Colorado floods talk of it as a 1000-year flood. However, the original source of this claim was talking about a 1000-year precip event (not the same as a flood-event). Pielke Jr discusses this on his blog.

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WAIS collapse during the last interglacial?

There are several lines of evidence pointing to a WAIS collapse during the last interglacial (MIS 5 / Eemian).

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Homogeneous record of Atlantic hurricane surge threat since 1923

Detection and attribution of past changes in cyclone activity are hampered by biased cyclone records due to changes in observational capabilities. Here we construct an independent record of Atlantic tropical cyclone activity on the basis of storm surge statistics from tide gauges.

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Aslak Grinsted, John C. Moore, and Svetlana Jevrejeva (2012),Ā Homogeneous record of Atlantic hurricane surge threat since 1923,Ā PNAS, 10.1073/pnas.1209542109 Share

A rebuttal to Pielke Jr's 18ft critique.

We show in our paper that the surge index correlates with major land falling hurricanes with a correlation coefficient of 0.6. As expected this correlation improves with smoothing (see paper or table below). We show that the vast majority of the 50 greatest surge events can be related to known land-falling hurricanes.

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The units of ACE are simply wrong

The definition of Accumulated Cyclone Energy does not make sense.

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