In keeping with reviewing books read last year I will start with “Weather- A visual guide” Buckley et. al. Some great pictures are used to describe sections about clouds, tornadoes, cyclones and satellite images. In addition there are some excellent illustrations to help explain some of the more complex aspects of the Earth's climate.
As expected there is a section on climate change with some of the obvious examples being the shrinking glaciers around the world and the large chunk of the Antarctic ice shelf that broke off the mainland. A lot of the so called changes are difficult to quantify. For example I think this fall and winter have been very cloudy compared to the so-called normal, but what do I have for a base line?
The weather guide gives some examples of complex solar monitoring devices which quantifies solar radiation through the seasons. While my solar panels (SP) may not be as precise I think they provide a reasonably good baseline. For example, the 30 SP only produced 43 kilowatt hours (kwh) during the months of November and December compared to 5,600 kwh from May to September.
The low sun angle and snow on the SP does restrict the available sunlight and the warm temperatures during the same timeframe also supports the theory of a cloudy fall. I will need a lot more data, but after a few decades some more reliable and specific long-term trends may be available.
During this cloudy period many of the days showed a clear arch to the south and west which indicated a sunny area towards the coast mountains. During a few of these days I viewed the cloud formations on the weather satellite which showed a distinct cloudless area in the West Chilcotin . On days that there was no fog or low clouds the main cloud formations were east of a line north and south through the central Chilcotin as observed on the climate satellite.
Another interesting section was on tornadoes with the southeastern U.S.A. being one of the most prolific storm areas. While tornadoes can be seen on every continent except Antarctica, one of the most severe areas saw 148 tornadoes in a 16-hour period hit 11 states killing 315 people and injuring more than 5,300.
Fire tornadoes are described in the December 2019 Scientific American. These rather rare events can be very dangerous as exemplified in the one near Redding California in July 2018 when it killed four people working on the Carr wildfire. Judging from the damage it was estimated the winds reached 165 mph making it a category three tornado similar to regular tornadoes that have occurred in California.
They can be created in a lab on a small scale, but the large ones develop from multiple small dust devil-sized fire funnels which leads to the large dangerous size when a cold wind from the ocean interacts with a large hot wildfire. While these are rather rare events, the hotter longer wildfire season in B.C. may produce some of these fire tornadoes. We will have to use a variety of tools over years to quantify where significant climate changes are taking place and then get serious about how to make realistic changes to our life styles.