From the Cliff Mass Weather Blog

Cliff Mass

The Big Chill will Save California From the Big Melt

The media has been going big on potential disasters in California.

Drought warmings earlier this winter have been replaced by scary warming of major flooding as an incipient  “Big Melt” rapidly melts the record-breaking snowpack over the Golden State.

Desperately, California reservoir managers have been dumping water in a race to prevent reservoirs from being overtopped and potentially damaged as temperatures warm.

But it now appears that the weather gods have decided to be kind, and meteorological salvation is now in California’s future.

An incipient Big Chill is about to reduce the Big Melt to tolerable levels.

Using the European Center ensemble prediction system, the best in the world, here are the predicted differences from normal of surface air temperatures around California for the next week.  This is also called the anomaly from climatology.

Blue indicates colder than normal;  green is much colder than normal (by 8°F or more).

Wow.   Lots of green over the entire state.  The mountains above LA will be frigid.

Consider Truckee Airport at 5600 ft in the Sierra Nevada range (see below).  No heatwave there, with temperatures most nights dropping into the 20s and many days only getting into the lower 40s.

The National Weather Service’s extended temperature forecast for the entire month of May from their GFS model is for substantially cooler than normal over California.

And did I mention that Pacific Ocean sea surface temperatures along the West Coast are MUCH colder than normal?  See below.  Blue colors indicate below-normal ocean temps.

In short, such suppressed temperatures will be California’s near-term future and will greatly decrease snowmelt.

This is going to be one of the coolest Mays in California history if the models are correct. 

So let’s give this a name:  The California Big Chill.

I know your next question.  Why is California going to be SO COLD during the next week or so?

The reason:  a deep trough, low-pressure area, not unlike some of the features seen for much of the late winter.

Below is the upper-level map for 2 PM Wednesday.  The solid lines show the heights of 500 hPa pressure (you can think of this as the pressure around 18,000 ft) and the shading is the difference from normal of these heights/pressures.

An unbelievably strong low off California.  Very unusual for this time of the year.

This low sticks around for a few days and then ANOTHER strong low begins to move in from the Northwest on Monday (see below).

A cool May will allow the Sierra Nevada snowpack to slowly melt.  Reservoirs will fill but not overtop.  Flooding will be lessened.

Bottom line:  it appears that California will get through this unusually wet/snowy period without serious flooding.

But one thing is clear:  the political “leadership” in California has been deeply irresponsible during the past decades by not adding more reservoir capacity.   No new reservoirs have come online in the Golden State during the past 40 years, as the population has doubled. 

More reservoirs would not only have promoted safety by holding all the wet bounty for slow release, but would make huge water resources available for the growing population and agriculture in the State.  

There is too much talk about global warming and not enough rational planning and action to deal with the known environmental challenges of the state.

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The Northwest Weather Workshop agenda and information are online.   This meeting, which will take place on May 12-13th in Seattle, is the major weather meeting of the year in the Northwest.   We have a varied and interesting agenda.  The meeting is open to everyone and if you want to attend you must register (on the website).   

We will also have a banquet/talk at Ivar’s Salmon House on Friday May, 12.  This is a fun meeting and will be hybrid (in person and on zoom).

From MasterResource

By Steve Goreham — May 2, 2023

“CCS has been slow to take off due to the cost of capture and the limited salability of carbon dioxide as a product. Thirty-nine CCS facilities capture CO₂ around the world today, totaling 45 million tons per year, or about one-tenth of one percent (0.1%) of industrial emissions produced globally.”

The Environmental Protection Agency is working on a new rule that would set stringent limits on carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from US power plants. Utilities would be required to retrofit existing plants with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology or to switch to hydrogen fuel. Others call for the use of CCS to decarbonize heavy industry. But the cost of capture and the amount of CO₂ that proponents say needs to be captured crush any ideas about feasibility.

Carbon capture and storage is the process of capturing carbon dioxide from an industrial plant before it enters the atmosphere, transporting it, and storing it for centuries to millennia. Capture may be accomplished by filtering it from combustion exhaust streams. Pipelines are proposed to transport the captured CO₂. Underground reservoirs could be used for storage. For the last two decades, advocates have proposed CCS to reduce emissions from coal plants and steel, chemical, and other hard-to-decarbonize industries in order to fight human-caused climate change.

CCS has been slow to take off due to the cost of capture and the limited salability of carbon dioxide as a product. Thirty-nine CCS facilities capture CO₂ around the world today, totaling 45 million tons per year, or about one-tenth of one percent (0.1%) of industrial emissions produced globally. Of these, 20 reside in the US or Canada, six in Europe, and five in China. Twenty-four of these facilities use captured CO₂ for enhanced oil recovery. Captured CO₂ is injected into oil wells to boost oil output,

The news from these facilities is mixed. Many are not meeting their carbon-capture goals or are incurring costs well over budget. Nevertheless, Australia, Canada, China, Japan, the US, and nations of Europe now offer billions in direct subsidies or tax breaks to firms for capture of CO₂ emissions and to build pipelines and storage. Over 300 large and small capture projects are in planning around the world which, after completion, may be able to boost capture to 0.5 percent of man-made emissions.

Illinois, Iowa, and other states are struggling with issues involving plans for CO₂ pipelines. Ethanol plants and other facilities propose to capture CO₂ and need a new network of pipelines to transport the gas to underground storage sites. These pipelines face strong opposition from local communities over farmland use and safety concerns in the case of a pipeline rupture.

Carbon capture and storage is very expensive. An example concerns plans for CCS in Wyoming, the leading US coal state. Wyoming mined 41 percent of US coal in 2020 and coal-fired plants produced about 85 percent of the state’s electricity. With abundant coal resources and good opportunities to store CO₂ underground, Wyoming appeared to be an excellent candidate to use CCS. The state passed House Bill 200 in March 2020, directing utilities to produce 20 percent of electricity from coal plants fitted with CCS by 2030.

In response to the statute, Rocky Mountain Power and Black Hills Energy, Wyoming’s two major power companies, analyzed alternatives for their operations and provided comments to the Wyoming Public Service Commission in March 2022. But the comments were not favorable for CCS. Black Hills Energy determined that adding CCS to two existing coal plants would cost an estimated $980 million, or three times the capital cost expended to build the plants. Rocky Mountain Power stated that adding CCS to its existing plants was “not economically feasible at this time.”

Beyond cost, the amount of carbon dioxide that advocates say must be captured is vast. The amount of CO₂ produced by industry is small in global terms, only about five percent of what nature releases into and absorbs from the atmosphere every day. But the amount of industrial CO₂ produced is still huge in human terms.

For example, an empty Boeing 747 jumbo jet weighs 412,300 pounds (187,000 kg). Its maximum fuel weight is 433,195 pounds (196,494 kg), more than the empty weight of the aircraft. During fuel combustion, two oxygen atoms are taken from the atmosphere and combined with each carbon atom. For each kilogram of jet fuel burned, 3.16 kilograms of carbon dioxide are created.

Consider the Drax Power Station in North Yorkshire, England, the third-largest power plant in Europe, which has been converted to using two-thirds biomass fuel. The plant is experimenting with CCS to reduce emissions. Each day, the plant uses about 20,000 tons of wood pellets delivered by 475 railroad cars. Picture the volume that these railroad cars would carry and then more than double it to get an idea of the amount of CO₂ to be captured and stored each day.

The world’s heavy industries use vast amounts of coal, natural gas, and petroleum. Ammonia, cement, plastics, steel, and other industries produce billions of tons of materials each year for agriculture, construction, health care, industry, and transportation. Capturing, transporting, and storing CO₂ from these processes would involve trillions of dollars and many decades of investment.

The International Energy Agency calls for 9 percent of the world’s CO₂ emissions to be captured and stored by 2050. Today we have a mix of 39 major and minor capture facilities in operation. The IEA estimates that 70 to 100 major capture facilities will need to come online each year until 2050 to achieve this goal. It’s unlikely that even 20 percent of the goal will be achieved, despite hundreds of billions of dollars in spending.

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Steve Goreham, a popular speaker on energy, environmental, and public policy issues, is author of three books on energy, sustainable development, and climate change. His previous post at MasterResource was “Green Energy: Greatest Wealth Transfer to the Rich in History,”