Fire damage on the mainland so far. And it’s not yet December …
#NSWRFS Building Impact Assessment teams are continuing their inspection of fire affected communities. In the past fortnight, 421 homes have been destroyed. Around 2000 homes have been spared. Already this fire season, six lives have been lost and 530 homes destroyed.#nswfires pic.twitter.com/c4Hlon64DZ
— NSW RFS (@NSWRFS) November 17, 2019
Tasmanians who were threatened by last summer’s bushfires will be well familiar with the Sentinel website that shows fire activity.
Happily, Tasmania’s recent polar blast has made the state cold and wet and Sentinel shows no fires across the island.
To the north, on the Australian mainland, NSW and SEQ burns.
Less well publicised are the fires burning across Indonesia. Two Sentinel snapshots are shown from today, NSW above, Indonesia below.
A polar blast is spreading out over the mainland as I write this.
Whether it is related to the unusual stratospheric warming event I mentioned earlier this year I do not know, but we are having a very wet and cold November in southern Tasmania, after hitting 34C and humid just a few days ago.
The Snowy Range is well covered in white.
Meanwhile, north of the polar intrusion, unprecedented fires burn in NSW/SEQ (below) …
Click here to view a page with an animation.
See a series of pictures of the developing NSW fronts here.
The top two images show the latest methane levels recorded at Barrow, in the Arctic.
The bottom image shows the record slow refreeze of ice in one of the Arctic seas.
Is something happening in the Arctic?
The methane spike has not yet been picked up at other global sites, but if Barrow is showing the beginning of a feedback loop fed by melting undersea methane hydrates, and thawing permafrost, we may be seeing the beginnings of a climate change feedback loop and an increase in the rate of global warming.
With Arctic towns relocating because of melting permafrost, and seals and seabirds turning up dead in the high latitudes, things are looking a bit odd in the northern hemisphere.
And below, some food for thought. The graphic is by Reg Morrison.
Looks like it is going to be a helluva year.
EDIT: November 9 – Huon has had a week of good rain, fire hazard is much lower now.
Some Huon Valley roads are not high above tidal water.
This is significant given that sea level rise has reached an astounding 5mm a year, and is likely to accelerate further.
Read a news story about the latest findings here. Here is the WMO report.
The road from from Huonville to Cygnet is already being cut off during floods, while the Huonville-to-Franklin route and Huonville-to-Judbury have low spots which will be a problem in future.
The report in the above link notes an acceleration in global warming, not unexpected given the vast increase in greenhouse gas output over the past 30 years.
Sea level rise will bring more flooding to Huonville. The Huon River floods quite regularly, and higher sea levels will worsen the effects.
Parts of some Huon roads will eventually go under during high tides.
Global warming and sea level rise will speed up further as Antarctic, Arctic and Greenland ice caps melt and the sea warms.
Check out polar ice melt trends here.
Road managers need to make plans, perhaps by creating future funds to pay for the required costly roadworks.
The stratospheric heat event continues, and may be the most intense yet experienced.
Heat to more than 70C above normal has been recorded in the stratosphere, and this will likely affect southern hemisphere weather soon.
Tasmania could cop severe cold blasts, while mainland Australia could be extremely dry this summer.
Blue Skies Weather forecaster Tony Trewinnard​ said: “Temperatures at 30km are in single digits and that’s 50, 60, 70C warmer than normal at that altitude. That is quite bizarre.
“We may find the spring season as a whole turns out cold, or summer is. It isn’t affecting our (NZ) weather patterns here yet, but basically it will only be a matter of time.”
Noll said the sudden stratospheric warming was a “climate driver”.
“It influences weather patterns over weeks to months but isn’t a predictor of day-to-day weather,” he said.
“It can and will influence patterns during October and, given the longevity of the event, it may be a player into November. So it’s not over yet.”
This interactive graphic by Climate Central should remove any doubts about current temperature trends.
It shows hot and cold temp records over the past century in American cities.
Spend 10 minutes with it and you’ll better understand our future. It’s the most recent 20 years you’ll be noticing.
A severe stratospheric warming event over the South Pole could have big implications for Tasmanian weather, see the story here.
This story and this story explain it further.
If you have an interest in Tasmania’s future, please read this translated article about the future of fighting bushfires, according to Marc Castellnou, who is the Forestry Action Group (GRAF) of the Firefighters of Catalonia chief, and a former EU fire advisor.
He says: “The era of firefighting is ending and the era of landscape management is beginning … there is no capacity to extinguish the big fires, you have to manage the landscape. Large fires are entering areas where they are not expected. They have stopped being the exceptionality to start being the norm.”
Asked if people could live safely next to forest in the Mediterranean, he said: “Yes, if you have a lowered fuel load. But an unmanaged forest, which lacks species, or with an impoverished ecosystem, will burn. The answer must always be to look for healthy landscapes and, whether for mature forests or for forest management, to remove fuel from the landscape, and this has never been done in modern times.”
To reiterate, he says the future of fighting the world’s intensifying wildfires is landscape management, as it is impossible to stop big fires once they get going.
Clearly, Tassie is in a difficult place, given its endless tracts of drying pine monoculture and eucalypt forests, in a windy climate, with hot, dry summers.
Unfortunately, when burned, the flammable eucalypts quickly grow back and there is no gradual change to a less flammable landscape.
Southern Tasmania’s burned areas are already growing back after the Jan/Feb 2019 fires.
Pine plantations near towns will grow more dangerous with every year of warmer, drier, windier weather.
Weather data shows southern Australia is becoming increasingly dry, and Tasmania seems to have a growing propensity for lightning strikes. The wind is famously, at times, gale force.
Is Tassie condemned to a Groundhog Day of intense bushfires?
The solution, according to the above article, requires a little more than the famous “raking” that Donald Trump espoused.
Large scale forest removal/fuel reduction is a radical solution.
Will it take a disaster to implement it?