Atlanta snow

by Coercion Code  8th November 2014

In a recent article at bloomberg they ask, remember how evidence was mounting last month that early snowfall was accumulating across Siberia? And remember how there’s a theory that says this snowfall signals a cold winter?

So in the two and a half weeks since, the news for the winter-haters has, unfortunately, only gotten worse.

About 14.1 million square kilometers of snow blanketed Siberia at the end of October, the second most in records going back to 1967, according to Rutgers University’s Global Snow Lab.

The record was in 1976, which broke a streak of mild winters in the eastern U.S. In addition, the speed at which snow has covered the region is the fastest since at least 1998.

Taken together they signal greater chances for frigid air to spill out of the Arctic into more temperate regions of North America, Europe and Asia, said Judah Cohen, director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research in Lexington, Massachusetts, who developed the theory linking Siberian snow with winter weather.

“A rapid advance of Eurasian snow cover during the month of October favors that the upcoming winter will be cold across the Northern Hemisphere,” Cohen said in an interview yesterday. “This past October the signal was quite robust.”

There are a few steps to get from the snows of Siberia to the chills in New York City.

Cold air builds over the expanse of snow, strengthening the pressure system known as a Siberian high. The high weakens the winds that circle the North Pole, allowing the cold air to leak into the lower latitudes. The term Polar Vortex actually refers to those winds, not the frigid weather.

Chance Discovery

Cohen said he first noticed the relationship between the Eurasian snow cover and larger weather patterns while doing post-doctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1990s.

It came about by chance because the original assignment was to look at the North American snow cover, Cohen said. He changed it to Eurasian and “when we investigated further it turned out it was Eurasian snow cover that was the dominant influence.”

Last year, 12.85 million square kilometers covered Eurasia at the end of October. By January, waves of frigid air were pummeling the U.S. Prices for natural gas, a heating fuel used by half of American households, rose to a five-year high in February.

“The big early snowbuild will definitely set things up for a cold back half of the winter,” said Todd Crawford, a meteorologist at commercial forecaster WSI in Andover, Massachusetts.

October Snow

When the snow across Eurasia began piling up again this October, many forecasters and energy traders began to take note.

By Oct. 13, Cohen had calculated, 12.2 million square kilometers of Eurasia were covered by snow, compared with 10.8 million the same day last year.

As previously reported Ebola needs cool or cold weather to bring a greater risk to Northern Hemisphere continents.

Polar Vortex

A polar vortex is expected to impact the Central and Eastern United States, with below normal temperatures for this time of year and freezing temperatures all the way down to the Gulf States, all courtesy of Typhoon Nuri’s influence on the upper pattern.

Blocking will cause air to spill down in from Canada.  Some of the forecast numbers showing up in the long range models suggests that very cold air will filter down into the United States.  Areas across Montana will be in the single digits, an early start to what we think will be a much below normal temperature season for that area, into the Plains and Southeast.

A taste of Winter is what we’re looking at here and here are some of the latest numbers for Thursday night into Friday morning, and into next week (November 13-14, 2014)

110614b

Single digit temperatures from the Northern Plains,

Teens for the Midwest to North/Central Plains all the way into Kansas and Missouri, widespread 20s as far south as The Northern Gulf States, and 30s as far South as South-Central Texas. (Fahrenheit)

Tom Clancy (now dead) developed a video game called ‘The Division’

Check out the trailer, and see how it introduces an interesting future scenario

 

In fact, Wikipedia explains that Operation Dark Winter was the code name for a senior-level bio-terrorist attack simulation conducted as far back as June 22–23, 2001.[1][2][3]

It was designed to carry out a mock version of a covert and widespread smallpox attack on the United States. Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies (CCBS) / Center for Strategic and International Studies(CSIS), and Randy Larsen and Mark DeMier of Analytic Services were the principal designers, authors, and controllers of the Dark Winter project.

Dark Winter was focused on evaluating the inadequacies of a national emergency response during the use of a biological weapon against the American populace. The exercise was solely intended to establish preventive measures and response strategies by increasing governmental and public awareness of the magnitude and potential of such a threat posed by biological weapons.

Dark Winter’s simulated scenario involved an initial localized smallpox attack on Oklahoma City, Oklahoma with additional smallpox attack cases in Georgia and Pennsylvania. The simulation was then designed to spiral out of control. This would create a contingency in which the National Security Council struggles to determine both the origin of the attack as well as deal with containing the spreading virus. By not being able to keep pace with the disease’s rate of spread, a new catastrophic contingency emerges in which massive civilian casualties would overwhelm America’s emergency response capabilities.

The disastrous contingencies that would result in the massive loss of civilian life were used to exploit the weaknesses of the U.S. health care infrastructure and its inability to handle such a threat. The contingencies were also meant to address the widespread panic that would emerge and which would result in mass social breakdown and mob violence. Exploits would also include the many difficulties that the media would face when providing American citizens with the necessary information regarding safety procedures.