By Ian Simpson | Reuters

Deadly storms leave millions in the dark Many in the mid-Atlantic states could go days without power in the middle of an intense heat wave. At leas 13 killed

Statewide emergencies were declared in Washington D.C., Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia because of damage from overnight storms, which brought hurricane-force winds along a 500-mile (800-km) stretch.

Forecasters predicted more severe thunderstorms as renewed heat blanketed the area on Saturday.

Temperatures surpassed 100 Fahrenheit (37 Celsius) in several southern cities, including Atlanta, where the mercury hit 106 degrees (41 Celsius), and Charlotte, North Carolina, where it reached 102 F (38 C), according to Accuweather.com. The nation's capital cooled down to 96 Fahrenheit (96 C).

Restoring power in some areas could take up to a week. Utilities in Ohio and Virginia described damage as catastrophic.

"It's going to be a while before some folks get power, and with the heat, that's our big concern," said Bob Spieldenner, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Emergency Management.

More than 1 million Virginia customers had no power in the worst outage not linked to a hurricane in the state's history, he said.

Six people were killed in Virginia in storm-related incidents.

Utilities or state emergency agencies reported the following outages and damage:

- Maryland: About 869,000 customers without power with outages reported in every county.

- West Virginia: More than 600,000 customers without power.

- Ohio: Power out across two-thirds of state, about 1 million homes and businesses without electricity, and one storm-related death reported. Governor John Kasich said power could take a week to be restored fully.

- New Jersey: Atlantic County declared a state of emergency, and at least 206,000 customers were without power. Two cousins, aged 2 and 7, were killed by a falling tree in state park.

- District of Columbia: 67,000 power customers affected. State of emergency declared.

- Pennsylvania: 32,500 homes and businesses without power.

- Indiana: 135,000 customers with power lost.

- Kentucky: 187 customers without power.

- North Carolina: 618 homes and businesses with power lost.

The storm also knocked out Amtrak passenger rail service between Washington and Philadelphia, Amtrak said.

Power companies called in crews from utilities in neighboring states to help restore electricity.

FEEL THE HEAT

The widespread power outages came as the National Weather Service forecast more heat and severe thunderstorms across the Ohio Valley, through the mid-Atlantic states and into New York.

Blazing temperatures in New York, where thermometer readings were in the 90s on Saturday, came ahead of a possible strike by 8,500 Consolidated Edison workers over a new contract. The union membership has authorized its leaders to call a strike at midnight Saturday, when the collection bargaining agreement expires.

If the 8,500 Con Ed workers do walk off, that would leave managers and any crews the company can hire to fix whatever problems arise as 8.2 million New Yorkers crank up their air conditioners to beat the heat.

Up and down the East Coast, state and local officials urged residents to seek air-conditioned areas, drink lots of water and wear light-colored clothing. They also called for people to watch out for those most vulnerable to high heat - the elderly, small children and the mentally ill.

"Our biggest concern right now is temperatures going up to 100 degrees today," said Ed McDonough, spokesman for the Maryland Department of Emergency Management.

Records for June were broken on Friday in Washington, Atlanta, Nashville, Tennessee and Louisville, Kentucky. The temperature hit at least 104 F (40 C) in all four cities, according to the National Weather Service.

The high temperatures were blamed for the deaths of two brothers, ages 3 and 5, in Bradley County in eastern Tennessee. They had been playing outside in 105-degree heat.

The high heat prompted the AT&T National golf tournament at the Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland, to close the competition to spectators and volunteers on Saturday.

Weather even struck the Internet. The storms disrupted power for Amazon.com Inc cloud computing operations and disrupted online services such as the video streaming website Netflix, photo sharing company Instagram and online pinboard Pinterest, the Wall Street Journal reported.

A representative from Amazon could not be reached for comment. Netflix and Pinterest reported on their Twitter pages by early Saturday that they had resolved their problems.

(Additional reporting by Paul Thomasch in New York, Susan Guyett in Indianapolis and Tim Ghianni in Nashville; Editing by Bill Trott and Doina Chiacu)

Heat Wave Spawns Deadly Severe Thunderstorms

• Published: June 30th, 2012
• By Andrew Freedman

An intense heat wave broke records in more than a dozen states on Friday, and spawned one of the most damaging severe thunderstorm events seen in years. At least 3 million Americans, mainly in areas from Indiana Southeast to Virginia, were facing the prospect of another day of triple-digit heat heat without the benefit of air conditioning on Saturday, after the storms knocked out power. The severe weather also killed at least 12 people, including two young boys who were killed by a falling tree as they camped with their family in southern New Jersey.

A shelf cloud at the leading edge of the severe thunderstorms, taken in Illinois as the storms gathered strength. Click on image for a larger version. Credit: Twitpic via Angela Fritz.

The severe thunderstorms took shape over Iowa and Illinois during the early afternoon on Friday, and by evening they had roared all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, rippling along the boundary between the extremely hot and humid conditions to the south, and cooler and drier air to the north.

The storm complex, known as a “derecho,” knocked out power to two-thirds of Ohio residents, and caused large-scale tree damage in that state. Columbus, home to Ohio State University, was particularly hard hit. The thunderstorms then raced southeastward, delivering a punishing blow to the Washington, D.C. metro area, where more than a million customers were without power as of noon on Saturday. The storms even affected the Internet, as Amazon’s cloud computing service experienced power outages, taking out popular online services such as Instagram and Pinterest.

Derechos typically occur during late June or early July, when a large dome of High Pressure sets up across the South Central states, pumping warm, humid air northward, and setting up a sharp boundary between the hot conditions and cooler air to the north. They have been known to bring winds as strong as some tornadoes, and that occurred on Friday when numerous locations reported wind gusts to 80 miles per hour or higher.

With the heat continuing through the weekend, conditions will be favorable for more damaging thunderstorms, including derecho events.

Satellite image showing the towering thunderstorms as they raced southeast toward Ohio on Friday afternoon. Click on image for a larger version. Credit: SSEC/CIMSS satellite blog.

The derecho event was similar to storms that took place during the deadly Chicago heat wave of 1995, during which heat took the lives of about 750 people in the Windy City. The heat helped fuel the storms by making the atmosphere extraordinarily unstable, and providing the energy needed to sustain thunderstorms for long periods of time.

There were numerous daily, monthly, and all-time record high temperatures established on Friday. In total, there were 276 record daily high temperatures set or tied on Friday, along with 70 record warm overnight low temperature records. There were also 96 monthly record high temperatures, and 37 all-time high temperature records set or tied.

For the year-to-date, warm temperature records are outpacing cold temperature records by a ration of 7-to-1. Since January 1 there have been 21,402 daily high temperature records set, compared to just 3,338 daily records for cold high temperatures, according to a database maintained by the National Climatic Data Center.

In a long-term trend that demonstrates the effects of a warming climate, daily record-high temperatures have recently been outpacing daily record-lows by an average of 2-to-1, and this imbalance is expected to grow as the climate continues to warm. According to a 2009 study, if the climate were not warming, this ratio would be expected to be even. Other studies have shown that climate change increases the odds of extreme heat events and may make them warmer and longer lasting.

Since climate change can boost the odds of major heat waves such as this one, and the extreme heat contributed to the severe weather, it's plausible — albeit rather speculative at this point — that climate change played some sort of role in the derecho event. However, it will require rigorous scientific analysis to determine whether this may have been the case.

Severe storm reports for Friday, June 29. The blue dots represent wind damage. Credit: NWS/SPC.

In Washington, both Reagan National Airport and Dulles Airport had their warmest June days on record. At Reagan National Airport the high temperature was 104°F, beating the old June record of 102°F. According to the Capital Weather Gang blog, June 29 was one of just 10 times on record that Washington has reached 104°F or higher in any month.

Charlotte, N.C. also reached 104°F, breaking the old daily record and tying the all-time record high temperature for that location.

Columbia, S.C. experienced searing heat of 109°F, breaking their previous all-time high temperature record of 107°F. Daily temperature records in Columbia date back to 1887.

Nashville, TN also hit 109°F, breaking their all-time high of 107°F. In Paducah, KY, the high temperature of 108 deg°F tied that city’s all-time high temperature record, which was set in 1942.

In addition to severe weather, the combination of the heat and drought conditions in the Midwest is causing corn prices to rapidly increase due to growing fears of a poor harvest.

Western Wildfires: Is It Time To Settle Some Debts?

Published: June 30th, 2012

By Tom Yulsman, The Daily Climate

The High Park Fire in Colorado. Scientists fear that a century's worth of fire suppression and other efforts, combined with a warming climate, have left Western wildfire rates dangerously out of balance with historic norms. Credit: Official U.S. Air Force/flickr

BOULDER, Colo. – As the West has warmed and dried over the past 30 years, headlines describing fire season have grown ever more apocalyptic: "epic" dryness, "monster" fires, new records for damage and devastation.

This year is no exception. The Waldo Canyon Fire has incinerated hundreds of homes in Colorado Springs, and every indication points to another big, early start to the wildfire season.

Recent research, however, suggests these severe conflagrations could be a prelude. Climate stressors are putting increasing pressure on a "fire deficit" the West has accumulated over the past 100 years, say scientists who have compared today's burn rates with fire activity over thousands of years. As the West continues to warm, that debt will come due – possibly with interest – triggering fires that are fiercer and harder to contain, they warn.

"If you just look at what the current climate is like, the rate of biomass burning should be much higher than what we've observed over the 20th century," said Patrick Bartlein, a climatologist at the University of Oregon and a co-author of the study, published earlier this year in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Fire activity for the last 100 years has been remarkably low compared to the past three millennia, Bartlein and his colleagues concluded. Given just how much the West has warmed since the early 1900s, these scientists believe fire should be more common and widespread than it has been.

Fire activity hasn't grown with the warming climate, Bartlein said, because since about 1900 Westerners have worked hard to keep fire out. "This divergence between climate and fire activity is unsustainable," he added. "Eventually, nature will catch up."

In their research, Bartlein and his colleagues used a record of past fire activity obtained from cores of sediments extracted from the bottom of mountain lakes. These sediments contain layers of charcoal particles that fell from smoke plumes or were carried into lakes by streams after wildfires. These bands can be read like a timeline. Combined with other data, they allow scientists to reconstruct 3,000 years of wildfire history in the West.

Overlaying that history on a record of natural climate change, the researchers saw a pattern: More fire when the climate was warmer and drier, such as during the period known as the Medieval Climate Anomaly from about 950 to 1250; less fire during the cool and moist Little Ice Age from 1400 to 1700.

In other words, for most of the past 3,000 years, climate has determined fire activity.

That changed as the 19th century ended. The charcoal record shows that fire activity plummeted – and continued to do so in the 20th century even as a strong signal of global warming from human activities emerged.

Bartlein and his colleagues point to a number of factors for the change, including the introduction of cattle, which reduced fuel loads by eating and trampling grasses; fragmentation of the landscape; and vigorous suppression of any fires on public lands that did break out.

Recent trends suggest the fire deficit is now being paid back. Since the 1980s, fire frequency in the West has increased more than 300 percent, and the annual acreage burned has jumped 500 percent, according to Anthony Westerling of the University of California’s Sierra Nevada Research Institute.

Thomas Veblen, a researcher at the University of Colorado who studies wildfire and climate but who was not involved in the fire debt research, cautions that the broad-brush strokes of the fire deficit picture do not reflect the situation everywhere in the West and in all mountain ecosystems. "It aggregates data over an enormous area," he said.

The Waldo Canyon Fire rages in Colorado. Credit: Karl Gehring, The Denver Post.

There are, for example, significant differences in fire behavior between the naturally open, grassy ponderosa forests common in the foothills of the Rockies, and the denser Douglas fir and lodge pole pine forests higher up. These differences – key to managing wildfire risks – are not captured by the fire deficit research.

Bartlein acknowledges that his study was not designed to provide insights specific to a particular location or forest type. But when the West is examined as a whole, he believes the research shows that fire suppression has pushed the region toward "a much more flammable condition."

Whether he is right or not, one aspect of the research is undisputed: It shows a clear relationship between climate and fire – namely, warmer and drier conditions bring more fire over the long haul.

As Veblen noted: "The most important message is that with warming temperatures we should expect increased wildfire activity in many ecosystems in the West.

"But as a society we're not really dealing with that problem."

The Daily Climate is a nonprofit news service covering climate change, and a Climate Central content partner.

Greenland Ice Sheet Melt Nearing Critical ‘Tipping Point’

• Published: June 29th, 2012
  
  

• By Andrew Freedman

  The Greenland ice sheet is poised for another record melt this year, and is approaching a "tipping point" into a new and more dangerous melt regime in which the summer melt area covers the entire land mass, according to new findings from polar researchers.

  The ice sheet is the focus of scientific research because its fate has huge implications for global sea levels, which are already rising as ice sheets melt and the ocean warms, exposing coastal locations to greater damage from storm surge-related flooding.

  

  Trend in the reflectivity of high elevation ice in Greenland, showing the record low as of June 26, 2012. Credit: Meltfactor.org.

  Greenland's ice has been melting faster than many scientists expected just a decade ago, spurred by warming sea and land temperatures, changing weather patterns, and other factors. Until now, though, most of the focus has been on ice sheet dynamics — how quickly Greenland's glaciers are flowing into the sea. But the new research raises a different basis for concern.

  The new findings show that the reflectivity of the Greenland ice sheet, particularly the high-elevation areas where snow typically accumulates year-round, have reached a record low since records began in 2000. This indicates that the ice sheet is absorbing more energy than normal, potentially leading to another record melt year — just two years after the 2010 record melt season.

  “In this condition, the ice sheet will continue to absorb more solar energy in a self-reinforcing feedback loop that amplifies the effect of warming,” wrote Ohio State polar researcher Jason Box on the meltfactor.org blog. Greenland is the world's largest island, and it holds 680,000 cubic miles of ice. If all of this ice were to melt — which, luckily won't happen anytime soon — the oceans would rise by more than 20 feet.

  In a new study, Box and a team of researchers describe the decline in ice sheet reflectivity and the reasons behind it, noting that if current trends continue, the area of ice that melts during the summer season is likely to expand to cover all of Greenland for the first time in the observational record, rather than just the lower elevations at the edges of the continent, as is the case today. The study has been accept for publication in the open access journal The Cryosphere.

  

  Satellite data of Greenland reflectivity June 1-22, 2012 versus the same periods in previous Junes back to 2000. The blue colors indicate a decrease in reflectivity compared to previous Junes. Credit: NASA/Meltfactor.org.

  The high reflectivity of snow is what has kept Greenland so cold by redirecting incoming heat from the sun back out toward space. But with several factors combining to increase temperatures in Greenland and reduce the reflectivity of the snow and ice cover, the ice sheet is becoming less efficient at reflecting that heat energy, and as a consequence melt seasons are becoming more severe.

  Freshly fallen snow reflects up to 84 percent of incoming sunlight, but during the warm season the reflectivity declines as the ice grains within the snowpack change shape and size. In addition, once snow cover melts completely it often reveals underlying ice that has been darkened by dust and other particles, whose surface absorbs more solar energy, promoting heating.

  Box's research has shown that the change in the reflectivity of the Greenland ice sheet during the 12 summers between 2000 and 2011 allowed the ice sheet to absorb an extra 172 "quintillion joules" of energy, nearly twice the amount of energy consumed in the U.S. in 2009. This extra energy has gone into raising the temperature of the snow and ice cover during summer.

  “If the area of the Greenland Ice Sheet experiencing net melt expands to eclipse the accumulation zone of the ice sheet, the ice sheet will, by definition, be tipped into a state of inevitable decline,” said William Colgan, a research associate at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) who did not participate in the new research.

  In an interview shortly before leaving for a Greenland research expedition, Box said the new findings reveal that the normally snowy, windswept higher-elevation areas of Greenland are rapidly transitioning to melt during the summer in a similar manner to the lower reaches of the ice sheet.

  “It appears that we’re about to cross a threshold in summer . . . you might even call it a tipping point as we go into a net energy absorption” of the higher elevations, Box said. “Then we’ll see the melt area expanding abruptly and potentially covering the entire ice sheet in summer for the first time in observations.”
  
  Box said the shift may take another decade or so, provided that current trends continue. “We’re right on the threshold.”
  
  Colgan said it’s difficult to make predictions based on the reflectivity record, but it would be significant if 2012 becomes another record melt year.
  
  “The frequency with which Greenland record melt years are being established is exceptional, and certainly supports the notion that the Arctic climate is warming, and moving away from an equilibrium climate state in which extreme or record events are relatively rare,” Colgan said in an email conversation.