5 Planets On Show

It snowed a lot today in the Tokyo region, according to the news with over 300 traffic accidents and 15 injuries so far. Most people are not used to extreme weather conditions, and not prepared. We got about 20 cm here northwest of the capital which is the most I have experienced since moving here.

National Geographics cites a fresh report that may explain the unstable weather conditions - could it be due to melting ice in the Arctic:

Some scientists have speculated that such harsh winters might be a result of disappearing Arctic sea ice, which reached a record low in 2007 due to global warming, according to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center.

To test that theory, scientists entered data about Arctic sea ice and sea-surface temperatures into a climate model created by the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research. The results pinpointed two mechanisms for how a decline in sea ice could lead to more snowfall.

For one, major sea ice loss could alter how air circulates in the atmosphere, so that more cold air masses from the Arctic would travel farther south. At the same time, melting sea ice also exposes more ocean water, which results in increased water vapor in the atmosphere that can be transformed into snow.

"The implication from this research is, if Arctic sea ice continues to decrease, we will probably see more snowfall and stronger snowstorms in the winter," said study leader Jiping Liu, a climate scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

A connection between declining Arctic sea ice and increased snowfall sounds reasonable, said David Rind, a climate scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City. Yet complex atmospheric events can rarely be caused by a single factor, cautioned Rind, who was not involved in the study.

"The atmospheric dynamic is so variable, and the basic equations of motion on the time scale that we're discussing have so much inherent variability in them that you can have the same situations next time but everything is different," Rind said.

Note the question marks in this article, no one knows for sure what is going on.

As in English and other languges, there are two common expressions in Japanese:
気候変動 (Kikou hendou) Climate change
地球温暖化 (Chikyuu ondanka) Global warming

Also found on the National Geographics website: See 5 Bright Planets in Night Sky—First Time in 8 Years

If the weather clears up we might be able to see all five of them tomorrow night!