Discussion: Slovenian forests badly damaged by ice storm

According to news reports in the last 24 hours, an ice storm has caused major damage to Slovenian forests (among numerous other impacts), with 40% of the country's forests reportedly affected. From what I know about the weather situation, I think the relatively high-elevation forests which are the ones generally used for their summer events will have been less affected than those at lower elevations, but have no firm information to that effect.

While the news reports I saw were specific to Slovenia, I imagine that the Croatian side of the border was also affected, too. I haven't heard any reports of substantial freezing rain in Italy.

It looks pretty scary at some places. Everything in ice.
- The entire damaged area is around half a million hectares
- Around 3,000,000 cubic meters of wood mass on the ground
- Around 174km high voltage transmission lines affected (30km on the ground)
- A lot of villages and cities without electricity, phone connections for 5th day

It's not over yet. A new snow&rain is coming. Maybe wind (hope not).

How it looks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedd...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embed...

Wow, that was worth watching - unimaginable (for me).

Another unusual weather event, possibly caused by Global Warming, and the continuing loss of Arctic sea ice.

...There is virtually no controversy among climate scientists that massive changes have occurred in the Arctic, and that those changes are largely due to manmade greenhouse gas emissions....

...a connection between Arctic warming and extreme weather events rests on the Arctic’s crucial role as a shapemaker of the jet stream, the powerful ribbon of upper level winds that steer weather systems from west to east....

Wow,,,terrible. All the broken limbs and down trees allow more light into the forest which stimulates undergrowth which leads to much thicker vegetation in a few years; at least that is what happens around here. Of course, without power, the Slovenians have much more immediate concerns.

Short video clip from Croatia (by Matej Mirkac):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNNNU8A7RQ0

A note from FB page Croatia Open - Orienteering Competition - Croatia, Gorski kotar:
"During last week largest natural disaster ever hit region of Gorski kotar. For now we don´t know what the damage will be since roads are closed but it looks chaotic. Most of places in mountais have no electric power or telephone."

Coincidentally, we in DVOA land (Philadelphia) are experiencing a very similar ice event today. My workpIace has no power, but my home is apparently in the lucky minority that has power. My suburban setting is full of fallen trees and limbs, and I can easily imagine that our forested settings are not much different from the videos above, perhaps less ice, but more existing snow weight to cause breakage.

However, I think it is very careless to characterize an ice storm as extreme weather. Unusual, definitelty, but not extreme. An ice storm does not involve extreme temperatures, winds, or precipitation, or small changes over a long period of time, just a slightly prolonged transition of otherwise completely normal winter conditions around 0C/ 32F degrees.

If someone wants to connect global warming to this transitional phenomena, they've got many dots to connect, and trying to associate this issue with this weather event, without showing work, looks like another kneejerk response for a personal/political agenda. The global warming issue needs and deserves better reasoning.

Indeed, the original article at the link has "... a connection between Arctic warming and _summertime_ extreme weather events ..."

I guess it is always summertime somewhere.

Not in March or September.

Mars has seasons too.

EricW is feeding the troll, much as I want to do.

But, I try to stop myself before I say anything about TrailO or climate change, although as many know, this severely taxes my store of self control.

I defer to others who are more thoughtful and know more than I do about these things, our priests.

The priests just say that this is what we get when people are confused about whether to pray for snow or to pray for a warm winter.

Well, ice storms might the go up north, but where i live, we are experiencing heat waves like I don't remember. The forest floor is dessicated. Just a side note for the trolls.

Ice storms are not something which can be easily linked to climate change because they require both warm and cold air (for Australians and others who have no experience of them, they happen when rain falls from a warm layer of air aloft into a sub-freezing layer at the surface, becomes supercooled and freezes on contact with whatever it hits). I've not previously heard of such an event on this scale in Europe, though they are reasonably common in North America.

Indeed. My unprofessional hypothesis and observation

Every winter is different. Last year was very warm till New Year but then we've had almost 4 months of snow, each week two or three snowfalls; at some places fall up to 7-8 meters of snow all together. This year we had a historically very warm winter till the end of January. Large fluctuations in the temperatures is now almost normal. But it shouldn't be. And if people say "climate is changing" I would say YES, because we have other weather situations more often.

Maybe the weather is the same as 15-30 years ago and just media report more today what's happening around the world. Maybe. But I think that we need to look also what Insurance companies do. How much cost insurance for that and that event 30 years ago and today. Are insurance conditions more detailed today, is each event more expensive to get proper insurance today? I am guessing, but I would say, Yes. If these events statistically fall in historical average and "climate changing" is not the cause of all this why then we need to pay higher price for insurance of each event soon after when it happened. Is really only because capital want more profit? I would say that Insurance companies fear that those events will occur more often in the future than they occurred in the past. And to decrease risk an cover potential costs ICs are rising their insurance prices. Is there any data, any analysis, any report that can prove or disprove with high probability that there is/isn't historically correlations between weather&insurance prices.

And all we can do is to pray because world politics is changing slower than weather.

Insurance prices may reflect weather that has already occurred, but they do not predict future weather, although they may show what the companies think the weather will be. Or perhaps, they show what the companies think is the worst case scenario that they may need to cover.

Orienteering folks, orienteering. Serious forest damaging ice storms happen in Ontario and Quebec on a regular basis - at least once every 10 to 15 years. Some people wail at the damage and it is hard to take but the wiser folk tell us it is just nature's way of pruning, taking off the tree's weaker limbs and removing the weaker of the species. Ice storms cause breaks in the forest canopy thus allowing sunlight through to the forest floor and new growth to occur.
I remember back in the 70's asking Danish mapper Flemming Norgaard how they map such damage and storm damage in general in Denmark. He replied "the trees do not stay on the ground long enough to be mapped. The wood is too valuable."
In Canada the wood just rots to become nutrients for the next generation of vegetation, habitat for birds and rodents and trouble for the orienteer's legs.

Those confusing snow prayers are coming from this part of the world (California). After a January of record-breaking heat, two pitifully weak cold fronts have passed through in the last week. Another one is forecast for Thursday night which looks like more of the same; just enough to spit on the sidewalk and move on.

This is an ice storm...

Fortunately, northern California is getting a series of storms that should run into next week, probably changing our drought situation from "worst ever" to "still pretty bad". Unfortunately, it's too late for the Sierra Ski-O events we had to cancel.

bubo - actually, it's something different - splash/spray from waves on Lake Geneva freezing on contact with the shore. I'm not sure when that picture was taken but it looks similar to the conditions I saw there in February 2012. (The topography around Lake Geneva is a perfect funnel for northeast winds, so during very cold spells it is also often very windy at the west end of the lake: manageable for running in, but standing at a tram stop in -12C and 80 km/h winds isn't a lot of fun).

Even Clark (admittedly not the world's most cautious person when it comes to suggesting weather events might be influenced by climate change) only said "possibly caused by Global Warming". Can someone point me to research saying it's impossible for increasing the amount and changing the distribution of heat in the climate system to cause an ice storm that otherwise wouldn't have occurred? Or am I supposed to accept Randy's personal incredulity as evidence?

My power was out 12hrs in B'more. A mess of branches to clean up in the back yard. Southern PA (where randy is) got hit hard. I brought a load of firewood up to Brad's house near the PA line. Their power has been out 40 hrs now. We cleared just enough of the branches so they could get into the barn without jumping fences. The main concern is frozen drinking water for the animals. Otherwise just a few busted fence rails and heavily damaged trees. Another few days without power and the pipes will be a concern.

I haven't seen many complete trees down, but lots of half-broken ones. The DVOA and SVO maps may suffer a little.

I'll take Randy's incredulity over this request for the first study in the history of the world to prove a negative.

Looks like I have to repeat myself. The global warming issue needs and deserves better reasoning.

I am going to sacrifice some goats. Just trying to figure out what might propitiate the priests who intervene on my behalf.

One day the mass will be in the vernacular. But then we may understand.

@jjcote Do scientists or Insurance companies have data to prove this trend?
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/extreme-weather-dr...

For the moment I would just appreciate some advice as to which of the following four events I should register for..
Bubo Cup
Cherkno Cup
Croatia Open
OOCup
The limited evidence so far suggests OOCup may be the least impacted.

TheInvisibleLog, at this point it is hard to give really valid advice. This will be possible only after the areas are thoroughly checked, which is not possible to do these days.

But at this moment everything looks like the Bubo and Cerkno cup areas might be severely affected. Same goes for Gorski kotar region where Croatia open is organized. At the moment we have no information about OOCup areas being damaged. We just hope that those areas avoided the worst, as they are higher up (1300m - 1500m asl) and probably there was no ice there but only snow.

It is quite possible that some of the mentioned races will (have to) change the venues. Or partly change them. Personally, I can speak for Bubo cup and OOCup. We are already thinking about B scenario for Bubo cup. If the situation proves too bad, we are considering the idea to move south, to Kras region (Lipica open area) which was not affected. OOCup, on the other hand, will hopefully not need any major changes in the programme.

Btw., we just got information from the local that in Bubo cup areas there are no major consequences caused by ice. We still need to check this ourselves, but it's definitely a good sign.

If Randy doesn't want to be called on to produce proof of negatives, he should refrain from asserting them with absolute certainty.

Thanks, Ivan. I wasn't expecting any answers soon, given the state of infrastructure in both countries. I am sure there are other important issues at the moment.
By way of contrast, today is expected to be our tenth day over 40 degrees this calendar year. Bushfire risk is extreme this weekend.

As for the Cerkno Cup reports are mixed - a glympse at some of the areas I did yesterday showed me, that it is not as bad as the reports say, but it is almost sure, that we will need to move some of the stages. We have however a few reserve areas (with the same terrain quality) that have almost not been affected. Of course - more will be known in the weeks to come.

As a follow-up, The Weather Channel this week posted a remarkable video that documented the disappearance of some of that Arctic sea ice, as ice the size of Manhattan calved off a Greenland glacier and dropped into the sea. The final speeded-up sequence is sobering.

j-man and the other deniers with extreme sensitivities can turn down the audio to avoid the Global Warming propaganda. :-)

I'm not sure j-man or anyone else in this discussion is specifically taking a stand that global warning doesn't exist, but rather is expressing skepticism of pretty much any weather event being attributed to global warming.

Croatia Open reports even bigger devastation on their maps then they expected. They will check more of the terrain soon. I believe they have quite some reserved areas so they will manage to organize another great event like they managed in the many of last years. You can find more info on Cerkno Cup and Croatia Open on FB pages of both competitions.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Cerkno-Cup/35965106...
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Croatia-Open-Orient...

Actually, pretty much all the weather is attributable, at least partially, to climate change. However, this is an almost vacuous statement. What with the butterfly effect and all, a tiny change in the composition of the atmosphere will lead to different weather. On the other hand, some weather may well be symptomatic of climate change, and (tautologically) frequency of weather events changes with climate change.

I am sure Blair can point to better web-forum options for anyone wanting a climate change stoush. There are too many people on this forum who want to get off-topic to discuss matters such as orienteering.

Thank you RL.

I'm not sure j-man or anyone else in this discussion is specifically taking a stand that global warning doesn't exist, but rather is expressing skepticism of pretty much any weather event being attributed to global warming.

Seems like a distinction without a difference - for global warming to exist some set of weather events have to be partly attributable to it. You have to, at a minimum, be willing to admit that sometimes, somewhere it will be warmer than it would otherwise be to not be denying the existence of global warming (saying nothing about whether humans have anything to do with causing it or not). Admit that and then it follows that sometimes it will rain rather than snow, or snow or rain more than it otherwise would (since warmer air can hold more moisture) or, given Blair's description of the conditions required for an ice storm, there will be an ice storm instead of snow because the higher air layer is just warm enough to produce liquid rather than solid precipitation that then falls through the colder layer. And that's just the minimal case of a perfectly evenly distributed increase in temperature worldwide, that doesn't change the temperature gradient between any two locations. In real life, the globe isn't warming evenly and since differences in temperature and pressure are major drivers of atmospheric circulation, it would be crazy to think global warming has happened without influencing where and when and how intensely various weather events occur.

Must go look up "stoush". The approximate meaning is clear enough from context but the pronunciation isn't obvious nor the etymology.

St for steve, ow as in cow, shhh i'm trying to sleep. Etymology is a big word. I am a PE teacher. I'll leave that to somebody else

If I inject two mice with something, and one of them dies, then I could write an article for the Daily Mail that says XXXXX causes cancer and is the worst thing in the world ever, and they'd probably print it. Or I could be a good little scientist and repeat my experiment many many times to see if it holds true on a population scale. My single initial observation might have been because I gave a bad injection, perhaps I damaged something with the needle, maybe the mouse was already sick, blah blah. (Can I just add that I don't actually inject mice because it makes me cry).

On a similar theme, it is unwise to link a single weather event to climate change. But when a bunch of unusual things start happening, and there's a good reason for it (the consistent increase in CO2 and heat, Blair, please correct me if I'm wrong), then we may be a bit wiser to start drawing conclusions.

That's the point RLShadow tried to make earlier I'm sure - and jtorranc, your message doesn't really seem to disagree with him all that much in sentiment.

@Becks. The best analogy to use is the one presented by Dr. Jerry Meehl at NCAR from 2.5 years ago. He eloquently stated “As climate is by nature a statistical phenomenon, we can’t say precisely if one event is directly attributable to global warming, but we can say that it (and the humans that caused it) had a significant impact because all weather now develops in a different environment than before. Think of it like this. Barry Bonds had a certain average level of home run production in his baseball career before he started allegedly taking steroids. Once he started taking performance enhancers, his home run production increased, and he set the single season record for home runs in 2001. Now he holds the all-time record for the most home runs. If we watched Bonds hit any one of these home runs, would we be able to say that it was directly caused by his steroid use? “No, that’s impossible. But the odds of him hitting one are much higher; his base state has changed.”


I had a much longer response to this thread as I have been following the literature on freezing rain extreme weather from an Ontario context recently. But I also promised myself I wouldn't respond to the trolling of global warming denialists and passionate environmentalists alike.

I admit it. I was wrong. It seems are aren't many people wanting to go off-topic and discuss orienteering.

Yesterday's SVO event at Rocky Ridge (York PA) was cancelled by the park due to trail conditions, presumably because of broken trees from the ice storm.

EricW and others seem to want someone to "connect the dots" about the devastation being caused by Global Warming this winter. Well let's sum up the "dots" so far:

• severe ice storms in Slovenia, Atlanta area, Chester Co, Pa, and elsewhere
• devastating continuing drought in the western states; talk of food shortages
• one of the coldest, snowiest winters in the midwest
• "monster" storms and more rain than has fallen for 100 years in England
• what will this week bring?

It is hard to watch the TWC video of the turmoil of Arctic sea ice breaking up, and not fear that our planet is changing....big time! How many more "dots" do we need?

I should do my part and stop going to meets.

Sometimes I despair of the appalling flaws in human reasoning I see every day, but then I realize I can exploit them, and I smile inside.

Check out "Behind the Smile" by Matthew Sweet, and for 2 1/2 minutes you won't have to despair about anything. Those distorted guitars take no prisoners and leave nothing behind.

As long as the snow keeps falling in the mts of CO, keep it coming.

@chitownclark - regarding "...being caused by Global Warming this winter.", now you're the one going overboard with the certainty.

BTW, have I missed any mention of impacts on the Mason-Dixon Classic terrain? Or has there been no mention of such or lack of such because no one has had a chance to go take a look yet?

@jtorranc--

Mostly the latter. However, if I had to guess, I would not expect significant impact. I think that the relevant forest is more susceptible to wind than excess weight-related toppling.

No impact on the Mason-Dixon Classic terrain. At least not that I have seen after spending last weekend in the woods. Most of the ice was just north of here. Of course that could change with this week's storm.

The impending eastern seaboard storm doesn't look like much to worry about from a strictly Mid-Atlantic orienteering perspective - just a fair bit of snow. I may end up doing some field checking on snowshoes, depending on how much the DC area gets and the weather on Friday and Saturday after the storm has passed. Taking a broader perspective, I hope it's been long enough since the ice storm that randy and family and others don't experience the coming storm as the second part of a one-two punch.

Update: BTW, if you, like me until a short while ago, hadn't looked, photos from Slovenia are quite something - http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/amazing-scenes-severe-sto... - I wasn't in Ottawa for the late 90s ice storm but by all accounts this must leave that event in the shade.

The reports I've read are that Slovenia got 100-150mm of freezing rain accumulation but I'm not sure if that is just a reporter saying 4 to 6 inches. The official max freezing rain accumulation for the 1998 Eastern Ontario-Quebec and New England ice storm was 95mm.

So it certainly is not careless to characterize an ice storm as extreme weather (as was stated above) if the event is at the extremes of the historical distribution of either freezing rain event duration and/or ice accumulation.

To keep this thread linked somewhat to orienteering, I recall an orienteering race in the Gatineau Park (Ottawa region) a few months after that '98 ice storm. Not fun as it was pretty rough going with all the fallen trees, branches and underbrush (fortunately you won’t get any of remnants of that at the NAOC this year – THE orienteering race to attend in North America this autumn). Anyway, the '98 storm caused transmission line towers to collapse (they are built to withstand about a third of that ice accumulation) leaving over 1 million people without power and the storm caused over $1.5B in damage (Canada's largest natural disaster to date). This extreme event was caused by a slow moving low pressure system blocked by a high pressure system (blocking high).

Thanks for the plug Mike ;-)

It seems that Gatineau Park is still recovering from the tail end of the '98 ice storm damage as the woods seem to be getting clearer every year. On the other hand that might all be my imagination.
The theory goes that the ice storm ripped open much of the canopy which allowed a lot more light in and consequently there was a huge growth of saplings in the following years. In addition to the fallen trees these really slowed the running down and massively decreased visibility. The majority of these saplings are now at a stage where they impede running and visibility less / have killed each other off.

Regardless, NAOC2014 isn't in Gatineau Park so this is irrelevant to that particular event.

I can look up the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus on the internet too. Looks pretty convincing to me. http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/

But I'm not too concerned about the octopus. I'm much more worried about the dangers of DHMO http://www.dhmo.org

To stay on the topic of orienteering (very slightly) I hope to orienteer again in Spetember or October :)

Oh and @randy sorry to hear about your sufferings (seriously... unlike the rest of my post). It certainly does suck to be cold and unable to do much about it, whatever the cause.

Good orienteering news seems to be emerging from Cerkno Cup facebook page:
"We heard some fairly good news from Cerkno Cup STAGE 3 - village Dole (map Rupe) above Idrija. Locals report only a few fallen trees in the forest. Mostly from deciduous trees branches have been affected and there are some on the ground. This means partly limited runnability, but otherwise this map should be OK. "

I can look up the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus on the internet too. Looks pretty convincing to me.

The page you are trying to browse to is categorized as "Dubious"

Yesterday we checked the areas for Bubo cup/2014. The forests are perfect, no signs of ice storm. This is incredible luck, because very close to the West, North and East there are badly damaged areas. Everything south (Nova Gorica direction) seems to be completely fine. So, we can confirm that there are no changes needed in Bubo cup plans / program.

Looks like I again have a difficult decision to make. Good.