The snow was the product of warm air riding over the cold air hovering over the East Coast, said Jonathan Porter of Penn State Meteorology in State College, Pa.
"There's some debate about whether there is a low frequency oscillation — is there a distinct interdecadal oscillation?" said Penn State meteorology professor Michael Mann.
"You have to think, maybe it wasn't a Snowball Earth," said Dr. Gregory S. Jenkins, a professor of meteorology at Penn State who directed the new study.
In Alabama, Gov. Robert Bentley called James Spann, the rock star of meteorology in the state, a hero for his role when an unprecedented string of tornadoes bore down there this spring and killed nearly 250 people.
The authors concluded that '…the intercomparison has demonstrated that differences in the meteorology and/or initial state of the atmosphere in the simulations cause a relevant variability of the model results, even on a short timescale of only a few days'.
Modern operational meteorology relies on state estimation procedures that are based on the Kalman filter, described in Section 2.3.1.
In an article in Nature, meteorology professor Kerry Emanuel stated that potential hurricane destructiveness, a measure combining hurricane strength, duration, and frequency, "is highly correlated with tropical sea surface temperature, reflecting well-documented climate signals, including multidecadal oscillations in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, and global warming".
Since 1854, when state-sponsored meteorology was born, weather forecasting has always been recognised as a valuable business one dollar invested in meteorology is said to yield about $15 in terms of casualties avoided, harvests saved and so on.
"The grass was all green, the climatologists were saying summer would bring average rainfalls, and a lot of wishful thinking set in". Keith Arnesen, a professor of meteorology at Rutgers University and the assistant state climatologist, said that long-range forecasting was "not very good".
They also include a proposal to break up state-owned monopolies that are responsible for air navigation, meteorology, surveillance and other services in many member states.
