Are contrails affecting solar power generation in Australia?

U

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G'day,
I hope this is the right thread to ask this question. I have a rural property north of Sydney that is solar powered. I've noticed in recent years persistant contrails forming cirrus clouds on a much more regular basis. This clouding over effect reduces the amount of sun rays hitting my panels, resuting in longer charge time for the battery bank and on some days, reliance on the back up generator. My question relates to to whether something has changed in our atmosphere in recent times to increase the prevalence of persistant contrails because I have had this property for many years and this has only become a problem in the last 2-3 years.

Has their been a dramatic increase in air traffic flying at altitudes that produce persistant contrails or is it weather related?
 
There has not been a dramatic increase in the last 3 years, so any changes are probably weather related.

Do you have some figures as to how much the change has been?
 
There has not been a dramatic increase in the last 3 years, so any changes are probably weather related.

Do you have some figures as to how much the change has been?

No I haven't kept data on this, its more observation.

In the past <3years ago+ I would have to start the generator maybe a dozen times a year. This year alone I've started it at least once a week.
 
There are some figures for the Sydney area available thought this page -
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/data/...FFFFFFFTFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFTTT&dp=IDC10002-d

Find a relatively close station on the map (or there is a text search option), under "I would like" select sunshine at the bottom of hte drop down, and then click on the link in the little dialog for that station that pops up on the map to get the tabulated info.

Eg for the sydney botanical gardens see http://www.bom.gov.au/jsp/ncc/cdio/...=203&p_display_type=dataFile&p_stn_num=066006 - it gives the monthly daily average sunshine back to 1990
 
Hi Unregistered.
Your noticing more cloud has real world ramifications but contrails and cirrus are symptoms rather than the cause.
I'm one of the people who has moved to Namibia Africa to film MadMax4 because outback Australia has become too wet and lush with vegetation. We originally set up to film in Broken Hill in 2010 but by then the surrounding regions that once doubled for arid nuclear wasteland looked like cow pasture. Most of the three+ months we were there were un-seasonally overcast.
So I suspect you are just noticing the shift to a wetter Australian interior that has resulted in the flooding of Lake Eyre, once used for speed record attempts by Donald Campbell etc
 
I've been to Namibia last year, and they recorded the highest amount of rain since 1898. I visited a friend on a farm who said he'd never seen the grass grown so high ...

This is probably sort of anecdotal, but still consistent with predictions that a warmer atmosphere will hold more humidity. I sometimes wonder if there might be an actual increase in cirrus activity caused by global warming. Did not research it yet though.
 
You've got to consider weather cycles like the El Niño/La Niña-Southern Oscillation when seeing if something really is new. Unseasonable weather happens every few years - about every five in this example. That's plenty of time for people to forget how things used to be, and for it to seem very unusual when they pay attention to the new weather.

La Nina in 2010-2011 has brought a lot of water to Australia:

[ex=http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2011/20110908_lanina.html]The strong 2010-11 La Niña contributed to record winter snowfall, spring flooding and drought across the United States, as well as other extreme weather events throughout the world, such as heavy rain in Australia and an extremely dry equatorial eastern Africa.[/ex]

Long term variations like these often seem very suspicious to the chemtrail community.
 
Yes, it was a La Niña year, but the spike was extraordinary.

I was citing from memory when I wrote about the record set in Namibia. The fact is that in several areas there was no precedence at all for last year's amount. Some values are here:
[ex=http://allafrica.com/stories/201105260547.html]Rainfall records dating back some 95 years in the case of Ondangwa and Rehoboth, and close to 120 years in the case of Windhoek, have been rewritten during the 2010-11 season.[/ex]NASA has annother page in its Earth Observatory:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=50573

2011 with its extremes has even had an impact on American's opinion about global warming (which I see as a positive development):
[ex=http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/science/earth/americans-link-global-warming-to-extreme-weather-poll-says.html]A poll due for release on Wednesday shows that a large majority of Americans believe that this year’s unusually warm winter, last year’s blistering summer and some other weather disasters were probably made worse by global warming.[/ex]In Germany and the neighbouring countries, we had our share of extreme flooding since the late nineties. I remember having pondered about the term "flood of the century" used by the media, and then hearing that the water had destroyed a bridge which had been there since the 13th century ...

I know that scientists are still somewhat careful about linking all those spiking cycles to global warming - but not as much as they were ten years ago.

Edit: Just found this article, almost taylored to support that last sentence:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-19/climate-change-has-nothing-to-do-with-al-gore.html
 
You've got to consider weather cycles like the El Niño/La Niña-Southern Oscillation when seeing if something really is new. Unseasonable weather happens every few years - about every five in this example. That's plenty of time for people to forget how things used to be, and for it to seem very unusual when they pay attention to the new weather.

La Nina in 2010-2011 has brought a lot of water to Australia:

[ex=http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2011/20110908_lanina.html]The strong 2010-11 La Niña contributed to record winter snowfall, spring flooding and drought across the United States, as well as other extreme weather events throughout the world, such as heavy rain in Australia and an extremely dry equatorial eastern Africa.[/ex]

Long term variations like these often seem very suspicious to the chemtrail community.

Thank you all for your your replies. Looking back at my rainfall records there does indeed seem to be a correlation between La Nina affect and an increases in observable persistant contrails. Prior to this cycle, I had no real issues with my solar system.
 
Incorrect... In Australia there has been huge increases in cloud seeding since 2007 at tax payers expense. Research always wins out.

Saucon
 
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