After two of the remaining four diagonal runways at O'Hare close later this month, the airport is planning to experiment with alternate landing runways to reduce noise:
The city has developed a concept to rotate the designated "fly quiet'' runways at night to abate noise. Instead of planes flying over the same air corridors night after night, the rotation of runways — on possibly a weekly basis — would move the worst noise impacts from one community to another, aviation officials said.
The experiment would start, pending FAA approval, after diagonal runway 32 Right closes Aug. 20, officials said. Diagonal runway 32 Left, which is scheduled to close in 2019, would be among the runways used in the rotation during the interim, officials said, adding that numerous runway combinations might be applicable to help spread out the noise.
Only one arrival runway and one departure runway are needed nightly, officials said.
Even when only east-west runways are used late at night, air-traffic controllers will be asked to direct pilots to make turns when they reach the appropriate altitude after takeoff so that noise isn't restricted to communities east and west of O'Hare, officials said.
Runways 32R and 22L are hardly ever used anymore, so the closure won't really change current operations at O'Hare. But the opening of 28L at the south end of the airport will give visitors to Chicago an extra 15 minutes of taxi time, just like 27R provides.
At least it will be a little quieter in some of the adjacent suburbs. Sometimes.
Just some of the news stories I haven't got time to read this morning:
I will now continue doing tasks from two jobs ago while I think about things I'd like to do for my current job.
We're well into our fourth day in five above 30°C, but around lunchtime a front passed that dropped the dewpoint from 22°C to 9°C. What a difference. It's still hot, but at least it's not so sticky. Walking home from trivia last night I practically swam through 25°C air with a 23°C dewpoint and lost two belt sizes along the way.
The Climate Prediction Center guesses that August will be cooler than normal, as will September and October. And I guess one week of every year we just have to take the heat. Today's dewpoint drop is very nice, though. It almost makes me want to spend more time outside. Maybe by October...
So far Chicago has had a milder-than-normal summer, with only a couple of over-32°C days and a lot of rain. Given our greenhouse gas emissions, that will change:
The NASA climate projections offer a detailed view of future temperature and precipitation patterns around the world at a 15.5 mile (25 kilometer) resolution, covering the time period from 1950 to 2100. The 11-terabyte dataset provided daily records and estimates of maximum and minimum temperatures and precipitation over the entire globe. It integrates actual measurements from around the world with data from climate simulations created by the international Fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, or CMIP, which is a standard experimental protocol for studying the output of coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation models.
The result? Pretty warm:
I won't be around to experience an average annual temperature around 30°C. Unfortunately, given the effects of climate change on our food and water supplies, not many others might be either.
Stuff I found on the Interwebs this week:
That's all for now.
The Atlantic's CityLab blog looks at the historic buildings and shares a 1965 video about its construction:
The city has granted Marina City preliminary landmark status. Final approval could take a few weeks.
Crain's Chicago Business has a web comic (of all things) that explains Motorola's decline from the only company making mobile handheld communicators to today's zombie corporation.
Spoiler alert: it was Iridium.
Yes, Illinois was #1 in rainfall last month, making us the wettest state in the country:
The National Centers for Environmental Information (formerly NCDC) released their numbers for June, showing that Illinois did indeed have its wettest June on record with 236.2 mm (according to their calculations). That made Illinois the wettest state** in the US for the month.
**There are no statewide records for Hawaii. However, an examination of the four main sites in Hawaii indicate June totals that are far less than 9.3 inches.
Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio all had their wettest months in the 121-year record; Arizona, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Vermont, Maryland, Virginia, and New Hampshire had top-5 wettest months ever.
The weather patterns causing all this rain, by the way, are related to global warming, and similar to the patterns causing frequent polar vortices in the eastern U.S. Welcome to the future!
The weather's perfect, there are holiday parties, and possibly some hiking. So not much blogging this weekend. There was also a small Ribfest nearby, but aside from Rod Tuffcurls & the Bench Presses, kind of disappointing (especially the vendor who ran out of ribs).
More later as circumstances warrant.
As feared, last month was the wettest June on record in Illinois, and the second-wettest month of all time:
The statewide average precipitation for June 2015 in Illinois was 242.1 mm, based on available data through June 30. That is 135.4 mm above the average June precipitation, and the wettest June on record for Illinois.
In addition to being the wettest June on record, it is the second wettest month on record for Illinois. Only September 1926 was wetter at 244.4 mm – just 2.3 mm higher.
Meanwhile, in Chicago, it was the cloudiest June in all 122 years of records, in part because we're covered in Canadian wildfire smoke making everything a little hazy.
On the other hand, it got up to 35°C in London today—and they don't generally have air conditioning over there. Yow.