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Checking in on SSTs
Posted by Stuart Staniford on April 30, 2006 - 12:45am
Topic: Environment/Sustainability
Tags: climate change, hurricanes, national hurricane center, peak oil, sst [list all tags]
Sea Surface Temperatures, and anomaly from climatic averages. Source: NOAA.
Here's an animation of the last 12 weeks:
12 week animation of Sea Surface Temperatures, and anomaly from climatic averages. Source: NOAA.
Is it just me, or does it rather look like the Gulf Stream is less warm as it heads into the Atlantic than usual?
Also, if you missed it, RealClimate butchered William Gray recently. The small pieces of him that they left scattered across the floor almost turned my stomach.
Update [2006-4-28 11:16:36 by Stuart Staniford]: Here's paired images of Gulf of Mexico SSTs yesterday (bottom), and at the same time last year (above). That doesn't look so good, does it? (Hat tip to Ben for the link). Note that the color scales are not identical, so the effect is not as large as it looks, but it's still pretty significant.
Sea Surface Temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico, this year and last. Source: Rutgers University..
I'm not really sure what I'm looking at.
Correct me if wrong.
The top graphic is the actual sea temps right now and the bottom is the difference from normal. So the temp in the GOM is 2-3 degrees above normal and -2 to -3 degrees below normal off of Peru, which would mean La nina is still running strong.
If this is the correct way to read it, it would also appear that the area off of SoCal is a degree warmer, which might explain why so many "spinning things" (not sure what they are mini-tropical storms?) are forming there, which I have never witnessed before.
Poor William Gray may have been dismembered, but he has forecast an above average hurricane season.
From here.http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/outlooks/hurricane.shtml
Excellent job! I have been periodically checking these charts myself. I am no meteorologist, but if the Gulf Stream is not flowing as strongly as usual up the East Coast, then the GoM should be heating up more than normal-- which might explain the big red bullseye anomaly. Any idea on how this affects the spinning off of those monster eddies from the Loop Current?
What worries me is if the GoM can actually get hot enough to spin up the birth of its own hurricanes--this would make it very difficult to shut down the oil ops in time to prevent an environmental castastrophe and/or safely evacuate the oil-workers, fishermen, shippers, and prepare land-based evacuations. A hurricane started near the Yucatan Strait could hit the hotspot of the Loop Current, then quickly grow to major status [Cat3-5] before hitting land a day or two later. If it comes ashore before starting its eyewall replacement cycle-- it is at full force with a very tight eyewall.
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Thxs for responding. Yes, if it gets really bad in the GoM, we can send the oilworkers to look for oil in the offshore Artic-- see this shocking chart of how ice-free it is becoming:
http://www.physorg.com/preview63552889.html
I often wonder if the effects from Global Warming will accelerate faster and create more problems for us than Peakoil. Consider this next link where scientists have now discovered huge rivers running underneath Antarctic glacial icecaps.
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British scientists have discovered rivers the size of the Thames in London flowing hundreds of miles under the Antarctica ice shelf by examining small changes in elevation, observed by ESA's ERS-2 satellite, in the surface of the oldest, thickest ice in the region, according to an article published in Nature this week.
The finding, which came as a great surprise to the scientists, challenges the widely held assumption that subglacial lakes evolved in isolated conditions for several millions of years and raises the possibility that large floods of water from deep within the ice's interior may have generated huge floods that reached the ocean in the past and may do so again.
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http://www.physorg.com/news64754411.html
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
At this point, all I think you can do is watch in horror ... I don't think TPTB are thinking earth marines and everybody up here is still driving Dodge RAM diesels and swearing at the oil companies ...
love your writings. I've been thinking about this lately. When you say "what will create more problems for 'us ', PO or GCC? Well, ask someone from NO, or a pacific islander. I think the effects will be uneven. If you live in cyclone/hurricane country and aren't really part of the oil economy, then its climate change. Or a nomadic ice-hunter - they're experiencing TEOTWA They KI - RIGHT NOW. If you live in suburban USA and drive an SUV, climate change is minor, for now, but not PO. And if you're a rich bastard with a big secure compound, you won't feel either in your lifetime.
Excellent point! I fear the Phx leaders are ignorantly synchronizing both dire effects to hit the Valley of the Sun at the same time. The recent addition of 500,000 new commuters adds to the Asphalt Wonderland of Sprawl and the heat island effects, and the continuing drought will eventually make it a dead-even price race between a gallon of water and a gallon of gasoline. Kunstler and Jay Hanson have warned for years that the Southwest US is doomed postPeak. Oh, joy! =(
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Thxs for the addition of more good news! =(
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Just a quick unscientific question on your latest update charts: Does it now look like the Loop Current has expanded into a giant swirl that encompasses the entire southwest section of the GoM? The piling up of all that hot water would explain why the east coast Gulf Stream is currently running so cold. Recall that the Mars Platform had to delay some repairs because some Loop Current eddies made underwater work too dangerous.
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Then again the weather has been pleasant and not having a working AC this has been great so far.
I move to a cooler Climate soon, so I won't care so much about the Hurricanes, Just more tornados.
According to the Global Dimming theory, particulate pollution is actually keeping GW at bay and when the particulates are pulled out of the air, we will really fry under the CO2. Not exactly happy news. I wish there was happy news again.
Hey, no problemo!
Just disconnect the electrostatic precipitators on all the coal-fired power plants for a couple of months out of the year, or as required.
And if that isn't enough, we can outfit our aging fleet of B-52 bombers to spray thousands of tons of finely divided carbon black into the stratosphere.
Of course, if we overshoot the mark and cause another ice age, we can always burn some extra fossil fuel to get that CO2 back up to where it can do some good.
And who said all pollution is bad!
Thanks for the additional insight.
For those that did not see the show: Bottom line is that particulate matter from pollution has an amplifying effect when it interacts with clouds. Tiny microdroplets of water collect or nucleate around each particle of pollution, i.e. fly ash from coal fired plants. Cloud reflectivity is a function of the size and number of such drops. Many small microdrops appears to increase reflectivity and thus increase global dimming. As Prosena notes: the mechanisms are complex and not yet well understood.
The same happend last year?
You can find same-period-last-year data at two places; first (and easiest) is:
http://cwcaribbean.aoml.noaa.gov/data.html
Once there, click on the SST Anomalies button, which gives you a choice of various 5-day intervals for each of several years. I suggest the night-time data, which is less likely to exhibit transient daytime heating effects.
Second place, if you want longer term averages less prone to transient noise, is at:
http://poet.jpl.nasa.gov/
This is a sort of roll-your-own data shop for satellite data.
I suggest using monthly aggregations of SST Anomaly data from Reynolds/NCEP. You can run off a couple years' worth "while you wait", unless TOD crowd bogs it down too much.
As for the area to look at, the default box shown there is not bad, but I like to look a bit further east as well.
If you do that, you'll see that:
(1) GoM SST anomalies have been greater, (2006>2005) year-over-year, consistently since at least Jan 2006.
(2) Temps to the east of the Antilles are a bit cooler YOY now than 2005.
I think this may be because the trade winds are either driving less warm surface water toward eastern Atlantic, or maybe even beginning to drive warm surface waters into GoM.
Les Lambert
Link http://www.usatoday.com/weather/news/2006-04-25-hurricane-usat_x.htm
Basically, it seems the state of play is that left off from the end of last year. Insurers refusing to insure coastal homes, even including New York City and Long Island. Could this be the beginning of the end of coastal communities along the Gulf and Eastern Seaboards? How will Florida cope if it gets hit by a couple of big hurricanes this year (more than likely I would think)? I don't know how rich Florida is but it could become a very poor state in a decade's time if Cat 4 and 5 hurricanes keep on pummelling it each season and the state has to pay out on house insurance policies.
It is no wonder the Ins. Cos. are bailing on their customers:
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Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, said that officials must plan for the worst.
"We could say, the 2006 hurricane season can't be worse than last year, but I'm here to convince you it can," Mayfield said. "All it takes is for one major storm to hit one community."
He stressed that the most vulnerable people during the next hurricane season will be the 100,000 victims of previous hurricanes still living in temporary housing.
Mayfield was speaking to federal, state and emergency officials in Orlando, Fla. attending the National Hurricane Conference.
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http://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2006/04/13/67260.htm
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
I live in a flood prone area along the Ohio river. A couple people I know had their home ruined by floods in 2004. The US Army corps of Engineers predicted a 35' flood which got broadcast over the news the night that the remnants of Ivan tore through here but 12 hours later the water crested at 44.97 feet. The undercalled it by 10'. People went to bed thinking they were ok and went downstairs in the morning to discover the first floor was 3' under water. OOPS! but the US Corp's underfuning by Washington is a different story. ANyway, FEMa put a lot of people into nice trailers at a value of $40k each. 4 months later we had another flood. People in these trailers called FEMA and said will you please send a tow truck to move our trailers up the hill to avoid this flood (the US corps learned a lesson and predicted this one very well in advance). FEMA would not spend $100 for a tow truck to move these trailers 100' and out of the flood, so they got ruined too and a bunch of people went homeless.
My feeling from the UK is that this winter has been colder than the recent average and almost returning to the norms to the 1980's.I have had a suspicion that the Gulf Stream is beginning to fail noticeably since February when it was going to get colder than normal. The Gulf Stream is something like 40% down on water flows since the 1960's. Nobody knows at what flow rate it will stop (41%, 60%, 90%??) and Western Europe will cool down. Perhaps we have reached the critical point last year, and any further decreases in Gulf Stream flows will now show up in cooler winters, such as the one we have just had.
How long it will take to show up in colder winters, I don't know (a decade, 3 decades?), but I feel we are witnessing the start of a cooling period in Europe. I think it will take a decade to show temperature patterns changing, and one colder winter than the recent high averages is certainly no cause for alarm. Of course, next winter will be warmer than this one.
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/monthly.land.00N.90N.df_1901-2000mean.dat
Furthermore, the unprecedented area of open sea around Spitsbergen, Franz Josef Land and Novaya Zemlya (unprecedented for this time of year I mean) hradly suggests a weakening Gulf stream.
According to this link, we can expect much more open sea around Antarctica as the GW temperature anomalies ramp up:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17257
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
it seems to me that you have described a phenomenon, rather than explained it. Hotter air temperatures over N America and colder over W Europe is the result, what's the cause? A weakening of the thermohaline transfer seems a likely candidate, this is supported by the ocean temperatures.
Those lucky people in the Gulf of Mexico get hurricanes, and in exchange we W Europeans get high heating bills.
Hey, to capture all that storm energy, they need to put wave generators and high-spec windmills in the G of M, instead of oil rigs...
In southern Sweden we had unusal long and cold winter, I have never seen its like - and so has nobody else. I think statistics were close sometime around WWII.
Being a surgeon I meet quite a few elderly people so I made it a habit of asking the 90+ if they remembered anything like it. They were all positive this was an unusual winter, they could remember colder spikes but never a manifest snowpack for months like this winter.
Please do not pick on the obvious non scientific of the above, its just an observation.
Title: Met office warns of a bitter winter
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4355946.stm
You can't blame the N Europe winter on Global Warming this time..
"Mr McCallum said the Met office prediction of a cold winter was 66% likely to be proved correct.
He said the calculations were based on the "North Atlantic oscillation" - a measure of *sea temperatures* which normally correlate with weather patterns. "
It's interesting that he calls it a measure of sea temperatures because it's actually a measure of the pressure differences in the north atlantic, generally between somewhere around the Azores and Iceland. But the point I was going to make is that the Earth is roughly 70% water and that water contains a lot of energy. Atmospheric circulations are driven more by the ocean than the ocean is driven by atmospheric circulations.