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Mystery "Warm Blob" In the Pacific Ocean Could Be Causing California's Drought
Mr D from 63 writes A mysterious "warm blob" in the Pacific Ocean could be the reason why US West coast states like California are experiencing their worst ever drought, a new study says. From the article: "Nick Bond, a climate scientist at the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean at the University of Washington, began watching the blob a year and a half ago. 'In the fall of 2013 and early 2014, we started to notice a big, almost circular mass of water that just didn't cool off as much as it usually did, so by spring of 2014 it was warmer than we had ever seen it for that time of year,' Bond said in a news release about the studies appearing in Geophysical Research Letters."
When your data size is 1, drawing conclusions is problematic.
Also, the blob itself went away last fall. There is a significant amount of warmer than average water that has appeared along much of the West coast this winter, but it's not in the same location as the blob.
#DeleteChrome
Excellent, leave the details vague enough that people can paint Fukushima-meltdown-related scenarios onto it and you're going to have a field day as the infowars crowd comes out.
Based on a mixed layer temperature budget, these anomalies were caused by lower than normal rates of the loss of heat from the ocean to the atmosphere, and of relatively weak cold advection in the upper ocean. Both of these mechanisms can be attributed to an unusually strong and persistent weather pattern featuring much higher than normal sea level pressure over the waters of interest. This anomaly was the greatest observed in this region since at least the 1980s.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
We prefer to called: "Coolness challenged entities"
You insensitive clod.
Sounds like the new SPECTRE base has been located.
There's a whole ocean out there waiting to be used. Droughts are bullshit, nothing but a disagreement over the price.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Table-ized A.I.
Shouldn't this be located near D.C...?
This could be the side effect of an underwater alien power plant.
The warmer the ocean, the further inland it can push wet air at night (the inland deserts get cold at night, and suck air off the water - if lucky, it can make it over the mountains and we get to keep the water). The warmer the ocean, the more rapidly water is evaporating. Sans paying $15 for what is likely bad science, I can't imagine how a singular event that would actually make /more/ rain logically, could be posited to make /less/. It's more likely that it's the planet sortof self-regulating, and is the start of how we'll get wet again.
I know this is just non-sense, but isn't that Texas-sized blob of trash floating in the middle of the Pacific roughly at the same place as that heat blob?
California lawmakers are currently writing up new legislation that bans warm blobs and requires warning labels on any existing warm blobs.
Problem solved!
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
Cthulhu's alarm clock going off, maybe?
http://thinkprogress.org/clima...
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Does it coincide with with the garbage blob?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
"worst ever drought"
It might be the worst drought since the area became a state (though there were others that were close if not worse) but it is far from the worst drought ever in the region. On at least 5 occasions over the past 1000 years there have been droughts that make this one seem mild in comparison.
but could it be all of the REALLY HOT radioactive material from Fukushima making its way to the US West coast?
No.
They way maps are flattened doesn't make it obvious, but it is closer between Chernobyl and New York than it is between Fukushima and the US West coast.
The much worse disaster at Chernobyl didn't have any impact on the US and Fukushima won't have any either.
Unfortunately media likes to spread FUD to make people panic.
Obviously it's an alien invader. The only solution is to nuke it, nuke it all the way to hell.
It's aliens and climate change.
The blob has obviously discovered all the fashionable discarded polymers and wears them like a Long-Island party queen. It's really California-warming.
Drop a pipe in the Pacific, run it over the mountains, maybe parallel to the road that descends into Palm Springs and refill that nasty smelling swamp. On the way down the hill you can generate electricity, desalinate, extract minerals and make sushi. Win, win, win and wasabi.
Death Valley is next. I'm pretty sure turtles float.
It's Kim Dotcom.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
You seem to think that businesses have a right to subsidies, even if they harm society. Let's give patent trolls some subsidies. Sure, they're damaging our society, but think of all the jobs we're lose!
A few decades ago, before global warming became popular, there was El Nino and La Nina - depending on whereabouts in the Pacific the warm surface water was located.
And before that, the meteorologists refered to "the southern oscillation"
the jet stream has moved very far south and is running north south - so it blocks the "atmospheric rivers" which are the big storms from Alaska and Hawaii. each one carries more water than the Mississippi, and we need a dozen or more a year...
It's amazing how much more water there was in parts of California in the relatively recent past, much lost outside of any extreme drought events.
Owens lake was used to fuel development in the Los Angeles area, especially the San Fernando Valley about 100 years ago.
Tulare lake is now gone, yet during the wetter years in the 1800's was as large as 900 square miles.
There's actually a tale of sunken treasure from a gold shipment lost in a storm.
http://www.tularecountylibrary...
http://www.workmansbooks.com/c...
I found a late 1850's newspaper report originating from Fort Yuma of a cinnabar (mercury ore) discovery near the junction of the Mojave and Colorado rivers. (Although dangerous, mercury was commonly used for extracting gold since that readily dissolves into it) The thing is, the mojave river isn't shown reaching the Colorado in later times. There were conflicting reports of the reach of the Mojave in the era, but whatever the recent water source had been, it certainly isn't there now. Here's a pdf of some of the study done of the mojave and ancient lakes. It looks like water at high levels about 7000 years ago went beyond a spillway causing erosion the led to water not being held. It seems that it isn't just climate shifts, but the keeping of water from the wetter periods that is behind some of the major changes seen in California.
The California land around Tulare lake was once treated as worthless because of it flooding, and was sold for a dollar an acre.
Well great job on getting rid of that troublesome water guys. The area was once so rich in animal and plant life that for a very long period it had one of the highest population densities of North American native (Indian) populations. Although about a third of the west coast natives had already been killed off by the combination of violence and exposure to European diseases, things got much worse after the mid 1850's. The gold rush drove much of the change, but climate played a role also. There was already a drought by the end of the 1850's. Santa Barbara saw a 133 degree heat burst of 133 degrees three solar rotations before the Carrington storm. Much of the Santa Barbara beef was culled to to limited grass in the drought. The southern part of the state saw some rain (and the death of Bernardo Yorba on his rancho by the Santa Ana river near what's now Yorba Linda near Anaheim) related to the San Diego Hurricane of 1958, the storm went back out to sea before getting to Santa Barbara. Even with the great California flood of early 1862, which silting in the lagoon at Santa Barbara, the drought was severe in 1863 and 1864. That caused the collapse of some of the rancho operation near Santa Barbara, leading to some land becoming available for sale to outsiders. The combination of drought, an extreme 1861-62 winter, and cattle eating what little the Indians grew led to problems when Indians working with ranches near the Owens Valley didn't get paid and stole cattle for food. That led to the Owens Valley Indian War of 1864. Fort Independence, seen as the town of Independence. The U.S. military found that going out and killing anything that the Indians might eat was the most effective way to drive them to submission. The population was largely killed off, less than 40 inhabit the current reservation in the area. In retrospect, as with the plight of some of the struggling farmers in Syria, climate variation had a major impact on what unfolded.
Here's a PDF of some ancient information on the Mojave river/lake and related areas.
http://quest.nasa.gov/projects...
The 1859 Santa Barbara heat burst event was not just a variation of the local "sundowner" winds causing compressive warming from sinking air in coastal canyons. The even peaked ju
Umbre Gambrae Glambre Globre La Nina
Because that'd put politicians out of work.
404 Not Found: No such file or resource as '.sig'
Proposition 99
Warm blob can cause drought
The _really_ hot stuff has already decayed. High output = short half-life. The most dangerous stuff is not dangerous because it's especially hot, but because the human body likes to retain and concentrate it (cesium-137, for example).
That thing looks like it gives off a lot of heat.
I already told the US government I'd remove my giant ocean warming space mirror as soon as they pay me one milllllion dollars...
I think its the blog of plastic.... nothing of back this uo just best guess... the absorb heat well....
I'm really not even qualified to put this out there,
Correct, you're barely qualified to even breathe.
It baffles me that anyone doesn't look at reality here:
We took every drop of ware naturally flowing through California and diverted it to make "fertile" land our of desert. Then the fires came to burn down what we left dry out. We cry about the fires, but ignore that we destroyed what nature put there over thousand of years.
The water we stole would literally have trickled down hill. Bringing with it evaporation, putting the water back into the ecosystem instead of into the mouths of fat, lazy Americans spread around the North American continent.
The air blowing over no longer pickes up any of the moisture we stole. The rains can't happen without the water.
Now tell me, who caused the water shortage?
"yes spongebob?" "why is there a warm blob in the pacific patrick?" "I couldn't hold it spongebob"
After decades of personal research on effects of minitature icebergs on environmental conditions, I've determined that the temperature rises rapidly after the last bit of ice melts. Lime or lemon does not make much difference, but the ratio of gin to tonic may be positively correleted with the rate of metling.. But, seriously, once the ice is gone... that balancing repository of chill is gone. S0unds like a wilder temp ride once they are gone.
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
Perhaps the water is being insulated by the eddy of plastic trash in the central Pacific?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_latitudesare what you are referring to. These deserts are referred to as "sub-tropical", as opposed to, say, the northern Great Basin or eastern Washington, which is mainly created from rain shadowing.
Also, Sahara is north of the equator (the desert, the street, and the casino).
This is, if not the truth, the kernel of a very good story...
Mystery compnay X decides that no one is "doing anything" about Global warming. So they decide to help everyone out, by submerging Project X in the ocean off California, meant to cause the water to somehow absorb more CO2 (or if you want to go for an advanced version of the story they were trying to "remove the acid" from the PH neutral sea water).
Well as large scale attempts at terraforming on a working system tend to do, things we terribly awry - now there is a warming hole parked of California, larger every year and no means to stop it. Inside ten years humanity is forced to abandon California entirely due to it becoming a hard desert with no incoming moisture at all - all except for Apple who has the funds to fully Biodome the new Apple Campus, and run desalinated water straight from the ocean.
The moral of the story is: do not terraform what you do not fully understand.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The warm blog has been a topic on Cliff Mass's blog several times. He does a good job of explaining it and its effects.
Ph'nglui mglw'nfah Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!
Have you heard the good news? Repent and believe in Him! Mighty Cthulhu is rising! Only the true believers will be eaten first!
Just looks like the PDO's flipped back to positive to me - not exactly a mystery!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
That's Bond. Nick Bond.
Not a blob, its Octopussy
Because that is a fantasy which exists in your own head, used as an excuse to not believe scientific findings which make you feel uncomfortable?
I find myself wondering if the Great Pacific garbage patch might alter the heat retention properties of the water.
they probably didn't cause it,
but they likely have a good collection of temp readings from the last 100 years
Godzilla's toilet!
ummm. wrong direction. The blob is in the water, not the air above the water.
Could that warm spot be the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in action?
People, stop peeing in the water!
I live in the western US, where we didn't have a winter AT ALL this year, and not much of one the year before. On the other hand, the eastern US got slammed. I(and most others who live out here) had hoped this year we would get what the east got. We didn't, and now there is a "pattern" of drought(yes, California has had this pattern for four years).
If our next "winter" was like this last one, there is going to be big problems. Real big problems for California, but also for everywhere west of Denver(except for perhaps Seattle).
I've noticed what I call a "whistling in the graveyard" attitude about the current drought situation, not only in California, but here in the rest of the west. By that I mean people consciously or subconsciously know how big of a problem this is, but no one really will change their behavior or expectations.
It's like the child hiding under the covers too scared to turn on the light because of the monster under the bed.
However, this time the monster is real.
Calling the current period a "drought" is contingent upon assuming the rainfall pattern of the last 150 years or so is normal. Research seems to indicate that the last 150 years were abnormally wet and that Cali climate is usually much drier. Doesn't matter though, as the current drought plays into the AGW narrative, because "climate change".
"California's current drought is being billed as the driest period in the state's recorded rainfall history. But scientists who study the West's long-term climate patterns say the state has been parched for much longer stretches before that 163-year historical period began.
And they worry that the "megadroughts" typical of California's earlier history could come again.
Through studies of tree rings, sediment and other natural evidence, researchers have documented multiple droughts in California that lasted 10 or 20 years in a row during the past 1,000 years -- compared to the mere three-year duration of the current dry spell. The two most severe megadroughts make the Dust Bowl of the 1930s look tame: a 240-year-long drought that started in 850 and, 50 years after the conclusion of that one, another that stretched at least 180 years.
"We continue to run California as if the longest drought we are ever going to encounter is about seven years," said Scott Stine, a professor of geography and environmental studies at Cal State East Bay. "We're living in a dream world."
Stine, who has spent decades studying tree stumps in Mono Lake, Tenaya Lake, the Walker River and other parts of the Sierra Nevada, said that the past century has been among the wettest of the last 7,000 years.
Looking back, the long-term record also shows some staggeringly wet periods. The decades between the two medieval megadroughts, for example, delivered years of above-normal rainfall -- the kind that would cause devastating floods today.
The longest droughts of the 20th century, what Californians think of as severe, occurred from 1987 to 1992 and from 1928 to 1934. Both, Stine said, are minor compared to the ancient droughts of 850 to 1090 and 1140 to 1320.
The last 150 years or so in Cali have actually been abnormally wet, similar to the wet period between two century-plus drought period 2000 years ago.
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/07...
BEGINNING about 1,100 years ago, what is now California baked in two droughts, the first lasting 220 years and the second 140 years. Each was much more intense than the mere six-year dry spells that afflict modern California from time to time, new studies of past climates show. The findings suggest, in fact, that relatively wet periods like the 20th century have been the exception rather than the rule in California for at least the last 3,500 years, and that mega-droughts are likely to recur.
The study involved trees at four places: Mono Lake, Tenaya Lake, the West Walker River and Osgood Swamp. Dr. Stine's tree-ring analysis found that live trees had covered dry beds of lakes, streams and swamps for overlapping periods of 50, 100, 141 and 220 years and that these "lowstand" periods were clustered in two major dry spells separated by a century-long wet period. "Epic drought," he wrote in Nature, is "the only plausible explanation for the site-to-site contemporaneity of the stumps."
IT IS NOT A TUMOR!
The cost of recycling can be brought down by starting with lower-mineral sources. Those that drink beer produce nearly clear output after the first one. By tapping frat house urinals less processing is required. Effective efficiency is best if the beer comes from outside the drought area.
The water lost in toilets might be reduced if they were some sort of chemical toilet, but they also need to be designed using negative pressure or something to keep odors from being released. Nobody wants a stinky one.
Changing food crops could certainly help, but I doubt people would be very happy replacing strawberries with lima beans. It might be too expensive, but maybe greenhouse production of strawberries would be much more efficient with reduced evaporation, and possibly avoiding loss into the ground. Water that goes down to the water table isn't really waste though.
Considering that much well, river, and lake water that is used ends up in the ocean, desal does have the potential advantage of a shift the other direction.
Although the large amount of water used in fracking and newer uranium mining methods pales compared to agriculture, the contamination left behind by both is a serious issue. It's very short-sighted to assume that there won't be leakage, or that water at a particular depth will never be wanted.
The issue of land sinking shouldn't be ignored. It's s so bad in central California that plans for a project to sustain fish had to be dropped because subsidence made the ground too unstable to support the related concrete. Rapid water loss round the Dead Sea in the Middle East has resulted in one popular beach areas being closed due to danger from a large number of sink holes forming.
http://www.accuweather.com/en/...
As real as CO2 and methane issues are, we should also remember to be open minded enough to research other factors affecting weather.
http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
They switched it off when they got noticed, then when it cooled down came back :p
California can't admit that kow-towing to environmentalists got them into this mess, so yeah... "warm blob." But, hey... Californians still have their delta smelt...
Rimmer says "it must be Aliens".
(For all the Red Dwarf fans out there).