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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
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.
This could be the side effect of an underwater alien power plant.
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
You're thinking of the mass of hot air in the atmosphere; this is in the ocean.
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!”
This probably explains, why some driest places on Earth are close to tropical oceans, right? The Atacama Desert, the Chihuahua Desert, the Namib Desert or the Sahara.
Those are not tropical deserts, but on the 30-35-degree latitude lines, the hottest and driest places in the world. Between these lines is cooler, but a lot wetter.
"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.
The garbage patch is where it is in the Pacific because it's a gyre, currents funneling inward on the surface from all directions. Could this be concentrating warm water also?
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.
did you not read my entire comment? If the ocean is warm enough, the wet air can make it over the mountains...only then do we keep the water. The Chihuahuan desert is hundreds of miles from the ocean, and guess what - it probably /does/ still manage to help pull wet air to it at night, if you consider the land between it and the ocean is relatively green. Do you not imagine geography to play a part? Do you really think that if one particular area is a particular way, every other place on the planet should be the same way? California, in particular, gets more wet when the ocean is warmer. If you don't believe me, google an obscure (snark) climate pattern known as "El Nino" - which for California brings heavy rains, but for other places can cause droughts. Or...and I guess you're choosing the or...pretend everyplace on the planet has the same climate.
It's aliens and climate change.
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.
Also look up "Pineapple Express"
While I don't disagree with the article, it should be noted that the problem isn't specific to California, and Glaciers have been melting at such high speeds, and low snow packs from lack of cold-enough precipitation that it's predicted there will be no water for California in as early as 20 years. Start those desalination plants now or water will have to be rationed. Californian farming businesses meanwhile have been buying land in Washington and BC so they can move farther north when it becomes uneconomical to grow anything in California. You already have rice farmers selling water because it's more profitable than actually growing anything.
The "canary in the coal mine" are the ski hills. If they can't open for 5 consecutive years, you are in trouble. It's too much of a gamble to just go "oh climate patterns change, let's just pray to jesus for rain", start desalination plants, there's no shortage of ocean water, and there won't be as long as "sea level rise" is still a concern.
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!
Your assessment is flawed. Warmer temperatures do mean more water can evaporate, but that does not mean it will precipitate in nearby regions. There are many regions around the world that are hot, humid, and still dry as a bone (Somalia, Northwestern Peru, most Middle Eastern countries that border the ocean, etc.).This is like the other bad science assumption often tossed around by deniers: " Well if there is more water vapor then there will be more clouds and so the world will cool down!". No, it doesn't work like that.
There are conditions that need to be met for cloud formation and precipitation. If the atmosphere is stable, then it really doesn't matter how much moisture is present. If a blocking ridge forms over the region, then those warm moist air masses are going to move somewhere else. If there is a thick enough layer of dry air beneath the moist air, then it'll just be virga. If the air masses destabilize before coming ashore, then it'll just dump rain back into the ocean.
But I'm sure you know all this.
~X~
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"
yes, I do know this. I also know that for California in particular - since that's the subject - warmer water means more rain. It's called El Nino. If the wet air makes it to the mountains and then cools, we get rain on the coast. Or maybe you didn't see the context (an article about California) and thought I was instead trying to make a statement about global weather patterns?
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
How do you explain the South Pole then?
It only gets about 6.5" of precip per year. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Antarctica)
Because that'd put politicians out of work.
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My understanding was that a lot of the moisture that CA usually gets was from the north pacific, carried by winds that are (lately) being diverted by an unusually strong high pressure zone. It seems conceivable that a patch of warm water could make a patch of warm wet air, that would divert more overall moisture than it carries.
Of course, not being a meteorologist, my understanding is probably somewhat flawed. But I don't think it's quite as simple as "this patch has more evaporation therefore CA gets more water".
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.
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?
* The Atacama Desert - 27 degrees South
* The Chihuahua Desert - 30 degrees North
* The Namib Desert - 23 degrees South
* The Sahara Desert - 23 degrees South
What is your point? Two are tropical deserts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropics) while none lie between 30-35 degrees.
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.
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
Hint: read wikipedia.
California is not affected by El Niño or El Niña (itself). Both phenomena are southern hemisphere events.
However during an El Niño you often have an additional warm event around California, which often causes heavy rain fall and flooding.
Most important: we don't have fully developed El Niño yet. We are actually in the 'normal' phase between an El Niña and an El Niño.
Your ideas how the weather/climate works are unfortunately pretty wrong.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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?
Actually, it does work like that. Warmer temperatures increase cloud cover which increases albedo, helping mitigate the temperature change.
It doesn't offset the change entirely though (else the temperature would never change). Water vapor is on a negative (stabilizing) feedback loop with temperature. But just because you've got a negative feedback loop in place doesn't mean the system is immune to state changes. It'll slow down the rate of change, as well as dampen the degree of change before the system reaches a new equilibrium. But (with very rare exceptions) it cannot prevent the change.
We've got climate change deniers ignoring scientific data to substantiate their position. And we've got climate change proponents ignoring basic control systems engineering and Laplace transform math to substantiate their position.
Could that warm spot be the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in action?
The Atacama Desert is definitely at least partly tropical, starting at 18 degrees south. So is the Sahara, whose southern boundary is around 15 degrees north. The Namib extends to the 18 th degree south, it is also at least partly tropical. The only desert that is not in the Tropcis is the Chihuahua desert, but it is at least close to a tropical sea, the Gulf of Mexico.
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."
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...
I can see you are not familiar with the weather patterns, or the Spanish language. It is La Nin~a, not El Nin~a.
If only /. supported unicode.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
It does support HTML, however: ñ
They switched it off when they got noticed, then when it cooled down came back :p
True, she is female, sorry :)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Isn't Liberal Elite an oxymoron? Liberals are typically blue collar or white collar worker with families, while conservatives are the elite moneyed types seeking to an ever larger slice of the pie.
Clearly you've never been to Marin County.
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...