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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.
http://thinkprogress.org/clima...
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
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.
Also, the lack of reprocessing and reusing of waste water. We could achieve a lot by filtering and reusing the waste water aka "toilet to tap."
This is exactly the wrong approach. The last thing California needs is more top-down "solutions". Just price the water properly, and if recycling makes economic sense, it will happen. Most likely it will NOT happen, because it is a dumb idea. You have to deal, not only with the cost of cleaning the sewage, but also the energy cost of pumping it back uphill to where it can be reused. A far simpler solution is to end the subsidies for growing rice in the desert.
It's Kim Dotcom.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
I hope you're just being sarcastic, but in case you aren't
http://www.mercurynews.com/sci...
http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
http://news.nationalgeographic...
a five minute internet search for "California drought history" can point to the fact that California has had water issues for centuries (it can be said of any area as well), it had destroyed Native American Cities and entire empires long before European settlers arrived. A statement in the National Geographic article pretty well sums it up "Unfortunately, she notes, most of the state's infrastructure was designed and built during the 20th century, when the climate was unusually wet compared to previous centuries."
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~
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
And before that, the meteorologists refered to "the southern oscillation"
It's still called that.
there was El Nino and La Nina - depending on whereabouts in the Pacific the warm surface water was located.
Those are names for the warm and cold phases of that oscillation. The only thing that might have changed is that people are more willing to use the Spanish words to describe the phenomenon.
A few decades ago, before global warming became popular
The Southern Oscillation and Anthropogenic Climate Change refer to different phenomena that are explained by different processes. The only thing they have in common is that they both have something to do with the weather.