Moderator: johnsmith
HBS Guy wrote:Montana’s brewing barley crop is in danger due to AGW:
https://thefern.org/2017/12/climate-change-threatens-montanas-barley-farmers-possibly-beer/
Bears out what Squire said: AGW will make the more northern states extremely hot due to the long days there.
HBS Guy wrote:Robert Scribbler on the Californian fires:
https://robertscribbler.com/2017/12/22/toasted-californias-2017-foreshadowing-of-the-monster-fires-to-come/
Wettest winter ever then the hottest summer, drying out the growth caused by winter rains, dried it out until it was flammable. Winds spreading the fires.
1. This is what weather and 1.1°C temperature rise brings
2. Can’t say there is a month in California where no fire can burn.
The trend in tropical sea temperatures continues inexorably upward, and high temperatures lead to coral bleaching. Climate change is happening more quickly than many imagined it would. The bleaching event of 2016 may not have been repeated as severely in 2017, but those circumstances will reproduce themselves soon enough, probably during the next El Nino event – these too are slated to become more severe. Scientists are now concerned about how early in the season bleaching has begun this year. Any bleaching events in close succession will kill parts of the reef that are not already dead.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com.au/animals/more-sharks-ditching-annual-migration-as-ocean-warms.aspx
This year has been strange,” Kajiura says. “Last year was unusually warm all winter: The water temperatures never got below 23 degrees Celsius. This year, the temperatures have risen dramatically to 26 degrees Celsius. It’s now even hotter than this time last year
Sea Level Rise in the United States — From Nuisance to Trouble
As fossil fuel companies fight to keep cities and nations captive to harmful emissions, the effects of rising greenhouse gas concentrations are growing more and more pronounced.
A new study from NOAA finds that the incidence of coast flooding along the U.S. coasts (primarily driven by fossil fuel burning) has increased considerably. This already-damaging situation, under present emissions scenarios, is expected to become much worse over the coming decades.
In the Southeast, high tide flooding days since 2000 have increased from an average of 1.5 per year to 3 per year. In the Northeast, similar flooding days have increased from about 3.5 per year to 6. Flooding is also becoming more common on the U.S. West Coast, though at a slower rate of growth. But hotspots for this region include San Francisco — which is seeing both land subsidence and rising oceans.
Atmospheric Train Wreck
Looking for causes, we need to go all the way back to February. At that time, a big polar warming event was taking place. In the upper levels of the atmosphere over the pole, the stratosphere was warming up. But at the same time, surface temperatures at the pole were rising to above freezing. In some locations near Northern Greenland, readings were pushing as high as 63 F above average.
High amplitude Jet Stream waves were eating away at the typically faster polar circulation patterns even as they were helping to inject much warmer than normal air into the Arctic and pull its resident cold air out. Eventually, all this heat running into the various layers of the Arctic atmosphere drove the polar vortex to collapse. This, in turn, resulted in cold Arctic air being ejected south and west into Europe. This massive jet stream dip, in eddy-like fashion produced a large, countervailing high pressure ridge over Greenland.
A deep trough that has consistently lingered over the U.S. East Coast and helped to spawn storm after powerful storm, was initially generated by a very intense polar warming event linked to human-caused climate change. Image source: Earth Nullschool
The rippling upper level jumble of winds backed all the way to the U.S. East Coast — forming a deep and persistent trough. The trough funneled numerous disturbances slowly through the region. And it was both the trough’s persistence and depth that enabled strong storms to form repeatedly even as they set off such long-lasting and intense impacts (see Dr Jennifer Francis’s related work on how polar amplification impacts the Jet Stream here).
You will need to Right-Click and open the image in a new tab.Much Warmer than Normal Ocean Waters
Though polar amplification — which is another term for how global warming spurs the poles to heat up faster than the rest of the world — helped to generate the upper level features in the atmosphere that would consistently generate storms running across the U.S. East Coast, widespread warmer than normal ocean waters helped to give these storms more fuel.
In the Gulf of Mexico, sea surface temperatures have consistently ranged between 0.5 and 3 C above normal since February. These warm ocean waters contributed to severe floods over the Ohio River Valley at that time by pumping record levels of atmospheric moisture into the storms running south.
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As the Jet Stream dip became more oriented toward the East Coast during March, storms that would ultimately blow up over the Atlantic at first got a big plug of moisture from the extra evaporation flowing off that warmer than normal Gulf. But it was over the Atlantic Ocean that the storms would really start to fire. There, ocean temperatures were ranging between 0.5 and as high as 9 C above normal over parts of the Gulf Stream.
Such very warm sea surfaces provide a lot of fuel in the form of moisture and related convection. And, in particular, we saw some rather amazing instances of convective lift during the recent March 2nd and 7th storms as they tapped that incredible Atlantic Ocean heat and moisture.
rhymeswithgoalie / March 14, 2018
This is reminiscent of the “conveyor belt” of major storms that hit the UK in early 2014 due to a different stalled configuration of the jet stream.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/interesting/2014-janwind
the situation is now looking a bit worse for the Totten Glacier — an enormous sea-fronting slab of ice as big as France that if it melted in total would, by itself, raise sea levels by about 10-13 feet globally.
Previously thought to be more resilient to melt as a result of human-caused climate change and related fossil fuel burning, the Totten was once considered to be stable. However, over recent years, concerns were raised first when plumes of warm water were identified approaching the glacier’s base and later when it was confirmed that Totten was melting from below. Concerns that were heightened by new research identifying how winds associated with climate change were driving warmer waters closer and closer to the huge ice slab. . . .
After follow-on expeditions to Totten, scientists (over the past two years) discovered that the glacier’s floating underside was losing about 10 meters of thickness annually even as its seaward motion was speeding up. Now, new research has found that more of the Totten Glacier is floating upon this warming flood of ocean water than previously thought. According to Professor Paul Winberry, from Central Washington University, who spent the austral summer of 2018 with a Tasmania-funded team of scientists taking measurements of Totten:
“A hammer-generated seismic wave was used to ‘see’ through a couple of kilometres of ice. In some locations we thought were grounded, we detected the ocean below indicating that the glacier is in fact floating (emphasis added).”
Beneath Totten lies a large ridge upon which most of the glacier is grounded as it flows toward the sea. But penetrating this ridge are numerous gateways that, if melted through, provide sea water access to the glacier’s interior. And recent studies have found that a number of these gateways have been thawed open, allowing warming ocean waters access to sections of the glacier that are hundreds of miles inland.
This year has been “anything but ordinary” according to the latest data released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In the first three months of 2018, the United States has seen three climate and weather disasters each resulting in more than $1 billion in damages.
Two of the four nor’easters to hit the central and eastern U.S. during a one month period resulted in record snowfall and more than a billion dollars in losses each. Millions were without power and hundreds of flights were grounded. Multiple deaths were reported across Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Virginia. . . .
. . .scientists know that climate change is making nor’easters more powerful.
Nor’easters form when warm ocean air converges with cold terrestrial air. They are more powerful in the winter when the temperature difference is greatest. Climate change is making the temperature contrast even more pronounced, both by warming the Atlantic and by distorting the jet stream, allowing frigid Arctic air to reach further south. Rising temperatures in the Arctic are responsible for reshaping the jet stream.
Like with summertime hurricanes, winter nor’easters start in the ocean. And with warmer waters, these storms become more intense. According to Accuweather, this year’s series of devastating nor’easters spent more time forming over the ocean, giving them a chance to increase in strength by absorbing more of the warmer ocean temperatures.
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