Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal

This is an excellent story from the AP. It’s about the Gulf of Mexico – AFTER the oil spill.

Pretty powerful stuff isn’t it.

Dan

Red dots are areas with warmer than normal temps. Blue dots are colder than the average from 1971-2000.

August 2010 was the third warmest on record worldwide.

1998 and 2009 are at the top.

The January through August temperatures are still running at the hottest levels ever recorded. If it stays as warm as it ha sbeen, then 2010 will go down as the hottest year ever recorded. If it does, it will be espcially noteworthy because of the developing La Nina in the Pacific.

1998 is the hottest year on record. It was helped by a massive El Nino that year. El Nino’s warm the planet because there is so much warm water in the Pacific. La Nina’s are in some ways the opposite. Colder waters across the Tropical Pacific tend to make a record high year unlikely.

A moderate La Nina is now developing. IF 2010 does indeed turn out to be the warmest, it will be a stunning signal from Mother Nature that greenhouse gases are truly becoming the major player in our climate.

I enjoy the stories but the day to day forecast is worthless.

I always enjoy reading the stories in the Farmers Almanac. It’s been around for a LONG time and they have good basic astronomical info in it. Although you can get much more precise info from free programs like Stellarium.

About this time every year they release their forecast for the upcoming winter. TV stations everywhere gobble it up and do news stories on what the coming winter will be like.

Great free publicity!

Just to be clear here, the day to day forecasts are made up. They will not have any accuracy over that of a pure guess.

Some real science: An average of all moderate to strong La Nina's shows a milder than normal winter for much of the U.S. and Eastern Canada.

If you want to know what the winter will be like, the only think I can tell you is that with a moderate to strong La Nina brewing, the Southeast will likely have a drier and slightly milder than  normal winter. The odds of this are about 65%. That means there is a 35% chance it will be colder than normal here!

Other parts of the country will vary. See the graphics.

This kind of long range forecast is only possible because the La Nina pattern of colder than normal water in the Equatorial Pacific will cause a fairly predictable shift in the storm track over North America. The affects will actually be felt world wide.

Temperature anomalies for January during La Nina events. Images from NOAA. Click for full size image.

However, not every La Nina winter is the same. Each one is slightly different. Sometimes the La Nina pattern will hardly show up at all in some areas. Sometimes the expected warm areas are super warm.

The temperature anomalies in January for La Nina years shows that it’s quite warm in the Southeast U.S. most of the time but not always. The La Nina winters of 1971 and 1976 were slightly below normal over the Eastern U.S.

A scientific forecast would be for a good chance of having a mild winter in the Southeast. For those of you in Western Canada, a colder than normal winter seems like a good bet. Sometimes it is a super cold winter as well.

Just what you folks in Edmonton wanted to hear, isn’t it!

Later,
Dan

Data from the Univ. of Illinois shows the NW Passage is now mainly clear of ice.

Meteorologist Jeff Masters has a lot more about it, but the NW Passage is now mainly free of ice and is navigable. You can see a cool 30 day animation of the melt here. It looks like the NE Passage from Europe to Alaska is almost free as well. Masters says this is the 4th consecutive year that the passage has opened. It’s also the 4th time in recorded history.

The sea ice will continue to melt for a couple of more weeks but the big freeze is already starting above 80 degrees. There were already signs of summer’s end when I was in Greenland three weeks ago.

The real story is not so much the amount of ice on the surface but the overall volume of the ice. This too is dropping very rapidly.  Look at the graphic below from the Polar Science Center at the University of Washington.

Dr. Masters has an excellent detailed writeup on this with a commentary that is spot on.

The surface sea ice melt will not reach a new record this year but it will be close.

The great melt off at the top of the World continues.

Predictions made 20 years ago by Hansen and others that climate change would show up first and most strongly in the Arctic have certainly been proven true…

from Church J.A. and White N.J. "A 20th century acceleration in global sea-level rise" Geophys. Res. Lett. 2006; 33: L01602

NASA’s top climate scientist James Hansen has put together a new website. It basically updates the graphics in his book “Storms of My Grandchildren“. Definitely worth checking out for the graphics which are from papers published in the peer reviewed literature.

If you have not read the book, I highly recommend it. It’s even available for iPad and Kindle (Which makes me happy since I pretty much read everything on my iPad now).