Biblical Floods in Colorado

You've probably been hearing about the epic-Biblical-thousand year floods that Boulder, Colorado is experiencing. The cause is record rainfall - as you can see from the chart, above, developed by Climate Central. In fact, according to Weather Underground and Climate Central, Boulder, which normally gets 1.7 inches of rain in September and 20.68 for the year, got half a year's rain in less than half the month of September. (The forecast has a small chance of rain today, and then sunshine for the next few days.)

What might be causing all the rain? The Pacific. According to Climate Central:

During the past couple of weeks, the weather across the West has featured both an active Southwest Monsoon and a broad area of low pressure at upper levels of the atmosphere, which has been pinned by other weather systems and prevented from moving out of the region. It was this persistent low pressure area that helped pull the moisture out of the tropics and into Colorado. Signs point to the tropical Pacific being the source of the abundant moisture according to the University of Wisconsin’s Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies. From there, the moisture plume was transported northeastward, over Mexico and into Texas, and then northward by upper level winds.

This tropical air mass, which is more typical of the Gulf Coast than the Rocky Mountains, has been forced to move slowly up and over the Front Range by light southeasterly winds. This lifting process, known as orographic lift, allowed the atmosphere to wring out this unusually bountiful stream of moist air, dumping torrents of rain on the Boulder area for days on end.

That's a screen shot of the satellite images loop CIMSS released showing the tropical air mass. (I couldn't find it to embed it, but click on the link to Climate Central - you can see it moving there.)

Is climate change involved? No one weather event can be traced back easily to climate change, but there is at least one suggestive factor: the magnitude of the change from past events. And, of course, temperatures are rising around the globe. Generally, warmer temperatures mean more water vapor in the air, which means more extreme rain or snowfall. Stay tuned.

That picture is moss growing on what we once thought of as a cold, snow-covered continent: Antarctica. I wrote a post earlier this summer about a plants that had come in from the cold and that seemed kind of exciting. Almost sweet, in a way, that plants that had lived under the ice for so long could still bloom. But, as grist.org points out, this patch of moss is yet another signal of long-term climate change. Scientists report in the underlying article, available here, that "growth rates and microbial productivity have risen rapidly since the 1960s, consistent with temperature changes. . . " though growth seems to have tapered off in the most recent years. (They don't say why, but don't assume it means that the global climate has finished changing.)


Image via grist.org

Yosemite fire in images

That spectacular but frightening photograph is of the Yosemite fire, one of several that TheAtlantic.com published yesterday, available here.

And from Grist.org, here is what they call a list of 9 scary facts about that fire. If you have time, watch the video they've embedded - taken from a plane dumping retardant at the edge of the fire, it's got some amazing views.

Global Temperatures by Decade

I can't resist sharing this terrific graph that came via Grist.org. The dotted gray line is the long-term average for the period 1961-1990 so if the last two decades were included it would be much higher.

Grist quotes from the associated report:

The rapid changes that have occurred since the middle of the past century, however, have been caused largely by humanity’s emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Other human activities also affect the climate system, including emissions of pollutants and other aerosols, and changes to the land surface, such as urbanization and deforestation.

Retreat of glaciers uncovers old plants

One more effect of climate change is becoming evident: plants that were frozen under ice for centuries are reviving and growing. Biologists from the University of Alberta have discovered bryophytes that last grew before the Little Ice Age (1550-1850). They are newly uncovered, and appeared to be growing in the wild. They grew in the lab, too. The abstract and article are here. A news report from the BBC is here. Here's what Catherine La Farge, the lead biologist, had to say:

"We ended up walking along the edge of the glacier margin and we saw these huge populations coming out from underneath the glacier that seemed to have a greenish tint," said Catherine La Farge, lead author of the study.

. . .

"When we looked at them in detail and brought them to the lab, I could see some of the stems actually had new growth of green lateral branches, and that said to me that these guys are regenerating in the field, and that blew my mind," she told BBC News.

"If you think of ice sheets covering the landscape, we've always thought that plants have to come in from refugia around the margins of an ice system, never considering land plants as coming out from underneath a glacier."

Global warming in Alaska

The Guardian is running a powerful series on the impact of global warming on life in the indigenous villages in Alaska. Nearly 200 are under threat - that's a threat of washing away:

A study by the US Army Corps of Engineers on the effects of climate change on native Alaskan villages, the one that predicted the school would be underwater by 2017, found no remedies for the loss of land in Newtok.

The land was too fragile and low-lying to support sea walls or other structures that could keep the water out, the report said, adding that if the village did not move, the land would eventually be overrun with water.

The second screenshot shows the extent of Arctic sea ice melt. Climate change is happening fast in Alaska - in addition to villages at risk, animal habitats are changing. The series continues tomorrow.

Update, May 15: See this article in Scientific American about the possible impact of sea level rising along the East Coast: the five foot rise in sea level over the next century will mean that a storm of Sandy's impact could occur much more often.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide continues to increase

Update, May 14: You can read Climate Central's take on why this is an important measure here.

Two weeks ago I wrote a post about the Keeling Curve, which measures the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and explains why that's important. If you're wondering why NOAA reported that the Earth had, on Friday, the threshold level of 400ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but the Scripps Institute of Oceanography  did not, there's a simple explanation - time zones. As a note on the Scripps site puts it:

May 10 Comment: NOAA has reported 400.03 for yesterday, but Scripps has reported 399.73. The difference is similar to other differences we have reported.   The difference partly reflects time zone differences.  NOAA uses UTC, whereas we use local time in Hawaii to define the start and stop of a given day.  Changing to UTC excludes the lower CO₂ period from the baseline on the May 9, shifting it to May 10.

399.73 or 400.03 - both are bad. There's a good roundup of this and other climate news on the blog "Scrapbook of a Climate Hawk," here.

Warming ocean surface temperatures, and a cool chart

Did the water at your East Coast beach seem warmer than usual last summer? That's because it was: sea surface temperatures for the Northeast Shelf Ecosystem, which reaches from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina to the Gulf of Maine, reached a record high of 14 degrees Celsius in 2012, higher than the average of 12.4 degrees Celsius for the past 30 years. That's according to a new report from NOAA's Northeast Fisheries Science Center.

And it's not just the surface temperatures that are increasing - the warm water thermal habitat was at a record high, while cold water habitat was at a record low. Warm water went deeper than usual, and the habitat is changing. What is the impact? According to NOAA,

Temperature is also affecting distributions of fish and shellfish on the Northeast Shelf. The advisory provides data on changes in distribution, or shifts in the center of the population, of seven key fishery species over time. The four southern species - black sea bass, summer flounder, longfin squid and butterfish - all showed a northeastward or upshelf shift. American lobster has shifted upshelf over time but at a slower rate than the southern species. Atlantic cod and haddock have shifted downshelf.”

You can see the movement in the chart at the top of the post. Or, as Grist.org puts it, "record-breaking temperatures  . . . are driving the fish away from fast-heating waters to more hospitable depths and latitudes."

The warming won't affect the appearance of mung seaweed on Cape Cod, at least not according to this National Park Service information sheet. That apparently drifts in from points farther north.  

I am quite taken with the way the chart incorporates geographical information to show the movement of species. Do you agree?

Global Warming Measurements, now on Twitter

 

Here's another way of looking at climate change: measuring the carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air. And that's what the Mauna Loa record, which has been kept since the late 1950s, does. It's also known as the Keeling Curve, after Charles David Keeling, who set up the program and directed it for many years. 

Keeler was one of the first climate scientists to discover that the earth might behave with surprising regularity (given the right scale), and the long-term effort to measure atmospheric CO2 grew out of that insight. 

The value of the Mauna Loa record soon became readily apparent. Within just a year or two, Charles David Keeling had shown that CO₂ underwent a regular seasonal cycle, reflecting the seasonal growth and decay of land plants in the northern hemisphere, as well as a regular long-term rise driven by the burning of fossil-fuels.

There's some fascinating history at the website of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography here, which was Keeling's academic home. And now Scripps is posting the daily Keeling Curve on Twitter. You can follow it here. What does it mean? Atmospheric carbon dioxide has been increasing steadily. You can see the measure is approaching 400 ppm - a threshold that will mean a different climate. You can read more here.

March weather, 2012 and 2013

 

March 2012 was unusually warm, and March 2013 unusually cold. The short-term explanation appears to lie in the Arctic Oscillation, as described in the NOAA video above. The cold March came at the tail end of a cold winter.

But there seems to be a longer-term possible explanation appearing as well. Remember climate and weather are two different things, and this video describes the weather. But yes, the climate is changing. And one of the effects appears to be on sudden stratospheric warming events like the one that occurred last January.

Sudden stratospheric warming events take place in about half of all Northern Hemisphere winters, and they have been occurring with increasing frequency during the past decade, possibly related to the loss of Arctic sea ice due to global warming. Arctic sea ice declined to its smallest extent on record in September 2012.

And yes, sudden stratospheric warming events can affect the Arctic Oscillation. You can read more about them here. As they say, you can expect the climate; the weather is what you get.  

Update, May 6: There's an interesting interview with meteorologist Paul Huttner here. He talks about the unusual weather events we've been seeing, like last week's late snowstorm. And how that's a weather event, but there are lots of signs of regional climate change around the world.

Climate news roundup from Climate Central

That image? It's a toxic tide in Lake Erie - something that, as Climate Central reports, could come more often, with greater intensity, as the climate warms. 

It's just one of six images, linked to related reports, in Saturday's "Six to See" Slideshow on Climate Central's website. Another story covers NOAA's new hurricane warning and watch system, developed in response to Hurricane Sandy.

Beginning on June 1, the agency will be permitted to leave watches and warnings in effect even if a hurricane transitions into a post-tropical cyclone, which technically speaking is a different type of storm than a storm of purely tropical origins, provided that the storm still poses “a significant threat to life and property.

Other stories involve Antarctic sea ice, projected droughts this summer in the Western United States, and other economic and social impacts of climate change.

Cool pavements - a little hope for climate change?

Via Grist.org - or maybe this video just explains why New York City has painted the bike lanes in my neighborhood a pastel green. You can find Grist's take here.

Slideshow illustrating global climate issues

Here's a link to a slideshow, from Climate Central, illustrating a week's worth of climate change news. Each slide links to a longer story. The screenshot above is photo of fractures in the sea ice off Canada and Alaska - and the related story explains why the fractures are a problem.

The NSIDC (National Snow and Ice Data Center) said the fracturing is likely a sign of the prevalence of young and thin sea ice, which can be disturbed more easily by weather patterns and ocean currents, and also melts more easily when exposed to warm air and ocean temperatures during the melt season. As Arctic sea ice extent has plummeted since 1979, down to a record low in September 2012, first-year ice has become much more common across the Arctic, as thick, multiyear ice has declined.

Some of the other stories in the slideshow include NOAA's announcement that February 2013 was the 336th consecutive month in which global temperatures rose above the 20th century average; evidence that wet seasons are wetter and dry seasons dryer, and why the atmosphere has not warmed as much over the last decade as predicted. (No, it's not because global warming isn't happening.)

Climate change: more data

Update, March 16: For more on the loss of the monarch habitat, see this Op-Ed in the New York Times.


Update, March 14: The New York Times is reporting that the monarch butterfly migration is the smallest in many years. If you have a subscription, read the article: first, I think it's fair to conclude that it illustrates that there are many unintended consequences from our decisions - weed-resistant plants mean fewer weeds, which means less food for the butterflies. And second, it illustrates the use of proxy measures - researchers cannot count the number of butterflies, so they count the amount of space the butterflies cover. The sharp declines are scary.

That is a graph showing temperature ranges over the last 11,000 years - the Holocene period, published last week in Science magazine (the full abstract is here; the full article is behind a paywall). What the data show is that the earth is warmer today than it's been for most of that period. What's different about this paper? Several things: it goes back much further than previous research and it examines global, not just regional, temperatures. As Tim McDonnell of The Climate Desk puts it:

To be clear, the study finds that temperatures in about a fifth of this historical period were higher than they are today. But the key, said lead author Shaun Marcott of Oregon State University, is that temperatures are shooting through the roof faster than we've ever seen.

"What we found is that temperatures increased in the last hundred years as much as they had cooled in the last six or seven thousand," he said. "In other words, the rate of change is much greater than anything we've seen in the whole Holocene," referring to the current geologic time period, which began around 11,500 years ago.

How did we get here and where are we going? Here's a link to a good infographic that tells you what you need to know about the continuing release of carbon dioxide will play out in different scenarios. It's not a pretty picture.

From Climate Desk, in case you haven't yet seen it:

"How to win a Global Warming Argument" infographic.

Original here.

New nautical charts for the Arctic

 

UPDATE, March 5: Grist.org reports today that by 2040 some ships will be able to cross the North Pole itself during the summer - a route now covered in 65 feet of ice. 

You may have heard that the Northwest Passage, the sea route between Europe and Asia via the Arctic, has been open, also here, and traversed by vessels. Now, in order to make navigation safer, NOAA is developing new sea charts for Alaskan coast areas seeing more shipping traffic. (NOAA, a US agency, provides charts and "other features required for safe navigation in US waters.)

Why is this important? Ships have not been able to travel here in the past. In fact, NOAA says in its announcement,

[M]any regions of Alaska’s coastal areas have never had full bottom bathymetric surveys, and some haven’t had more than superficial depth measurements since Captain Cook explored the northern regions in the late 1700s.

This is climate change coming our way. As Climate Central puts it:

The world as a whole is warming due to heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions, but the Arctic is warming faster than average thanks to something called “Arctic Amplification”: as bright, reflective sea ice melts, it exposes darker ocean waters, which absorb the Sun’s heat. That heat warms the air, which makes new, thick ice harder to form, setting the stage for even greater warming the following season. By 2030, or perhaps even earlier, the Arctic Ocean could be largely ice-free during part of each summer. - See more at: http://www.climatecentral.org/news/noaa-to-map-alaskas-increasingly-ice-free-arctic-waters-15664#sthash.8fZF5qx8.dpuf

The world as a whole is warming due to heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions, but the Arctic is warming faster than average thanks to something called “Arctic Amplification”: as bright, reflective sea ice melts, it exposes darker ocean waters, which absorb the Sun’s heat. That heat warms the air, which makes new, thick ice harder to form, setting the stage for even greater warming the following season. By 2030, or perhaps even earlier, the Arctic Ocean could be largely ice-free during part of each summer.

The world as a whole is warming due to heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions, but the Arctic is warming faster than average thanks to something called “Arctic Amplification”: as bright, reflective sea ice melts, it exposes darker ocean waters, which absorb the Sun’s heat. That heat warms the air, which makes new, thick ice harder to form, setting the stage for even greater warming the following season. By 2030, or perhaps even earlier, the Arctic Ocean could be largely ice-free during part of each summer. - See more at: http://www.climatecentral.org/news/noaa-to-map-alaskas-increasingly-ice-free-arctic-waters-15664#sthash.8fZF5qx8.dpuf

The world as a whole is warming due to heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions, but the Arctic is warming faster than average thanks to something called “Arctic Amplification”: as bright, reflective sea ice melts, it exposes darker ocean waters, which absorb the Sun’s heat. That heat warms the air, which makes new, thick ice harder to form, setting the stage for even greater warming the following season. By 2030, or perhaps even earlier, the Arctic Ocean could be largely ice-free during part of each summer. - See more at: http://www.climatecentral.org/news/noaa-to-map-alaskas-increasingly-ice-free-arctic-waters-15664#sthash.8fZF5qx8.dpuf

The world as a whole is warming due to heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions, but the Arctic is warming faster than average thanks to something called “Arctic Amplification”: as bright, reflective sea ice melts, it exposes darker ocean waters, which absorb the Sun’s heat. That heat warms the air, which makes new, thick ice harder to form, setting the stage for even greater warming the following season. By 2030, or perhaps even earlier, the Arctic Ocean could be largely ice-free during part of each summer. - See more at: http://www.climatecentral.org/news/noaa-to-map-alaskas-increasingly-ice-free-arctic-waters-15664#sthash.8fZF5qx8.dpuf

The world as a whole is warming due to heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions, but the Arctic is warming faster than average thanks to something called “Arctic Amplification”: as bright, reflective sea ice melts, it exposes darker ocean waters, which absorb the Sun’s heat. That heat warms the air, which makes new, thick ice harder to form, setting the stage for even greater warming the following season. By 2030, or perhaps even earlier, the Arctic Ocean could be largely ice-free during part of each summer. - See more at: http://www.climatecentral.org/news/noaa-to-map-alaskas-increasingly-ice-free-arctic-waters-15664#sthash.8fZF5qx8.dpuf

The world as a whole is warming due to heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions, but the Arctic is warming faster than average thanks to something called “Arctic Amplification”: as bright, reflective sea ice melts, it exposes darker ocean waters, which absorb the Sun’s heat. That heat warms the air, which makes new, thick ice harder to form, setting the stage for even greater warming the following season. By 2030, or perhaps even earlier, the Arctic Ocean could be largely ice-free during part of each summer. - See more at: http://www.climatecentral.org/news/noaa-to-map-alaskas-increasingly-ice-free-arctic-waters-15664#sthash.8fZF5qx8.dpuf