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.

Sandy's tail lights

This beautiful image displays the impact that Hurricane Sandy had on the skies late in the afternoon of October 30th in Huntsville, Alabama. Each of those solar effects is pretty unusual; to see them together is rarer still.

The picture sent me to the website spaceweather.com to get an explanation:

The apparition is almost certainly connected to hurricane Sandy. The core of the storm swept well north of Alabama, but Sandy's outer bands did pass over the area, leaving behind a thin haze of ice crystals in cirrus clouds. Sunlight shining through the crystals produced an unusually rich variety of ice halos.

 Click on the links to find out more about these phenomena.

Understanding Sandy's storm surge

The impact of the storm surge from Sandy on New York City and New Jersey is now becoming clear: it was tremendous. The surge at the Battery reached more than 13 feet above mean low tide, and water flooded streets and subways stations and tunnels. The screenshot is from Climate Central's sea level change forecast map, showing what a 10-foot rise in sea level will look like in lower Manhattan.

Three different but related actions contribute to a storm surge:

• Wind - which piles water up high
• Waves - which push the water ahead faster than the water can drain back
• Pressure - low pressure of a hurricane means that water typically is higher near the eye

You can find a very clear explanation of a storm surge, by Jeffrey Masters of Weather Underground, here.

Why is a storm surge so damaging? All that water is heavy, and carries a lot of force. As Masters explains it,

A cubic yard of sea water weighs 1,728 pounds--almost a ton. A one-foot deep storm surge can sweep your car off the road, and it is difficult to stand in a six-inch surge. Compounding the destructive power of the rushing water is the large amount of floating debris that typically accompanies the surge.

Here's a photograph of some of the local debris deposited by the storm surge:

And yes, while no particular event is due to global warming, it's clear that global warming made Sandy worse: warmer seas meant that the storm was stronger and generated a bigger surge, and higher seas meant there was no place for the water to go but inland. Here's a good explanation.

Update: The Center for Climate and Energy Solutions has produced a useful fact sheet.

And in case you don't believe that Mitt Romney really said that the federal government should get out of the post-disaster aid business, here's a link to the transcript.

Hurricanes since 1851

The screenshot above is a projection (notice the South Pole center) showing hurricanes since 1851. North America is to the top right, just to the left of the firework of hurricane paths. The graphic was produced by John Nelson on UXBlog. The brighter colors are the more intense storms.

Here's what else Nelson says:

A couple of things stood out to me about this data...

1) Structure.
Hurricanes clearly abhor the equator and fling themselves away from the warm waters of their birth as quickly as they can. . . . The void circling the image is the equator.  Hurricanes can never ever cross it.

2) Detection.
Detection has skyrocketed since satellite technology but mostly since we started logging storms in the eastern hemisphere.  Also the proportionality of storm severity looks to be getting more consistent year to year with the benefit of more data.

You can see an animated version on the Guardian data blog, here.

Tracking Sandy

If you're interested, that's a screen shot of the predicted path as of this morning of Hurricane Sandy. For various reasons meteorologists are getting better and better at predicting the paths of storms, though not the intensity at any one time. The possibility that Sandy may come into contact with a more typical North American weather system means that a big hybrid system may develop.
And, as Adam Sobel explains on Climate Central, that would result in an unpredictable storm.

As Sandy moves northward, it will move over cooler water. If this were all that were happening, Sandy would weaken, as tropical cyclones moving toward a pole typically do. At the same time, though, Sandy will come close enough to the upper trough now over the U.S. to interact with that trough in something like the way that an extratropical surface low normally would  . . .

When this happens, they will form a hybrid storm system with some tropical and some extratropical properties. Some energy will still come from the ocean surface, but some will now come from the pole-to-equator temperature contrast. This new energy source will enable Sandy to maintain its intensity, or maybe even increase it.

This process is called “extratropical transition.” It poses a lot of problems for forecasters. In the first place, the computer models aren’t that great at predicting exactly when it will happen. 

So keep an eye on the storm. You can do it easily through ESRI's social storm tracker: