Forecasting, Tropical

Tropical Depression 16 Headed to FL

As expected, the disturbance formerly known as 96L was classified today as Tropical Depression 16. The depression will probably strengthen to Tropical Storm Nicole. The models are forecasting the depression to get picked up by a trough and carried away as it becomes extratropical, with the GFS from 12Z indicating a rainmaker for most of the East Coast. (Lucky punks.)


This is impressive model agreement and indicates that they have a good handle on the strength of this trough.

Despite extremely warm water in its path, there probably isn’t enough time for it to strengthen into a hurricane, and shear associated with the trough is expected to increase before it makes its landfalls in Cuba and Florida. The SHIPS model shows a modest increase of 28 knots in the storm’s intensity before it weakens again.

In the longer term, this system—along with its predecessor, Matthew—probably heralds a shift in the type of tropical cyclone that will be forming in the remainder of the season, as well as the likely players that will be influencing the path of whatever does form. With the demise of the persistent ridge that brought the Southeast such oppressive heat for weeks upon weeks, and the establishment of a fall-like troughing pattern, we should see a greater threat to the Gulf Coast from anything that brews up—and, statistically, it is approaching the time of year when the Cape Verde conveyor belt shuts down and the tropical threat from “home-grown” systems increases. Additionally, this is a La Nina hurricane season; those have a tendency to start late and finish late, and by no means should the Gulf Coast consider itself safe from threats, including significant systems. In 1999, also a La Nina year, Hurricane Lenny almost reached Category 5 status in November. Even last year, during an El Nino, Hurricane Ida entered the Gulf in November and reached Category 2 status. We’re still in this.

Drought, Forecasting, Tropical

Fall at Last, But When Will We Have Some Rain?

Over the weekend, an extremely welcome cold front passed through the Southeast, finally giving the record high temperatures and the persistent high pressure system that generated them a kick out the door. No 90s in the foreseeable future. According to Jackson NWS, this should finally begin a fall pattern in which troughs periodically pay the Southeast a visit. The front didn’t make a dent in the drought conditions that have developed over the area in the past month, however. It brought cool temperatures and rainfall to select areas, but most places just didn’t get much. Columbus AFB recorded less than a tenth of an inch for the entire frontal passage. With the ground as parched as it is, this meager water was soaked up immediately. It looks like we’ll have to wait a bit for a significant rain event.

That rain event unfortunately probably will not come from the tropics, though this would be a very fruitful source if it did happen. The Hurricane Center is giving a 40% chance of development to an area of low pressure in the west Caribbean, designated 96L, which is forecast to move into the Gulf.

However, models are all taking this disturbance into South Florida.

Things can change, of course, but it’s uncommon to have this much agreement that close to a landfall and to have a shift of that magnitude.

The next frontal passage will be this weekend, but this front is expected to be dry. It’s soon going to be tempting to have fall bonfires, but I don’t think it’s quite safe to do that just yet!

Tropical

Getting Ready: An Early Preview of the 2010 Hurricane Season

From the point of view of a snow lover, it was an excellent winter. But that is now long over for those of us in the Eastern United States. Many areas have already hit 90°F! Here in MS we have not, but I anticipate that some spot in the Gulf Coast states will reach this wretched milestone early in May.

Before I get to the topic about a future event, I feel compelled to talk about one closer to the present. Severe weather season is upon us, though it is off to a slow start. The Southeastern states are arguably past the springtime peak and seem to have gotten off quite light, but we must not forget that it is the months of May and June when so many major tornado disasters have occurred. Jarrell, TX… Moore, OK… the May 2003 outbreak sequence… Greensburg, KS… Parkersburg, IA… those are all F5 or EF5 events except for 2003 (and even it had a tornado that was considered by some to have been underrated as F4). The list goes on, and it does not require an EF5 tornado to do massive, tragic damage. But it is very difficult to forecast severe weather more than a few days in advance, let alone a month or more.

Hurricane season is a different matter, and it is quite possible to make long-range forecasts about the overall activity level of a particular season, especially now that we are merely a month and a half away from the beginning of the Atlantic season. 2010’s hurricane season is not, I believe, going to be anything at all like 2009’s.

The strong El Nino event that gave the Eastern U.S. such a cold and snowy winter (and killed off much Atlantic hurricane activity) is fading fast. The majority of ENSO models predict a return to ENSO-neutral conditions by the June-July-August period (link: PDF).

However, El Nino has left its mark. As is typical following a significant El Nino event, sea surface temperatures in the eastern Atlantic are well above average, and in fact, the anomalies for this year are greater than the anomalies in April of 2005, a year that had record heat across the ocean. In the far eastern part of the ocean, there are areas that are already at 30°C.

Apr. 12, 2010:

Apr. 12, 2005:

Note: All graphics in this post are created by NOAA and are therefore public domain. I have downloaded the graphics current for 04/12/2010 to my server to avoid taking U.S. Government bandwidth. Links to the pages where these graphics were found will not point to the same images at dates in the future.

If this continues and shear decreases as expected, this year may be quite good for long-tracked Cape Verde systems. Indeed, these temperatures are apparently a record in terms of warmth.

The Gulf of Mexico is below average, but this is because of the cold winter. With surface temperatures reaching into the upper 70s and low 80s in the Gulf states for the foreseeable future, and little cloudiness to moderate the effect, it’s likely that this body of water will warm up. Indeed, observing the sea surface temperature anomaly maps for the past few weeks indicates that this warmup is occurring already.

A limiting factor at present may be wind shear, which is above the climatological average:


(Link takes you to the current shear map on NOAA.)

This will continue to be a limiting factor for cyclone development if it persists into the early season. However, as the El Nino fades, shear should decrease. Indeed, the current above-average level of wind shear may only be a temporary event, as overall it has been below average for much of the past several months:


(Link takes you to the current shear graph on NOAA.)

The Bermuda High, an area of high pressure that extends to the western Atlantic, is not yet established. The location of this feature will be important to watch, as it determines whether long-tracked Cape Verde hurricanes tend to strike land—and what landmasses that they strike—or recurve to sea. The farther west it goes, the more likely that such hurricanes will hit a coastline, but too far west and storms tend to be steered south of the United States, as was the case in 2007.

In short: Sea surface temperatures are likely not going to be a problem in 2010. I think the features to watch, here in the pre-season, will be the evolution of ENSO, the location of the Bermuda High, the warmup of the Gulf and far western Atlantic near the Bahamas, and the levels of wind shear as compared to climatology. If the ENSO level decreases to neutral by the peak of the season and shear decreases to the climatological average (and these two factors are very intimately connected, I should note), but sea surface temperatures continue to remain high, I fully expect to see some beasts brewed up and for “Category 5” to make a reappearance in this basin for the first time since 2007.

Unless the ENSO prediction models are mostly wrong, the Atlantic coasts are not going to get off light this year. It’s impossible yet to determine what areas are likely to be targeted, since we do not know how far west that the Bermuda High will set up, but at present I would go out on a limb and say that somebody is in for a bad year. It’s time to start getting ready.

Climate change

+6°C

Forget the brouhaha about the ideologically motivated hackers who combed through megabytes of e-mails in order to find some indicating that, horrors, scientists are humans too and some of them will jazz up their data to make a point. It means nothing in terms of the credibility of anthropogenic climate change. All that the climate deniers have proven is that their “position” is utterly bankrupt. In the language of the Internet, the hacking stunt was a fail. Hoping to find proof of a grand conspiracy to falsify data in favor of global climate change, their hackers simply uncovered a few e-mails in which a few scientists spoke about manipulating the presentation of the data that they had found. No secret coverups, no collective lying about what is contained in the data, no forged results, just a mere matter of data presentation. The data themselves are what’s really the issue. Considering how lackadaisical that the politicians of the world have been on this subject, and considering what their stalling seems to have done, I can’t say I’m against jazzing up the data to scare people.

A scientific study group led by British scientists has run the climate models again, and the group has found that we are on target for a global rise in temperature of 6°C by the year 2100. This is the worst-case scenario of the 2007 United Nations report on climate change, which even then was widely seen as being far too conservative. The odds are very strong that I wouldn’t live to see it, since I’d be 117 if I did, but the children and definitely grandchildren of my generation would see it.

This is not quite a repeat of the carbon- and methane-caused temperature spike that caused the massive Permian extinction and resulted in the loss of 95% of all species on Earth. It’s not quite the catastrophic mass extinction scenario of the Pixar movie WALL-E. (Yes, the real environmental damage portrayed in that film was caused by global warming, not just garbage.) But it’s close, and it isn’t an isolated result. For several years now, scientific studies of climate have been finding that the observed conditions are on the upper end of the range of predicted results for that period of time, or even exceed all estimates outright. Those people who have paid attention to global warming news probably saw this British result coming.

Life on Earth at +6°C would not be a pleasant affair, even if the description of it in The Independent is a bit sensationalized. The Gulf Stream Current of the Atlantic would have shut down, plunging Europe into coldness (and probably also much of the Atlantic coast) and cutting off the outward flow of hot water from the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. Without a source of outflow for this tropical heat, hurricanes like Katrina could be brewed up in the Gulf every month in every hurricane season, theoretically. Tropical diseases and invasive species would have an easier time of spreading past their appropriate ranges. The Arctic ice would long ago have melted—indeed, the summer ice is very close to disappearing now, and mainstream scientific consensus is that it is too late to prevent this particular loss—and the resulting changes in air masses would have a profound impact on Northern Hemisphere climates. At 6°C, the Antarctic Ice Shelf likely would have melted as well, along with Greenland, resulting in the submerging of areas like the Florida peninsula and the marshes of Louisiana.

But even so, what the West will face in this brave new nightmare world is mild in comparison with what is coming Africa and Asia’s way. Africa, already suffering from critical food and disease problems, would see both exacerbated. The melting of glaciers and the sea-level-driven flooding would be climatic bombs dropped on east Asia. Imagine a scenario in which the ice of the Himalaya mountains—a source of fresh water for India, China, and Pakistan—melted away. Then add to that the seawater flooding of the Ganges, Yangtze, and other river basins in Asia that have port cities housing millions of people. Those people have to go somewhere, but resources would already be strained because of the decrease in usable fresh water. China, India, and Pakistan are all nuclear powers. (It suddenly makes “Global Zero,” a full nuclear disarmament movement, sound not at all hippie-idealistic, but critical.) Even the Bush-era Pentagon produced a report about the geopolitical effects of catastrophic global climate change, and its conclusions were chilling. It predicted a global resource war.

What scientist in his or her right mind would want to fabricate data to support such a horrific situation? The only people who enjoy dreaming of things like this are people like the scriptwriters for 2012. People who actually do deal in fantasy. Of course the stupid hackers did not find anything real. It is indicative of the level of media discourse in America that, to the extent that either news story is being discussed at all, their failed stunt garnered more attention than the scientific study of the Global Carbon Project. But the Global Carbon Project’s results are far more important.

I’ve said it before and I will reiterate it in the face of this ugly report. I do not believe that energy efficiency and conservation will be enough to forestall this. I am absolutely in favor of moving in that direction, if for no other reason than because it is cheaper in the long run and it is not advisable to power a world economy on fuels that will someday run out. However, I am utterly convinced that we will need to develop geoengineering techniques that can remove the greenhouse gases that we have already put into the atmosphere. Technology created this problem, yes, but it is a fallacy to extrapolate from this that technology must be avoided in finding a solution. In fact, I think that the judicious use of technology to clean up the atmosphere is the real solution.

Climate change, Oscillations

Global Warming Now Messing with El Nino?

Possibly.

Scientists have recently discovered a positive relationship between an alternative type of El Nino, called El Nino Modoki, and Atlantic hurricane activity. The connection had largely slipped under the radar because the scientists in Japan and Korea who knew the most about Modoki did not connect it with Atlantic hurricanes. (It would just figure. This has happened before with respect to ENSO and hurricanes; the ENSO specialists didn’t work with the hurricane specialists, and so that connection wasn’t known for years either.) This type of El Nino involves warming in the central and/or western Pacific rather than the Pacific coast of South America, and it is associated with increased Atlantic hurricane activity and increased landfalls—unlike the traditional El Nino, which tends to suppress activity in this basin.

2004 (of Ivan infamy) was an El Nino Modoki year. 2006 was a traditional El Nino year. 2009… may be a split:

“We spent all last week trying to figure that out,” [Peter] Webster [meteorologist of Georgia Tech] said. ‘It looks like it might be a hybrid,” with warming starting in the east and them moving west, possibly meaning more hurricanes late in the season.

Webster speculates that the Modoki phenomenon may be caused by global warming. Then again, it may not be. I’m rather interested, in fact, in the year 1969, which was an El Nino year for most months but still had a highly active hurricane season, including record Hurricane Camille. General consensus is that we are just now seeing the effects of climate change in our weather, so 1969 may (or may not) be out of the window of opportunity for global warming to have had an effect on El Nino.

As far as that “increased late-season hurricane activity” is concerned, though… that’s about what I figured. I’ve been seeing parallels between the oceanic setup of this year and 2004, and that rather reinforces my belief.

Climate change

Geoengineering Is On the Table!

It gratifies me to read that the President’s science advisor, John Holdren, is a proponent of geoengineering as a possible option to counter atmospheric global warming. I have long held the position that going green is not going to be sufficient, and for two reasons: Granting that I am a pessimist, I still don’t think that humanity as a whole can do it fast enough, and secondly, global warming would still continue because of the carbon dioxide that is already in the atmosphere. It’s going to be there for centuries, because it takes that long for the earth to filter it out in the absence of geoengineering techniques.

We as a species created this mess, and it’s our responsibility to clean it up. The earth can clean itself up, eventually, but in the meantime, countless other inhabitants of the planet could die off. The most recent TIME Magazine, in fact, has a cover story about the “mass extinction” that some scientists say has already begun here. The most recent National Geographic has an article about vanishing amphibian populations. The earth could indeed clean up the mess that Homo sapiens made of its atmosphere, but at what cost? No, this is our moral imperative. Continue reading Geoengineering Is On the Table! →

Climate change

Carbon Dioxide Emissions Are Accelerating

Despite several years of intensive focus on anthropogenic climate change, including a media blitz about “green” technologies that regular people could adopt (e.g., CFL bulbs) easily, carbon emission rates are accelerating. In fact, the current rate of CO2 emission was apparently not even considered in the IPCC climate change report of two years ago.

Carbon emissions have been growing at 3.5 percent per year since 2000, up sharply from the 0.9 percent per year in the 1990s, Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“It is now outside the entire envelope of possibilities” considered in the 2007 report of the International Panel on Climate Change, he said. The IPCC and former vice president Al Gore received the Nobel Prize for drawing attention to the dangers of climate change.

The worst-case scenario of global warming is thought to be a mass extinction comparable in scope to the great Permian extinction of about 251.4 million years ago. (Think of the lack of almost all life in the Pixar cartoon WALL-E. Global warming was a strong undercurrent of that movie, despite the stated focus on garbage.) Indeed, current research into that event is strongly suggestive of its also being triggered by a form of CO2-induced global warming, albeit volcanic in origin. That is not thought to be a risk today because the earth’s mantle is much less active today than it was then, but it looks as though the human species can more than make up the difference with our own activities.

I have long been pessimistic that we humans can stave this (“this” meaning whatever scenario we are creating for ourselves, up to and including a mass extinction event) off by energy efficiency and conversion to green power. I just don’t think there is enough time, and moreover, even if we could do it in time, global warming would still continue. The reason is that the carbon dioxide would remain in the atmosphere for many, many years. And ironically enough, the CO2-containing emissions that are causing all this are actually mitigating themselves to a certain degree. Smoke particles and other particle-matter pollutants create misery for those of us who are prone to asthma and allergies, but when released in large enough amounts, they have an atmospheric cooling effect by blocking sunlight. It’s much shorter-term than the warming effect of CO2, because these are heavy particles, but it does exist. If we stop using these technologies, then we would indeed drastically cut our CO2 emissions, but we’d also cut the cooling particle pollution. What is currently in the atmosphere would be filtered out relatively quickly, but the CO2 that is currently there would not. Because of this phenomenon, it’s distinctly possible, even likely, that global warming might hit an exponential rate if we somehow cut CO2 emissions down to a safe level. I have read, in fact, that the CO2 that is currently in the atmosphere is likely to be there for one thousand years. That’s how long it takes to filter back to earth.

What, then, can we do?

The climate change mitigation community is becoming divided into the “go green” people and the “geoengineering” people. Given my pessimistic outlook on it (and my general inclination in favor of technology), I am firmly in the geoengineering camp. What is geoengineering, you may ask? Here is an overview of it. The general idea is to take active, rather than passive, measures to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Carbon capture/sequestration is one example of what it might entail. Personally, I think that geoengineering technology will be necessary if we want to prevent a catastrophe. Strong language, but I’m convinced of it.

I also am very strongly in favor of what I’d call “disaster engineering.” The purpose is to shore up communities against the weather disasters that are thought to be most likely for them—hurricanes for the Gulf coastal cities, drought for the interior of the Southeast, etc. It is possible to model this for large areas, and it seems reasonable that as science develops a greater understanding of the climate change process, these predictions can be further refined.

Needless to say, geoengineering and disaster engineering would create countless jobs, many in the sci-tech arena, but many also in construction and production.

None of this is to say that I think “going green” is a waste of time. Certainly, it should be attempted, if for no other reason than because the types of energy that generate the most CO2 are also the most likely to be nonrenewable. Even if climate change wouldn’t nab us, we would eventually run out and have to find some other way of producing energy. But as a panacea for curing the ills of anthropogenic climate change, I think going green by itself is far too passive. Too much damage has already been done, I think. We made this mess, and it won’t clean itself up—at least, not in a short enough period of time for us to feel confidence that we actually saved the planet.

Severe

Thoughts on Mobile Homes: A Problem with No Solution?

Yesterday and today an early-season severe weather outbreak occurred in the Central and Eastern U.S. The outbreak produced comparatively few tornadoes, but under the right conditions, it takes only one to do catastrophic damage—and that is exactly what happened when an EF4 struck the community of Lone Grove, Oklahoma.

EF4 and EF5 tornadoes are classified as “violent,” and they are known for flattening “fixed” buildings. The main difference is that EF4s blow houses down and EF5s blow them away. Obviously, in these tornadoes, survival above ground in ordinary buildings is not something that can be counted on. (Sometimes, in fact, survival in basements is not guaranteed, such as in the Parkersburg, IA EF5 tornado that struck in May of 2008. It ripped houses from their foundations and filled the exposed basements with debris.) But a mobile home is absolutely the worst place that one could be. It’s not any better than being in the open outdoors in EF3 and higher events. And, indeed, most of the fatalities associated with yesterday’s tornado occurred in a trailer park.

This is really no surprise. These structures are death traps in severe weather. Last year, 56 of 123 tornado-related deaths occurred in mobile homes. Continue reading Thoughts on Mobile Homes: A Problem with No Solution? →

Tropical

The blob race is on

Our three invests have been intensifying all day. All of them have developed banding features and notable rotation. The race is on to see which one is deemed TD 12 first.

96L is a massive system. The cyclonic rotation is very evident on it and I am surprised that it hasn’t been called a TD yet. The size of this storm’s rotation could be an impediment to rapid development, as well as its latitude.

97L has made quite the comeback today from the exposed swirl it was earlier. Models take this to a hurricane, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it happen.

94L is sheared on the west side, but it too has put on a burst of convection today. It seems headed for Mexico and doesn’t appear likely to have the chance to develop into a powerful system.

Tropical

Tropicornucopia

Well, the Atlantic has awakened from dormancy once again. We have four features to track, three of which are a potential threat.

First, Subtropical Storm Jerry got named today. Its satellite photos show a classic subtropical storm. It is forecast to develop tropical features before merging with an extratropical system. I’m not sold on the tropical transition happening, but whether it does or not, it’ll provide extra energy to the system it is merging with and may prove to be a threat to shipping interests if it develops into a nasty high seas cold-core storm. Either way, it’s heading out.

Closer to home is 94L in the Gulf of Mexico, and the computer models are taking this one anywhere and everywhere, although it should be noted that none of them take it farther northeast than Texas. The SHIPS forecasts it to become a hurricane. I would disregard this if not for the inconvenient little fact of Humberto. Shear in the Western Gulf is forecast to be high, though, so SHIPS may indeed be out to lunch. At the moment the system doesn’t look like much; it would have to get organized soon to reach that intensity. On the whole, I’d deem this a rainmaker for Texas–which is unfortunate, as it does not need it.

Next is 96L, in my opinion, the most interesting. This one is looking good, with banding already showing up in the satellites. 96L is a potential Cape Verde system located in the Atlantic, and any interaction with land is many days away… however, SHIPS forecasts it to be a major hurricane by the time it reaches the Caribbean. I see nothing in the short term to prevent this from happening and expect this system to develop. Models are in agreement on a WNW track, with the global models forecasting a more NWly bend at the end, but the GFDL keeping it going WNW. At this point it’s tough to tell whether it will recurve at sea. For some reason, the HWRF and GFDL don’t develop this system beyond a tropical storm, but I think this is unrealistic, and am thus disinclined to put a lot of trust in their current solutions, including track, which at this time of year is very dependent on the strength of the system. The bottom line, keep an eye out. This one could be an East Coaster. Not saying it will, of course, but I want to point out the possibilities.

97L is in the Central Atlantic and is forecast by the models to enter the Caribbean. This one was recently declared and currently doesn’t look so hot, although better than 94L. If it wants to become anything, it needs to get its act together before it hits the infamous “dead zone” in the Caribbean. I’m unable to pull up model runs for this system yet. However, if it does develop, it seems that it is likely to go south of the big shear masses that are forecast to develop over the Caribbean.