Tuesday, May 19, 2015
Heat is piling up in the depths of the Indian Ocean
An illustration showing movement of water from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean.
From Climate Central by Brian Kahn
The world’s oceans are playing a game of hot potato with the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions.
Scientists have zeroed in on the tropical Pacific as a major player in taking up that heat.
But while it might have held that heat for a bit, new research shows that the Pacific has passed the potato to the Indian Ocean, which has seen an unprecedented rise in heat content over the past decade.
The new work builds on a series of papers that have tracked the causes for what’s been dubbed the global warming slowdown, a period over the past 15 years that has seen surface temperatures rise slower than they did the previous decade.
Shifts in Pacific tradewinds have helped sequester heat from the surface to the top 2,300 feet of the ocean. But unlike Vegas, what happens in the Pacific doesn’t stay in the Pacific.
Since 2003, upper ocean heat content has actually been slowly decreasing in the Pacific.
“When I first saw from the data that Pacific temperature was going down, I was very curious and puzzled,” Sang-Ki Lee, a scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies, said.
Lee, who led the new research published in Nature Geoscience, looked at records going back to 1950 and noticed that the Indian Ocean heat uptake “was pretty much flat” until 2003.
Suddenly, heat began to build there, but it wasn’t coming from above.
By running ocean circulation models, he found that the heat stashed in the Pacific had hitched a ride on the ocean conveyor belt and danced its way through the Indonesian archipelago, ending up in the Indian Ocean.
The Indonesian shuffle means that the Indian Ocean is now home to 70 percent of all heat taken up by global oceans during the past decade.
“This is a really important study as it resolves how Pacific Ocean variability has led to the warming slowdown without storing excess ocean heat locally,” Matthew England, a professor at the University of New South Wales, said.
“This resolves a long-standing debate about how the Pacific has led to a warming slowdown when total heat content in that basin has not changed significantly.”
England led previous research that examined the role of the tradewinds in the Pacific’s heat uptake.
Tom Delworth, a climate modeler at Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory who has also examined the Pacific trade winds in the hiatus, agreed, though he noted, “the results are very interesting, but I’m not sure they help us with predicting the future evolution of the hiatus.”
Ocean heat content has risen dramatically over the past decade even as surface temperatures have not. Globally, oceans account for 93 percent of the heat that has accumulated on the planet since 1970 due to human greenhouse gas emissions.
A flurry of recent research shows that the current slowdown in surface warming could end in the near future as Pacific trade winds shift, allowing for less heat to enter the ocean.
Trade winds along the
equatorial Pacific are in part responsible for a warming slowdown and
western U.S. drought says new research.
Credit: Earth Wind Map
Credit: Earth Wind Map
In its current location, Lee said it’s possible that the warm water in the Indian Ocean could affect the Indian Monsoon, one of the most important climate patterns in the world that affects more than 1 billion people.
The current El Niño stewing in the Pacific could be also be affected.
“It seems pretty clear that an El Niño event (such as this year) would reverse this anomaly, at least while the El Niño is underway,” Delworth said.
What its means for future El Niño cycles is less clear, however.
Lee said it’s likely to continue globe trotting along the ocean conveyor belt and find its way to the Atlantic in the coming decades.
“If this warm blob of water in upper Indian Ocean is transported all the way to North Atlantic, that could affect the melting of Arctic sea ice,” Lee said.
“That can also increase hurricane activity and influence the effects of drought in the U.S. These are simply hypotheses that need to be tested and studied in the future work.”
Links :
- Nature : Indian Ocean may be key to global warming 'hiatus'
- Study Ties Global Warming ‘Hiatus’ to Pacific Cooldown
- Pacific Winds Tied to Warming Slowdown, Dry West
- Oceans Getting Hotter Than Anybody Realized
- Washington Post : Global warming fueling fewer but stronger hurricanes, study says
Monday, May 18, 2015
Evgenia Arbugaeva – Weather man
Vyacheslav Korotki walks out under a full moon to an abandoned lighthouse that used to serve the Northern Sea Route, to gather firewood to help heat his home.
From BeStreet & NewYorker
Photographer Evgenia Arbugaeva got a glimpse into the loneliest man in the world.
This man is Vyacheslav Korotki, a « polyarnik », in other words, a meteorologist specialized in the north pole, that the Russian government sent to the end of the world, in Khodovarikha, in order to gather the temperature, snow and wind data.
Korotki lives and works in the Arctic outpost of Khodovarikha, in a century-old wooden house that became a meteorological station in 1933.
He enters all the data he collects in a journal.
The 63 year old scientist is cut from the rest of the world, and only rarely visits his wife that lives on the other side of the country; either way, he prefers the Arctic and grand spaces.
Meteorological journals, an atlas of clouds, and other books and data tables scattered across Korotki’s desk.
The photograph of Yuri Gagarin was cut out from a newspaper article about his death, in 1968.
This fantastic series called « Weather Man » is available now on her site !
Korotki, knee deep in the Barents Sea, measures the water level.
Vyacheslav Korotki is a man of extreme solitude.
He is a trained polyarnik, a specialist in the polar north, a meteorologist.
In the past thirty years, he has lived on Russian ships and, more recently, in Khodovarikha, an Arctic outpost, where he was sent by the state to measure the temperatures, the snowfall, the winds.
The outpost lies on a fingernail of a peninsula that juts into the Barents Sea.
The closest town, by any definition, is an hour away by helicopter.
The radio that Korotki uses to relay his data to another weather station, which then sends it on to Moscow.
Owing to some of the same conditions that he measures—frequent high winds and heavy snowstorms—transmissions can be delayed for days.
He has a wife, but she lives far away, in Arkhangelsk.
They have no children.
On his rare visits to Arkhangelsk, he has trouble negotiating the traffic and the noise.
Arkhangelsk is not Hong Kong.
Arkhangelsk with the GeoGarage platform
Korotki is sixty-three, and when he began his career he was an enthusiast, a romantic about the open spaces and the conditions of the Arctic.
He watches the news on TV but doesn’t fully believe it.
Polyarniki were like cosmonauts, explorers for the Soviet state.
There are fewer now.
Who wants to live like this anymore?
Korotki enjoys a cigarette in his handmade boat on the Barents Sea.
A view of the northern lights, at Khodovarikha, on January 25th of this year.
The measurement booth, a five-minute walk from the house where Korotki lives and works, records the air temperature.
That day, it was minus four degrees Fahrenheit.
“The world of cities is foreign to him—he doesn’t accept it,” she says.
Korotki observes the landscape from the window of his house the day after a strong storm blanketed the terrain with snow.
“I came with the idea of a lonely hermit who ran away from the world because of some heavy drama, but it wasn’t true. He doesn’t get lonely at all. He kind of disappears into tundra, into the snowstorms. He doesn’t have a sense of self the way most people do. It’s as if he were the wind, or the weather itself.”
A view of the Barents Sea from a window of the Mikhail Somov, a ship that delivers food and supplies to Korotki’s station once a year, during the summer navigation season.
On the months-long voyage, crew members are entitled to a treat of an orange a week.
Sunday, May 17, 2015
The biggest ship in the world
World's Biggest Ship one of the best documentary films in 2015, in this
BBC documentary you will see
the biggest ship in the world Emma Maersk
oil ship.
It can hold 16k containers and this World's biggest ship dose
not designed for the Panama Canal or Suez Canal.
From The Telegraph
The Maersk 'Triple-E' container ship is the biggest vessel in the world.
But what goes into building the ultimate engine of commerce?
What makes the ship a state of the art machine
Links :
- NYTimes : Aboard a cargo colossus
- BBC : On board the world's biggest ship
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)