Wednesday, January 6, 2016

A still-growing El Niño set to bear down on U.S.

see also : El Niño evolution January – December 2015

From NASA

The current strong El Niño brewing in the Pacific Ocean shows no signs of waning, as seen in the latest satellite image from the U.S./European Ocean Surface Topography Mission (OSTM)/Jason-2 mission. 

El Niño 2015 has already created weather chaos around the world.
Over the next few months, forecasters expect the United States to feel its impacts as well.
The latest Jason-2 image bears a striking resemblance to one from December 1997, by Jason-2's predecessor, the NASA/Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) Topex/Poseidon mission, during the last large El Niño event.
Both reflect the classic pattern of a fully developed El Niño.

The images can be viewed at:
The images show nearly identical, unusually high sea surface heights along the equator in the central and eastern Pacific: the signature of a big and powerful El Niño.
Higher-than-normal sea surface heights are an indication that a thick layer of warm water is present.

People the world over are feeling, or soon will feel, the effects of the strongest El Niño event since 1997-98, currently unfolding in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean.
New satellite observations are beginning to show scientists its impact on the distribution of rain, tropospheric ozone and wildfires around the globe.

El Niños are triggered when the steady, westward-blowing trade winds in the Pacific weaken or even reverse direction, triggering a dramatic warming of the upper ocean in the central and eastern tropical Pacific.
Clouds and storms follow the warm water, pumping heat and moisture high into the overlying atmosphere.
These changes alter jet stream paths and affect storm tracks all over the world.

This year's El Niño has caused the warm water layer that is normally piled up around Australia and Indonesia to thin dramatically, while in the eastern tropical Pacific, the normally cool surface waters are blanketed with a thick layer of warm water.
This massive redistribution of heat causes ocean temperatures to rise from the central Pacific to the Americas.
It has sapped Southeast Asia's rain in the process, reducing rainfall over Indonesia and contributing to the growth of massive wildfires that have blanketed the region in choking smoke. 

El Niño is also implicated in Indian heat waves caused by delayed monsoon rains, as well as Pacific island sea level drops, widespread coral bleaching that is damaging coral reefs, droughts in South Africa, flooding in South America and a record-breaking hurricane season in the eastern tropical Pacific.
Around the world, production of rice, wheat, coffee and other crops has been hit hard by droughts and floods, leading to higher prices.

While El Niño may provide some drought relief locally, in other parts of the world, it wreaks havoc.

In the United States, many of El Niño's biggest impacts are expected in early 2016.
Forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration favor an El Niño-induced shift in weather patterns to begin in the near future, ushering in several months of relatively cool and wet conditions across the southern United States, and relatively warm and dry conditions over the northern United States.
The latest El Niño forecast from NOAA's Climate Prediction Center is at:

While scientists still do not know precisely how the current El Niño will affect the United States, the last large El Niño in 1997-98 was a wild ride for most of the nation.
The "Great Ice Storm" of January 1998 crippled northern New England and southeastern Canada, but overall, the northern tier of the United States experienced long periods of mild weather and meager snowfall.
Meanwhile, across the southern United States, a steady convoy of storms slammed most of California, moved east into the Southwest, drenched Texas and -- pumped up by the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico -- wreaked havoc along the Gulf Coast, particularly in Florida.  

"In 2014, the current El Niño teased us -- wavering off and on," said Josh Willis, project scientist for the Jason missions at JPL.
"But in early 2015, atmospheric conditions changed, and El Niño steadily expanded in the central and eastern Pacific. Although the sea surface height signal in 1997 was more intense and peaked in November of that year, in 2015, the area of high sea levels is larger. This could mean we have not yet seen the peak of this El Niño."

Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, scientists on the history of El Niño research and what's being done to get ready for the biggest El Niño on record.
During normal, non-El Niño conditions, the amount of warm water in the western equatorial Pacific is so large that sea levels are about 20 inches (50 centimeters) higher in the western Pacific than in the eastern Pacific.
"You can see it in the latest Jason-2 image of the Pacific," said Willis.
"The 8-inch [20-centimeter] drop in the west, coupled with the 10-inch [25-centimeter] rise in the east, has completely wiped out the tilt in sea level we usually have along the equator."

The new Jason-2 image shows that the amount of extra-warm surface water from the current El Niño (depicted in red and white shades) has continuously increased, especially in the eastern Pacific within 10 degrees latitude north and south of the equator.
In the western Pacific, the area of low sea level (blue and purple) has decreased somewhat from late October.
The white and red areas indicate unusual patterns of heat storage.
In the white areas, the sea surface is between 6 and 10 inches (15 to 25 centimeters) above normal, while in the red areas, it is about 4 inches (10 centimeters) above normal.
The green areas indicate normal conditions.
The height of the ocean water relates, in part, to its temperature, and is an indicator of the amount of heat stored in the ocean below.
Within this area, surface temperatures are greater than 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) in the central equatorial Pacific and near 70 degrees Fahrenheit (21 degrees Celsius) off the coast of the Americas.
This El Niño signal encompasses a surface area of 6 million square miles (16 million square kilometers) -- more than twice as big as the continental United States. 

While no one can predict the exact timing or intensity of U.S. El Niño impacts, for drought-stricken California and the U.S. West, it's expected to bring some relief.
"The water story for much of the American West over most of the past decade has been dominated by punishing drought," said JPL climatologist Bill Patzert.
"Reservoir levels have fallen to record or near-record lows, while groundwater tables have dropped dangerously in many areas. Now we're preparing to see the flip side of nature's water cycle -- the arrival of steady, heavy rains and snowfall." 

In 1982-83 and 1997-98, large El Niños delivered about twice the average amount of rainfall to Southern California, along with mudslides, floods, high winds, lightning strikes and high surf.
But Patzert cautioned that El Niño events are not drought busters.
"Over the long haul, big El Niños are infrequent and supply only seven percent of California's water," he said.
"Looking ahead to summer, we might not be celebrating the demise of this El Niño," cautioned Patzert.

"It could be followed by a La Niña, which could bring roughly opposite effects to the world's weather."
La Niñas are essentially the opposite of El Niño conditions.
During a La Niña episode, trade winds are stronger than normal, and the cold water that normally exists along the coast of South America extends to the central equatorial Pacific.
La Niña episodes change global weather patterns and are associated with less moisture in the air over cooler ocean waters.
This results in less rain along the coasts of North and South America and along the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, and more rain in the far Western Pacific.
El Niño events are part of the long-term, evolving state of global climate, for which measurements of sea surface height are a key indicator.

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Tuesday, January 5, 2016

How satellite technology is helping to fight illegal fishing

From their control centre in Oxfordshire, analysts from Satellite Application Catapult can track vessels around the world and watch for abnormal or illegal behaviour.

From BBC by Karl Mathiesen

A new initiative is arming coastguards with satellite intelligence that allows them to target their search for pirate fishing vessels in remote marine areas

Pirate fishing vessels plundering fish from the world’s marine reserves, such as the one around Ascension Island announced on the weekend, can now be watched, tracked and brought to justice using satellite technology.

Despite a proliferation of huge, publicly lauded marine reserves, actually stopping fishing in many remote areas has previously been almost impossible.
Fishing vessels are required to carry a transponder that tracks their movements and allows authorities to monitor their behaviour.
But illegal fishers simply switch off the machine, disappearing from the system.

 Take a deep dive into our groundbreaking satellite tool to combat pirate fishing. Project Eyes on the Seas uses the latest technology to track illegal fishing activity in real time, giving authorities the information they need to protect the world's oceans.

A UK-funded initiative, developed by Satellite Applications Catapult (SAC) and the Pew Charitable Trusts, uses satellite radars to track these “dark targets”.
Now, instead of blindly patrolling vast areas of ocean, coastguard vessels use the satellite intelligence to target their search.
“We don’t put a cop on every corner 24 hours a day. So let’s at least know what the situation out on the water is [before sending boats to investigate],” said Bradley Soule, senior fisheries analyst for SAC.

Satellite radar has traditionally been used by the military and law enforcement agencies.
But the cost has dropped dramatically, opening up the data for private companies to use.
“It is definitely a big deal,” he said. “[The global satellite tracking] gives you a sense of the scope ... It is a wide-ranging problem.”
Roughly one in every five fish landed around the world is caught illegally.
In the past, said Soule, the problem was not effectively shared between neighbouring governments. This meant “there are opportunities for bad actors to move swiftly across borders and use our borders against us”.
But even though the system is still effectively being trialled, having only been in development for two years, it has already been used during investigations.
The details of these are not yet public.
Soule said: “We have identified some abnormal behaviour and are working with the relevant authorities.”

 Fishing vessels tracked using transponders.
Illegal vessels will often switch off their transponders and “go dark”, making them impossible to track without the use of satellite radar.
Photograph: Satellite Applications Catapult 

Just five years after the global figurehead of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) ocean protection programme, Dan Laffoley, co-authored a report that said that most marine protected area’s “are ineffective or only partially effective” he now believes the reserves can now offer true sanctuary.
“The excuses that it’s far too large, it’s far too remote, it’s far too expensive are old excuses. The reality is that we do have the technology to be able to police these places,” said Laffoley.

“There really is a breakthrough in terms of remote sensing,” said Charles Clover, the chair of the Blue Marine Foundation who lobbied the UK government for the creation of the Ascension marine protected area (MPA).
However, he added that “the feasibility of actually taking a prosecution through the courts using remote sensing [on its own] is still questioned by the Foreign Office” and the technology would still require boats in the water.

 Ascension island in the GeoGarage platform (UKHO chart)

The Guardian understands that satellite technology will play a part in the enforcement of the 234,291km2 Ascension MPA.
An initial study of Ascension waters using satellites found at least eight boats that had turned off their transponders and were possibly fishing illegally. 
SAC is already working with the UK government to track vessels in the world’s largest marine reserve around Pitcairn Island.
The announcement that the UK government would ban fishing in more than half of the island’s huge territorial waters (which are a British overseas dominion) was hailed as a “massive step” by Laffoley.
Ascension’s lonely volcanic peak juts from the heart of the Atlantic Ocean, almost midway between South America and Africa.
Laffoley said the waters around Ascension were one of the few remaining places where the marine environment had not been irreversibly damaged by overfishing.
But even here, recent years have seen a rapid decline.
“There’s a fairly disastrous Asian longline fishery going off in Ascension Island waters, which paid money into the Ascension Island government to make up the shortfall [of funding] from London,” he said.


When he visited last year, Laffoley spoke with locals who told him great natural events and creatures, such as “large tuna chasing fry up the beaches that they’d seen generation after generation were becoming more memories than reality”.
“When we were diving there we only saw one shark and there should have been plenty,” he said.
In 2015, a huge year for marine conservation, big reserves were designated in Palau, Easter Island, Pitcairn Island and New Zealand’s Kermadec islands.
The Ascension reserve brings the total proportion of the world’s oceans protected from fishing to 2%. In 2002, the World Summit on Sustainable Development and the Convention on Biological Diversity committed countries to reaching 10% by 2012.

Almost half of Ascension’s waters will remain open to the (mostly Taiwanese) tuna vessels that have caused so much damage in the past.
However, a $300,000 grant from the charitable foundation of US hedge fund manager Louis Bacon will fund a policing presence for the next two fishing seasons in order to “ensure best practice is observed”.

There is a good chance that one fish in five sold in a store or served in a restaurant has been caught illegally.
That would amount to 26m tonnes - the weight of nearly 500 Titanics - of fish a year.
The environmental cost of illegal fishing is huge: In the past fifty or so years one in four fisheries has collapsed, largely because of it.
And the economic cost is high too: 23 billion dollars according to the Pew Charitable Trusts.
But clever use of technology could help prevent this pillage.
How would it work?
A new satellite-based surveillance centre in Britain may be a game-changer.
Called a virtual watch room, it resembles the control centre for a space mission and can track fishing boats anywhere in the world with the results displayed on a giant video wall.
The watch room uses satellites to pull together data from multiple sources. including radar, photographic images and the signals emitted by radio transponders which are supposed to be fitted to fishing boats.
Automated alerts, such as when a vessel enters a prohibited area and slows to fishing speed, allow operators to zoom in on anything suspicious.
The watch room can also spot vessels working with another ship to which they transfer their catches for transport to market.
The virtual watch room has been developed by Pew Charitable Trusts and Satellite Applications Catapult.
But the success of the watch room’s technology will also depend on governments and the authorities responsible for fishing sharing information and enforcing international rules and regulations.
If, for example, radio transponders aren’t made mandatory on all fishing vessels, tracking them will be complicated.
Industry would also need to play its part by using the watch room’s technology to protect their supply chains.
The one-in-five illegal fish identified by Pew are often sold by otherwise law-abiding firms.
Now those firms have a way to reliably trace where their fish comes from.
If customers care enough about buying fish from sustainable sources, then retail pressure coupled with satellite technology should be a powerful weapon to combat pirate fishing.

But Laffoley said this left the job of protecting the area half done.
“I think we need to close that fishery still operating. After all, the marlin, the turtles, the sharks and others won’t know which bit is open and which bit is closed.”
“The reality is that if you want to have places in the ocean where you’ve got the really impressive wildlife spectacles, where you’ve got intact ecosystems, where you’ve got the big old individuals that we know are more resilient and have better quality of eggs to reseed areas [then you need no-take areas]. When you have a fishery, you lose them,” he said.

Clover said the fishery was kept open by necessity in order to fund the Ascension Island government.
UK government funding of public services on the island is severely limited and the community has had to open up licences to the fishing operators.
“It’s all about the [UK] Foreign Office not paying for this outfit,” said Clover.

Laffoley seconded Clover’s call for increasing the budget to make the Ascension community viable without fishing.
“We have to question why we are using the biodiversity and exploiting it, to then protect the biodiversity,” he said.
“Is that a really good strategy when we are seeing catastrophic declines where we’ve had fisheries?”

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Monday, January 4, 2016

What happened to the Polar Vortex?

President Obama's Science and Technology Advisor, Dr. John Holdren, explains the polar vortex in 2 minutes—and why climate change makes extreme weather more likely going forward.

From Scientific American by Andrea Thompson

The polar vortex has strengthened this year, helping exacerbate current mild weather.

It has been ridiculously warm across the eastern half of the country this month, with many spots likely to see their warmest December on record. New York City may reach as high as 72°F on Christmas Eve.
Washington D.C. is forecast to reach the mid-70s, and Miami the mid-80s.



One of the factors behind this decidedly un-Christmas-like weather is a feature that came to be associated with the brutally cold winters of the past few years: the infamous polar vortex.
But if you like warm winter days, enjoy it while you can.
Because while the current state of the polar vortex is keeping dreams of a White Christmas at bay, a shift could soon be in the offing, one scientist says, potentially ushering in a more typical winter wonderland in January.


Over the past two years, the term polar vortex became synonymous with the bitter outbreaks of Arctic air that sent teeth chattering from Boston to Atlanta (after all, polar is right there in the name).
The polar vortex is a feature of the atmosphere defined as the fast moving current of air encircling the Arctic that forms during the cold months because of the increased temperature difference between the dark, frigid Arctic and the warm tropics.

There are actually two vortices, one in the layer of the upper atmosphere known as the stratosphere and one in the lower section, where our weather happens, called the troposphere.
These two features interact with each other and can affect the meteorological goings-on outside of the Arctic.
The polar vortex also interacts with other features and fluxes in the atmosphere, which causes it to vary in strength over time.

North pole could be 35C warmer than average this week, warn meteorologists
When the polar vortex is strong, as it is now, it keeps arctic air fenced in.
That is part of what is currently keeping the weather so mild in the eastern U.S..
But when the vortex is perturbed or weakened, the jet of air becomes more wobbly and can set up southward excursions of frigid air — what we saw plenty of times over the last couple winters.

The polar vortex is particularly susceptible to such weakening when it reaches its peak in mid-winter, Judah Cohen, an atmospheric scientist with the private firm Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER), said in an email.
And that is what Cohen is forecasting will take place in January.
Cohen expects some pulses of energy working their way from the lower to upper atmosphere to perturb and weaken the polar vortex over the next few weeks.
That weakening would favor a dip in temperatures over the eastern U.S. and potentially an uptick in snowstorms, Cohen wrote in an AER blog post.





A map showing the difference between temperatures on Dec. 30 and averages shows how a potent storm carried extremely warm air over the North Pole.
Some research suggests that the rapid warming of the Arctic, which is happening at about twice the pace of the planet as a whole, could be impacting the polar vortex.
Cohen and others think that declining sea ice and increased snow cover in Siberia are two manifestations of this amplification that are exerting a weakening influence on the polar vortex, which could be fueling more outbreaks of Arctic air.
Cohen thinks that the pulses of energy he expects to perturb the vortex over the next few weeks are related to particular areas of low sea ice and high snow cover present this fall and winter.
But this research is hotly debated.
“There are many that argue that any influence of Arctic amplification cannot be detected above the noise of the intrinsic or natural variability of the atmosphere,” Cohen said.
If the Arctic chill from the weakening of the polar vortex blows in next month, Cohen, a self-avowed fan of winter weather, would welcome the switch.
At first he didn’t mind Boston having a break after last year’s epic snows, “but I have to admit I miss winter and this is just crazy,” he said.

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Sunday, January 3, 2016

From timber to tide

Ben Harris is a traditional wooden boat builder based in Cornwall, UK.
This film documents Ben Harris’ love of wood work and boat building, how he acquired his skills, and how incredible it is to be able to take something that you’ve built with your own hands out onto the water and sail it across the sea.

Who is Ben Harris?
Ben has always loved wood.
His mother said that his first word was ‘log’.
He has been working with wood throughout the UK since the age of 15.
First as an assistant to a cabinet maker, where he started by sharpening the tools and clearing up.
He then developed his skills in furniture making and his passion for wood and forestry by working in broadleaf woodlands.
Later he tuned his skills in bespoke oak-framed carpentry and went on to establish a sawmill and oak framing business in Scotland, sourcing timber from the local estates.
In 2005 Ben moved to Cornwall to study boatbuilding.
He has been building boats and sailing them ever since. (benharrisboats.co.uk)
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Saturday, January 2, 2016

The longest night

Páll Pálsson has been a man of the sea for 36 years.
With a life of fishing, comes a life of little sleep. Research shows that nearly half of Icelandic fishermen suffer from sleep-related disorders such as chronic fatigue and apnea.
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