bluewave

https://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/faq/#area_extent What is the difference between sea ice area and extent? Area and extent are different measures and give scientists slightly different information. Some organizations, including Cryosphere Today, report ice area; NSIDC primarily reports ice extent. Extent is always a larger number than area, and there are pros and cons associated with each method. A simplified way to think of extent versus area is to imagine a slice of swiss cheese. Extent would be a measure of the edges of the slice of cheese and all of the space inside it. Area would be the measure of where there is cheese only, not including the holes. That is why if you compare extent and area in the same time period, extent is always bigger. A more precise explanation of extent versus area gets more complicated. Extent defines a region as “ice-covered” or “not ice-covered.” For each satellite data cell, the cell is said to either have ice or to have no ice, based on a threshold. The most common threshold (and the one NSIDC uses) is 15 percent, meaning that if the data cell has greater than 15 percent ice concentration, the cell is considered ice covered; less than that and it is said to be ice free. Example: Let’s say you have three 25 kilometer (km) x 25 km (16 miles x 16 miles) grid cells covered by 16% ice, 2% ice, and 90% ice. Two of the three cells would be considered “ice covered,” or 100% ice. Multiply the grid cell area by 100% sea ice and you would get a total extent of 1,250 square km (482 square miles). Area takes the percentages of sea ice within data cells and adds them up to report how much of the Arctic is covered by ice; area typically uses a threshold of 15%. So in the same example, with three 25 km x 25 km (16 miles x 16 miles) grid cells of 16% ice, 2% ice, and 90% ice, multiply the grid cell areas that are over the 15% threshold by the percent of sea ice in those grid cells, and add it up. You would have a total area of 662 square km (255.8 square miles). Scientists at NSIDC report extent because they are cautious about summertime values of ice concentration and area taken from satellite sensors. To the sensor, surface melt appears to be open water rather than water on top of sea ice. So, while reliable for measuring area most of the year, the microwave sensor is prone to underestimating the actual ice concentration and area when the surface is melting. To account for that potential inaccuracy, NSIDC scientists rely primarily on extent when analyzing melt-season conditions and reporting them to the public. That said, analyzing ice area is still quite valuable. Given the right circumstances, background knowledge, and scientific information on current conditions, it can provide an excellent sense of how much ice there really is “on the ground

The last few days set the new all-time extent anomaly record.

All the extra ocean heat on the Siberian side is really slowing the freeze-up this October. So the the extent is currently the lowest on record for this time of year well below 2012. The Siberian heatwave this year was one of the most extreme events we have seen.

Yeah, we are well below where 2012 was at this point in October. The the heat on the Siberian Arctic side this year was off the charts. 5.422 7.329 6.871 6.596 5.715 6.515 5.681 5.234 5.108

Very unusual to see a daily area drop in mid October as the record Arctic warmth is slowing the freeze-up https://cryospherecomputing.tk

The record SST warmth form the Siberian heatwave is slowing down the freeze- up in those regions. https://theconversation.com/arctic-sea-ice-is-being-increasingly-melted-from-below-by-warming-atlantic-water-144106 All this may be feeding into ever more extreme climate change in the Arctic. Throughout summer 2020 the Siberian heatwavecontinually shattered temperature records, including eastern Arctic sea surface temperatures. And while sea ice reflects much of the sun’s rays back into space, open water is dark and absorbs the sun’s heat. So as the sea ice retreated the surface water is warmed, which in turned further warms the atmosphere above, quite apart from the influence of increasing greenhouse gases. There is still much more to learn about the link between the eastwards spread of the influence of Atlantic heat, and the reduction in sea ice it brings, and knock on effects on severe weather at lower latitudes. But it is clear that the Arctic – already warming faster than anywhere else on Earth – could be in the process of transitioning to a “new” state.

11-16-89 still stands as our strongest November severe thunderstorm outbreak. https://www.nj.com/weather/2019/11/this-is-what-nj-looked-like-when-7-tornadoes-hit-in-1989-it-sounded-like-incoming-artillery.html

Updated for another unusually strong October Northeast severe thunderstorm outbreak producing the highest October wind gust on record in Albany. RECORD EVENT REPORT NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE ALBANY NY 312 AM EDT THU OCT 08 2020 ...HIGHEST WIND GUST SET AT ALBANY NEW YORK YESTERDAY... A HIGHEST OR PEAK WIND GUST OF 67 MPH FROM THE WEST OCCURRED YESTERDAY...WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 7...2020...AT THE ALBANY INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT IN THE THUNDERSTORMS. THIS BROKE THE OLD RECORD FOR THE DATE OF 54 MPH SET IN 2009. THIS IS ALSO THE HIGHEST WIND GUST FOR THE MONTH OF OCTOBER ON RECORD. WIND GUST RECORDS AT ALBANY GO BACK TO 1987.

Scaling up fast enough and meeting expanding global energy demand is quite a challenge. https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/12/24/72/our-pathetically-slow-shift-to-clean-energy-in-five-charts/ By most measures that matter, clean energy had a stellar decade. The cost of large wind and solar farms dropped by 70% and nearly 90%, respectively. Meanwhile, renewable-power plants around the world are producing four times more electricity than they did 10 years ago. Similarly, electric vehicles were barely a blip at the outset of the 2010s. But automakers were on track to sell 1.8 million EVs this year, as range increased, prices fell, and companies introduced a variety of models. But the swift growth in these small sectors still hasn’t added up to major changes in the massive global energy system, or reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. So far, cleaner technologies have mostly met rising energy demands, not cut deeply into existing fossil-fuel infrastructure, as the charts that follow make clear. That’s a problem. Cutting emissions rapidly enough to combat the increasing threats of climate change will require complete overhauls of our power plants, factories, and vehicle fleets, all within a few decades.

Main La Niña theme since 2000 has been a dominant SE Ridge. The years with over 20” in NYC had Alaska and Greenland blocking episodes mixed with the SE Ridge. 16-17 was a great example of a few well timed blocks in a warm SE Ridge pattern producing respectable seasonal snowfall totals.

Winter 20-21 discussion for NYC Metro.

We will need to see a significant increase in public-private partnerships in order to make an energy transition possible. https://www.ecowatch.com/high-powered-public-private-partnerships-essential-to-expediting-renew-1882132714.html Public-private partnerships have been around since the start of the U.S. and exist at all levels of government. Basic science and technology has historically been funded by the U.S. government and taken place in national and university laboratories. When the technologies matured, some were released for commercial use. Perhaps the best example is the personal computer, which has shrunk significantly in size since the 1970s and has dramatically increased in computing power. A product used by billions of people worldwide began as an investment by the U.S. federal government, in order to develop better missile guidance systems for the U.S. Department of Defense and smaller on-board computers for NASA's space program. At some point, technology will take over. Fossil fuels will eventually be driven from the marketplace by something better and cheaper, but we first need the investment in basic and applied research to make that happen. The transition from an economy based on the one-time use of finite resources to one that relies on renewable resources requires a sophisticated, high-powered public-private partnership. The commitments made by Gates and the White House are a good start and there are many other signs that the transition from fossil fuels has begun. The speed of that transition, however, will depend on creativity, consensus and cash to be completed.

Updated for the 3.88 in Sloatsburg, NY. Rockland County... Sloatsburg 3.88 815 AM 9/30 CWOP

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05978-1 Ocean heatwaves will become more frequent and extreme as the climate warms, scientists report1 on 15 August in Nature. These episodes of intense heat could disrupt marine food webs and reshape biodiversity in the world’s oceans. Scientists analysed satellite-based measurements of sea surface temperature from 1982 to 2016 and found that the frequency of marine heatwaves had doubled. These extreme heat events in the ocean's surface waters can last from days to months and can occur across thousands of kilometres. If average global temperatures increase to 3.5 °C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century, as researchers currently project, the frequency of ocean heatwaves could increase by a factor of 41. In other words, a 1-in-100-day event at pre-industrial levels of warming could become a 1-in-3-day event. Marine heatwaves have already become more long-lasting, frequent, intense and extensive than in the past,” says lead study author Thomas Frölicher, a climatologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland. He adds that these changes are already well outside what could be expected on the basis of natural swings in Earth’s climate: the study’s analysis determined that 87% of heatwaves in the ocean are the result of human-induced global warming. Going global Scientists have studied heatwaves on land for decades. But it wasn’t until researchers faced episodes of extreme heat in the ocean in the past several years that they started paying more attention to the issue at sea. Those episodes included the massive warm water ‘blob’ in the northeastern Pacific Ocean that killed off sea otters (Enhydra lutris) in Alaska and sea lions (Zalophus californianus) in California, and disrupted fisheries off North America from 2014 to 2015. They also included the massive 2015–16 El Niño that ravaged coral reefs around the world. The emphasis on marine heatwaves is really motivated by the recognition that the same kinds of extremes can happen in the ocean as on land,” says Noah Diffenbaugh, a climatologist at Stanford University in California. He adds that this latest study takes global perspective on these regional issues. The study provides a useful framework for disentangling short-term temperature spikes from long-term warming trends in the oceans, says Kris Karnauskas, a physical oceanographer at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. He says that marine heatwaves could be the result of natural temperature swings that become more extreme owing to a warming ocean. Or they could be a signal that global warming is changing how the ocean functions — thus altering the likelihood and intensity of marine warming events. Frölicher says current models suggest that more frequent and intense ocean heatwaves are largely a result of warming oceans. And now, he and his team are working to develop models that can explore marine heatwave trends and their ecological impacts at local and regional levels. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0383-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08471-z#ref-CR7 Tropical cyclones that rapidly intensify are typically associated with the highest forecast errors and cause a disproportionate amount of human and financial losses. Therefore, it is crucial to understand if, and why, there are observed upward trends in tropical cyclone intensification rates. Here, we utilize two observational datasets to calculate 24-hour wind speed changes over the period 1982–2009. We compare the observed trends to natural variability in bias-corrected, high-resolution, global coupled model experiments that accurately simulate the climatological distribution of tropical cyclone intensification. Both observed datasets show significant increases in tropical cyclone intensification rates in the Atlantic basin that are highly unusual compared to model-based estimates of internal climate variations. Our results suggest a detectable increase of Atlantic intensification rates with a positive contribution from anthropogenic forcing and reveal a need for more reliable data before detecting a robust trend at the global scale.

The Central Arctic continues to set records for low extent as we get close to the beginning of October.

https://www.disl.edu/about/news/marine-heatwaves-and-hurricanes-study-examines-compounding-impact-of-severe-weather Several coastal communities are picking up the pieces after being ravaged by hurricanes in the past month. Hurricane Laura, a category 4, and Hurricane Sally, a category 2, seemed to meander their way across the Gulf of Mexico constantly shifting forecasts and keeping meteorologists on their toes. In the hours before these storms struck land, they seemed to explode in intensity. Researchers at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab with support from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory can offer insight into why these storms intensified quickly as they moved across the continental shelf. “Surprisingly, both Hurricane Laura and Hurricane Sally appeared to have similar setups to Hurricane Michael with both storm events being preceded by smaller storms (i.e. Hurricane Hanna and Marco, respectively),” Dr. Brian Dzwonkowski explained. “This pre-storm setup of the oceanic environment likely contributed to the intensification prior to landfall. Importantly, this pre-landfall intensification was not well predicted by hurricane models or forecasts, which as you can imagine is critical information for evacuation and disaster preparation.” Dzwonkowski and his team’s publication, “Compounding impact of severe weather events fuels marine heatwave in the coastal ocean”, outlines how one storm could impact the intensity of another storm by restructuring the thermal properties of the water column. Nature Communications published the findings in its September issue. The research focuses on Hurricane Michael which devastated Mexico Beach, Florida, and the surrounding communities, on October 10, 2018. The category 5 storm intensified hours before making landfall. Dzwonkowski, a physical oceanographer with the Dauphin Island Sea Lab and Associate Professor at the University of South Alabama in the Department of Marine Sciences, and his team tracked down the key events and processes that pushed the coastal waters in the Gulf of Mexico to an extremely warm state (i.e. a marine heatwave), likely contributing to the intensification of a storm so close to shore. Unlike the deep ocean, the continental shelf has a shallow bottom that limits how much cold water can be mixed up to the surface, cooling the sea surface temperature and weakening approaching storms. Dzwonkowski and his team focused on how a strong mixing event pushes surface heat downward and clears the bottom water of its cold water reserve. If this mixing is followed by a period of rewarming, such as an atmospheric heatwave, the shelf’s oceanic environment could be primed for the potential generation of extreme storm events, i.e. Hurricane Michael. This work shows that understanding the preceding weather conditions in a region where a storm is going to make landfall can improve interpretation of hurricane model forecasts and what the storm is likely to do prior to landfall,” says Dr. Dzwonkowski In mapping out heat flux and mixing, the team focused on the Mississippi Bight in late summer and early fall with data gathered by a mooring site off Dauphin Island’s coastline. The mooring site collects data throughout the water column allowing for the full heat content of the shelf to be determined. The period prior to the landfall of Hurricane Michael turned out to be the warmest ocean conditions during this time period in the 13-year record. “Turns out hurricanes and atmospheric heatwaves will be getting stronger in a warming world which would indicate the identified sequence of events that generate these extreme conditions may become more frequent,” Dzwonkowski said. “The occurrence of extreme heat content events, like marine heatwaves has significant implications for a broad range of scientific management interests beyond hurricane intensity.”Importantly, the mechanisms that generated this marine heatwave are expected to be more frequent and intense in the future due to climate change, increasing the likelihood of such extreme conditions. For example, coral reefs and hypoxia-prone shelves are already stressed by long-term warming trends. These temperature-specific benthic communities and habitats are typically of significant societal and economic value. As such, the newly identified sequence of compounding processes is expected to impact a range of coastal interests and should be considered in management and disaster response decisions. This research was funded by the NOAA RESTORE Science Program and NOAA NGI NMFS Regional Collaboration network. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18339-2 Abstract Exposure to extreme events is a major concern in coastal regions where growing human populations and stressed natural ecosystems are at significant risk to such phenomena. However, the complex sequence of processes that transform an event from notable to extreme can be challenging to identify and hence, limit forecast abilities. Here, we show an extreme heat content event (i.e., a marine heatwave) in coastal waters of the northern Gulf of Mexico resulted from compounding effects of a tropical storm followed by an atmospheric heatwave. This newly identified process of generating extreme ocean temperatures occurred prior to landfall of Hurricane Michael during October of 2018 and, as critical contributor to storm intensity, likely contributed to the subsequent extreme hurricane. This pattern of compounding processes will also exacerbate other environmental problems in temperature-sensitive ecosystems (e.g., coral bleaching, hypoxia) and is expected to have expanding impacts under global warming predictions.

Warmest melt season resulted in the second lowest minimum sea ice extent and a new record low in the Central Arctic.

New lowest extent record for the Central Arctic.

https://www.njherald.com/news/20200909/summer-2020-was-second-hottest-on-record-in-new-jersey New Jersey experienced its second-hottest summer on record, continuing a long-term warming trend in the Garden State and across the planet that has seen sea levels rise and extreme weather become more common. The average temperature statewide soared to 75.3 degrees from June through August, ranking only behind 2010′s record-setting heat, according to a report released Tuesday by Rutgers University. Climate change is being felt increasingly in New Jersey, with the 10 hottest summers having all occurred since 1999, including seven since 2010, said David Robinson, the state climatologist and author of the report. A full list is below. “It’s indicative of what we’re seeing in other seasons in New Jersey, what we’re seeing nationally and what we’re seeing globally,” Robinson said. “It’s just another sign that climate change is here.” This summer’s milestone was not much of a surprise considering that July was the hottest month ever recorded in New Jersey. August 2020 was tied for the sixth-warmest August on record, and June was the 10th-warmest it’s been since record-keeping began in 1895.

50 years is not cherry picking. It represents the time of most rapid global warming as emissions have increased. The actual charts with trend lines are available at the NCDC site. New Jersey is one of the sates that you posted and summers have been warming at 0.3° F decade since 1895. This year was the 2nd warmest summer on record in NJ. Notice how many of the top 10 warmest summers have occurred in recent years. https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/statewide/time-series/28/tavg/3/8/1895-2020?trend=true&trend_base=10&begtrendyear=1895&endtrendyear=2020 201006 - 201008 75.7°F 126 202006 - 202008 75.3°F 125 201606 - 201608 74.9°F 124 200506 - 200508 74.8°F 123 201106 - 201108 74.6°F 122 201806 - 201808 74.4°F 121 201906 - 201908 74.4°F 121 199906 - 199908 74.3°F 119 201206 - 201208 74.2°F 118 200206 - 200208 74.0°F 117

It will be interesting to see how much longer this continues before it gets overpowered by warming. But how does agriculture cause increased rainfall and decreased temperatures? The team suspects it has to do with photosynthesis, which leads to more water vapor in the air. When a plant’s pores, called stomata, open to allow carbon dioxide to enter, they simultaneously allow water to escape. This increases the amount of water going into the atmosphere and returning as rainfall. The cycle may continue as that rainwater eventually moves back into the atmosphere and causes more rainfall downwind from the original agricultural area. Rong Fu, a climate scientist at UC Los Angeles, agrees with the team’s assessment. She also thinks that though human influence might be “greater than we realize,” this regional climate change is probably caused by many factors, including increased irrigation in the region. “This squares with a lot of other evidence,” says Peter Huybers, a climate scientist at Harvard University, who calls the new study convincing. But he warns that such benefits may not last if greenhouse gas emissions eventually overpower the mitigating effect of agriculture. Alter agrees, and says it’s unlikely that the large increases in U.S. crop production during the 20th century will continue. Other scientists have voiced concern that agricultural production could soon be reaching its limit in many parts of the world. “Food production is arguably what we’re more concerned about with climate change,” Mueller says. And understanding how agriculture and climate will continue to affect one another is crucial for developing projections for both climate and agricultural yields. “It’s not just greenhouse gasses that we need to be thinking about. While the cooling effect of irrigation mitigates global climate change on the regional scale, climate models suggest that regional warming attributed to the global trend will eventually overcome the magnitude of mitigation offered by irrigated agriculture. Farmers, who are partially buffered for now from more extreme heat, would quickly face increasing stress in that scenario. “Farmers in irrigated regions may experience more abrupt temperature increases that will cause them to have to adapt more quickly than other groups who are already coping with a warming climate,” says Kucharik. “It’s that timeframe in which people have time to adapt that concerns me.” The current study is the first to definitively link irrigation in the Midwest U.S. to an altered regional climate. These results could improve weather and climate forecasts, help farmers plan better, and, the researchers hope, better prepare agricultural areas to deal with a warming climate when the irrigation effect is washed out. “Irrigation is a land use with effects on climate in the Midwest, and we need to account for this in our climate models,” says Nocco.