Global Warming Cited in Wind Shift

[jpak]

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/tech/2006/may/03/050300678.html

NEW YORK (AP) - An important wind circulation pattern over the Pacific Ocean has begun to weaken because of global warming caused by human activity, something that could alter climate and the marine food chain in the region, new research suggests.

It's not clear what climate changes might arise in the area or possibly beyond, but the long-term effect might resemble some aspects of an El Nino event, a study author said.

El Ninos boost rainfall in the southern United States and western South America and bring dry weather or even drought to Indonesia, Malaysia and elsewhere in the western Pacific.

As for the Pacific food chain near the equator, the slowdown might reduce populations of tiny plants and animals up through the fish that eat them, because of reduced nutrition welling up from the deep, said the author, Gabriel Vecchi.

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[Mabus]

1. If it is happening in the Pacific it is happening everywhere

:kick: and recommended.


Holy shit.

[One_Life_To_Give]

2. Good news for Tuvalu

The last major ElNino (Early 90's) dropped their sea level about 35cm. IIRC
This should help keep them dry through 2050.


And for so many others. Picture the ending from Life of Brian.
"Always look on the bright side of life"

[phantom power]

3. Groovy diagram:

From here:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060503171511.htm

[Dogmudgeon]

4. All that hot moisture with no place to go at first.

I've been thinking that this kind of thing is long "overdue", and that it will help drive a major climate disaster. First a bumper crop of tropical cyclones (such as a jump in the number of Atlantic hurricanes), then a major re-arrangement of the atmospheric wind system.

A build-up of heat and moisture at the equator will eventually force a new equator-to-poles prevailing wind, possibly in the high troposphere. "Eventually" comes once tropical storms of any kind can no longer dissipate the accumulated heat.

A driven flow of warm, moist air to the poles would sink as storms. It could be the first stage in a planetary atmospheric "air (and temperature) inversion". This is only a wild-assed guess on my part, but it makes as much sense to me as the idea of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation. Perhaps this is how all the snow and ice got to the ice caps to begin with. Does anyone know if there has been recent research in Heinrich Event-related paleoclimatology that has ventured better-educated guesses than mine?

--p!

[phantom power]

5. Won't corriolis effects prevent an equator-to-poles circulation?

[Dead_Parrot]

6. I don't think so

They would act against warm air blowing to the poles, but with the cold air blow back to equator: I think the net effect would be zero. Shoe-horning the air around Boyle's law might be tricky, though.

[phantom power]

7. It seems to me that coriolis will always produce...

the banded wind systems we have now:



However, if the temperature gradient between equator and poles is increased, these systems will be driven into a higher gear. Especially so if we lose heat transfer of ocean currents such as the THC. That energy will find a way to make it to the poles. If not by sea, then by air.

[Dead_Parrot]

8. that can't be right...

The corrolis effect doesn't change direction just because you've hit 30°. I can see it would be responsible for the east-west pattern, but not the north-south...

...Or am I being really dumb? :shrug:

Always a possibility :)

[phantom power]

10. What I'm thinking is...

At the 30 parallels, there must be a down-draft in a convection pattern. When that air descends, some goes north, some south. Coriolis produces corresponding turns in opposite directions.

Here is what I believe is going on: you've got air "trying" to move in a simple convection pattern, equator to pole. Rise at the equator, flow to the pole, drop at the pole, flow back to the equator, along the ground. If the earth weren't rotating, this might happen. We'd have wind always flowing southward, or northward in the southern hemisphere. Until all the atmosphere froze on the dark side of the planet. But I digress.

But (fortunately) the earth rotates, and coriolis effects jam it all up. Air tries to flow from the pole to equator, but the path gets bent sideways. The net effect is to break up the simple convection into multiple convection zones. Two areas of descent: One at the pole, the other at 30 degrees N. Two areas of rise: One at the equator, the other at 60 degrees N.

I either learned that in high school earth science, or I made it up. I frequently can't tell anymore.

Really, there's no need for me to have an opinion about it, these circulation patterns are well understood by somebody out there, if I can find it.

[jpak]

12. PP has is mostly right

Here's a good tutorial on polar heat transport...(for some reason I can't post a link, so google this up)

1 2 How does the atmosphere transport energy?


geography.berkeley.edu:16080/ProgramCourses/CoursePagesFA2005/Geog142/geog142_10-1.pdf

[Dogmudgeon]

11. Coreolis force is only one of the heat-dissipating mechanisms

The heat is dissipated because the Coreolis force encourages tropic cyclone formation. Well, that's at least one of the ways, but it's significant.

My concern is that the excess heat will soon become so great that tropical cyclones alone won't be able to "sink" the heat. There is a lot of play -- hysteresis of a sort -- in the atmospheric system. I do not think that the formation of new, previously-unknown weather systems will wait until a typical hurricane season produces 150 named storms a year. The process(es) is (are) probably already getting started now.

Eventually, we may have a situation where a huge amount of tropical air is driven to the poles. If the poles are already temperate or even tropically warm due to the generation of massive amounts of greenhouse gases by newly-active microbes, this will turn the polar areas into nightmarish landscapes resembling something out of the Elder Eddas or the Greeks' legends of Hyperborea -- lands of fire and ice and eternal darkness and the stench of death. (And they're just the European legends!)

Of course, when this epochal temperature inversion collapses, all that steamy, moist air will have nowhere to go but south -- as enormous storms. Some of them with snow and ice. And that would be just one kind of the many changes in the world's weather.

Sure, it's a wild-assed guess, but while it's difficult to say exactly what will happen when you put a pot of soup on a stove, you know that if you turn the heat all the way up and slam the lid on tight, you're going to have a big, steaming, nasty mess. And that's what I believe we have done with global warming; coming into a period of natural climatic instability, no less!

Famines. Desertification. Superstorms. Unpredictable monsoons. Hurricanes year-round; tornadoes likely anywhere, any time. And when the instability eventually collapses back to a lower-energy state, probable tranformation into a rapid-onset ice-age (but more Wally Broecker than The Day After Tomorrow).

I'll end on my usual cheery note: This will be survivable, IF we start getting ready for it now. Ten or twenty or even fifty years of balmy "endless summers" and mild winters, followed by permanently good skiing conditions and snow-tire sales. OR, famine, freezing, disease, and mass death. The climate will do what it damn well pleases; planning and executing our response is what counts.

--p!

[kestrel91316]

9. I'm going to hope for the upside of this - more rain in SoCal.

I get AWFULLY tired of madly watering my lawn 7-11 months out of the year just to keep it from completely dying.