Tag Archives: ocean

To Cut Ocean Trash, Adrian Grenier and Dell Enlist Filmmakers and Virtual Reality

by Myrna Posted on March 15, 2016

A push by Dell and Adrian Grenier to raise awareness of ocean problems while trying to find a use for floating plastic trash. Visit link:  To Cut Ocean Trash, Adrian Grenier and Dell Enlist Filmmakers and Virtual Reality ; ; ;

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To Cut Ocean Trash, Adrian Grenier and Dell Enlist Filmmakers and Virtual Reality

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Science Has Found a Brilliant New Use for Your Kitchen Scraps

by Myrna Posted on March 9, 2016

Turns out, dumping compost on grasslands can do a surprising amount for the planet. Steve Russell/The Toronto Star/ZUMA When John Wick and his wife, Peggy Rathmann, bought their 540-acre ranch in 1998, it was in bad shape. Located in California’s Marin County, a windswept region northwest of San Francisco Bay, the land had been worn down by overgrazing; the grass was gone and the soil was degraded. Neither Wick nor Rathmann knew how to fix it because the couple didn’t have any ranching experience—Wick worked in construction management, and Rathmann wrote children’s classics like 10 Minutes till Bedtime and Good Night, Gorilla. So Wick consulted his friend Jeffrey Creque, a rangeland ecology expert. Creque helped Wick repair the soil by bringing back some grass—which gave the two an idea: They knew that in addition to enriching the soil, healthy grass, through photosynthesis, could remove carbon from the atmosphere. So was there a way, they wondered, to grow more grass on Wick’s land and slow global warming at the same time? The theory made sense: Carbon that is absorbed by grass can be stored for hundreds of years in the grass’ roots and surrounding soil—a much better spot for it than in the air, where it warms the planet in the form of carbon dioxide. Carbon-enriched soil, in turn, feeds grass so it can grow taller and suck down even more carbon. In rangelands, this cycle takes place on a massive scale: Between the grass and the soil, a third of the world’s carbon is stored in these expanses. But tilling and overgrazing unleash that carbon. These practices also cause topsoil erosion, which compounds the problem by making it hard for grass to grow. To make matters worse, rangelands are often home to cows, and manure releases methane and nitrous oxide gases into the atmosphere. In fact, livestock are responsible for nearly one-fifth of the globe’s overall greenhouse gas emissions. Read the rest at Mother Jones. Originally posted here –  Science Has Found a Brilliant New Use for Your Kitchen Scraps ; ; ;

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Science Has Found a Brilliant New Use for Your Kitchen Scraps

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Giant Trawlers Are Gobbling Up Fish in Critical Marine Ecosystem

by ChadwickNrd Posted on March 6, 2016

Industrial fishing operations are scouring the waters of the Barents Sea around Norway,threatening more than 200 fish species and potentially endangeringmillions of seabirds, seals, whales, sharks, and walruses.

Using satellite data and field work, researchers for Greenpeace spent three years documenting the devastating impact industrialtrawlers have hadon whatmany scientists call the “Arctic Galapagos.” In their report, “This Far, No Further,” Greenpeace concludes that”the largely unexplored and vulnerable northern part of the Barents Sea ecosystem is at the mercy of destructive fishing practices, due to the current lack of action to protect it by the Norwegian government or the fishing and processing companies.”

The report specifically implicates companies like Birdseye, Findus and Iglo, which are buying millions of pounds of cod fish caught by the destructive trawlers, as well as haddock, northern prawns and halibut. Greenpeace wants food companies, restaurants and retailers to refuse to traffic in fish caught in the Barents Sea. They are also calling for the Norwegian government to create an off-limits zone in the region.

There are several reasons why industrial trawling is such a big problem. First, itis simply “one of the most destructive methods of fishing,” says marine conservation biologist Calum Roberts, a professor at the University of York, England. “Over the last 200 years, it has converted once rich and complex seabed habitats to endless expanses of shifting sands and mud.”

The trawlers are “weighted with heavy metal rollers; they smash and crush everything in their path.” They can destroy deep-water coral reefs and kelp forests that provide food and breeding grounds for all manner of oceanic wildlife.

The sheer volume of fish that trawlers can catch is also extraordinary. Overfishing has already caused fisheries in other parts of the world to collapse, to the point where some scientists believe we could not just overfish but outfish the oceans by 2050. The increasing number of trawlers, fish processors, exporters and distributors that are now operating in the Barents Sea are putting the entire ecosystem there at risk, as well.

Plus, trawlers catch millions of other animals besides fish. “According to some estimates,as much as 40 percentof fish caught around the globe is discarded at sea, dead or dying,”reports Lee Crockett, Director of U.S. Oceans at the Pew Charitable Trusts. That means millions of whales, turtles, seals, seabirds and other marine life are indiscriminately being caught, killed and thrown back into the sea.

Greenpeace and other conservationists are advocating establishment of a marine reserve to put the most sensitive areas of the Barents Sea completely off-limits to all extractive uses. The organization is also urging fish processors to stop doing business with suppliers that are fishing the northern Barents Sea waters.

Consumers, meanwhile, can put pressure on retailers not to buy fish from producers that can’t document that their fish did not come from the Barents Sea.

Consumers can alsoalso consult the recommendations made at SeafoodWatch.org, a resource created by the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California to help people choose seafood that’s been farmed or fished in ways that minimize their environmental impact.

Related
Overfishing is Actually Worse Than We Thought
12 Problems with Ocean Fish Farming

Photo Credit: g.norðoy

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Giant Trawlers Are Gobbling Up Fish in Critical Marine Ecosystem

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Is Man-Made Noise Messing Up the Oceans?

by KatrinaSandover Posted on February 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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We may imagine the bottom of the deep blue sea as a peaceful, quiet place—certainly compared with the blaring horns and chit-chattering radios of rush-hour traffic. But the ocean is filled with the sounds of undulating waves, marine animals calling out to one another, and, increasingly, the ceaseless din of human commercial activity. Over the past 60 years, our contribution to the undersea cacophony has doubled every decade, and much of that noise is generated close to the shore. Roughly 40 percent of the world’s population lives within 100 kilometers—or 62 miles—of the coast.

A new study in the journal Nature finds that all the racket from our ships and construction activities penetrates deep beneath the surface, not merely messing with the communications of undersea mammals but changing the very nature of life at the bottom. The researchers found that bottom-dwellers such as small clams and lobsters, which are crucial to the underwater ecosystem, alter their behavior when exposed to man-made noise. To put it simply, they don’t move around as much.

Here’s why it matters: These creatures are responsible for churning up sediment when they burrow into the seabed, thus increasing oxygen levels and distributing nutrients. Their waning activity, the study’s authors say, may impact seabed productivity, sediment biodiversity, and even fisheries production. “There has been much discussion over the last decade of the extent to which whales, dolphins and fish stocks, might be disturbed by the sounds from shipping, wind farms, and their construction,” co-author Tim Leighton, an expert in underwater acoustics at the University of Southampton in England, noted in a statement accompanying the paper. “However, one set of ocean denizens has until now been ignored…These are the bottom feeders, such as crabs, shellfish and invertebrates similar to the ones in our study, which are crucial to healthy and commercially successful oceans because they form the bottom of the food chain.”

And these kinds of creatures, unlike fish and dolphins, can’t simply relocate to escape the noise. To maintain healthy oceans, we humans might simply have to keep it down.

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Is Man-Made Noise Messing Up the Oceans?

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There May Soon Be More Plastic in the Oceans Than Fish

by WiltonIacovelli Posted on January 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Discarded plastic will outweigh fish in the world’s oceans by 2050, according to a report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. That is, unless overfishing moves the date up sooner.

The study, a collaboration with the World Economic Forum, found that 32 percent of plastic packaging escapes waste collection systems, gets into waterways, and is eventually deposited in the oceans. That percentage is expected to increase in coming years, given that the fastest growth in plastic production is expected to occur in “high leakage” markets—developing countries where sanitation systems are often unreliable. The data used in the report comes from a review of more than 200 studies and interviews with 180 experts.

Since 1964, global plastic production has increased 20-fold—311 million tons were produced in 2014—and production is expected to triple again by 2050. A whopping 86 percent of plastic packaging is used just once, according to the report’s authors, representing $80 billion to $120 billion in lost value annually. That means not only more plastic waste, but more production-related oil consumption and carbon emissions if the industry doesn’t alter its ways.

The environmental impact of plastic waste is already staggering: For a paper published in October, scientists considered 186 seabird species and predicted that 90 percent of the birds—whose populations have declined by two-thirds since 1950—consume plastic. Plastic bags, which are surprisingly degradable in warmer ocean waters, release toxins that spread through the marine food chain—and perhaps all the way to our dinner tables.

Most of the ocean’s plastic, researchers say, takes the form of microplastics—trillions of beads, fibers, and fragments that average about 2 millimeters in diameter. They act as a kind of oceanic smog, clouding the waters and coating the sea floor, and look a lot like food to small marine organisms.

In December, President Barack Obama signed a law banning microbeads, tiny plastic exfoliaters found in toothpaste and skin products that get flushed into waterways. But the MacArthur report urges plastic producers to step up and address the problem by developing products that are reusable and easily recycled—and that are less toxic in nature—and working to make compostable plastics more affordable.

The 2050 prediction is based on the assumption that global fisheries will remain stable over the next three decades, but a report released last week suggests that may be wishful thinking. Revisiting fishery catch rates from the last 60 years, Daniel Pauly and Dirk Zeller of the University of British Columbia found that the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization drastically underestimates the amount of fish we pluck from the seas. The United Nations relies on official government data, which often only captures the activities of larger fishing operations. When the British Columbia researchers accounted for smaller fisheries, subsistence harvesting, and discarded catches, they calculated catches 53 percent larger than previously thought.

There was a glimmer of hope in the findings, though: The researchers write that fishing rates, after peaking in 1996, declined faster than previously thought—particularly among large-scale industrial fisheries. Whether that trend will hold is another story.

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There May Soon Be More Plastic in the Oceans Than Fish

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All those toxic chemicals in the ocean? Birds are pooping them back on shore

by VioletMata Posted on November 30, 2015

All those toxic chemicals in the ocean? Birds are pooping them back on shore

By on 30 Nov 2015commentsShare

You know all that pollution that we’ve been dumping into the oceans for decades? All the plastic, DDT, PCBs, mercury, etc. that we’ve been shamelessly washing away like the memories of too many tequila shots and poor decisions? Well, like those tequila shots the next morning, it looks like it’s all coming back up.

Here’s the rub: When we dump chemicals into the ocean, they get absorbed by microbes, which then get eaten by fish, which then get eaten by bigger fish and other animals until, over time, these chemicals accumulate in those larger animals.

Fulmars — seabirds that live in northern Canada — are one such animal. And according to Mark Mallory, a biologist at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, these fulmars eventually bring our discarded chemicals back on land … in the most disgusting way possible. Here’s more from Smithsonian:

[Mallory’s] studies found that fulmars are like the great cleaners of the ocean, ingesting a lot of plastic as well as chemicals that sometimes adhere to plastic. When the birds get back to Cape Vera, they vomit or defecate onto the cliffs, and the contaminants are then washed down into the freshwater pools beneath.

The nutrients from the fulmar guano bring algae and moss but also attract small midges and other aquatic insects — a tasty snack for snow buntings, largely terrestrial birds that will feed the bugs to their chicks.

Unfortunately for those adorable little snow buntings, their tasty snacks are also filled with chemicals, and thus, the game of pass-the-pollutant continues.

“We may think of the Arctic as this remote, pristine region, but it’s not,” adds Jennifer Provencher, a graduate student in eco-toxicology at Carleton University in Canada who frequently collaborates with Mallory. Provencher has found plastic and chemicals in the stomachs and livers of the thick-billed murres that live on the cliffs of Coats Island in the north of Hudson Bay. She has also found that great skuas can ingest plastic from preying on northern fulmars.

The winged predators aren’t the only things with an appetite for small birds. Provencher says that the Inuit in northern communities also eat murres. … That means the junk we dump into the oceans could be coming back to affect human health.

Veronica Padula, a researcher who studies seabirds off the Alaskan coast, told Smithsonian that she’s found significant concentrations of phthalates — chemicals used to make plastics flexible and harder to break — in kittiwakes, horned puffins, and red-faced cormorants. She says that these chemicals ultimately get into the birds’ reproductive tissue and perhaps even into their eggs, which could then infect egg-eaters like eagles and foxes.

And in case you’re still not convinced that our pollution is coming back to haunt us, a recent study found that three species of Canadian water fowl that humans hunt for food contained plastics and metals in their stomachs.

“It’s actually quite scary, especially when you start looking at what these chemicals do,” Padula told Smithsonian. “You kind of want to find a bunker and hide.”

You probably also wanted to find a bunker and hide the morning after that alcohol-soaked rager. But deep down, you knew that you were getting exactly what you deserved. That wasn’t your first rodeo, and, still, you downed those shots like a freshman at welcome week.

Likewise, bird shit laced with toxic chemicals is exactly what we deserve now — we had our rocky initiation at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and here we are again. So what say we cut back on the pollution, buy some fancy beers and play this drinking game to Planet Earth like grownups?

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Seabirds Are Dumping Pollution-Laden Poop Back on Land

, Smithsonian.

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All those toxic chemicals in the ocean? Birds are pooping them back on shore

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Are We About to Say Goodbye to Fish Sticks?

by ElbaAudetqiabp Posted on October 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Many people think of climate change as something happening in the atmosphere, but in fact a lot of the most important changes are taking place under the ocean.

In fact, up to one-third of the greenhouse gases humans release, and up to 90 percent of the global warming caused by those gases, ends up sunk in the sea. That has a lot of scary impacts: Rising sea level threatens coastal communities; rising seawater acidity kills off coral and shellfish; changing conditions are forcing dozens of species from whales to puffins into unfamiliar regions of the globe. We’ve even got cannibal lobsters, for crying out loud.

Those impacts can also devastate vital US industries, as a peer-reviewed study published today in Nature illustrates. The research found that warming waters are to blame for a recent collapse of the cod fishery in New England. Although a smaller industry than major commercial fish like salmon and mackerel, cod, commonly used for fish sticks and other processed foods, is a multimillion dollar business in New England.

But the fish have become increasingly rare. Last year, federal regulators slapped tight limits on cod fishing after they discovered that the population was at only 4 percent of the level needed to be sustainable. That was the lowest point in a nosedive that has played out over the last decade. In 2014, the commercial catch of cod in New England—about 5 million pounds—was 67 percent less than it was in 2004; the net value of the fishery was correspondingly cut by more than half, to about $9.3 million.

Researchers at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute wanted to know whether climate change played in role in that collapse. Indeed, they found that sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Maine have risen 99 percent faster than those in the rest of the ocean, rising especially quickly over the same decade-long decline of the cod fishery. The correlation is clear when you look at the two trend lines side-by-side, as in this chart from the study:

Pershing, et al

Higher temperatures make it harder for the fish to metabolize food, leaving them with less energy, especially at their prime reproductive age of about four years. That leads to fewer fish being born. Those that are born may have a harder time finding food, as the plankton they survive on move into deeper water in search of cooler temperatures. Deep water is home to more cod predators.

These problems have all been compounded by a lack of climate-savvy policy by fishing officials, the study found. Because the officials have largely overlooked the impact of ocean warming, they’ve consistently set quotas for commercial fishers far too high, giving the cod population no opportunity to rebound even in cooler years. In other words, overfishing has been rampant even when the overall catch comes in below the legally prescribed limit.

For that reason, the key solution that the researchers advocate is better integration of climate modeling in decision about where, when, and how cod fishing should be allowed. In Canada, extreme limitations on cod fishing seen to have been remarkably successful in revitalizing the population. Still, those management choices aren’t getting any easier to make, as warming continues to rise; the only true fix for New England’s fishing industry is to slow the warming. Bear that in mind the next time you hear a politician complain about job-killing climate action policies.

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Are We About to Say Goodbye to Fish Sticks?

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Donald Trump Once Again Shows That He’s Probably Never Cracked Open a Bible in His Life

by YvonneMacadam24 Posted on September 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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David Brody asks Donald Trump, “Who is God to you?…You’ve contemplated this before, or have you contemplated this?” Here’s his reply:

Here we are on the Pacific Ocean. How did I ever own this? I bought it fifteen years ago. I made one of the great deals they say ever. I have no more mortgage on it as I will certify and represent to you. And I was able to buy this and make a great deal. That’s what I want to do for the country. Make great deals. We have to, we have to bring it back….

Wait. A question about God produces a stock speech about what a great dealmaker Trump is? Yep. Then this:

….but God is the ultimate. I mean God created this points to his golf course and nature surrounding it, and here’s the Pacific Ocean right behind us. So nobody, no thing, no there’s nothing like God.

“There’s nothing like God.” Okey doke. It sounds like Brody has his answer: Trump has not, in fact, ever contemplated the nature of God.

Brody defends Trump’s lack of a “biblically thorough answer” and says that Trump may well appeal anyway to the “I’m Sick and Tired” evangelical voter. That’s good to know. I had no idea that it was so easy to appeal to evangelical voters. Using the Trump metric, I think I could do pretty well myself. I guess all I have to do is denounce abortion and praise the Bible as the best book ever written. That sounds easy.

You know, to this day it remains part of conservative legend that a Washington Post article 20 years ago described evangelicals as “largely poor, uneducated and easily led.” It’s one of the seminal wellsprings of white Christian grievance culture. I don’t happen to know if evangelicals, on average, are poor and uneducated compared to the rest of us, but if Brody’s take on Trump is correct, it sure seems as though “easily led” was right on the mark.

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Donald Trump Once Again Shows That He’s Probably Never Cracked Open a Bible in His Life

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A Hawaiian clean energy plant makes electricity from seawater and ammonia

by HansNorthcote Posted on August 25, 2015

A Hawaiian clean energy plant makes electricity from seawater and ammonia

By on 25 Aug 2015commentsShare

The ocean is often considered to be the final frontier for energy, whether we’re talking about Arctic oil reserves or giant floating wind turbines. Now, a 40-foot tall tower on the Big Island of Hawai’i will harvest the oceans’ energy using a method that has renewable energy advocates drooling. It’s part of a new research facility and demo power plant that uses seawater of different temperatures to power a generator via turbine.

Most sources of energy (even the naughty ones!) originate from the sun’s rays, and the technology at the demo plant — a joint project of Makai Ocean Engineering and the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority — is simply experimenting with a different way to capture them. Oceans cover upward of 70 percent of the earth’s surface, which means that 70 percent of Earth-bound sunlight strikes the ocean — and that makes for a lot of unharnessed heat. The Makai project extracts this thermal energy from the warmed ocean water.

Popular Science has the story:

The plant uses a concept called Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC). Inside the system is a liquid that has a very low boiling point (meaning that it requires less energy to evaporate), like ammonia. As ammonia passes through the closed system of pipes, it goes through a section of pipes that have been warmed by seawater taken from the warm (77 degrees Fahrenheit), shallow waters. The ammonia vaporizes into a gas, which pushes a turbine, and generates power. Then, that ammonia gas passes through a section of pipes that are cooled by frigid (41 degrees Fahrenheit) seawater pumped up from depths of around 3,000 feet. The gas condenses in the cold temperatures, turning back into a liquid, and repeats the process all over again. The warm and cold waters are combined, and pumped back into the ocean.

Despite the cool factor, the type of OTEC technology powering the Makai plant isn’t the most efficient out there. It takes a good chunk of electricity to pump in (and out) all that deep seawater. The demo plant currently uses a 55 inch-wide pipeline pumping 270,000 gallons per minute in order to operate. There are also relatively few ocean sites — off the U.S. coast or otherwise — that allow for the depth and temperature gradients necessary for ideal OTEC conditions. But above all else, the Makai plant is a research facility, and teams of engineers are constantly fiddling with the heat exchangers in the name of efficiency gains.

Of course, the thermal plant would also be more efficient if it were actually offshore, closer to the chilly ocean depths. Making the expansionary move could boost the plant’s capacity to powering upwards of 120,000 homes — 1,000 times as many as Makai expects the demo plant to power today. The energy company projects that a single full-scale offshore plant would prevent the burning of 1.3 million barrels of oil annually.

Watch the rather patriotic video above for more info.

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A new energy plant in Hawaii generates power from ocean temperature extremes

, Popular Science.

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A Hawaiian clean energy plant makes electricity from seawater and ammonia

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Winter Is Coming. Here’s What to Expect Around the Country.

by ElishaRicketts Posted on August 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared in Slate and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

There’s a silver lining to all this talk of a super mega record-breaking Godzilla El Niño: The seasonal weather outlooks for this fall and winter will be some of the most accurate ever issued.

Last spring I profiled what El Niño—a periodic warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean—means for 60 places across the globe. Now that the event is in full swing, we have an even better idea of how US weather will be affected over the next nine months. That’s because El Niño acts like a heat engine that bends weather in a predictable pattern worldwide. Typically, the stronger El Niño is, the more predictable its influence. And this year’s event is on pace to be one of the strongest ever recorded. By some measures, it already is.

“We’re correct more than the usual proportion of the time when there’s an El Niño,” said Tony Barnston, chief forecaster at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, in a video statement. Barnston and his team—which actually invented successful El Niño prediction—recently issued an astounding forecast that essentially locks in a strong El Niño through next spring.

Globally, it’s now virtually certain that 2015 will be the hottest year in history. That’s a pretty remarkable thing to be able to say with more than four months of the year remaining. Last week data from NASA and the Japan Meteorological Agency confirmed that last month was the hottest July on record, joining every month so far this year except February and April as the warmest ever measured, according to calculations from Japan. As of mid-August, the Pacific Ocean had configured itself into an unprecedented temperature pattern, with record-setting warm water stretching from the equator all the way northward to Alaska. Thanks to the pattern’s expected persistence, we can already piece together a pretty good guess of the implications—months ahead of time.

So, without further ado, Here’s what to expect this winter:

Will California get some drought relief?

To answer everyone’s question, yes, this winter will likely bring above-normal rainfall to California. To answer a related question, no, it won’t end the drought. After a record-breaking four-year stretch, California has racked up a mind-boggling rainfall deficit: San Francisco is more than 31 inches behind—meaning this winter would have to feature a year and a half of extra rainfall during the six-month rainy season to break even. That very likely won’t happen, and even if it did, flooding and mudslides would create an even bigger problem than another year of drought would.

What’s more, there’s an especially big caveat this winter. Current temperatures off the West Coast are already far warmer than anything ever measured. The placement of that huge mass of warm water—cutely called “the blob” by local scientists—tends to work against heavy rainfall in California, and it’s a big reason why the drought has been so bad there the last couple of years. This’ll be an epic battle between dueling masses of warm water (El Niño vs. “the blob”) all winter long on the high seas of the North Pacific (and in the atmosphere above it), but as of now, it looks like California will indeed get some desperately needed rain—enough to matter, just not enough to end the drought.

Will the Pacific Northwest get some drought relief?

One place that probably won’t benefit from this winter’s El Niño is the Northwest. It’ll be another low-snowpack year, putting additional pressure on salmon, hydroelectricity, and ski resorts in the Cascades. Local officials are treating the current “wet drought”—in which rain and high temperatures have replaced snow for many parts of the Northwest—as a possible preview of global warming. Officials in Washington state, for example, are modifying river flows as a last-ditch effort to provide cooler water for migrating salmon. As this year has proved, a dearth of snow has lasting implications for several months—including an increased risk for huge wildfires come summer. Expect more of the same next year.

Sorry, Pacific Northwest. What about ski conditions in Colorado?

In sharp contrast to the Northwest, this winter could bring a good snowpack to the southern Rockies, a boon to tourism and a continuation of relatively recent drought-free conditions in Colorado.

A heavy snowfall would also be a significant boost to the fragile Colorado River basin, which is inching toward first-ever mandatory water restrictions after decades of over-allocation have pushed Lake Mead to record low levels. Lots of snow this winter in Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico could help delay Arizona’s inevitable droughtpocalypse by another year or two.

Back to droughts. How are things looking for South Florida?

The driest spot east of the Rockies right now is in southern Florida, where this summer’s rainy season has been the worst in 70 years. That’s a big problem, because as sea levels rise, the Miami area needs a steady supply of freshwater as a counterforce against saltwater intrusion and as a salve for Everglades restoration. Ultimately, this is a battle the region cannot win, but for now southern Florida is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on new pumps to keep the sea at bay.

The polar vortex last winter was brutal. Will it be bad again?

If the last two years are any indication, winters in the east are getting weirder. There are lots of theories for this, including the exceptionally warm Pacific Ocean and melting Arctic sea ice, as well as plain old natural variability. A broad signal for further rounds of extreme cold air outbreaks, especially for the Southeast, is present again this winter.

Should everyone in Boston move?

There’s good and bad news for Boston and other East Coasters. It almost certainly won’t be as cold as last year in the Northeast, but fierce Nor’easters could be commonplace, bringing a return of heavy snowstorms.

Back in 2012, in my New York City weather column in the Wall Street Journal, I did a quick analysis that showed El Niño winters brought an additional 10 inches of snowfall to the Big Apple, all else being equal. To get especially strong winter storms in the Northeast, the large-scale El Niño signal (which increases the amount of wintertime moisture available along the East Coast) needs to coincide with a weak and wavy jet stream. That’s a recipe for heavy snow, even if temperatures aren’t as brutally cold as the last two winters. Watch for big dips in the North Atlantic Oscillation (a rough approximation for jet stream strength) this winter for signs a big storm could be on the way.

Update: You forgot the entire middle part of the country! What’s going to happen in Texas and in the Midwest?

Sorry! After a very rainy summer, drought has reappeared in eastern Texas. But since El Niño tends to bring above normal rainfall to the South during the winter months, the current dry spell should quickly come to an end.

Further north, the coming winter should be warmer than average in the Upper Midwest. That’s got to be welcome news: The region has endured exceptionally cold stretches leading to record-setting ice cover on the Great Lakes in recent years, but snowfall should be below normal this time around, giving cities like Chicago and Minneapolis a well-deserved break.

It’s August. How the heck did you come up with this forecast?

To make the above predictions, I took a blend of the most recent North American Multi-Model Ensemble, my go-to source for seasonal forecast information, and a blend of the large-scale weather during four past El Niños that I think are particularly close fits with the current one. Those four El Niños are: 1957–58, 1986–87, 1987–88, and 1997–98. Each of those El Niños peaked at least at “moderate” strength (more than 1 degree Celsius above normal in a key section of the tropical Pacific) and at the same time, each of those four El Niños also featured a strongly positive Pacific Decadal Oscillation—more than 1 degree Celsius above normal across a specific region of the north Pacific off the west coast of North America.

Got any weather maps?

You can find the raw seasonal forecast maps I used to make this forecast here.

Link: 

Winter Is Coming. Here’s What to Expect Around the Country.

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