Nat'l Snow & Ice Data Center

NOAA has created a startling animation of this year’s record shrinkage of ice in the Arctic Ocean. The 34-second clip zooms in from a western hemisphere view and presents as a time-lapse, tracking the ice from January 1 to September 14. This is the first time since NOAA started using satellites to monitor the Arctic in 1979, that sea ice area has shrunk to less than 4,000,000 square kilometers. What happens in the polar regions has a profound effect on the world’s climate.

As head of NOAA’s Coastal Services Center, Margaret Davidson has her eye firmly on the future of the country’s coasts, and the threats imposed from rising seas and more extreme weather. Davidson is based in South Carolina, but is a close watcher of California, where coast and climate may be on a collision course.

Climate Watch Senior Editor Craig Miller spoke with Davidson about sea level rise and the California coast. Their conversation will air this evening on This Week in Northern California, on KQED Public Television 9.

Here’s a clip that’s not included the TV broadcast.

Read more about San Francisco’s plans to slow erosion and prepare for sea level rise at Ocean Beach:

• Ocean Beach Bulletin: Ocean Beach Master Plan Charts Course for Future
• SPUR’s Ocean Beach Master Plan website
• Climate Watch stories on Ocean Beach

NOAA

Satellite imagery shows the storm that spawned tornadoes across the Midwest earlier this month.

Jane Lubchenco, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, answered questions about the agency’s budget today in a hearing held by the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment.

Lubchenco began by sending her condolences to people who lost loved ones to the tornadoes that tore across the Midwest in the past week. This year, she said, now ranks in the top five for the number of tornadoes occurring in the first two months of the year. She said making the nation “weather-ready” is a top priority in her budget request for Fiscal Year 2013, which comes to $5.1 billion, an increase of $153 million over last year’s.

Not all programs get more money in the budget request. NOAA is asking for nearly $20 million less than last year for the National Weather Service (NWS), a point with which Andy Harris, Maryland Republican and chair of the subcommittee, took issue.

“Obviously climate change got a large increase, climate research. Weather service gets a decrease,” he said. “Is looking at decades in the future more important than looking a week into the future? I would say some people in the Midwest might disagree with that.”

Lubchenco said the Weather Service savings resulted from administrative efficiencies. And, she said, understanding the climate part of the equation is important.

“The investment in understanding how the climate system works influences directly our ability to provide outlooks — for example, with drought — severe weather such as heavy precipitation events, heat waves, those kinds of things,” she said. “Climate research is designed to help us understand how the climate system works. That helps us understand what will happen months ahead, years ahead, and decades ahead.”

Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican from California’s 46th District in Orange County, was also concerned about weather monitoring. He grilled Lubchenco on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network, citing a report from the Government Accountability Office that found that 42% of the network’s weather stations don’t meet all of NOAA’s standards.

“It certainly seems to me that before you’re going to go into all these other calculations you’re going to want to fix that problem,” he said. “And I guess what I’m hearing is, no you’re not going to go after those stations and that money that’s been requested to increase climate research, will have to just work around those figures that may or may not be accurate.”

Lubchenco didn’t have the answer; she said she’d have to get back to him.

Democrat Jerry McNerney, from California’s 11th District, which includes parts of the Central Valley, the Delta and the Bay Area, expressed concern that funding for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education had been cut. Lubchenco agreed, calling those cuts “the most painful” for her, but said NOAA’s highest priorities are saving lives and property.

Dr. Seuss, Bartholomew and the Oobleck (1949)

"And it's going to keep on falling," he shouted, "until your whole great marble palace tumbles down!"

From droughts and wildfires to tornadoes and hurricanes – and let’s not forget flooding, hail and that Halloween snowstorm — last year will go down as one of the most extreme weather years on record.

This week the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released the final tally for 2011.

The two latest disasters to make the grim list are September’s Tropical Storm Lee which swept up the East Coast to cause record flooding and 21 deaths, and July’s severe weather that brought high winds, hail, and flooding to the Rocky Mountains and the Midwest, and took two lives.

Across the planet it was the 15th consecutive year of above-average temperatures. Here in the U.S., the portion of the nation in extreme drought or very wet conditions was the highest ever:  58%, and that’s nearly three times normal. No surprise that temperatures in Texas made for the second warmest year on record, with the drought there surpassing the severity of ones in the 1930s and 1960s.  Seven states across the Midwest and Northeast had their wettest years ever.

Even effects from the El Nino Southern Oscilliation (ENSO) — and it’s current, opposite La Nina phase — are changing, according to NOAA; both El Nino and La Nina years are tending to be warmer. The 2011 global surface temps during this La Nina were, “as warm as anything we’ve seen in the past,” said Thomas Karl, director of the agency’s subcommittee on Global Change Research.

The global La Nina/El Nino graph shows a steep rise in temps since 1990 and last year, the phenomenon was responsible for the warmest summers recorded in Norway and Spain, the second warmest for the UK. “The extreme conditions witnessed in 2011 are consistent with trends driven by global warming,” Karl said. Of course, no single year’s data necessarily links to long-term climate changes, but scientists say last year’s weather roller coaster is consistent with what they expect from global climate change.

Over the next three months, NOAA expects temps in California to be close to normal, slightly cooler north of the Golden Gate, and precipitation will be slightly below normal south of San Francisco.  Still sunny in here in L.A.  Send (some) rain.  Not too much.

You can find all the hard numbers and graphs on the NOAA website.

NOAA

Those grim numbers are part of the reason why the country’s top weather official is calling for better and smarter observation tools, new climate models and a new national readiness.National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Administrator Jane Lubchenco shared those stats with scientists here at the American Geophysicial Union’s fall meeting in San Francisco (#AGU11), many of whom are giving presentations about how to better forecast these events and measure them.”

I think that people have to appreciate how very bizarre the weather has been this year,” Lubchenco told us in an interview following her keynote presentation. “And it’s pretty clear that for some of those events like heat waves, droughts, really big intensive rainfall events – those we can connect the dots to climate change pretty convincingly.”

Lubchenco showed the hall NOAA’s Extreme Climate Index that takes in highs and lows of heat and cold, rain, drought and hurricanes that made landfall from 1920 to 2011. While the index has been high in the past, the change from 1970 on is “quite pronounced and qualitatively different” from previous years, said Lubchenco.

She also quoted Munich Reinsurance Company, which says the frequency of extreme events has risen steadily over the past 20 years, tripling during that period. It’s one of the reasons why the insurance company now offers climate change micro insurance to farmers in the Caribbean, and why companies here in the States are struggling to recalculate their risks.

Lubchenco tossed out to the crowd two more stats from the United Nations and the White House Office of Science and Technology, which both say it is “very likely” that large-scale changes in climate are influencing extreme weather events. Plus, all ten indicators on the American Meteorological Association’s climate scale along with NOAA’s own National Climate Data Center show changes consistent with a warming climate.

Lubchenco would like to see the country develop what she calls “critical environmental Intelligence:” better and broader climate information and more finely tuned weather warnings that can be used by citizens, emergency managers and businesses. It’s already happening to some extent: New York City is using NOAA’s Digital Coast tool for flooding and sea level rise to revamp its infrastructure in Manhattan, for example.

She ended her address with a forecast of “increased overall warming, an amplified water cycle, more extreme events and more variability, more wild weather and wild swings in weather,” and a plea to keep budgets intact to monitor all of this.

“I can tell you that I think the road ahead in fraught with great uncertainty,” she told the gathering. “Observing systems, research, high-performance computing are all absolute prerequisites to producing weather and climate forecasts and all of these are at great risk. We need to make sure the current economic and political landscapes don’t erode our abilities to provide accurate reliable forecasts.”

nasa hq/Flickr

Launch of the NPP satellite from Vandenberg Air Force Base on Friday.

In a joint effort to improve observations of the Earth from space, NASA and NOAA launched a new satellite on Friday from Vandenberg Air Force base near Lompoc, CA. The satellite carries with it a suite of next-generation technologies and tools that the agencies say will enable scientists to continue monitoring climate change and weather patterns as many existing Earth-observing satellites are reaching the outer edge of their life expectancies.

The new satellite is part of the NPOESS Preparatory Project (NPP), which aims to monitor the entire planet, collecting and processing data on the Earth’s weather, atmosphere, oceans, land, and near-space environment.  The agencies say this data will not only help with monitoring climate change, but also with natural disaster prediction and planning, and military strategies.  NASA describes the NPP as a bridge between the aging Earth Observation System (EOS) satellites and the “forthcoming” Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) satellites, which are scheduled to begin launching in 2016.

NASA lists the key science objectives and capabilities of NPP as the following:

• Climate change — contribute to long-term records of global environmental data critical for understanding the dynamics of climate change
• Health of the ozone layer — daily measurements of the atmospheric ozone layer that will determine whether the ozone layer is recovering as expected
• Natural disasters — monitor wildfires, volcanic eruptions, snowstorms, droughts, floods, hurricanes and dust plumes
• Weather predictions — a sounding instrument will collect information about cloud cover, atmospheric temperatures, humidity and other variables critical to accurate weather prediction
• Vegetation — map global land vegetation and quantify changes in plant productivity to understand the global carbon cycle and monitor agricultural processes to predict and respond to food shortages and famines
• Global ice cover — monitor changes to Earth’s sea ice, land ice and glaciers to track the pace of climate change
• Air pollution — monitor the spread of health-sapping pollutants such as soot, particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide
• Temperatures — maintain a global record of atmospheric, land surface and sea surface temperatures critical to understanding the long-term dynamics of climate change
• Earth’s energy budget — make measurements to determine how much energy is entering and exiting Earth’s atmosphere

As The New York Times and Popular Mechanics report, it’s been a bumpy road getting the NPP program off the ground, and the budget for future satellites and launches is far from secure in the current economic climate.  Too long a delay, scientists warn, could affect not just the nation’s ability to monitor climate change, but could also impact weather prediction and natural disaster preparedness.

For more about the NPP satellite, check out this video from Space.com

Or, if you’d rather have it explained to you by a cartoon polar bear, you can watch this NASA video for the basics:

Craig Miller

Ocean Acidification topped the list of concerns for a panel of marine scientists opening the annual Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Miami this week.

The topic was oceans, and when moderator Nancy Baron of the science education group, COMPASS asked the scientists to “Tell us how it is, really,” panelist and top NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco said that rapidly rising acidity in the ocean is a “huge challenge.”

“It’s the most important under-reported global environmental story today,” she said. “The ocean has become 30% more acidic over the last century, and this massive change is likely to have serious impacts, and it’s likely to get worse.”

And where it’s playing out first, said Lubchenco, is the Pacific Northwest. Coastal Washington and Oregon, she said, are “ground zero” for ocean acidification, due to upwelling from the deep ocean and local runoff that exacerbates the already acidifying sea.

An increasingly acidic ocean, she said, is sometimes referred to as “osteoporosis of the sea” because it affects the “hard parts” of organisms, causing shells to break down, or not form at all. This is not only lethal for the organisms themselves, she said, but it also disrupts the entire food chain. Lubchenco said new research is showing that rising acidity also affects organisms’ sense of smell and impacts reproduction. “This is an unfolding story,” she said. “There’s a lot we don’t know.”

Lubchenco said more research and monitoring is needed, but that’s unlikely to happen in this tough economic climate. She recommended that action be taken at the local level to reduce runoff into the sea, particularly nitrogen pollution, and to prevent overfishing and invasive species.  But the only long-term solution, she said, is for the world to reduce carbon emissions.

For an explanation of how carbon emissions influence ocean acidification, and what that means for the world’s marine ecosystems, check out this four-minute video from NOAA.

A rice field in the Sacramento Valley. According to NOAA, rice paddies are a source of methane emissions. Photo: Craig Miller

Despite all the focus on regulating CO2 as a way to combat global warming, a new NOAA study finds that to really put the brakes on climate change, the world can’t ignore the other greenhouse gases.

The study takes an inventory of non-carbon greenhouse gases including methane, which emits from landfills and farms, and nitrous oxide, which primarily comes from soil management and combustion. Per molecule, the study notes that these gases have a stronger muscle for trapping heat compared with carbon dioxide, but they don’t last as long in the atmosphere.

“This study looks at what would happen if society decided to go after the short-lived greenhouse gases, as well as CO2.” said Jim Butler, Director of Global Monitoring at NOAA and author of the study.

Short-lived is a relative term in atmospheric science. Butler said it takes decades for methane to fully run its course in the atmosphere, during which its potential to trap heat is much greater, even though its share in the atmosphere is pennies compared to that of CO2.

Carbon dioxide sticks around much longer, some of it for thousands of years, said Butler.

“CO2 is still the big dog in the fight,” he said.

The warming impacts from all human-based greenhouse gases. At 390ppm, CO2 leads the pack but other greenhouse gases like methane, at 1.8ppm, and nitrous oxide, at 0.3ppm, have a measurable impact.. Table: NOAA

Butler said that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now at 390 parts per million and is responsible for 63% of all greenhouse gas warming influence, as shown in the NOAA chart above.  The study equates this warming influence to the heat generated from nine trillion, 100-watt light bulbs.

Butler likens this persistent heating effect to a hot electric blanket.

“If we cut emissions, the [heat of] blanket would still go up by a bit,” said Butler.  “We can’t turn the blanket back down very fast.”

A graph showing the outcomes between the current emissions trajectory (in red) and a scenario where CO2 and non CO2 greenhouse gases are cut by 80% of 2008 levels (in green). Graph: NOAA

The NOAA scientists graphed the “electric blanket” heating outcomes under different emissions scenarios. Even under the most optimistic scenario, where 80% of all greenhouse gases are cut, the study finds it will take 40 years before the blanket’s thermostat goes down.

“The long-term necessity of cutting carbon dioxide emissions shouldn’t diminish the effectiveness of short-term action,” said Butler in a press release. “Managing emissions of non-carbon dioxide gases is clearly an opportunity to make additional contributions.”

The tidal gauge off of San Francisco's Fort Point is the oldest in North America.

The Ocean Climate Center is housed in a collection of century-old military buildings on the edge of the Bay at Crissy Field. It couldn’t be a more picturesque — and critical — location. Adjacent to the oldest tidal gauge in North America, the center will allow cash-strapped federal agencies to pool resources into climate change research and work with natural resource managers to combat negative impacts on the marine ecosystem and communities along the coastline.

DeWayne Cecil of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said the center is a first-of-its-kind collaboration among federal agencies on the West Coast, including NOAA, the Department of Interior parks and marine fisheries services, and the US Geological Survey (USGS).

“We all have dwindling budgets to do basic and applied research to respond to societal needs,” said Cecil. “As those budgets dwindle we can put together centers like this where we can all work together to leverage our funding.”

Patrick Barnard, a coastal geologist with USGS, said the center was located in San Francisco because of the degree of scientific research already underway here. The center’s reach will stretch across the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, from the Farrallon Islands to Suisun Bay and along the coastline up to Point Reyes.

A $100 million research grant has been designated for the first joint project to study sea level rise and storms along the coast and the communities most vulnerable. Barnard said the results of the two-year study will be translated into tools for community planning.

“All these agencies working together gives more credence to the data that comes out of it instead of one isolated institution,” Barnard said. “The collaboration is important in getting more of a foothold in the public mindset in what’s going to happen.”

The center will also be hosting real-time “webinars” for the public to ask questions of scientists. A separate visitors’ center is planned to open in a few years, to explain how the changing climate will affect the Bay Area.

Alison Hawkes is a San Francisco-based environmental journalist and co-founder of the Way Out West News website.

People along the West Coast from Seattle to San Diego, who have shivered through an unusually cool summer, can be forgiven for being just a little bit jealous of residents of the East Coast, where warm temperature records have repeatedly been smashed this summer. During June, July and part of August as well, it seemed that many coastal areas of the West were missing out on summer entirely.

Temperature departures from average during July, 2010. Note the cooler-than-average weather along the California coast. (Credit: NOAA/NCDC)

For example, whereas Washington, D.C. tied its record for the warmest month on record, with an average temperature of 83.1 degrees F in July, San Francisco recorded its coolest average July maximum temperature since 1971. Only one day reached the 70 degree mark in San Francisco during July. The Climate Central infographic below shows some of the contrasting statistics from early to mid-summer. The data goes through the end of July, but in general the pattern of warmer weather in the East and cooler conditions along the West Coast has continued through much of August, with a few exceptions. For example, a heat wave briefly brought record warmth to the West Coast in mid-to-late August, but such heat was the exception there this summer.

Comparison of early to mid-summer conditions along the eastern seaboard vs. the West Coast. The data in this graphic goes through the end of July. (Credit: NOAA/NCDC; California State Climatology Office. Design by Russell Freedman.)
Click on the image for a larger version.

The cool temperatures along parts of the West Coast may be related to the emergence of a La Nina event in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, which is characterized by cooler-than-average water temperatures. In addition, an area of cool waters persisted offshore of California, Oregon and Washington, and this may have contributed to the below average conditions as well. Persistent onshore winds blew cooler air into coastal California during July, according to the National Climatic Data Center. The cool water temperatures off the California coast, extending northward into the Gulf of Alaska, can be seen in the image below, along with the La Nina conditions along the equator.

Sea surface temperature anomalies from May 30, 2010 to August 28, 2010. Note the cool waters in the equatorial Pacific, related to La Nina. Cool water anomalies can also be found off California, Oregon, and Washington. (Credit: NOAA/ESRL)