Tropical Storm Karl becomes hurricane over Gulf link

From space the three storms, currently all hurricanes, are clearly visible

Tropical Storm Karl has been upgraded to a hurricane having gathered strength as it passes over the Gulf of Mexico.

The US National Hurricane Center (NHC) says Karl is currently a Category One hurricane, but could strengthen more.
Before moving into the Gulf, Karl made landfall in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, where it downed trees and left about 10,000 homes without electricity.
Out in the Atlantic two more hurricanes are churning, including a powerful Category Four storm, Hurricane Igor.

On Wednesday, both Igor and Hurricane Julia were classified as Category Four storms, the first time in a decade that two simultaneous Category Four storms have been seen.

However, according to the NHC Hurricane Julia has weakened to a Category Two storm on the scale of one to five and is currently pushing sustained winds of 165 km/h (105mph).
Life-threatening swells Igor's top wind speed has increased to 230 km/h - making it the most powerful hurricane of the season.
The NHC describes Igor as "large and powerful" and while the hurricane is not expected to make landfall for days, forecasters say that Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Bahamas are likely to feel the effects of storm swells by early on Thursday, and the US East Coast by the weekend.
"These swells are likely to cause life-threatening surf and rip current conditions," the NHC warned.

Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula was hit by heavy rain and wind as Karl made landfall

Hurricane Karl's maximum sustained wind speed is put at 120km/h.
When the storm passed over Yucatan, the sparsely populated peninsula was hit by heavy rain.
The NHC warned that up to 20cm (20in) of rain could fall, causing "life-threatening flash floods and mud slides" particularly in mountainous areas.
Twenty-five people have been killed and almost a million people been affected by floods already this month in Mexico, which is in the grips of its annual rainy season.
Following Karl's increase in power, a hurricane warning was issued for Mexico's coast from Palma Sola to Cabo Rojo, and a tropical storm warning issued for the stretch of coast from Cabo Rojo to La Cruz to the north of the storm and from Palma Sola to Veracruz in the south.
Karl is currently located about 500km to the south-east of Tuxpan, Mexico, moving westwards at a speed of about 19 km/h.
It is threatening to "pass very nearby" Pemex oil company installations, Jaime Albarran of the National Weather Service told the Agence France Press news agency.
The state-owned oil operator has said it has no immediate plans to halt production because of the approaching hurricane.

NASA calls Igor 'monstrous hurricane' link

Hurricane-force winds extend outward from the center of the storm up to 45 miles

Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Respo

A view of Hurricane Igor from NASA's Aqua satellite taken on Sept. 13. Igor shows all the characteristics of a strong hurricane, including a distinct eye and spiral arms spanning hundreds of kilometers.

Hurricane Igor, currently churning across the Atlantic as a major Category 4 storm, has been followed by NASA satellites, and dubbed a "monstrous hurricane," in a NASA statement.

Igor is so large that it is the same distance from one end of the storm to the other as it is from Boston, Mass., to Richmond, Va., some 550 miles (885 kilometers). That's a 10-hour drive.
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station were so impressed by Igor's immensity that they nicknamed it, "Igor the Terrible."
Igor's winds have weakened slightly, hitting a maximum of 145 mph (233 kph), but it remains a major Category 4 hurricane. While it's projected path is somewhat uncertain, it could make a direct hit on Bermuda in the next three or four days.
But even if it doesn't make a direct hit, Igor is so large that the National Hurricane Center noted that Bermuda can be buffeted by winds of hurricane-force or tropical storm-force on its current track. Hurricane-force winds extend outward from the center of the storm up to 45 miles (72 km), while tropical-storm-force winds extend as far as 225 miles (362 km) from the storm's center.
Igor is accompanied by Hurricane Julia, also a Category 4 hurricane, in the Atlantic, and Tropical Storm Karl in the Gulf of Mexico, which made landfall at Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula earlier today (Sept. 15). Julia is not expected to be a threat to land, but Karl is expected to move over the Yucatan and back out over the Gulf before hitting the coast of mainland Mexico.

New Clue to How Last Ice Age Ended

September 9, 2010 by Megan Hahn   link

As the last ice age was ending, about 13,000 years ago at the beginning of the myan calender, a final blast of cold hit Europe, and for a thousand years or more, it felt like the ice age had returned. But oddly, despite bitter cold winters in the north, Antarctica was heating up. For the two decades since ice core records revealed that Europe was cooling at the same time Antarctica was warming over this thousand-year period, scientists have looked for an explanation.

Thick ice once filled New Zealand's Irishman Basin

A new study in Nature brings them a step closer by establishing that New Zealand was also warming, indicating that the deep freeze up north, called the Younger Dryas for the white flower that grows near glaciers, bypassed much of the southern hemisphere.
“Glaciers in New Zealand receded dramatically at this time, suggesting that much of the southern hemisphere was warming with Antarctica,” said study lead author, Michael Kaplan, a geochemist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “Knowing that the Younger Dryas cooling in the northern hemisphere was not a global event brings us closer to understanding how Earth finally came out of the ice age.”
Ice core records show that warming of the southern hemisphere, starting 13,000 years ago, coincided with rising levels of the heat-trapping gas, carbon dioxide. The study in Nature is the first to link this spike in CO₂ to the impressive shrinking of glaciers in New Zealand. The scientists estimate that glaciers lost more than half of their extent over a thousand years, and that their creep to higher elevations was a response to the local climate warming as much as 1 degree C.
To reconstruct New Zealand’s past climate, the study’s authors tracked one glacier’s retreat on South Island’s Irishman Basin. When glaciers advance, they drag mounds of rock and dirt with them. When they retreat, cosmic rays bombard these newly exposed ridges of rock and dirt, called moraines. By crushing this material and measuring the build-up of the cosmogenic isotope beryllium 10, scientists can pinpoint when the glacier receded. The beryllium-10 method allowed the researchers to track the glacier’s retreat upslope through time and indirectly calculate how much the climate warmed.
The overall trigger for the end of the last ice age came as Earth’s orientation toward the sun shifted, about 20,000 years ago, melting the northern hemisphere’s large ice sheets. As fresh melt water flooded the North Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf Stream weakened, driving the north back into the ice age. During this time, temperatures in Greenland dropped by about 15 degrees C. For years, scientists have tried to explain how the so-called Younger Dryas cooling fit with the simultaneous warming of Antarctica that eventually spread across the globe.
The Nature paper discusses the two dominant explanations without taking sides. In one, the weakening of the Gulf Stream reconfigures the planet’s wind belts, pushing warm air and seawater south, and pulling carbon dioxide from the deep ocean into the air, causing further warming. In the other, the weakened Gulf Stream triggers a global change in ocean currents, allowing warm water to pool in the south, heating up the climate.
Bob Anderson, a geochemist at Lamont-Doherty who argues the winds played the dominant role, says the Nature paper adds another piece to the puzzle. “This is one of the most pressing problems in paleoclimatology because it tells us about the fundamental processes linking climate changes in the northern and southern hemispheres,” he said. “Understanding how regional changes influence global climate will allow scientists to more accurately predict regional variations in rain and snowfall.”
Other researchers involved in the study: Joerg Schaefer and Roseanne Schwartz, also of Lamont-Doherty; George Denton and Aaron Putnam, University of Maine; David Barrell, GNS Science, New Zealand; Trevor Chinn, Alpine and Polar Processes Consultancy, New Zealand; Bjørn Andersen, University of Oslo; Robert Finkel, University of California, Berkeley; Alice Doughty, Victoria University of Wellington.

NZ Emerged From Last Ice Age While Europe Shivered

Friday, 10 September 2010, 10:25 am
Press Release: GNS Science link NZ Emerged From Last Ice Age While Europe Shivered, Study Finds
A geological study of a South Island glacier shows that New Zealand began warming up 13,000 years ago at the same time as Europe sank back into an ice-age freeze.
This 1000-year cold period in Europe is known as the ‘Younger Dryas’, after a cold-tolerant species of rose that became widespread at that time.
Previous studies of core samples from Arctic and Antarctica ice sheets revealed a climate see-saw at the end of the last ice age, with warming in the north matching cooling in the south, and vice versa.
But scientific debate has raged over whether the Arctic or the Antarctic conditions were the more important influence worldwide.
The study involved 10 scientists led by Michael Kaplan of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in the United States. The group, including two New Zealanders, studied glacier moraines at the head of the Irishman Stream in the Ben Ohau Range on the eastern side of the Southern Alps.
The findings are published this week in the international science journal Nature.By using improved methods for dating glacier moraines, the Southern Alps study has shown that the Antarctic climate signal matched the behaviour of glaciers in New Zealand.
Flowing glaciers carry rocks and dirt which build up mounds and ridges, called moraines, at the downhill end of the glacier. When glaciers retreat, cosmic rays bombard these moraines, producing concentrations of distinctive isotopes in the glacial rocks.
Scientists can work out when a glacier retreated by measuring the amount of the cosmogenic isotope beryllium-10 in moraines.
The beryllium-10 dating method enabled the scientists to track the glacier’s retreat through time and indirectly work out how much New Zealand’s climate had warmed.
The scientists showed that the Irishman Stream glacier more than halved in size over 1000 years and that this shrinkage was due to local climate warming of as much as 1 degree Celsius.
David Barrell of GNS Science, one of the authors of the paper, said Irishman Stream was the perfect target for this study.
“Although no glacier survives there today, the ice-age glacier lay in a semi-circular basin with simple topography and the moraines are perfectly preserved fossil landforms,” Mr Barrell said.
“We could reconstruct the shape and size of the glacier to a high degree of certainty and estimate the rise in the height of its snowline over time. Thanks to the precise dating, we knew exactly what time interval was represented.
“Glaciers are remarkable thermometers for average summer temperatures, because the summer melt determines the average position of the snowline. It is exceedingly rare to find such a perfectly preserved set of landforms for this type of study. There is probably nowhere else in Australasia where we could have obtained such precise results for this critical time period at the end of the last ice age.”
The scientists offer two alternative explanations for temperatures in the northern and southern hemispheres being out of sync at the end of the last ice age.
In one, the weakening of the Gulf Stream reconfigured the planet’s wind belts, pushing warm air and seawater south, and pulling carbon dioxide out of the ocean and into the air, causing further warming.
The other explanation has the weakened Gulf Stream triggering a worldwide change in ocean currents, allowing warm air to pool in the south, heating up the climate there.
According to study lead author, Dr Michael Kaplan, a geochemist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, “Knowing that the Younger Dryas cooling in the northern hemisphere was not a global event brings us closer to understanding how Earth finally came out of the ice age.”

LIFE ON THIS EARTH JUST CHANGED
Death of the North Atlantic Current
linkThe latest satellite data establishes that the North Atlantic Current (also called the North Atlantic Drift) no longer exists and along with it the Norway Current. These two warm water currents are actually part of the same system that has several names depending on where in the Atlantic Ocean it is. The entire system is a key part of the planet’s heat regulatory system; it is what keeps Ireland and the United Kingdom mostly ice free and the Scandinavia countries from being too cold; it is what keeps the entire world from another Ice Age. This Thermohaline Circulation System is now dead in places and dying in others.

This ‘river’ of warm water that moves through the Atlantic Ocean is called, in various places, the South Atlantic Current, the North Brazil Current, the Caribbean Current, the Yucatan Current, the Loop Current, the Florida Current, the Gulf Stream, the North Atlantic Current (or North Atlantic Drift) and the Norway Current.
 
Early Snow in Russia
Russia has seen it’s first snow accumulation of the season. According to Rutgers Global Snow Lab, Russia doesn’t normally receive snow until the second week in September. More is forecast for the next week, as well as in Norway and Sweden. Southeast Greenland is expecting heavy snow. Much of The UK and Ireland are expecting cold weather during the next week, as is Moscow. Temperatures on the Greenland ice sheet will be dipping down to near -25C. Nice August weather!

Never before so much rain in Germany
31 Aug 10 – Germany received more rain in August than in any August since records began in 1881, the German Weather Service (DWD) announced Monday. “We have measured more than double the amount of rain as the long-term average for August,” said DWD spokesman Uwe Kirsche. About 157 litres per square metre had fallen on average across the nation, a new record. The previous record, set in August 1960, brought  “only” 134 liter / sq m. That compares with the average over many years of just 77 litres / m. 

Coldest South Australia August in 35 years
ADELAIDE has recorded its coldest August in more than 35 years. The city had an average temperature of 14.8C for the last month of winter. That compared with a usual average of 16.6C for August. Bureau of Meteorology senior forecaster Allan Beattie said the previous record for a cold August was in 1970 when the average temperature was 14.4C. But the coldest August was in 1951 when the average temperature was 14.1C. Adelaide’s winter this year also had a below-average temperature of 15.5C, compared with the usual average of 16C.

Snow in the Alps a month earlier than normal
30 Aug 10 – Snow in Voralberg, a month earlier than “normal”. Many farmers still had their cattle in the fields! Global warming seems far removed from these regions. It’s in Dutch, but you can use an online translator to get the gist of it. click here! 

Half a meter of snow in Norway
I live in Norway. Here is what was in the news today! The winter just arrived, with a half a meter of snow. It snowed several places in the mountains in eastern Norway, although it is still only August. “This was totally unexpected,” says Anne Wangen to Nettavisen.
…..
“There have been large amounts of snow, between 40 and 50 centimeters,” says Wangen. It is many years since there has been snow so early in Juvasshytta, located 1840 meters above sea level.
“It has happened that there has been so much snow in August, but it is many years since the last time. It is not normal anyway, and there was no indication of a time,” says Wangen.