I remember joking with my friend Ana about how her name would be attached to the first named storm in the 2015 Atlantic Hurricane season. It turns out Ana is an exceptional individual. Both of them.
Ana Miller as Aisha Lefu in “The Recompense: A Star Wars Fan Film.”Ana, my friend, is an actor and is currently engaged in a project I’ll be telling you more about later. But in the meantime, you can visit this page and find out about a new and very interesting Star Wars related crowd-funded production called The Recompense. Give them money.
Meanwhile, back in the Atlantic Ocean, Tropical Storm Ana has formed, nearly three weeks before the official start of the Atlantic Hurricane Season. A few days ago Ana was a disorganized disturbance (I’m talking about the storm here) and now Ana is a full on tropical storm tracking the very warm Gulf Stream. Winds are steady at 60 miles per hour, gusting to 70.
From the National Weather Service:
Deep convection has increased somewhat near the center of the storm, and SFMR observations from the Air Force Hurricane Hunters continue to support an intensity of 50 kt. Ana will be moving over the cooler waters to the northwest of the Gulf Stream later today, and water vapor imagery shows a belt of upper-level northerly flow advancing toward the tropical cyclone. The decreasing sea surface temperatures and increasing northerly shear should cause Ana to weaken as it nears the coast. The official intensity forecast is similar to that from the previous package, and very close to the latest intensity model consensus, IVCN.
Tropical Storm Ana, the first storm of the Atlantic Hurricane Season.The initial motion estimate is 320/3. The track forecast reasoning remains basically unchanged from the past few advisories. Global models continue to predict that the blocking mid-level ridge to the north of Ana will shift eastward and weaken over the next couple of days. These models also show a broad trough moving from the central to the eastern U.S. over the next 72 hours or so. This should result in the cyclone turning northward and north-northeastward with a gradual increase in forward speed. The official track forecast is similar to the previous one and in good agreement with the latest dynamical model consensus, TVCN.
Hey, good news, the NWS is implementing the long-ago announced policy of GETTING RID OF ALL CAPS!!1!! Meanwhile, Ana the Storm is expected to strike the coast of South Carolina, and/or North Carolina, tonight. The storm, once over land, will turn northeast and make its way back out to sea off Delmarva, and eventually menace, a little, southern New England. The middle of the storm will probably be crossing the Carolina coast about 8:00 AM Sunday, and what is left of it will be re-joining the coast and the Atlantic early Monday.
I just did an interview on Green Diva Radio, and talked about a lot of climate change science news. For those who want to see the sources, here is a quick summary:
On Friday, NASA and NOAA are expected to announce that 2014 was the hottest year on record. I had been planning to write an extensive blog post going into all sorts of details about how that works, how they calculate it, etc. But then the people at Climate Nexus wrote a post that would have blown mine out of the water with the detail and informtation provided in it. Go here to read this excellent post: 2014: Putting The Hottest Year Ever in Perspective.
More than one new paper has come out describing new work on melting glaciers, especially in the Antarctic. One of the papers is described by an author, John Abraham, in this blog post: The Antarctic ice sheet is a sleeping giant, beginning to stir. You can get to the original paper via a link in that blog post. Bottom line is that the polar ice sheets are melting faster and faster every time someone looks. There is also some interesting stuff about melting glaciers, gravity, and sea level rise. Very much worth a look.
There is also a new sea level rise curve. I’ve not looked at this so I have no comments on it, but you can see a write up here: A new sea level curve.
The first in a series of predictions for the 2015 Atlantic Hurricane seasons has come out: 2015 Hurricane Zone Predictions: Stronger Season with Three U.S. Hot Spots. Bottom line is that it will be a pretty average hurricane season, which, in turn, means more hurricanes and more severe hurricanes than during the last few years, which have been rather anemic. Which, by the way, is probably a side effect of climate change.
There has been some recent work confirming some earlier work, suggesting that a lot of “small” volcanoes have created a lot of dust contributing to cooling of the Earth’s atmosphere, slowing greenhouse gas caused warming. Despite what at lease one of these items says, we are now pretty sure that most of the surface temperature slowdown is because most of that heat is going into the ocean (see this), but volcanic dust has also made a contribution (as has the sun, being in a somewhat weak phase). So there are two things you should have a look at: Volcanoes may be responsible for most of the global surface warming slowdown and Small volcanic eruptions explain warming hiatus. Imma go out on a limb and guess that a little over 50% of the lack of warming (though it is warming, just slower) is from the ocean taking in more heat, the next biggest contribution is the volcanic dust, and a smaller but still two digit percentage (maybe) is from the sun. Feel free to challenge me on those numbers but do so with evidence please. I’ll be happy to see that estimate refined.
