Sunday 29th of December 2024

awaiting the next one...

sydney no-show storm

As I was dozing awake, I went, yet again, through the motions of global warming. A + B = C + (x)... Sorry, I am boring, aren't I?


Lately I may have been reading too much about quantum mechanics, where some strange things happen, depending on the momentum of particle collisions. It's also a question of statistics. Though there is a certain degree of unpredictability, the amazing study of particles often arrives at 99.998 per cent precision. Hell it works, even if we don't see the accident. 
Nuclear physics, though a bit more main-stream, make use of such prediction of particle decay. It works in making big bombs.

Imagine a car accident we don't see. We have to reconstruct the impact by studying the damage. There are different ways a collision happens. A front-on collision is going to leave some specific residuals damage and many bits. A not-so front-on collision is going to shave the side of the car and leave some of it intact, with some bits on the road... The bits will be different and scattered differently in various type of collision. Speed will be proven to be paramount.
The bumper bar capability is going to play another part in the study. Thus we can study the bits and know which type of car (particle) it was, as well as calculate the impact (or if there was damage — or not even a collision) because the bumper bar is going to prevent such damage (or make sure no collision happens, say due to new radar devices now installed on some cars — near miss, heart attack). 

In particle "dynamics", I would say the bumper bar is the electromagnetic force which prevents two particles of the same charge meeting under "normal" circumstances. They will repulse each other unless there is a mitigator (gluon?) that can keep them close by but "not too close". Add the speed of light to the same particles on a collision course and bang. Damage. Bits. Quarks. Simple (quite complicated really, because the bits are numerous and weird, the forensic study of particles is thus complex and contradictory to the point Einstein spent 30 fruitless years of his life trying to disprove the theory).

Same with climate change. We know the bits: glaciers are melting, ice sheets are melting, weather patterns seem to be changing, warming of the oceans, acidification of oceans, sun performance, earth wobbles, albedo, heat loss, heat records in some places (Australia, 2013), the list of bits is long. 
Yet on this theory, the impact has not been fully felt, because climate is a bit like rubber... It's elastic and it absorbs a lot of punishment before getting completely out of "balance". But we keep on pushing on... We are adding extra CO2 in the atmosphere from fossil fuels. 


Some facts:
We know that CO2 is a "moderately" warming gas in the greenhouse. Oxygen is a cooling gas. For example the atmosphere on Venus is mostly CO2 and stays at about 440 degrees Celsius night and day. That's CO2 for you. Should Venus atmosphere be oxygen alone, my slide-rule guesstimate tells me its surface would be around 50 degrees C with zones at + 30 and some at +90 degrees C. I could be wrong.

We know that should there be NO water vapour in the atmosphere, "our" planet would be on average minus 35 degrees Celsius. Say about - 20 in Singapore and - 95 at the south pole for good measure. Ice everywhere. Water vapour is the main warming gas on "our" planet. 

Should Venus' atmosphere be mostly water vapour, it's likely it would be above 700 degrees C more or less everywhere. Gus' slide-rule conjecture here, but not far off the mark.

Then, this morning the news bring us the Climate Council report that global warming is going to cost a packet... Yes we know... Yesterday, I had seen a repeat article in the Guardian from the Conversation that was telling of the "tropicalisation" of Sydney... The authors of the latter article receiving funds from the Australian Research Council. Goodo. They must know too... 

I do my own little kitchen table predictions with a crystal ball and a slide-rule. Good old Gus gets not a cent from anyone, not even brickbats, since no-one listens to him... A voice in the wilderness. No echo.
So, wide awake, I decided to go for broke this morning and gamble most of it by making bird-entrails voodoo predictions, other than scientifically vague increases in temperatures and possible associated problems. 
I sharpened my head with the latest tool in brain-wave computing one calls a hunch, based on various resources — mathematical, geological, historical, meteorological and a dash of personal observations. let's start.

Despite gaining ice in the centre and with some increase of sea ice around it, Antarctica is loosing ice. It's my grandfather's fridge conundrum. Seas are warming up down there in the deep. It's been measured. 

So, just for your own good, you can see this phenomenon for yourselves. Let the freezer door of your super duper self-defrosting upright-fridge one inch ajar overnight. The next morning, you will notice three major things:
a) the engine is still going like the clappers because the freezer is set to be at a certain temperature (usually -19 C) and the system is loosing cold. The engine is playing catch up. Your electricity bill is going through the roof.
b) because cold leaks out, the freezer is "warmer" inside as it can't maintain the -19 C temperature now hovering around -14 to -16 C. 
c) A LOT OF ICE (snow-like) has formed on all the "normally" dry packets inside the freezer.
Conclusion:
Your local big freezer, Antarctica, is warming up: more ice — less cold. More disturbances. less ice in the ice trays. Simple.

Australia is warming up as well. The centre of the continent is likely to get some super-warm air pockets that will stay longer during summer. It's only mid September and the patch of red on the weather charts is already "huge" — about three quarters of the continent above 30 degrees Celsius during the day.
Meanwhile, under a warming planet, the "normal" heat exchange between Antarctica and tropical air mass is likely to "contract" the more temperate zone in-between, in the southern hemisphere. This could be worrying. You are allowed to worry. 

See, this is how it works theoretically: The Antarctic region circulates air like a pump pushing the cold air out towards the Southern Ocean, on the surface. It replaces this air from higher altitude winds that create a HIGH PRESSURE system at the south pole. These high altitude CONVECTION winds are fed by the LOW PRESSURE systems that lurk above the Southern Ocean. These LOW PRESSURE systems also feed high altitude CONVECTION winds TOWARDS the tropical region, creating the TEMPERATE banding and a HIGH PRESSURE system at the boundary of the tropical/temperate junction. 
The equator is the "doldrum" where a LOW pressure system exists "permanently". This low pressure system convection also feeds the HIGH pressure system at the junction of the tropical/temperate boundary. The tradewinds are the surface winds of this latter exchange.

This system is very elastic and quite compromised due to land masses and other factors such as SEASONS. In the Northern hemisphere such a system is often disturbed beyond recognition, though on probability, there will be a high pressure system on the Azores island for example. Sometimes the north polar high pressure system shifts far south as noted during this winter in the USA, creating a bitterly cold air pocket, while it's warmer further north.

There are waves, troughs, inversion layers, high and low systems, jet streams (that act like flowing garden hoses on the loose) and eddies, including cyclones, that muck up this "ideal" system. While the convection currents will be "rolling" from top to bottom and/or from bottom to top, the eddies will be spinning horizontally. The waves and trough will flow across like waves on the sea, while cold fronts and warm front will try to climb above each others. And all these bits and pieces feed from — or compete against — each other. It's like watching waves landing on a beach where there are a few dangerous rips and sandy shallows... Suddenly there is a storm and the waves get bigger and there is a water surge on top of a high tide and the beach is hollowed out... 

Now you have a clear picture: It's complex YET SIMPLE. No wonder that predicting the weather is difficult, even with the help of super computers. Three days maximum and the wheels fall off the prediction table. Long range forecasts are only for "trends" — not for local conditions tomorrow. Most of the forecast work on historical record and brackets of possibilities due to what "air mass" is rolling in, or what sea temperature is. Most of the predictions are correct though yesterday the bad weather alert for Sydney was a fizzer (too warm) – see picture at top. But out to sea, a few miles off the coast of Sydney, it was hell.

But you still should know that, now in September, you're likely to develop a sweat in central Australia while freezing your balls off in the Southern ocean. Easy prediction. 

Now the trick is to know by how much and compare the trend in those regions with historical records. The trends as measured for the last 50 years and compared with the last 150 years show an unequivocal warming. Bugger. 
Even the most ardent genuine scientific denialists cannot deny this, despite a recent deceleration of the warming due to variability (elasticity) in the system for which most models forgot to include the warming trend of oceans (acting like a bumper bar in a car collision). 

Antarctica warms up, thus sends masses of cool air into that temperate zoning, cooling it mostly through the eddies of LOWS. But the warm air from the north is warming the top part of the temperate zoning. There are conflicts. Noticeable increase of atmospheric conflicts especially in the shape of clouds.
Under such conflicting conditions, there is an unavoidable acceleration of convection currents and ground disturbances of the boundaries of climatic banding. Even if this acceleration is small, it is likely to increase the formation of much stronger storms, especially at the junction of climatic banding. It's happening. This winter was one of the WEIRDEST winter I have noted for the last forty years. Nothing exceptional except weirdness. My onions and my carrots agree.

The climatic system can be imagined a bit like a LOW CEILING ROOM with a cold air-conditioning system in one top corner and a heater in an opposite corner on the floor. The air inside the room is going to behave in a very funny way. The more heat and the more cold having to find their relative position — cold on the lower level of the room and heat on the higher level — will create some convection windy currents. 
And the position of the two devices will have an effect on the system. For example should the heater and the cold unit be closer to the centre of the walls rather than be in corners, there is a chance that the convection be more pronounced (Corners are another story on their own. More about corners another day: they create their own interesting disturbing sometimes cancelling effects). 
But such a room is not fully representative, because of the SIZE of the atmospheric system. 

In the atmosphere there are other parameters to take into account. The higher the altitude, the colder the air is and the thinner the air is (40 per cent of surface air density at 10,000 metres). Up to around 10,000 metres (35, 000 feet), there is a limit at which most of the major heat exchanges can be performed —apart from heat loss into the dark yonder. 

One has to also realise that we are dealing with a VERY VERY THIN layer. The distance from the South pole to Canberra is about 6000 kilometres. The thickness of the air layer in which most of the meteorological and climatic banding happens is about 10 kilometres thick. The convection currents are limited in altitude due to the thinness of this air layer.

What can be noted too is that JET STREAMS usually sit at the boundaries of climatic banding. There are two jet streams over the southern hemisphere. One usually flows above central Australia — at the boundary between temperate and tropical air mass — and one that flows above the great Australian Bight (that's why it takes longer to fly to Perth from Sydney than fly to Sydney from Perth) — at the boundary between Antarctic and Temperate air mass. Recently there has been times when the two jet streams appeared as if they had combined above the centre of Australia. This may not be a new thing but the frequency of this occurrence needs to be investigated pronto. Because this means the "disappearance" of the temperate banding — having the Antarctic banding competing with the tropical banding directly. This, in my own kitchen table calculations represents a big step in global warming, even if the temperatures in Sydney have been cool.

So, what's next? The "competition" between the two major air masses is likely to increase atmospheric disturbances. I would not be surprised for example that within a week, in this 2014-15 summer, Sydney would experience a few days above 45 degrees C (including one above 46 — breaking previous temperature records — 45.8) then the temperature would plummet to around 15 degrees C with a quick shift in the air masses position. With such change could come hail-storms with stones the size of half-bricks.  

Cold air falling from the jet streams could savage the countryside, while a few days later, the heat from a "tropical bubble" above the centre of the continent would turn some places into steaming furnaces. It will happen. The timing depends how much we carry on adding to the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. The CO2 warms it up gently and retards the formation of clouds, thus there is an increase in humidity which in turns lets more heat from the sun through. Simple. 

So what would disturb the "normality" of climate banding? Having increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is a bit like opening the freezer door and turning the heater full-on in the other corner of the room, the ceiling of which being low, only 2 feet above ground. With a 50 per cent humidity index, the floor of the room fills up with pools of water, while steam condense on the ceiling to drip like rain. But as the temperature in the room increase, there would be less condensation, more humidity in the air and still water on the floor. Meanwhile the electricity bill goes up as we have set the room THERMOSTAT to be say 25 degrees. 

Antarctica is our cooling system. I repeat: carbon dioxide acts like a small heating element in the atmosphere. it also changes the behaviour of water vapour, especially that of the dew point according to altitude and pressure. When water vapour should be cloudy in certain critical conditions, CO2 turns it into clear water vapour — letting more sunlight through to the ground, increasing the warming quickly — until a return to cloudy water vapour which in turn, though not letting more sun-heat through, helps retain heat at ground level, especially at night. 

WE KNOW that the sum total of this heat-cooling process is towards warmer. That is the slide-rule conclusion. 
The warmer the system, the more disturbances there are. That is the pot on the stove conclusion. 
All this is the 99.998 per cent certain result as supported by 97 per cent scientists. Of the 3 per cent other "scientists", few deal with climate and most work for our Carbon Lord corporations. They would sell their grand mother. They need to be debunked. They are dangerous.

We know that our "bumper bar" — mostly the oceans can absorb so much heat without creating large disturbances of their own: but rising sea level becomes unavoidable. Melting ice adds some coolant in the water thus temporarily reduce the amount of warming (reducing the amount of expansion which (re)starts at 4 degrees C), though melting ice from land glaciers adds water to the sea level. These semi-conflicting conditions though still add to rising sea level.
If you have central heating, using radiators with hot water, you know you need a large reservoir at the top of the system (usually set above the roof so if it spills over, it does not flood your ceilings as I have seen in some dicky installations) to let the water EXPAND. OTHERWISE THE SYSTEM BLOWS UP.

Global warming won't make things blow up. No Armageddon. Only climate change into warmed up instability, then shift into a new balance with variables that won't be comfortable — including higher sea levels, hot summers (49-50 degrees Celsius in Sydney, occasionally) and warmish winters plus storms. Some plants species won't survive. Some animal species won't survive... Then it will go into warmer instability again. The geological record shows that for a natural increase of 100 ppm of CO2, the temperature CAN rise by 8 degrees Celsius, but studies have shown there is usually a delay in the process due to the elasticity of the system, including the warming of oceans and the speed of increase of CO2. The climatic system is doing catch up to the CO2 concentration. The particle content of the atmosphere also plays a big role in compromising this relationship.
We are in for a rough ride. As our Idiot-de-Turdville refuses to go to a Climate Change meeting in New York, because he wants to play Napoleon-in-Isis, I was imagining with extraordinary clarity, the houses of all the Aussie champion denialists — Abbott (he is not an Aussie — he also holds a British citizenship contrarily to the strict law of the land), Warburton, Newman, Jones, Janet, Nova, Bolt et al — being destroyed by floods, fire, drought (clay shrinkage) and hailstones without having a single effect on their idiotic views... Why? Because they are denialists. They don't want to know. Simple.
But as the Climate Council warns of a 40 centimetre to a one metre sea level rise by the end of this century, one has to also include that storm surges will become more frequent and "higher". A small storm surge of say 30 centimetres in Sydney could translate into a couple of metres in the Central Coast low lands. Imagine Spike Milligan's Woy Woy being flooded on the equinox.
In such massive storms as seen in Europe, 14 years ago, 8 metres of storm-surge in low lying areas is not out of the question. The only question is when. But no-one is prepared. Most of the MPs, Liberals (CONservative and friends of Turdy Tony) in that region, are more interested in flaunting the electoral laws by taking illegal "donations" and being in the camp of the denialists, because it suit the carbon industry.
When is the elasticity of the climatic zoning balance going to be disturbed beyond a point of no-return and snap? Because this is the point. When an elastic band snaps in your fingers, it can hurt... But on the other side, it may not snap, like in some other springy system, it may become permanently distorted without snapping. Summer 2014-15 will be very telling. The next ones follow soon after that. By 2032 (only 18 years from now) hell could break loose.
I know this well. I studied the distortion and springyness of metals, especially aluminium, in detail, while working in the metal-folding industry. 
A good day to all. Make sure our monster Turdy Tony is kicked out... The sooner the better.

Gus Leonisky
Your local expert on too many bloody things 

Picture at top by Gus: The storm that did not hit Sydney yesterday...

 

we need to harp on this issue, daily...

Rising sea levels are a “sleeping giant” issue that will put at risk coastal infrastructure worth up to $226bn, a new report has found.

Analysis by the Climate Council found Australia was likely to experience a sea level rise of 0.4m to 1m by the end of the century, with a “high end” scenario of 1.1m possible if the world warmed by about 4C compared with pre-industrial temperatures.

In this worst-case scenario, $226bn in property, including houses, schools, hospitals and ports, would be exposed to flooding and erosion, making much of it unviable.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/17/rising-sea-levels-sleeping-giant-could-cost-226bn-australia

Carbon emitted today affects temperatures 30 years from now


Preventing climate change and adapting to it are not morally equivalent

Climate hawks are familiar with the framing of climate policy credited to White House science advisor John Holdren, to wit: We will respond to climate change with some mix of mitigation, adaptation, and suffering; all that remains to be determined is the mix.

It’s a powerful bit of language. It makes clear that not acting is itself a choice — a choice in favor of suffering.

But in another way, Holdren’s formulation obscures an important difference between mitigation (reducing greenhouse gas emissions to prevent climate effects) and adaptation (changing infrastructure and institutions to cope with climate effects). It makes them sound fungible, as though a unit of either can be traded in for an equivalent unit of suffering. That’s misleading. They are very different, not only on a practical level but morally.

Carbon is global, adaptation is local

With every ton of carbon we emit, we add incrementally to the total concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. That total is what determines the effects of climate change. By emitting ton of carbon we are, in a tiny, incremental way, harming all of humanity, especially the poorest and most vulnerable.

Conversely, however, every ton of carbon emissions we prevent or eliminate benefits, in a tiny, incremental way, all of humanity, especially the poorest and most vulnerable. Say I pay $10 to reduce carbon by a ton. I bear the full cost, but because all of humanity benefits, I receive only one seven-billionth of the value of my investment (give or take).

In other words, mitigation is fundamentally altruistic, other-focused.

In fact, I’ve understated the altruism. Remember the famous carbon time lag: Carbon emitted today affects temperatures 30 (or so) years from now. So mitigation today doesn’t actually benefit humanity today; it benefits humanity 30 years in the future, when the carbon that would have been emitted would have wrought its effects. It benefits people who are both spatially and temporally distant. That’s almost pure altruism.

read more: http://grist.org/climate-energy/preventing-climate-change-and-adapting-to-it-are-not-morally-equivalent/


Gus: Carbon emitted today affects temperatures now till about 5000 years from now.

as much as calling people names pains me...

The government has repeatedly called on Labor to compromise over the RET, which requires that 41,000 gigawatt hours of Australia’s energy comes from renewable sources by 2020.

The scheme is made up of the large-scale RET, aimed at wind and solar farms, and the small-scale renewable energy scheme, which has helped encourage more than one million Australian households to install solar panels on their roofs.

A review of the RET, led by businessman Dick Warburton, found that the system had helped lower carbon emissions, drive investment and create jobs. But it recommended the scheme be either closed or suspended until energy demand increases.

On Wednesday, Tony Abbott said the review was a “good document”, but would not set out the government’s official position. Both the Coalition and Labor pledged at the election to keep the RET as it is.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/17/renewable-energy-target-coalition-and-labor-no-closer-to-compromise

-----------------------

The "RET review" has been written by imbeciles for an imbecilic government. No compromise should be made on the subject. Renewable energy sources should be increase, rather than diminished. Read article at top.

 

explicando La Niña y El Niño

El Niño?

In the Pacific Ocean, there is a repeating pattern of El Niño events and La Niña events. El Niño years are hotter, and here the Pacific Ocean releases its heat to the atmosphere.

On the other hand, La Niña events are cooler, and here the Pacific Ocean sucks heat from the atmosphere.

You can see how this could affect the global climate, especially when you consider that by itself, the Pacific Ocean is bigger than all the land masses on Earth added together.

Let me get back to 1998. In that severe El Niño year, the Pacific Ocean dumped about 42 zetajoules of energy into the atmosphere. (By the way, "zeta" means "1" followed by 21 zeros, so it's a really big number).

To put that into perspective, each year, the human race generates about half-a-zetajoule of energy in its power stations. The amount of heat energy that the Pacific Ocean released into the atmosphere in 1998 was about 80 times more than the energy generated by the human race in that calendar year of 1998.

So for a while, 1998 topped the charts for the hottest year on record.

We then had record-breaking heat waves in Europe in 2003. In 2010, the hottest year so far, the record-breaking summer heat and fires were responsible for the deaths of 50,000 people in Russia.

This was followed by record-breaking heat waves in the USA in July 2012, and in Australia in January 2013. Globally, in 2014, we had the hottest May and June ever on record, and the equal-warmest April. And let's not forget that 13 of the 14 warmest years on record have happened in the 21st-century.

Let me also point out that the hottest years on record ever, 2005 and 2010, happened during a La Niña-dominated period - when you would expect cooling.

So it's very wrong to claim that surface temperatures are cooling. It's also very wrong to claim that surface temperatures are constant. The climate is still heating up.

 

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2014/09/16/4088609.htm

This burst of activity comes at a crucial time...

The marchers and mayors, the ministers and presidents, have come and gone. So what is the verdict on Climate Week, the summit meeting on global warming convened by the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, in New York?

The meeting was not intended to reach a global agreement or to extract tangible commitments from individual nations to reduce the greenhouse gases that are changing the world’s ecosystems and could well spin out of control. Its purpose was to build momentum for a new global deal to be completed in December 2015, in Paris.

In that respect, it clearly moved the ball forward, not so much in the official speeches but on the streets and in the meeting rooms where corporate leaders, investors, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and state and local officials pressed the case for stronger action.

It was important to put climate change back on the radar screen of world leaders, whose last effort to strike a deal, in Copenhagen five years ago, ended in acrimonious disaster. President Obama, for one, was as eloquent as he has ever been on the subject: “For all the immediate challenges that we gather to address this week — terrorism, instability, inequality, disease — there’s one issue that will define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other, and that is the urgent and growing threat of a changing climate.”

But most of the positive energy at this gathering came from people closer to the ground, like the 300,000 activists who marched last Sunday. They included mayors like New York’s Michael Bloomberg and his successor, Bill de Blasio, who both spoke of the critical role that cities can play in reducing emissions. They included governors like California’s Jerry Brown, who is justly proud of his state’s pathbreaking efforts to control automobile and power plant pollution. And they included institutions like Bank of America, which said it would invest in renewable energy, and companies like Kellogg and Nestle, which pledged to help stem the destruction of tropical forests by changing the way they buy commodities like soybeans and palm oil.

Underlying all these declarations was a palpable conviction that tackling climate change could be an opportunity and not a burden, that the way to approach the task of harnessing greenhouse gas emissions was not to ask how much it would cost but how much nations stood to gain by investing in new technologies and energy efficiency.

This burst of activity comes at a crucial time.

 

read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/opinion/sunday/a-group-shout-on-climate-change.html?_r=0

of heat capacity... and walrus...

 

Now this is a little complicated, so let me introduce you to a technical term that is very relevant — heat capacity. Heat capacity is a measure of how much heat energy a substance can store. Mathematically, it's the ratio between how much heat energy enters a material, and the resulting temperature change.

You might have noticed that when you unload the dishwasher, the ceramic plates are dry, while the plastic plates are still wet with a myriad of droplets.

At the end of the washing cycle, a heater switches on and heats everything inside the dishwasher. Plastic has a lower heat capacity, and can't store much heat energy. So there's not enough heat energy to evaporate off the water droplets. But ceramic has a much greater heat capacity. So when the ceramic plates get heated to the same temperature as the plastic plates, they can absorb and store much more heat energy. This extra heat energy can then heat up, and evaporate away, the water droplets. So the ceramic plates come out perfectly dry, while the plastic plates are sparkling with water droplets.

It turns out that, volume for volume, water has over 3000 times the heat capacity of air. If you shove the same amount of heat energy into the same volumes of water and air, the air will get a lot hotter than the water. The air's temperature will increase over 3000 times more than will the temperature of the water. Water has a massive heat capacity, as compared to air.

Now about 93 per cent of all the extra heat of global warming goes into the oceans, and only about one to two per cent remains to heat up the air. So you need only a tiny increase in the percentage of heat energy going into the oceans to slow down the rate of increase in air temperature.

The Earth's oceans form a very complex system. They cover some 70 per cent of the Earth's surface, and are hard to access because they have an average depth of some 3.7 kilometres.

Even so, we have taken tens of millions of measurements of ocean temperature and saltiness across the globe since 1970. These have been collected by buoys, ships and the Argo profiling floats. As a result, we have very good evidence that a few conveyor belt of various ocean currents have pushed the warmer surface waters into the depths — below 700 metres.

 

Read more: http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2014/09/30/4097388.htm

 

Walrus mass on Alaska beach - in pictures 38 comments

Pacific walrus unable to find sea ice on which to rest in Arctic waters are coming ashore in record numbers on a beach in north-west Alaska. Females give birth on sea ice and the animals use it as a diving platform to reach snails, clams and worms on the shallow continental shelf, but climate change means there is ever less available

 

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2014/oct/01/walrus-mass-on-alaska-beach-in-pictures

 

just a monster storm...

The Joint Typhoon Warning Center points to a favorable environment for the cause of the rapid intensification, including low wind shear and excellent outflow, which helps to ventilate and strengthen the storm.


Forecast models are suggesting that the super typhoon could continue to intensify, tanking to 895 millibars — a typhoon intensity not seen since Typhoon Haiyan in 2013, which killed over 6,000 people. A pressure that low would beat this year’s second most intense storm — Typhoon Genevieve — by 20 millibars.


Luckily, this monster storm is not expected to make landfall while it’s at such high intensity. Over the next 24 to 48 hours, Vongfong is forecast to make a sharp turn north toward Japan. By Saturday morning, the typhoon is forecast to weaken to the equivalent of a category three, and then a category two with wind speeds of 105 mph, as it approaches the southern islands of the Kagoshima Prefecture of Japan

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2014/10/07/super-typhoon-vongfong-explodes-becomes-most-intense-storm-on-earth-in-2014/

unprecedented drought...

The governor of the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo has asked for emergency clearance to siphon the remaining water out of the main reservoir serving Sao Paulo city, which has almost run dry.

After nine months of unprecedented drought, 95% of the water has gone.

Geraldo Alckmin, re-elected in last week's elections, has been criticised for not imposing water rationing to tackle the crisis.

Twenty-nine other Brazilian cities have been affected by the drought.

In Sao Paulo's main reservoir, the Cantareira system, the fall in the level has exposed a cracked earth landscape littered with the wrecks of dozens of old cars dumped over the years.

read more http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-29581069