Abrupt climate change - 04/04/2017

The Gulf Stream is heating up as the 2017 El Niño strengthens

The Gulf Stream is heating up as the 2017 El Niño strengthens, fueled by record low global sea ice extent, which means a lot of extra heat is getting absorbed globally.

Over the next half year, increasingly warm waters will be carried by the Gulf Stream from the coast of North America to the Arctic Ocean.

As this warmer water arrives in the Arctic Ocean, there will no longer be the buffer of sea ice there to consume the heat, as was common for the past thousands of years and more. Additionally, warmer water looks set to arrive in an Arctic Ocean heated up like we've never seen before, as so much of the sunlight reaching the surface of the Arctic Ocean doesn't get reflected back into space anymore.

Where can all this extra heat go? Sea ice will start sealing off much of the surface of the Arctic Ocean by the end of September 2017, making it hard for more heat to enter the atmosphere. The extremely dangerous situation is that it looks like much of the extra heat will instead reach sediments at the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean that contain huge amounts of methane in currently still frozen hydrates.

Arctic Sea ice is breaking up and flowing through Bering Strait

Arctic Sea Ice 04 02 2017. While the "flock" has been squabbling, Bering Sea ice has been breaking up and Arctic Sea ice is breaking up. Arctic Sea ice is flowing through the Bering Strait, almost unnoticed.

Here we go again - first state of emergency of new wildfire season

Within five hours today, the area swept by the raging fires expanded by one and a half times, reaching more than 2,000 hectares.

The weather in the Siberian region is dry, warm and windy.

The local Ministry of Natural Resources reported 20 epicentres of wildfires.

323 firefighters were involved, and 66 units of equipmentdeployed to stop the fires.

A state of emergency was declared in Chitinsky and Khiloksky districts of the region

So Far, 2017 is in the Running to be the 4th Consecutive Hottest Year on Record

We haven’t quite gotten to the global ‘year without a winter’ yet. But it sure looks like we’re heading in that direction –fast.

Due to the highest volume of heat-trapping gasses hitting the Earth’s atmosphere in all of the past 4-15 million years combining with a warming of Pacific Ocean surface waters, the period of 2014 through 2016 saw an unprecedented three consecutive record hot years. With Pacific Ocean waters cooling during late 2016, it appeared that 2017 would become ‘just’ the 2nd to 5th hottest year ever recorded. But that was before the waters off South America’s west coast began to blaze with unexpected heat during early 2017 even as temperatures at the poles climbed to surprisingly warm levels.....

Looking ahead, early indications are that March was also around 1.3 C hotter than 1880s. If a first or second hottest March on record pans out as indicated by early NCEP and GFS model reanalysis, then the first three months of 2017 will come in nearly 0.1 C hotter than all of last year.

Karsten Haustein‏ @khaustein

Both, March GFS analysis & NCEP reanalysis 0.03K warmer than Feb. Corresponds to +1.07K in @NASAGISS Easily 2nd warmest March #climatechange

• RETWEETS14
• LIKES15
• 

2:14 AM - 3 Apr 2017

During the present human-forced warming trend, it has tended to take about ten years for a global temperature increase of 0.15 degrees Celsius to occur. And that rate of warming is about 30 times faster than the warming that occurred at the end of the last ice age. Since 2013, the world has warmed 0.25 C — which could jump to 0.3 to 0.35 C in the period of 2013 to 2017 if the present trend for this year continues.

London Just Experienced Its Warmest March Since Records Began

Southeast England, which includes the capital, had the warmest month since records began in 1910, according to the U.K.’s Met Office. The average temperature of 9.2 degrees Celsius (49 degrees Fahrenheit) equaled a record set in 1957, the year the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first human-made object in space. The U.K. overall had its fifth-warmest March on record.

The trend is supposed to continue into April across the whole of Europe, according to meteorologists surveyed by Bloomberg. An early start to summer could raise the risk of drought and further reduce heat and power prices, which have plunged since February.

April “is looking very dry across Iberia,” said Claire Kennedy-Edwards, a senior meteorologist at Atlanta-based The Weather Co. “Very dry springtime conditions over Iberia, resulting in soil moisture deficits, can lead to a greater risk of heat wave events over Europe.”

March was 1.8 degrees Celsius (3.2 Fahrenheit) warmer than average, according to the Met Office. It was also unusually bright, with 21 percent more hours of sunshine than usual. Precipitation was near normal levels except in Wales, where 164.7 millimeters (6.5 inches) of rain fell, 141 percent of the seasonal norm.

For Colombia, The Rain Bombs of Climate Change Fell in the Dark of Night

As the lower atmosphere becomes warmer, evaporation rates will increase, resulting in an increase in the amount of moisture circulating throughout the troposphere (lower atmosphere). An observed consequence of higher water vapor concentrations is the increased frequency of intense precipitation events… — NASA’s Earth Observatory

******

Just off the coasts of Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, the Pacific Ocean has been abnormally warm of-late. For the past month, sea surface temperatures have ranged between 3 and 5 degrees Celsius above average. This excess heating of the ocean surface, facilitated by human-forced climate change, has pumped a prodigious volume of moisture into the atmosphere of this coastal region. Southerly winds running along the western edge of South America have drawn this moisture north and eastward — feeding into the prevailing storms that originate on the Atlantic side of South America and track eastwards.

(Sea surface temperature anomaly map from Earth Nullschool shows 4 degree Celsius above average ocean surfaces just off-shore of Ecuadore and Colombia. These extremely warm waters have helped to fuel very severe storms over Peru and Colombia during recent weeks. Such warm ocean waters are not normal and their highest peak temperatures are being increased by a human-forced warming of the Earth, primarily through fossil fuel burning. Image source: Earth Nullschool.)

Lately, these systems have blown up to enormous size as they’ve run across the Andes or collided with pop-up storms along the coast. And the amount of rainfall coming out of the resulting monster thunderstorms has been devastating. In Peru, hundreds of thousands of people have been rendered homeless by these deluges which have caused the tragic loss of 100 souls, destroyed thousands of buildings, 200 bridges, and 2,000 miles of highway. For the state, the estimated damage toll from this ongoing climate disaster is now 6 billion dollars.

Friday night, a member of this new breed of monster thunderstorms, pumped to greater intensity by the moisture bleed off the record warm ocean waters, unloaded a total of a half-month’s worth of rainfall in just a few hours upon the small Colombian city of Mocoa. More than five inches fell in 1-2 hours on a region where three rivers run out of the mountains toward this community of 40,000. The deluge arrived in the darkness. Its ferocious intensity unleashed a massive flood of boulders, mud, and water as the combined rivers leapt their banks and invaded the town. A nearby hillside, unable to retain integrity beneath this merciless assault of the elements, gave way — burying a large section of Macoa in rubble......

Himalayan Melt 1984 to 2016