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Post by acidohm on Jan 28, 2016 22:30:12 GMT
Do excuse me if I'm totally getting the wrong end of the stick here, but is it the wind direction can effectively raise or lower the thermocline, ie upwelling and downwelling.
Water doesn't need to he heated in the case, more like a 'gravity' effect, either pooling and concentrating warmth in one area, while bringing cooler water nearer the surface in another?
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Post by missouriboy on Jan 28, 2016 23:08:44 GMT
Do excuse me if I'm totally getting the wrong end of the stick here, but is it the wind direction can effectively raise or lower the thermocline, ie upwelling and downwelling. Water doesn't need to he heated in the case, more like a 'gravity' effect, either pooling and concentrating warmth in one area, while bringing cooler water nearer the surface in another? As icefisher has pointed out, offshore winds tend to induce or reinforce upwelling and I assume, vice versa. I do not have any background in fluid mechanics, so I could not speak to open ocean wind or current forcing of upwelling or downwelling. So, I don't know why not ... but, if it envolves moving sizeable bubbles or streamers of heat at depth, it doesn't seem to show up in Argo. Could be too small or too brief to show up given the spatial resolution and the one-month aggregation periods. But I sure wish someone would figure it out.
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Post by icefisher on Jan 29, 2016 2:40:02 GMT
Do excuse me if I'm totally getting the wrong end of the stick here, but is it the wind direction can effectively raise or lower the thermocline, ie upwelling and downwelling. Water doesn't need to he heated in the case, more like a 'gravity' effect, either pooling and concentrating warmth in one area, while bringing cooler water nearer the surface in another? The thermocline is fairly well defined by the penetration of sunlight into the ocean. The whole thing is some times called the mixing zone because of convection from heating from sunlight. But there is a more active mixing zone much further up in the water column from winds that makes for a very flexible depth of completely mixed water without a temperature gradient. Even hurricane winds don't mix water all that deep. Its generally recognized to be to the depth of the swells that a storm creates. So as you go from calm water with virtually no swell to hurricanes with perhaps rarely even 100 foot swells that zone of uniform temperature is variable. Now offshore wind upwelling zones tend to go deeper in certain locations where shorelines dropoff fairly fast and deep. I don't know much more about this other than there is considerable interest in these offshore wind upwelling zones. Most of the interest is biological. Basically plankton blooms extract minerals and nutrients out of ocean waters. Surface oceans are generally very poorly fertilized for the growth of sea life because of this extraction from the point of light penetration upwards, the only place that photosynthesis can occur in the ocean. Then when sea life dies it sinks to the deep ocean. So the deep ocean is a rich source of minerals and nutrients. Upwelling from this deep water is credited with the abundant forage found around major upwelling areas. It is thought the huge volumes of anchovies off Peru are a result of the upwelling occurring there carrying these minerals and nutrients up where biological plant processes can begin. Despite the fact the upper oceans are clearly not as productive of biological processes as it could and NGOs go crazy over exploitation of sea life in the ocean, they go even crazier at the thought of actively fertilizing the oceans to feed the ever expanding populations. I guess that in itself is a difficult enough problem to grope with.
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Post by missouriboy on Jan 29, 2016 10:38:52 GMT
Do excuse me if I'm totally getting the wrong end of the stick here, but is it the wind direction can effectively raise or lower the thermocline, ie upwelling and downwelling. Water doesn't need to he heated in the case, more like a 'gravity' effect, either pooling and concentrating warmth in one area, while bringing cooler water nearer the surface in another? The thermocline is fairly well defined by the penetration of sunlight into the ocean. The whole thing is some times called the mixing zone because of convection from heating from sunlight. But there is a more active mixing zone much further up in the water column from winds that makes for a very flexible depth of completely mixed water without a temperature gradient. Even hurricane winds don't mix water all that deep. Its generally recognized to be to the depth of the swells that a storm creates. So as you go from calm water with virtually no swell to hurricanes with perhaps rarely even 100 foot swells that zone of uniform temperature is variable. Now offshore wind upwelling zones tend to go deeper in certain locations where shorelines dropoff fairly fast and deep. I don't know much more about this other than there is considerable interest in these offshore wind upwelling zones. Most of the interest is biological. Basically plankton blooms extract minerals and nutrients out of ocean waters. Surface oceans are generally very poorly fertilized for the growth of sea life because of this extraction from the point of light penetration upwards, the only place that photosynthesis can occur in the ocean. Then when sea life dies it sinks to the deep ocean. So the deep ocean is a rich source of minerals and nutrients. Upwelling from this deep water is credited with the abundant forage found around major upwelling areas. It is thought the huge volumes of anchovies off Peru are a result of the upwelling occurring there carrying these minerals and nutrients up where biological plant processes can begin. Despite the fact the upper oceans are clearly not as productive of biological processes as it could and NGOs go crazy over exploitation of sea life in the ocean, they go even crazier at the thought of actively fertilizing the oceans to feed the ever expanding populations. I guess that in itself is a difficult enough problem to grope with. Good post. I'm no biologist, but, as long as I can remember, edges have been an issue in biology. Largely food and shelter. And in a life-eat-life world, if you want to survive, ya gotta have shelter. Edges form shelter and the surfaces on which plant life grows. The coral reef is productive because it maximizes both in the turbulent, light-rich zone of the upper tropical oceans. Other oceanic hard edges serve the same function as moving water is forced up, down and sideways, together with their mineral and life contents. At the surface, floating edges associated with seaweeds provide shelter and food for most marine species. Even 'trash', if not toxic, provides feeding and sheltering edges. Most enviro groups seem to hate docks and other marine structures ... but every post you drive in the sea floor quickly becomes a new edge that is colonized by plants and animals. Even fluid edges between waters of different properties seem to attract life.
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Post by graywolf on Feb 5, 2016 9:17:09 GMT
ONI came out for the past 3 months and it's 0.05 higher than the 98' Nino's comparative period making it officially bigger than the monster of 98' which would make this one ( currently) King of the monsters....... I wonder what the Japanese for that is?
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Post by douglavers on Feb 5, 2016 10:52:24 GMT
If this El Nino is so large, there should be some alarm that so far the temperature peak is still comfortably below that achieved in 1998.
As I gather it is now starting to decay, expect a rapid fall in planetary temperature in the next 12 months.
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Post by nautonnier on Feb 5, 2016 12:56:06 GMT
If this El Nino is so large, there should be some alarm that so far the temperature peak is still comfortably below that achieved in 1998. As I gather it is now starting to decay, expect a rapid fall in planetary temperature in the next 12 months. Look at the winds in Earth.nullschool.net there are no westerly winds in the equatorial Pacific. Even at its 'height' (cough) the winds never really locked in except for winds from the South crossing the equator northbound to the ITCZ close to Central America having a Coriolis veer North East. Effectively the El Nino never got the westerly wind lock in it would have needed to form properly. I doubt if there will be evidence of the El Nino in much more than 6 weeks. That of course won't stop the media and all the climate industry blaming every weather condition on the 'monster El Nino' for the next 6 months. To me more interesting is the Northern Hemisphere jet stream behavior it is really wild up at 250HpA, even some jet streaks crossing the equator which is not too common.
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Post by acidohm on Feb 5, 2016 15:36:10 GMT
ONI came out for the past 3 months and it's 0.05 higher than the 98' Nino's comparative period making it officially bigger than the monster of 98' which would make this one ( currently) King of the monsters....... I wonder what the Japanese for that is? If we based it on 1+2 ssta, it doesn't look as impressive...
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Post by graywolf on Feb 6, 2016 16:26:17 GMT
La Nina eh? ....... Naw! we'll see the 3.4 region briefly dip below 0.5 before it rises again in Oct/Nov? Just take a peep at the tropical sst anoms and then place northern summer, Nino impacted warming on top of that...... interesting times indeed!
The other thing is wind shear over the Atlantic responsible for forming and building 'Canes.... How is that looking to develop over the coming 8 months?
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Post by douglavers on Feb 7, 2016 11:06:46 GMT
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Post by sigurdur on Feb 7, 2016 14:23:03 GMT
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