The weather is hot and getting hotter. Excessive heat plagued the West, Texas and Florida and now, in the next 6-10 days, the heat will move southeast with soaring temperatures at 100°F+.
It’s not just the air that’s hot, the ocean is too. This timelapse video from Colin McCarthy @US_stormwatch shows ocean temperature anomalies from 22 February to 21 July. The hottest colors — the highest above normal — are off the Pacific coast of South America and in the North Atlantic near Newfoundland.
The North Atlantic is in uncharted territory.
The entire ocean basin is a record-smashing 1.5°C above normal, as millions of square miles of ocean experience strong to severe marine heatwaves.
Off the coast of Canada, ocean temperatures are up to 9°C (16°F) above average!… pic.twitter.com/AuPBCc82eX
Warming water off the coast of South America is the developing El Niño, part of the cyclical El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) that affects weather and climate around the world.
Hot water makes the air hot as Newfoundlanders can tell you. Summers are usually so cool there that only 1 in 5 households in St John’s, NL have air conditioning, at least as of 2019. That is probably changing this summer as temperatures soar into the 90s.
Hot water makes hotter air makes hotter water in an endless feedback loop.
With El Niño on top of climate change I don’t think it will end well.
DNA of giraffe and elephant were both detected in the air outside Copenhagen Zoo (photos from Wikimedia Commons)
18 July 2023
We’ve been paying attention to air quality this summer as Canadian wildfire smoke blows into town. The smoke that reaches us, called smog or soot in the chart below, is labelled PM2.5 by air monitors (the particles are less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter). As you can see there’s a lot of other stuff in the air that the monitors are not analyzing — but they could. In the past few years scientists have discovered that we can check the air for DNA.
In 2021 Mark Johnson, a graduate student at Texas Tech, realized that pollen and plant fragments are such a big component of air quality that he decided to compare manual plant surveys to eDNA measurements at Texas Tech University’s Native Rangeland.
The two methods complemented each other. Manual surveys detected 80 species while eDNA found 91 using the devices pictured below. According to Science Magazine, “eDNA was better at finding easily overlooked species with small flowers, such as weakleaf bur ragweed. But people were better at spotting plants too rare to release much eDNA, particularly when they had showy flowers, such as the chocolate daisy.”
It was only a matter of time before similar air monitoring was used to detect animals.
Two recent studies — one in the UK, the other in Copenhagen — collected and analyzed air samples for animal DNA. And they found it. To prove their equipment, each study located air samplers near a zoo and both found zoo animal DNA. According to NPR, the Copenhagen study “picked up 49 animal species including rhinos, giraffes and elephants. ‘We even detected the guppy that was living in the pond in the rainforest house.'”
Cathedral of Learning from CMU, 29 June 2023 (photo by Kaleem Kheshgi)
30 June 2023 (photo by Kaleem Kheshgi)
17 July 2023
When Canadian wildfire smoke swept into Pittsburgh in late June it gave us two and a half days of terrible air quality, then dissipated suddenly on 30 June. Kaleem Kheshgi captured the stark contrast from smoke to clear in photos on 29 and 30 June. Even as the smoke dispersed meteorologists warned that it could and would return because the fires are still burning.
Today their prediction comes true. Wildfire smoke from Alberta and British Columbia has blown into the U.S. and caused Code Red air quality alerts yesterday from Montana to Michigan and Kentucky.
Pittsburgh was in the clear at the time but not anymore. At 5am today Pittsburgh was already in Code Orange and the red zone was approaching. Cleveland and Buffalo are among the many locations in red. (Pittsburgh is marked with a * on these maps.)
Code Orange will force some of my friends indoors today. Code Red is bad for everyone.
A code ORANGE air quality alert means that air pollution concentrations within the region may become unhealthy for sensitive groups. Sensitive groups include children, the elderly, and people suffering from asthma, heart disease, or other lung diseases. The effects of air pollution can be minimized by avoiding outdoor exercise or strenuous activity.
A code RED air quality alert means that air pollution concentrations are unhealthy for the general population.
A look at some individual monitors on the AirMatters app tells the story at 6:30am. I’ve set my app to look at Pittsburgh, plus local monitors near Frick Park (“Forest Glen”), Carlow University and one of several monitors in Homestead.
Today’s forecast says we’ll be in Code Orange but the Red Zone is so close that we will probably see Red spikes before rain and thunderstorms clear it out late this afternoon/evening.
Check your own air quality at AirNow https://www.airnow.gov/. Download the AirMatters app at the Apple Store or Google Play.
And then it rained in central and eastern PA and the Drought Condition map changed. Most of the state is now in the green (good) or yellow zone. Except for low groundwater in 14 of our 67 counties, the drought appears to be short term because a good rain can clear it up. See the Before and After, July 9 and 11, in this slideshow.
Meanwhile, Arizona is not in a drought right now but it’s a desert, its water supply is limited, and it suffered a long term drought for many years. Water allocation has to be planned in Arizona so they won’t run out. This prompted Phoenix put the brakes on development last month in places that rely on ground water.
Arizona will not approve new housing construction on the fast-growing edges of metro Phoenix that rely on groundwater thanks to years of overuse and a multi-decade drought that is sapping its water supply. …
Officials said developers could still build in the affected areas but would need to find alternative water sources to do so — such as surface or recycled water.
Driving the state’s decision was a projection that showed that over the next 100 years, demand in metro Phoenix for almost 4.9 million acre-feet of groundwater would be unmet without further action, Hobbs said. An acre-foot of water is roughly enough for two to three U.S. households per year. …
Hobbs added that there are 80,000 unbuilt homes that will be able to move forward because they already have assured water supply certificates within the Phoenix Active Management Area, a designation used for regulating groundwater.
Back in the 1990s I had a friend in the City of Phoenix’s economic development department who was proud to predict that, based on the city’s projected level of development, they had 75 years of water. In other words, they were OK until approximately 2070. My thought at the time was “Only 75 years?? Then what??”
Now we know. It took only 30 years to put the brakes on.
p.s. Phoenix, in Maricopa County, is one of the fastest growing areas of the U.S.; Maricopa grew 20.55% since 2010. Being from Pittsburgh, where Allegheny County grew 2.89% in the same time period, I marveled at the notion of 80,000 unbuilt homes.
(photo and map credits are in the captions, click on the links to see the originals)
Sunrise on the summer solstice, Pittsburgh, 21 June 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
Wednesday 21 June 2023
Two days ago we learned how humans are changing the tilt of the Earth(*). Today we celebrate the most important Tilted Earth Day in the northern hemisphere when the summer solstice occurs at 10:57am EDT and gives us the longest day.
Three years ago meteorologist Bill Kelly made this video at WJLA in Washington, DC explaining how the Earth’s tilt is the key to the solstice. Only one fact has changed: The solstice is on a different date and time. Sunrise, sunset, and day length are the same in DC today as they were on the solstice in 2020.
In Pittsburgh today the sun rose at 5:49am, we’ll have 15 hours, 3 minutes and 50 seconds of daylight, and the sun will set at 8:53pm. Thanks to the tilted Earth.
(*) p.s. How much have humans changed the tilt of the Earth? The study highlighted in Monday’s blog calculated that we’ve already moved it 80 cm (31.5?) in just 17 years (1993-2010). Click here to read more.
(photo and video credits: Click on the captions to see the originals)
Occasionally during the May-to-August storm season, the National Weather Service warns of flash flooding because of potential “training thunderstorms.”
Training thunderstorms? Are they getting in shape for a big competition? Are they practicing to be better thunderstorms? Are they learning from older, wiser storms?
No. “Training” in this case means the storms are lined up in a row, moving one after the other like railcars in a train. The Philadelphia Area Weather Book describes it:
Most of the year, thunderstorms, steered by speedy winds a few miles above the ground, move along quickly enough so that flooding is not a problem. But those high-altitude winds are typically much weaker in summer and, at times, nearly calm. When this happens, thunderstorms can sit over the same spot for hours. Even if the steering winds are not that lazy, flooding can still occur if the winds blow parallel to a line of storms. When that happens, one thunderstorm after another passes over the same location like railroad cars in a train passing over a track. Appropriately meteorologists call this process training.
When radar-watching meteorologists saw this phenomenon they turned the concept of “moving like a train” into an adjective describing thunderstorm behavior. The new use of an old word did not catch on. Though it’s been around at least 30 years it’s not in the dictionary.
Compared to the size of our planet we humans aren’t particularly large but with billions of us pumping groundwater we have changed the tilt of the Earth. Slightly.
The angle of Earth’s axial tilt varies over a period of 26,000 years (precession) from 22.1 to 24.5 degrees, but within that it wobbles due to sloshing liquids like molten lava, ocean currents, and massive air currents such as hurricanes.
This very short video shows the North Pole wandering as the axis wobbles.
Earth’s spin axis wobbles, its North Pole tracing out a roughly 10-meter-wide circle every year or so. The center of this wobble also drifts over the long term; lately, it has been tilting in the direction of Iceland by about 9 centimeters per year. …
Now, scientists have found that a significant amount of the polar drift results from human activity: pumping groundwater for drinking and irrigation.
To find out what affected Earth’s axial tilt, Clark R. Wilson at the University of Texas at Austin and his colleagues built a model of polar wander factoring in all the sloshing over time, including changes to surface water. But the model was missing something.
When the researchers also put in 2150 gigatons of groundwater that hydrologic models estimate were pumped between 1993 and 2010, the predicted polar motion aligned much more closely with observations. Wilson and his colleagues conclude that the redistribution of that water weight to the world’s oceans has caused Earth’s poles to shift nearly 80 centimeters during that time, reported Thursday in Geophysical Research Letters.
The GRACE satellites detected groundwater changes that produced this map. Notice how groundwater dropped in the U.S. Southeast and the Central Valley of California.
Goatsbeard gone to seed, SGL 117, 6 June 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
10 June 2023
Goatsbeard (Tragopogon dubius) lived up to its name this week as it showed off its huge fluffy seed head at SGL 117 in Washington County, PA.
Nymphal froghoppers known as spittlebugs hid under foam while sucking plant juice at Frick Park.
Spittlebugs, Frick Park, 8 June 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
A fluffy white substance that looked like fungus may well be insects — perhaps woolly aphids (“boogie woogie” aphids) sipping sap from a cut branch.
Are these aphids
Canadian wildfire smoke made for eerie an sunrise on Thursday morning. My photos of it were anemic. Check out Dave DiCello’s instead. Click on a photo to enlarge it.
'The blood moon rises once again…'
Not really. But the sun looked eerie as it rose behind the smoke from the Canadian wildfires today in #Pittsburgh. The smoke and haze are supposed to get worse as the day goes on, so stay safe out there. So weird to see the city like this. pic.twitter.com/nZKJEg6R1f
White snakeroot (Ageratina altissima) wilting in Schenley Park, 7 June 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
9 June 2023
Plants are drooping, water levels are low, and clouds of dust engulf dirt roads in western Pennsylvania. It hasn’t rained for almost three weeks at a time of year that’s usually wet. Yesterday it became official. We’re in a drought.
Every week the U.S. Drought Monitor at University of Nebraska-Lincoln issues a nationwide drought assessment. Pennsylvania is labeled “SL” on this week’s map for evidence in both Short term and Long term indicators. (Click here for the latest Drought Map.)
The drought seems sudden but it’s been building for a while. Precipitation was above normal last year through January 2023 but starting in February it fell off. April and May were seriously below normal. June has been bone dry so far. As of today Pittsburgh has a year-to-date precipitation deficit of 4.55 inches.
