Earth ChangesS


Igloo

January 1 snow coverage sets new record for U.S.

Snow January US
© NOAA
With 67 percent of the contiguous U.S. covered by snow, the first day of 2013 marked the widest coverage of snow the U.S. has seen on Jan. 1 in the past ten years.

(Note: Percentages of snow coverage have only been calculated since 2004.)

The previous record was set in 2010, when the new year saw 61 percent of the U.S. beneath snow. That same season was marked by the blizzard nicknamed 'Snowmageddon,' in the mid-Atlantic, which set a long list of records in cities such as Philadelphia, DC and Baltimore.

"As far as New Year's Days go, I think that our snow cover is very healthy," AccuWeather.com Expert Senior Meteorologist Jack Boston said.

The lack of snow coverage since record keeping began in 2004, with the exception of 2010, have been an anomaly, Boston explained.

Better Earth

Deepest corals in Great Barrier Reef discovered

Image
© Catlin Seaview SurveyDeep-sea corals found lower than ever seen before in the Great Barrier Reef. The corals are four times deeper than most scuba divers can dive.
Even four times as deep as most scuba divers venture, the Great Barrier Reef blooms. A new exploration by a remote-operated submersible has found the reef's deepest coral yet. The common coral Acropora is living 410 feet (125 meters) below the ocean's surface, a discovery that expedition leader Pim Bongaerts of the University of Queensland called "mind-blowing." The group had previously seen the coral living in the reef at a depth of about 200 feet (60 m).

Coral reefs are made of colonies of polyps which secret a rock-like exoskeleton. The polyps have a symbiotic relationship with algae that provide them nutrients using photosynthesis. Because this process requires light, coral reefs thrive in clear, relatively shallow water.

"The discovery shows that there are coral communities on the Great Barrier Reef existing at considerably greater depths than we could have ever imagined," Bongaerts said in a statement.

Bizarro Earth

Will a megathrust earthquake strike the Northwest U.S. in 2013? Some clues are emerging

Megaquake
© Seattle Pi
There were 4,800 earthquakes in the Northwest in 2012 and a record "episodic tremor and slip" event - a string of deep mini-quakes running from Vancouver Island to below Centralia - over the summer, but does any of that mean we're likely to see the "big one" in 2013?

While the devastating megathrust quakes that happen every 300 to 500 years in our neck of the woods (those caused by the Juan De Fuca plate's grinding collision and subduction with the North American plate) are still impossible to predict, some clues may be emerging.

An immature science

Taken together, last year's quakes were "mild" since so few of them were big enough to be felt, said John Vidale, director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network.

The biggest and most interesting quake of the year struck under Victoria, B.C., last week. It was a magnitude 4 temblor and resembled in depth and fault the magnitude 6.8 Nisqually quake that damaged Seattle and shook the region in 2001, he said.It was felt and reported to the network's webpage by about 800 people.

He added that a string of unusual quakes around the globe has the seismic community baffled. A big earthquake off the coast of Sumatra in the Indian Ocean six months ago was "very strange" because of its size and distance from the plate boundary.It showed "we can get earthquakes we really hadn't anticipated," he said.

In the past few years, China got hit with an earthquake on a fault that wasn't mapped, New Zealand suffered a "very rare earthquake" ...
"There's a whole series of events in the last decade that give us the impression that we know less than ever," Vidale said. "We keep thinking that these are the specific risks we need to look out for and then earthquakes happen that aren't the ones we thought were most likely to happen."
Also, a roughly annual seismic event in the Northwest discovered 12 years ago - the "episodic tremor and slip,"or ETS - went wild last summer.

Igloo

Unseasonable snow falls in South Island, New Zealand

Collapse Bridge
© Hokitika Guardian A central section of this bridge near Harihari on the West Coast was carried away by the storm-swollen Wanganui River.
Gale force winds, torrential rain, thunderstorms and now unseasonable snow have pounded the South Island.

Snow fell on the Lindis Pass in Otago overnight, forcing travellers to abandon their vehicles near the summit.

Sergeant Mark Booth of southern police communications said Lindis Pass was closed and eight vehicles were stranded.

"But I imagine at this time of year the snow's not going to last long."

The centre of the island and the West Coast have "copped it" over the last few days, Mr Booth said.

The West Coast road via Lewis Pass through Murchison had closed, forcing travellers to make a seven hour detour around Blenheim and Kaikoura to get to the east coast of the island.

Last night severe thunderstorm warnings were issued for the Westport area as the last of the system moved through.

Nearly 600mm of rain has fallen on the West Coast in the past 48 hours.

A vital one-lane bridge on State Highway 6, just north of Harihari, was washed away yesterday.

Question

Seal discovered in landlocked British lake


St. Ives, England, -- Experts said a seal discovered 50 miles from the British coast likely made its way through flood waters to a landlocked lake.

Graham Elliott, area manager for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which also works to safeguard other forms of wildlife, said the seal was spotted at the Fen Drayton Lakes reserve, near St. Ives, England, about 50 miles from the coast, The Scotsman reported Wednesday.

"It would be the first time this has happened, to my knowledge, that one has made its way into the lake. The floods normally come from ground water rather than the river, and so it must have worked its way up in a ditch or something like that," Elliott said. "It would be extremely unusual and it would become an attraction to visitors"

Sun

Latest paper demonstrates that climate responds to short and long-term changes in solar activity

Image
IRBSi is the proxy for precipitation/climate change and shows good agreement with solar activity. Figure 12. The comparison between the graphs of the IR-BSi and that of the solar cycles shows good agreement between the percentage of mineral materials of allochthonous and solar cycles reconstructed on the basis of changes in concentrations of 14 C in macrofossils. A good agreement is also evident between the concentrations of 18 O of foraminifera in the Norwegian Sea and the index IR-BSi.
(Via the Hockey Schtick) A new peer reviewed paper published in The Holocene finds a significant link between solar activity and climate over the past 1000 years. According to the authors:
"Our results suggest that the climate responds to both the 11 yr solar cycle and to long-term changes in solar activity and in particular solar minima."
The authors also find "a link between the 11 yr solar cycle and summer precipitation variability since around 1960″ and that:
"Solar minima are in this period associated with minima in summer precipitation, whereas the amount of summer precipitation increases during periods with higher solar activity."

Ice Cube

'Forget global warming, Alaska is headed for an ice age'

Alaska is going rogue on climate change. Defiant as ever, the state that gave rise to Sarah Palin is bucking the mainstream yet again: While global temperatures surge hotter and the ice-cap crumbles, the nation's icebox is getting even icier. That may not be news to Alaskans coping with another round of 50-below during the coldest winter in two decades, or to the mariners locked out of the Bering Sea this spring by record ice growth.

Then again, it might. The 49th state has long been labeled one of the fastest-warming spots on the planet. But that's so 20th Century. In the first decade since 2000, the 49th state cooled 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit. But now comes cooling. Researchers blame the Decadal Oscillation, an ocean phenomenon that brought chillier surface water temperatures toward Alaska. Some contend the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is harming the state's king salmon runs, too.
Image
Full story here

Igloo

Delhi: Coldest day in 44 years

Delhi witnessed its coldest day on Wednesday in the past 44 years, with the maximum temperature falling sharply to 9.7 degree Celsius. Residents woke up to a foggy morning, with the minimum temperature dipping to 4.8 degree Celsius.

Poor visibility affected schedules of nearly 30 flights and led to diversion of an international flight to Mumbai. In Uttar Pradesh, the death toll continued to mount, with 15 more people succumbing to the chill in various parts of the state.

Officials said four people died in Muzaffarnagar which remained the coldest place with 0.6 degree Celsius, followed by three in Mathura, two each in Agra, Bulandshahr, Etah and one each in Barabanki and Mirzapur.


With this, the death toll in the state this winter has reached to 107.

Night temperatures remained below normal in most parts of the state including Moradabad, Agra, Meerut, Gorakhpur, Lucknow, Bareilly and Kanpur divisions.

Igloo

Frozen Alaska bucking global warming trend

Alaskan Weather
© Spc. Balinda O'Neal, Alaska National Guard Public AffairsAlaska National Guardsmen clear a building roof in Cordova, near Anchorage, on Jan. 9, 2012.
As the rest of the world contends with unusually warm temperatures and scorching drought, Alaska has been bucking the trend since 2000 by reporting some of the coldest winters on record.

Like most of the planet, the state has been heating up steadily over the past century and is frequently cited as one of the fastest-warming areas on the planet, according to the Alaska Dispatch, an online newspaper. The Alaska Climate Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks notes the state was warming at roughly twice the pace as the rest of the planet, particularly from the 1970s into the 1990s, reports the Dispatch.

But since 2000, nearly all the National Weather Service monitoring stations sprinkled across the vast state have reported colder-than-average temperatures. The station at King Salmon on the Alaska Peninsula, for example, experienced an average 4.5 degree Fahrenheit (2.9 degrees Celsius) drop in temperature over the course of the first decade of this century.

Snowflake

So much for 'global warming': Snow coming to southwestern Texas

Image
The City of El Paso, Texas, where the snow line has reached in recent years, despite the global warmists' predictions that snow would soon be a thing of the past for places far to the north.
An upper-air disturbance slated to move into the southwestern United States has the potential of bringing wintry weather to portions of extreme southern New Mexico and the Big Bend Country of Texas beginning on Thursday.

While the best chance for snow will be across the Trans-Pecos, a general coating to perhaps an inch of snow will likely fall before it is all said and done.

The upper-air disturbance will begin to enter the Southwest on Wednesday night and slowly ride along the United States and Mexico boarder. This disturbance will likely stick around through Friday before lifting northeastward into the southern Plains.

As the system tracks into the Southwest, it will draw Pacific moisture from the south and Gulf of Mexico moisture from the east.