El Niño is done; Haiti at risk of heavy rains next week; oil spill update
El Niño rapidly weakened during late April and early May, with sea surface temperatures over the tropical Eastern Pacific in the area 5°N - 5°S, 120°W - 170°W, also called the "Niña 3.4 region", falling a significant 0.65°C in just one month. Temperatures in the region are now in the "neutral" range, just 0.18°C above average, and well below the 0.5°C threshold to be considered an El Niño, according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. The speed of the collapse of El Niño makes it likely that a La Niña event is on its way this summer. This is what happened during the last strong El Niño event, in 1998--El Niño collapsed dramatically in May, and a strong La Niña event developed by hurricane season. Six of the sixteen El Niño models (updated as of April 15) are predicting La Niña conditions for hurricane season, and I expect more models will jump on the La Niña bandwagon when the May data updates later this week. The demise of El Niño, coupled with sea surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic that are currently at record levels, have prompted two major hurricane forecasting groups (tropicalstormrisk.com and Colorado State University) to predict a significantly above average 2010 Atlantic hurricane season. Over the full 160-year period we have records of Atlantic hurricanes, La Niña years have typically had more hurricanes, and more strong hurricanes, compared to neutral years. However, since 1995, there hasn't been any difference between neutral and La Niña years in terms of hurricane activity. La Niña conditions typically cause cool and wet conditions over the Caribbean in summer, but do not have much of an impact on U.S. temperatures or precipitation.
Figure 1. Oil spill edge over the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday, May 19, as seen from NASA's M ODIS instrument. Note that a band of cumulus clouds formed along the edge of the oil spill. I theorize this is because the low level wind flow out of the southeast moves faster over the oil, since the oil suppresses wave action. As the winds cross the spill boundary into rougher, clean water, they slow down, forcing the air to pile up and create updrafts that then spawn cumulus clouds. See my post on what oil might do to a hurricane for more information on how oil reduces wave action.
Oil spill update
Clouds over the Gulf of Mexico have again foiled satellite imaging of the extent of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, though through breaks in the clouds it appears that a significant amount of the oil that was pulled southwards towards the Loop Current is now caught in a counter-clockwise rotating eddy just to the north of the Loop Current. However, some oil has escaped this eddy and is on its way south towards the Florida Keys. According to the latest trajectory forecasts from NOAA, the tongue of oil flowing southwards has at most "light" concentrations. The oil will grow more dilute as it travels the 500 miles to the Florida Keys. My present expectation is that the oil entering the Loop Current this week will cause only minor problems in the Keys next week. However, there is a lot of uncertainty about what the oil may do to the fragile Keys ecosystem. See my post yesterday for answers to many of the common questions I get about the spill.
Oil spill resources
My post on the Southwest Florida "Forbidden Zone" where surface oil will rarely go
My post on what oil might do to a hurricane
NOAA trajectory forecasts
Deepwater Horizon Unified Command web site
Oil Spill Academic Task Force
University of South Florida Ocean Circulation Group oil spill forecasts
ROFFS Deepwater Horizon page
Surface current forecasts from NOAA's HYCOM model
HYCOM ocean current forecasts from LSU
Figure 2. Precipitation forecast from today's 8am EDT run of the NAVY NOGAPS model, valid 7 days from now. Precipitation amounts in excess of 70 mm (2.8") in 12 hours are predicted over Haiti, due to a tropical disturbance in the Western Caribbean. Image credit: U.S. Navy.
Potential serious rainfall threat to Haiti next week
Long-range forecasts from the GFS and NOGAPS models over the past few days have consistently been predicting an increase in moisture and decrease in wind shear over the Western Caribbean 5 - 7 days from now, and I expect that a tropical disturbance with heavy rains will develop in the Western Caribbean early next week. A strong subtropical jet stream over the southern Gulf of Mexico will steer the disturbance to the north and east, and the NOGAPS model shows heavy rains in excess of six inches impacting Haiti Wednesday through Thursday of next week. Rains of this magnitude are capable of causing a serious emergency with high loss of life in earthquake-shattered Haiti, and all interests in that nation should closely monitor the situation over the coming week. It is too early to speculate on the possibility of the disturbance becoming a tropical depression. The wunderblogs of StormW and Weather456, who are now featured bloggers for the coming hurricane season, have more information on this potential development, plus the possible development of a subtropical storm between Florida and Bermuda next week.
Major severe weather outbreak over Oklahoma expected tonight
NOAA's Storm Prediction Center has put much of Oklahoma in its High Risk region for severe weather today, warning that "The setup appears most favorable for large, relatively slow moving intense storms with large hail. A couple strong tornadoes also may occur."
I'll be back with a new post Thursday morning.
Jeff Masters
Reader Comments
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It is, I think the spelling of the planet is Arrakis though lol
Pressure is the name of the game in the Deep water Drilling World..it created the Mess were in.
In the Caribbean we call it " soon come "
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The answer would be one of 2 things. Either:
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1. BP and the management, consultants, engineers, etc. are criminally negligent after the fact. It already looks like they're negligent before the fact.
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2. There's some risk here that they're not revealing. My nightmare is that the "junk shot" may clog the leak at the well but cause a stress along the fault line, which could potentially be an exponentially worse catastrophe then we have already.
but its not, the models have generally tabbed the week of May 20th-27th as the week for a storms formation
quick question: when WAS the NOAA update supposed to come out, and when IS it going to come out?
Chapter 8: Fossil Fuels - Coal, Oil and Natural Gas
No kidding but we still need a lot more. All it did was "spit" in South Sound of and on today. Maybe tomorrow, who knows.
An occluded low defines the last stages of an extratropical cyclone's life. At this point, the cold front, which moves very quickly, overtakes the warm front which moves very slowly.
As a result, the cold front overtakes the warm front and lifts it aloft. So you have warm air rising twice - air that was rising above the cold front and air that was rising above the warm front.
This can produce heavy rains than otherwise. It also creates very deep pressures due to double rising airs. The deeper the pressures, the tighter the gradient and the stronger the winds.
It is no surprise that you guys are in for blustery winds.
Eventually the cold air wraps all the way around and the cyclone dies.
Yeah! It certainly did. Everything is green and pretty again. Except for the plants that didnt make it... Going nto have to replant big sections of the lawn too. Some amazing weeds coming up there, where the grass used to be. Oh, Well!
That starts tomorrow then.
East End but still spraying off and on. At least I can go one day without watering the plants. I told my husband this morning that if the models keep predicting something to form a week or two in advance sooner or later it will happen.
ah ok lol
maybe cuz reality in the current state sucks so bad, so we always look to next week for bigger and better things lol
1. When was the NOAA update supposed to come out?
2. When WILL it come out?
Told ya', told ya', told ya' it was going to rain :o). How much rain have you received?
I'm a little disturbed how little research has been done on these tarballs.
Er, um, I saw several posts a while back to the effect that it was delayed a few days due to some conference or other being moved from Washington to Miami or the other way around. Not sure which but if you go back a ways the answer is there LOL.
KFOR-TV OKC, OK met said that about 12-14 tornadoes in OK today.
ok, thank you for the answers...at least there's 2 bloggers left that ain't iggied me yet! :)
Are you kidding ??. I would never take my shirt off in front of this crowd !!
No singularity stuff, I could not sleep for days after the last round :)
So is arsenic, carbon monoxide, strychnine, and snake venom. I don't suggest ingesting any of it though. And oh yea SO2 comes from the earth too. This is a serious issue, how serious we really don't know yet. And yes there will be some panic and bad information. But there is a whole state whose shores could potentially be affected. If it was a regular thing happening, well, tourism wouldn't be so big here then. But it's not normal and lives have been disrupted and jobs already in jeopardy. We need to prepare for the worst and hope for the best.
skye, I'd like to see the comparison data, base-line analysis, heck I'd like to do some good old fashioned coplin-jar gas chromatography on those tarballs myself.
Musta come from Mars I guess. Maybe they'll let CBS see the data, hahahaha
Since 10th May, 35mm (about 1.4"). The mountains along the north of the island got 6 or 7 inches in the same period.
This depends on the origin, the thicker the original oil, the faster - with a light crude as you generally find in the GOM - several weeks. My personal experience is with cold water spills only - five weeks is not enough
I think it was OND 1955..
Cool, as your rainy season starts, mine is about to end in North TX (Arlington, TX)
You are perfectly right, I should have said : Nothing forms tar balls in 5 days.
FYI:
In a paper presented at the 2000 Ocean Sciences Meeting in San Antonio, Texas, and titled Estimates of Total Hydrocarbon Seepage into the Gulf of Mexico Based on Satellite Remote Sensing Images, one researcher estimated that 500,000 barrels of oil seep into the Gulf each year, twice the result of the Exxon Valdez spill.
Darwi Odrade
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