![places_gulfstream_sat3[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/places_gulfstream_sat31.jpg?quality=83)
NARRAGANSETT, R.I. – March 3, 2014 – Several recent studies have generated a great deal of publicity for their claims that the warming climate is slowing the pace of the Gulf Stream. They say that the Gulf Stream is decreasing in strength as a result of rising sea levels along the East Coast.
However, none of the studies include any direct measurements of the current over an extended period to prove their point.
But this is exactly what has been underway at the University of Rhode Island and Stony Brook University for the last 20 years: measurement of the strength of the Gulf Stream. And according to a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters, the researchers find no evidence that the Gulf Stream is slowing down. These new results reinforce earlier findings about the stability of Gulf Stream transport based on observations from as far back as the 1930s.
H. Thomas Rossby, a professor at the URI Graduate School of Oceanography, has spent much of his long career studying ocean circulation – especially the Gulf Stream – and how it makes its way across the Atlantic towards Europe and as far north as northern Norway. For the last 20 years he and his colleagues have measured the Gulf Stream using an acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP) attached to a ship, the freighter Oleander, which makes weekly trips across the Gulf Stream from New Jersey to Bermuda. The instrument, which measures the velocity of water moving beneath the ship down to more than 600 meters, has collected some 1,000 measurements of the Gulf Stream since it was installed in late 1992.
“The ADCP measures currents at very high accuracy, and so through the repeat measurements we take year after year, we have a very powerful tool by which to monitor the strength of the current,” said Rossby. “There are variations of the current over time that are natural — and yes, we need to understand these better — but we find absolutely no evidence that suggests that the Gulf Stream is slowing down.”
The rapidly flowing Gulf Stream plays a major role in the global heat balance through its transport of very warm water from the Caribbean toward Europe.
For this reason alone, Rossby says, there is good reason to be concerned about the long-term stability of the Gulf Stream, since if the Gulf Stream were slowing, a decrease in the flow of warm water to the northern North Atlantic could cause significant cooling in parts of Europe. But the data tell him that there is no evidence that this is happening, contrary to recent claims in the literature.
Although he officially retired in 2011, Rossby is continuing his Gulf Stream research and hopes to install a new instrument on the Oleander in the coming years that will be able to profile currents to even greater depths.
“Once we do that, all of the water going north will be well within our reach,” he said.
###
h/t to WUWT reader “Patrick”
================================================================
On the long-term stability of Gulf Stream transport based on 20 years of direct measurements
T. Rossby1,*, C. N. Flagg2, K. Donohue1, A. Sanchez-Franks2, J. Lillibridge3
Abstract
In contrast to recent claims of a Gulf Stream slowdown, two decades of directly measured velocity across the current show no evidence of a decrease. Using a well-constrained definition of Gulf Stream width, the linear least square fit yields a mean surface layer transport of 1.35 × 105 m2 s−1 with a 0.13% negative trend per year. Assuming geostrophy, this corresponds to a mean cross-stream sea level difference of 1.17 m, with sea level decreasing 0.03 m over the 20 year period. This is not significant at the 95% confidence level, and it is a factor of 2–4 less than that alleged from accelerated sea level rise along the U.S. Coast north of Cape Hatteras. Part of the disparity can be traced to the spatial complexity of altimetric sea level trends over the same period.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013GL058636/abstract
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Steven Mosher says:
March 4, 2014 at 11:24 am
around 50 measurements a year?
From the ,pdf copy of the Rossby et.al paper:
Key to the above results is the ability to monitor the ocean with high horizontal resolution on a repeat and regular basis.The ADCP enables us to scan ocean currents at high horizontal resolution, here every 2.4km (16 knot vessel speed × 5 min ensemble-averaged profiles).
Read their paper for the extended description of how their data is reduced and presented.
When I went to engineering school they taught us KE=1/2 m V^2. Does it take energy to move this water and are changes part of the earth’s total energy balance?
But this is exactly what has been underway at the University of Rhode Island and Stony Brook University for the last 20 years: measurement of the strength of the Gulf Stream. And according to a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters, the researchers find no evidence that the Gulf Stream is slowing down.
{Warmist meme]The measurement process must not be right if it doesn’t match pre-ordained models.[/Warmist meme]
🙂
more soylent green! says:
March 4, 2014 at 12:21 pm
Over 100 published science journal articles just gibberish
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/03/01/over-100-published-science-journal-articles-just-gibberish/
Shouldn’t that last be “peer reviewed gibberish”?
Wouldn’t be published otherwise, would it?
🙂
“Resourceguy says:
March 4, 2014 at 11:36 am
Direct observation and model error evaluation are so last century and non-consensus.”
Nowadays you could even call it Pre-Science!
SasjaL says:
March 4, 2014 at 11:27 am
If the Gulf Stream is getting slower, then it will be colder not only in UK/Eire but also in Scandinavia. In the latter region we’re missing that kind of cold at the moment …”
The warming effect of the gulf stream is easily overwhelmed by the temperature of the air masses transported into our region and in this respect Western and Northern Europe have been relative lucky this winter because the low solar activity responsible for “blocking” in and a split core of the Polar jet in combination with a (still) positive AMO) got us on the path of air masses coming in from the South South West all winter without any Arctic or Siberian air masses reaching our area. The relative warm Atlantic triggered the heavy rains we saw in the UK and the wild weather in Southern Europe. At the same time in the USA and Canada the blocking was (is) responsible for a continuous influx of cold Arctic air. Just realize that the landmass of the USA is only 2.5% and Western Europe is only 1%. (2% including Russia). Although the winter in Western Europe was balmy, Russia and Eastern Europe including former Yugoslavia had a cold snowy winter, just like Scotland with so much snow that the ski lifts were totally buried.
Both in the US and Western Europe people think they live in “The Center of the World” and every change in weather is a sign of climate change.
Well, our history tells a totally different story. The heaviest storms happened with CO2 below 350 ppm, the warmest period in the past century took place during the 30’s and the warmest period during the past .1.000 years was the Medieval Warmth Period. Non of the temperature records from the 30’s have been surpassed during the second half of the past century and the past 14 years of this century. We had many cold periods, the last one called the Little Ice Age and all signs point to a new cold period for the simple reason of the PDO and AMO going negative, bringing us the weather we had in the seventies when the world, including the CIA thought we were entering a new ice age. Over the past thousand years the Oort, Wolf, Sporer, Dalton and Maunder minimum have been identified and those periods were very bad news for our populations and brought them the pandemics (black plague) and famines whereas the Medieval warmth period was a time of wealth and prosperity allowing our ancestors the to build the beautiful Cathedrals in Europe and the vineyards in England.
The Western world, 3% of the World landmasses is the home of an alarmist neurotic and psychotic public. This public has the highest consumption rates of pharmacuetical medication, tranquilizers and legal and/or illegal drugs and because they all believe they live in the center of the Global civilization (many of them even believe the sun is orbiting the earth) they believe they can control the weather and stop the natural evolution and change of the environment.
The sum of the worst mental cases (we have a lot of them) believe human kind = our civilization, has become a threat to the planet and here lies the cause of all the absurd claims made about CO2 and the hysterical claims about the weather, sea level rise, mass extinctions of polar bears and other species even though our observations show none of this is happening.
These people are on a continuous “trip” and hallucinate about the new Utopia where everything is controlled, even the number of inhabitants and Gaia is their new master.
Of course some clever cookies have found way’s to make money out of the drug addicts and managed to politicize the entire subject securing an endless flow of state funding.
As a result our science has been corrupted and no sane argument comes through.
No wonder it is difficult to have a level exchange of opinion because a psychotic and neurotic public doesn’t listen and lost any ground for reason.
As a result of their practices our energy infra structure has arrived on the brink of collapse (it’s going bankrupt) and so is our economy.
All we need now is a new ice age, a pandemic or a collapse of our economy and our energy infra structure, whatever comes first so we get rid of them.
Those of us who see this coming will prepare.
Those who believe the world is in for a thermogeddon won’t
I am convinced that very soon we will be back in times ruled by the basic law of life, the survival of the fittest.
The addicts won’t make it.
The clear open water currently extending well north of Iceland to Svalbard and Novaya Zemlya is a clear indication that a very large volume of warm water from the Gulf Stream is still quite happily making its way into the far reaches of the Norwegian and Barents Sea, and not stopping short due to any hypothesised/modelled slowing of said current.
Naughty nature playing nasty tricks on the climastrologists/carbon cultists again by defying their robust ocean circulation models.
Direct observations always trump speculations based on inferred relationships and fancy modeling results.
Steve Mosher asks a good question. Woud we reject this study if the results were oposite, since it is based on what appears to be a tiny number of measurements?
I reject the premise of the GS slowing in any significant or unprecedented fashion because it has been highly variable in prior studies and specifically that a few cms. of change in shoreline is not going to impact a deep ocean current much at all in the first place.
Obviously their instrumentation is not as sensitive as thermometers. I’m sure if they had better instrumentation they’d find that the Gulf Stream is slowing by 0.01425 knotts a year. Disaster is on the loom, more grant $ for better instrumentation is needed.
R. de Haan on March 4, 2014 at 12:55 pm
Yes, agree. We sometimes talk here about “Russian winter“, when we get hit by Sibirean weather systems.
This does not make sense. Higher gulf stream flow means more heat transported to the Arctic and less Arctic sea ice. By contrast slowdown in the gulf stream will lead to Arctic ice recovery. Alternation between periods of stronger and weaker gulf stream flow probably constitutes the main element of the AMO.
@SDB
…My question: since 32/38000 = 0.0008; or… our total cumulative emissions in the past few hundred years is equal to 0.08% of the amount of CO2 stored in the oceans (less than 1/10th of 1%, how can our emissions have any appreciable impact on marine life? Is the ocean ‘that’ sensitive to less than 1/10th of 1%?
What am I missing?…
(Puts Global Warming hat firmly on)
What you are missing is the tipping point. We are now on the edge of stability, according to my upside-down balanced wine-bottle model, and another sugar-loaded evil fizzy drink can will cause the entire Gulf Stream to halt in its course and start running backwards. I don’t have any data to back this up, but suppose I’m right? I conservatively estimate that this will cost humanity $200 tn(modeled), or about 4 times the Earth’s yearly GDP. Plus, if it starts WW3, it will cost 5bn lives(estimate).
Can you afford to take the risk? Think of the children! Join my crusade for sealed Cola drinking rooms with carbon capture equipment installed NOW!!!…
signed
DG (Director, Hermetically-Sealed Halls Corp and Lime-Water Bubbling Equipment Inc.)
PS Donations accepted from all political parties. (Cash in unmarked bills, or unaudited grants, please)
Mosher writes “around 50 measurements a year?”
But surely jests. Each “measurement” is something like the equivalent of a “global temeperature measurement” which itself is made up of many individual regional measurements gridded and averaged across the whole globe. So in that sense the equivalent would be we only get one “global temperature measurement” per day.
Now why would you wonder that? Provoking discussion? Or something else?
One after another alarmist prediction turns out not to be true. No wonder Algore is hiding.
Is anyone actually counting on the Warmists even acknowledging this paper and its data? They likely see the slow down of the Gulf Stream caused by man-made carbon dioxide as solid fact by now so the observational data must be wrong and this Rossby guy, if he even exists, is just a Koch-paid anti-science denier. Or, maybe the current is just decelerating everywhere data has not been collected.
Mosher writes “around 50 measurements a year?”
How many measurements did Franklin use to map the gulf-stream?
would seem that if the GS is slowing, measuring a difference over time at a few points would suffice just to show a change. Unless there is some severe changing of the channeling (a widening or narrowing of the stream’s width or depth), it doesn’t really need a lot of simultaneous data points to show increases or decreases over time. More is always better, but in this case, more measurements in the same places over longer periods is more better…and that is what was done. Correct me if I’m missing something.
The Oleander is not the only ship outfitted with this type of measuring equipment, see here:
http://www.newswise.com/articles/ferries-freighters-cruise-ships-playing-important-role-in-oceanographic-research
Off Topic, but I think you all should know that Global Warming is likely to wake up ancient frozen pathogens. Giant prehistoric germs will roam the world, rending our flesh with their enormous teeth.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-03-04/30000-year-old-virus-from-permafrost-is-reborn/5296436
We’re doomed.
(Also, we’re getting more extreme weather, allegedly. Not clear how this will affect the Germs From The Dawn Of Time.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-03-04/climate-extremes-increasing-carbon-dioxide-levels-rise-report/5295876)
Here is a short NOAA web item describes what kind of animal this ‘ ADCP’ is and what makes it tick. They make the claim “ADCP technology is very robust”, and from the description of the technique in the article I am quite willing to believe that there is a good reason think it is somme thruth in that claim.
http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/technology/tools/acoust_doppler/acoust_doppler.html
SDB Mar 4 12:17pm asks “since … our total cumulative emissions in the past few hundred years is equal to 0.08% of the amount of CO2 stored in the oceans (less than 1/10th of 1%, how can our emissions have any appreciable impact on marine life? Is the ocean ‘that’ sensitive to less than 1/10th of 1%?
What am I missing?“.
As I understand it, there is an ocean surface “mixed” layer, some tens of metres thick, into which the CO2 mixes quite quickly. Transport from there to deeper parts of the ocean takes a lot longer. The CO2 therefore has a much larger effect in the surface layer than as per your calcs.
However, I would ask whether the impact of of the CO2 on marine life could in fact be a net positive. I’m sure that many organisms would relish the extra CO2.
The science is settled. Here is the peer reviewed literature.
Gulf stream slows down [1957 and 2004]
Gulf stream speeds up a little [1993 to 2009]
Am I allowed to guess that the Gulf Stream has slowed down and sped up at different times between 10,000 years ago up to 1700?
My article, 26th March 2012 :
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/03/29/the-gulf-stream-today/
and paper :
http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=7545&tid=3622&cid=69134
Old pictures from 1996 and 2000 respectively:
http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/gulf-fig6-small.jpg
http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/gulf-fig6-small.jpg
Now, Meander,warm and cold core eddy …weak !
See database for comparison :
http://rads.tudelft.nl/gulfstream/gif/
And as a note of intrest the news article that Iinked to in the first of my comment above is from year 2006 and in it Dr. Rossby is cited sayin that 14 years worth of data has already been colleceted so add the time gone by since then and update the number to more than 21 year of the same now.