We’ve been tracking the “blob” on WUWT almost since its inception thanks to the hard work of Bob Tisdale. In his most recent entry on it, Bob asked: THE BLOB Seems to Be Disappearing at the Surface – But Will It Reemerge?
The answer seems to be ‘no’.
From NASA Earth Observatory: The Demise of the Warm Blob – Image of the Day
In the winter of 2013-14, an unusually strong and persistent ridge of atmospheric high pressure emerged in weather maps of the northeastern Pacific Ocean. The feature, which was so unrelenting that meteorologists took to calling it the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge, weakened winds in the area enough that the normal wind-driven churning of the sea eased. Those winds usually promote upwelling, which brings deep, cool water up toward the surface; instead, the resilient ridge shut down the ocean circulation, leaving a large lens of unusually warm surface water in the northeastern Pacific.
At times, this patch of warm water seeped into the Bering Sea, the Gulf of Alaska, and the coastal waters off Washington, Oregon, and California. In fact, many parts of the northeastern Pacific experienced the greatest sea surface temperature anomalies in the historical record. Scientists and journalists took to calling the patch of warm water “the Blob.” Nicholas Bond, a University of Washington meteorologist and the Washington state’s climatologist, coined the term in a June 2014 newsletter.
As unusually warm surface water sloshed around for months, the grim consequences began to ricochet through the marine food web. Microscopic phytoplankton thrive in cool waters, so the lack of upwelling water meant surface waters became increasingly starved of nutrients. With fewer phytoplankton, fish and other marine life began to suffer. Certain types of fish started avoiding the region altogether, and by 2015 record numbers of starving sea lions and fur seals were found stranded on California’s beaches. Meanwhile, the warm water also began to produce some strange weather in the western United States.
Thanks in part to the strong El Niño in the equatorial Pacific, the Blob has finally broken up. Beginning in November 2015, strong winds blowing south from Alaska began to pick up, and sea surface temperatures in the northeastern Pacific began to cool.
Data collected by the U.S. Navy’s WindSAT instrument on the Coriolis satellite and the AMSR2 instrument on Japan’s GCOM-W satellite bear this out. The maps above show sea surface temperature anomalies in the Pacific in July 2015 (top) and January 2016 (bottom). The maps do not depict absolute temperatures; instead, they show how much above (red) or below (blue) water temperatures were compared to the average from 2003 to 2012. The maps were built with data from the Microwave Optimally Interpolated SST product, a NASA-supported effort at Remote Sensing Systems.
In July 2015, temperatures were unusually warm across a large swath from the Gulf of Alaska to the California coast. By January 2016, more seasonable temperatures had returned. The development came as no surprise to weather watchers. In September 2015, Clifford Mass, a University of Washington atmospheric scientist, explained in his blog that El Niño generally brings lower-than-normal sea surface pressures to the eastern Pacific—the opposite of the systems that sustained the blob. By mid-December 2015, Mass declared that the blob was dead.
Remnants of the warm water patch still persist. “There are significant temperature anomalies extending down to a depth of about 300 meters. So while the weather patterns the past few months have not been that favorable to warming, it will take a while for all of the accumulated heat to go away,” explained Bond. That means impacts on marine life and on weather in the Pacific Northwest could linger, though Bond does not think the blob will return in the near term.
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References and Further Reading
- Alaska Public Media (2016, January 11) ‘The Blob’…on winter vacation or gone for good? Accessed February 12, 2016.
- Cliff Mass Weather Blog (2015, September 2) Godzilla El Nino Versus The BLOB: Who Will Win? Accessed February 12, 2016.
- Cliff Mass Weather Blog (2015, December 17) Dead Blob. Accessed February 12, 2016.
- Hakai (2016, February 4) Keeping a Finger on the Pulse of the Pacific. Accessed February 12, 2016.
- Marine Mammal Center (2015, November 19) Unusual Ocean Conditions Continue to Cause Record Strandings.Accessed February 12, 2016.
- NOAA (2014, September) Unusual North Pacific warmth jostles marine food chain. Accessed February 12, 2016.
- NOAA Fisheries (2015, December 10) November Takes a Bite Out of ‘the Blob’. Accessed February 12, 2016.
- NASA Earth Observatory (2015, April 18) Warm Water and Strange Weather May Be Connected. Accessed February 12, 2016.
- The Star (2016, January 1) Pacific ‘blob’ breaking up, but that may not be good news. Accessed February 12, 2016.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen, using microwave and infrared multi-sensor SST data from Remote Sensing Systems. Caption by Adam Voiland.
- Instrument(s):
- Terra – MODIS
- GCOM-W1 – AMSR-2
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Poor Blob, I knew him well……
Trenberth is preparing to assert that the blob has merely went into hiding in the deep ocean.
This he knows for sure.
I wonder if piece or this old graph on page 2773 in a 1997 Trenberth paper on El Nino is meaningful?
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0477(1997)078%3C2771%3ATDOENO%3E2.0.CO%3B2
Figure 1 shows the 5-month running mean SST
time series for the Niño 3 and 3.4 regions relative to a
base period climatology of 1950–79 given in Table 1.
The base period can make a difference. This standard
30-year base period is chosen as it is representative of
the record this century, whereas the period after 1979
has been biased warm and dominated by El Niño
events (Trenberth and Hoar 1996a).
I had the privilege of studying climatology under Dr. Guzman-Rivas at UC Boulder in the 60’s (before it became a political den of “sustainability”. He described Latitudes 40-60 degrees as the “battlegrounds of the atmosphere”. Nothing has changed.
Who called the beginning of the end of the blob here http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/14/august-2015-global-surface-landocean-and-lower-troposphere-temperature-anomaly-model-data-difference-update/#comment-2027694,
“Is the Blob dissipating?” – yours truly – gotta love it when a plan comes together
Eliminate the obvious. The blob was slap bang over an active tectonic boundary
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2014/oct/03/the-most-detailed-map-of-the-ocean-floor-ever-seen
Watch out!
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdUsyXQ8Wrs&w=420&h=315%5D
I surf on the Washington coast. Like last winter, this winter the water is warm enough that I often don’t have to wear gloves. My threshold of pain is about 50degF, depending a bit on air temperature. So far the water has been a balmy 49-51degF all winter. About 4 years ago the water got down to an ice-cream-headache-inducing 42degF.
Looking the maps, the anomaly appears to be unchanged from the two graphs immediately near the coast.
“In the winter of 2013-14, an unusually strong and persistent ridge of atmospheric high pressure emerged in weather maps of the northeastern Pacific Ocean. The feature, which was so unrelenting that meteorologists took to calling it the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge,”
Ridiculously Resilient Ridge? This is a ridiculously resilient ridge:
A massive 19th-century storm on the Pacific coast of the US opened up a 300-mile-long sea that stretched through much of the central part of California. And it looks like the state is due for another mega flood.
http://www.businessinsider.com/incredible-45-day-storm-california-300-mile-sea-could-happen-again-2016-2
California came right to the edge of that very same event in the winter of 1996/97. It rained for around 31 days and nights. During that period there was always some level of rain falling. Lakes were starting to form in the valley, mainly north of Sacramento. The greatest danger at that point in time was that the dam on the Feather River drainage system was in danger of over topping. That is one of the largest earthen dams in the world..http://www.cnrfc.noaa.gov/storm_summaries/jan1997storms.php
If the Oroville dam gave way, then it would have flooded the entire region all the way up to and through the San Francisco Bay Area. Sacramento, the capitol, would have been severely impacted as well, perhaps almost wiped out. Every little stream of water anywhere had turned into a raging torrent.
Let’s see…
1) The Blob is dead.
2) The PDO 30-yr warm cycle died in 2008 and is now in its 30-year cool cycle.
3) The 2014/15 Super El Niño is dying.
4) The rapid Sea Level Rise myth is dead. (Stuck at 6″ per century for past 215 years).
5) The rapid Antarctic land ice loss myth is dead. (NASA Niw says increasing at 100 billion tons/yr)
6) Arctic Ice extents have been recovering since 2007.
7) Antarctic ice extents have been growing for the past 35 years.
8) IPCC admits no global severe weather intensity trends for the past 50~100 years.
9) No significant global warming trend in 20 years (despite 30% of all manmade CO2 emissions since 1750 being made over just the last 20 years.
10) CO2 fertilization has increased crop yields and forest growth 25% since 1850.
11) ocean pH stuck at 8.1.
12) the current solar cycle is weakest at this stage in 200 years.
13) the next solar cycle is expected to be the weakest since the Dalton Minimum (1790~1820)
14)the solar cycle starting from 2033 is expected to be the start of another Grand Solar Minimum that could last 50~100 years.
15) the AMO starts its 30-yr cool cycle from around 2020.
The disparity between CAGW projections vs. reality (RSS/UAH/Radiosonde data) currently exceeds 2+ standard deviations for a duration of around 20 years, which is already sufficient criteria to disconfirm the CAGW hypothesis…
In 5 years, the disparity will likely exceed 3 SDs for 25 years, which becomes absolutely laughable.
CAGW is dead…
Could be some additional deaths coming if some of the trends you list continue.
16. UAH/RSS temperatures are the highest recorded for January.
17. Sea ice extent is the lowest ever recorded. There has been no recovery in Arctic sea ice extent. .
CAGW might be questionable. AGW is looking more and more certain. Much of the talk on anti-AGW blogs has, for at least 10 year to my knowledge, been about imminent global cooling. It’s not happening. We’re continuing to warm – slowly perhaps – but warming nonetheless.
John– There hasn’t been a discernible RSS/UAH/Radiosonde warming trend in 20-years:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1996.6/plot/rss/from:1996.6/trend/plot/esrl-co2/from:1996.6/normalise/trend/plot/esrl-co2/from:1996.6/normalise
There was a 2014~16 El Niño spike, which will be negated by the subsequent La Niña cycle…. One-off events mean NOTHING..
Arctic Ice Extents have been recovering since 2007:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.arctic.png
Arctic Ice Extents follow 30-yr AMO warm/cool cycles. When the AMO switches to its 30-year cool cycle from 2020, Arctic ice extents will quickly recover.
I agree with your bringing attention to the lack of polar ice, after the previous comment, which struck me as being quite weird.
According to “Cryosphere Today” Arctic ice is at its lowest ever for this midwinter date, Antarctic ice is well below average, and global sea ice is at an all time low.
Merely parroting different facts doesn’t make them true. Hoping for a downturn in temperatures a few years hence is one thing, but the only facts we can report on are those which have already happened
The story of The Blog illustrates why the “fruit salad” metric — Land and Sea Surface Temperature (LSST — and its various versions and indexes) — are not useful as measures of anthropocentric global climate change or warming. The Blob (like El Niño and La Niña) caused an out-sized effect on LSST but is not caused by anything directly related to increased energy retention of the atmosphere or ocean due to increased GHG concentrations.
Mixing two different physical characteristics of the Earth’s climate that are not subject to changes by the same causes thus creates a metric that changes for reasons primarily unrelated to one another.
Both systems (atmosphere and ocean) are primarily ruled by complex fluid dynamics — with solar energy (and the increase in retention caused by GHGs) being only one of the inputs into those systems.
Yay!!!Goodbye Blob!!please dont come back!!!
Its interesting that when people think about climate change they only think about “oh it’s getting warmer/colder outside, when in fact it plays a much larger role than people know about. like in this article the ocean is absorbing the heat it cant put back into the atmosphere which directly affects the marine life living there due certain organism needing a specific temperature to thrive. By animals migrating and dying off that directly affects business and calls for an increase of specific seafood.