Record-Breaking Heat in Alaska Wreaks Havoc on Communities and Ecosystems

Alaska in March is supposed to be cold. Along the north and west coasts, the ocean should be frozen farther than the eye can see. In the state’s interior, rivers should be locked in ice so thick that they double as roads for snowmobiles and trucks. And where I live, near Anchorage in south-central Alaska, the snowpack should be deep enough to support skiing for weeks to come. But this year, a record-breaking heatwave upended norms and had us basking in comfortable—but often unsettling—warmth.

This spring, temperatures in Alaska and northern Canada
 have been significantly higher than usual. Red indicates
 areas warmer than average while blue indicates colder
 than average. The darker the red, or blue, the greater
the deviation from average.

Across Alaska, March temperatures averaged 11 degrees Celsius above normal. The deviation was most extreme in the Arctic where, on March 30, thermometers rose almost 22 degrees Celsius above normal—to 3 degrees. That still sounds cold, but it was comparatively hot.

“It’s hard to characterize that anomaly, it’s just pretty darn remarkable for that part of the world,” says Rick Thoman, a climate specialist with the Alaska Center for Climate Assessment and Policy in Fairbanks. The state’s wave of warmth was part of a weeks-long weather pattern that shattered temperature records across our immense state, contributing to losses of both property and life. “When you have a slow grind of warming like that, lasting weeks or months, it affects people’s lives,” Thoman says.

Read the Smithsonian story by Tim Lydon - “Record-Breaking Heat in Alaska Wreaks Havoc on Communities and Ecosystems.”

Sorry climate, energy and ocean, must dash

Letter from today's Age:

Marine parks decision risks making ocean tragedy even worse.

For too long, we assumed the ocean simply cleanses, purifies and spits out junk – and does not absorb it or get sickened by it.

A black footed albatross chick with plastics in its stomach
 lies dead on Midway Atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian
 Islands. Midway sits in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

But slowly, certainly and tragically, we are discovering how foolish that assumption has been. It took about a century to even start questioning the wisdom of shooting raw sewage into the ocean and allowing sewage and industrial waste to pour in, unchecked.

And now: plastic. We have all seen footage of ugly plastics suffocating our oceans, of bird stomachs lethally jammed with human-made jetsam, of string choking the throats of penguins, (just recently a friend of mine untangled balloon string from the neck of a turtle in our bay).

Read Julia Baird’s comment from The Age - “Marine parks decision risks making ocean tragedy even worse.”

The oceans have never been hotter than they are now

2017 was only the second-warmest year on record, according to NASA. But when it comes to the ocean, temperatures have never been warmer.

Our oceans have never been warmer.

New data from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Atmospheric Physics analyzing ocean data from the last half-century shows a clear trend: The oceans are steadily getting warmer, with this year registering the hottest yet. And while the atmospheric temperature is more susceptible to year-to-year shifts, the data from the Earth’s waters shows the consistency with which our world is heating up.

“The ocean heat records are so impressive because they’re absolutely on a steady warming trend,” Robert Anderson, a geochemist at Columbia University, told VICE News. “People who point to pauses in global warming haven’t looked at the warming of the oceans.”

Read the Vice News story by Alex Lubben - “The oceans have never been hotter than they are now.”

Using data science to understand global climate systems

Climate scientists at the University of Rochester are using data science to understand what drives the global climate system—from deep in the ocean to high in the sky.

Tom Weber uses data from NASA satellite images,
 such as the image above. The color of the surface
 ocean reflects how much phytoplankton biomass
 there is, with the greener color indicating more
 chlorophyll and therefore more phytoplankton. 

Xiaoxuan Wang ’18, a computer science major, is working with earth and environmental sciences professor Tom Weber on a project that combines data science and environmental science to look at the daily concentration of chlorophyll—and therefore phytoplankton—in the Great Lakes from 2002 to 2016.

The project mirrors Weber’s work on ocean carbon cycles by using NASA satellite data. Freshwater and seawater reflect light differently, and generally algorithms to sort this data have been designed for ocean waters. However, Weber and Wang are working with new satellite data from the Great Lakes, which is, Weber says, “the first attempt to visualize plankton growths in the Great Lakes from space.”

Wang uses a computer application called MATLAB to process and organize the large satellite data sets.

Read the Science and Technology Research News story - “Using data science to understand global climate systems.”

Climate change damage growing more pronounced across globe

Launching into coverage of climate change right now is like tuning into a football game that's half over and your team is on its way to losing. The only question is by how much.

Even if every word of last December's breakthrough Paris Agreement is implemented and global warming is slowed, according to climate scientists I've interviewed, nations might moderate the planetary abuse caused by generations of mankind pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, ocean, plants and soil.

At best, a catastrophe might be averted, they say.

But theirs is the joy of a patient learning that a diagnosis may not be terminal — only crippling. It's a reality reflected in the hooded expression of my youngest son, Noah, when the topic arises. At 20, he realizes all too well the world we've left his generation.

Read the Knoxville News Sentinel story - “Climate change damage growing more pronounced across globe.”