Water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico often enter the conversation during hurricane season, but they also play a role in tornado season each spring. Concern is growing for the potential impact that abnormally warm sea surface temperatures will have in the weeks and months ahead, with experts warily keeping tabs on what could be a busy tornado season.
Friday’s tornado outbreak in Mississippi and Alabama, which killed at least 24 people, coincided with gulf waters up to several degrees warmer than normal and as high as the upper 70s.
April, May and June are historically the most active for severe weather and tornadoes, with an average of 660 twisters spinning up within the three-month window. They materialize seemingly like clockwork, creeping north across the Deep South before swimming over the Plains and the nation’s heartland.
While considerable variability can occur year to year, there may be ties between gulf sea surface temperatures and the frequency and intensity of severe weather events in the U.S. Deep South in particular.
In the months ahead, several key atmospheric processes could favor a busier-than-normal tornado season, including the warm gulf water, but the jury is still out on just how active it will be. Seasonal tornado forecasting is still in its infancy, and meteorologists are careful to remind the public that confidence remains low in what lies ahead.
The year has already been off to a historically active start, with a preliminary total of 168 tornadoes touching down across the Lower 48 states in January. That’s the second-most on record. In February, there were 55 tornadoes — double the average of 29.
Oklahoma reported 17 tornadoes in January and February. The average during that window is one.
On Jan. 16, two tornadoes spun up in eastern Iowa, the state’s first January tornadoes in 50 years.
Alabama also logged 29 tornadoes during January, smashing state records, and New Jersey even faced an EF2 tornado, on the 0-to-5 scale for twister intensity, on Feb. 21. That marked the Garden State’s first February twister in nearly a quarter-century.
Warm Gulf of Mexico water temperatures probably boosted the winter activity, consistently running several degrees above average. In addition, temperatures were exceptionally high over land, especially in the eastern United States. January was 5.1 degrees above normal in the Lower 48. February was 2.7 degrees above average.
March tornado activity had been quiet until Friday’s outbreak in the South, which may have kick-started the spring season.
Nearly 50 years after being filled, Lake Powell recently reached its lowest point.
Since then, the lake’s seasonal uptrend in water levels has begun.
Lake Powell hit a new low of 3520.46 feet on March 13, data from the Bureau of Reclamationshows.
However, the following eight days all saw more water flow into the lake than out of it, resulting in just under half a foot of rise in water levels. The increase is the first sustained gains the lake has seen since May of last year.
The historically high amounts of rain and snow the U.S. Southwest has received over the past winter may have kickstarted Lake Powell’s seasonal uptrend very early. The lake usually doesn’t start seeing more intake than outtake until mountain snow begins to melt in mid-May, data from the U.S. Geological Survey showed.
It’s unclear just how much this past unusually wet winter will affect the lake and the Colorado River at large. However, a positive impact can be expected as nearly every upper and lower river basin state is reporting triple-digit percent above-average moisture.
As Spring kicks off, time will tell just how much of a boost summer snowmelt will bring to the parched Southwest.
A year and a half ago, China’s CATL put on a flashy event to make an announcement significant enough that Zeng Yuqun, the founder and chairman of the world’s biggest battery maker, served as emcee.
Zeng, who had just passed up Alibaba’s Jack Ma in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, revealed that CATL was working on battery packs that would use lithium-ion andsodium-ion cells. While sodium is more abundant and offers potential safety benefits over lithium, the latter is dominant in EV batteries. Lithium-ion chemistries offer superior energy density, enabling drivers to travel further between charges.
While CATL laid out steps it was taking toward commercialization, the massive supplier to automakers including Tesla, Geely and BMW has been beaten to the punch — at least to the prototype stage. Last month, Chinese automaker JAC unveiled a test version of its Sehol E10X electric car that was packing sodium-ion cells.
Supplying the cells was HiNa Battery Technologies, a small and relatively new player to China’s battery scene, having been founded in 2017 following years of work at a scientific research institute. The debut of a vehicle using HiNa’s cells has battery experts reconsidering the potential for sodium-ion chemistries to play a role powering future EVs. BloombergNEF and other research firms have been projecting that EVs will be powered almost entirely by lithium-ion batteries.
I posted the other day on the exposure of mortgage lenders to climate risk, something climate deniers are desperate to hold at bay. Another example that what right wingers call “Woke” is simply acknowledging reality.
U.S. President Joe Biden on Monday rejected a Republican proposal to prevent pension fund managers from basing investment decisions on factors like climate change, in the first veto of his presidency.
“I just signed this veto because the legislation passed by the Congress would put at risk the retirement savings of individuals across the country,” Biden said in a video posted on Twitter.
The bill cleared Congress on March 1, when the Senate voted 50-46 to adopt a measure to overturn a Labor Department rule making it easier for fund managers to consider environmental, social and corporate governance, or ESG, issues for investments and shareholder rights decisions, such as through proxy voting.
Below, further discussion on CNBC, with Vivek Ramaswamy, who apparently thinks this issue will vault him into the top tiers of Presidential candidates. Mr Ramaswamy has, tellingly, endeared himself to the right by expressing outrage that former President Trump might be held accountable for tax fraud, or, presumably, for shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, or anything else.
Did a zoom on climate and solutions for a group of college students last night. It underlined what I’ve recognized again for the thousandth time – that for most people, the abc’s of climate are still entirely new territory. So, veterans bear with me, but we all need a reminder. I showed them the footage above from PBS’s “Earth: An Operator’s Manual”, which describes US government research developing heat seeking missiles, which solidified scientific understanding of the radiative properties of atmospheric gases, and confirmed, to the degree that was needed, the insights of Fourier, Foote, Tyndall, Arrhenius, and Callender.
I underlined for them that we were not talking about the “hole in the ozone layer”, or “acid rain”, things I’ve heard recently confused with climate science. I did not, but probably should have, included a shot of Gilbert Plass’s 1956 paper. Plass had been a lead researcher on the missile development project, and took the next step to summarize the implications.
And probably should have made a link to Frank Capra, who even young people might know from watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” at Christmas time – and the Bell Telephone Science Hour segment he produced in 1958.
Fungus infections are limited because many fungal organisms cannot survive in warm blooded mammals like humans. But what if, HBO’s “The Last of Us” series asked, what if climate were to warm a few degrees, and fungi adapted to warmer temperatures, and found there way to infect more human beings…?
A deadly and highly drug resistant fungus is spreading at “an alarming rate” in long-term care hospitals and other health facilities caring for very sick people, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Monday.
Fungal infections from the yeast strain known as Candida auris tripled nationally from 476 in 2019 to 1,471 in 2021, according to CDC data. Cases where a person carries the fungus but is not infected nearly quadrupled from 1,077 to 4,040 in the same period. Preliminary data suggests the numbers have continued to rise.
Scientists believe the fungus is not a threat to healthy people whose immune systems can fight it off. But it poses a danger to medically fragile people, including nursing home patients on ventilators and cancer patients on chemotherapy. Between 30 to 70 percent of hospitalized people who develop bloodstream infections are estimated to die. –
The fungus has now been detected in more than half the states, with 17 states identifying their first case between 2019 and 2021. Most spread has occurred in long-term acute care hospitals and skilled-nursing facilities, where patients are more likely to be on ventilators, the CDC says. Case counts are probably an underestimate because screening requires specialized equipment and is conducted unevenly across the United States.
Candida can cause fatal infections in the bloodstream, heart and brain. The CDC does not track how many people died, and it can be difficult to discern cause of death when the patients at highest risk are often already fighting for their lives.
The emergence of the fungus, detected more than a decade ago in India, South Africa and South America, has perplexed researchers.
Fungi often cannot withstand the temperature of the human body, but one leading theory posits that Candida is now capable of doing so because it has evolved to survive in a warming world.
“This is how climate change or global warming can bring diseases because those in the environment have to adapt to survive and then have the capacity to survive in humans,” said Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who has studied the fungus.
That has eerie parallels to the HBO drama “The Last of Us,” where the real-life cordyceps fungus that creates “zombie ants” adapts to a warming climate and infects humans, unleashing a zombie apocalypse.
Experts credit the show for generating interest in fungal infections that wereoften overshadowed by viruses and bacteria as the pathogens gripping public attention. Despite its deadly potential, the CDC says the spread of Candida can be stopped if hospitals emphasize surveillance,hand hygiene and deep cleaning with the proper disinfectants.
Lyman offered further reassurance: “We are glad to report it does not cause people to turn into zombies.”
Unbelievable satellite imagery of one of the most intense March cyclones on record for California with the eye of the storm making landfall near San Francisco.
But despite the disconnect between the storm and the Pineapple Express, the storm did see a dramatic drop in pressure, falling below 990 millibars. This means it got close to reaching the benchmark that would’ve made it a bomb cyclone — a system whose pressure rapidly drops as it bursts into a powerful storm with an occasional eye at its center. But that’s only according to one definition of a bomb cyclone, where the pressure of a low-pressure system around 40 degrees latitude needs to drop by 17 millibars in under 24 hours.
Scientifically, that’s an impressive feat for a storm off the coast of California, with the National Weather Service saying the range was one of the lowest recorded for the month of March.
