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NASA confirms the Pacific ‘warm blob’ has disappeared (El Nino.... where are you ?>
wattsupwiththat.com ^ | February 16, 2016 | Anthony Watts

Posted on 02/19/2016 4:04:11 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach

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

npacificssta_am2_201507

Imagery acquired July 1 – 31, 2015

npacificssta_am2_201601

Imagery acquired January 1 – 31, 2016

npacificssta_am2_200507_palette

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.

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


TOPICS: Conspiracy; Science; Weather
KEYWORDS: elnino

1 posted on 02/19/2016 4:04:11 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach

...predicted by Weatherbell. (Joes Bastardi and DeLeo)


2 posted on 02/19/2016 4:08:12 PM PST by gorush (History repeats itself because human nature is static)
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach

Guess I am confusing theis warm blob with the warm blob off the coast of South America on the equator....sorry!


3 posted on 02/19/2016 4:09:43 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach
Easy to do. They all look alike.


4 posted on 02/19/2016 4:24:06 PM PST by UCANSEE2 (Lost my tagline on Flight MH370. Sorry for the inconvenience.)
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach

El Nino?
The Blob?
Wasn’t Steve McQueen in.that?


5 posted on 02/19/2016 4:35:16 PM PST by Tupelo (Honest men go to Washington, but honest men do not stay in Washington.)
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach

Amazing breakthrough discovery by NASA - the northern Pacific is cooler in January than it was in July.


6 posted on 02/19/2016 4:36:14 PM PST by PAR35
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To: PAR35

I have c 1900 atlas showing the hot spot. Why do they act likes it something knew.


7 posted on 02/19/2016 4:39:55 PM PST by Sacajaweau
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach

It was eaten by a giant squid.


8 posted on 02/19/2016 5:24:00 PM PST by TigersEye (This is the age of the death of reason and rule of law. Prepare!)
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To: TigersEye
Damn,...the squid must be really big,...must have done in Godzilla also.

Reference :

Godzilla El Nino Versus The BLOB: Who Will Win? ....Northeast Pacific Blob....

9 posted on 02/19/2016 6:17:54 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach

Well, it was ... giant! lol


10 posted on 02/19/2016 6:22:34 PM PST by TigersEye (This is the age of the death of reason and rule of law. Prepare!)
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach

Hasn’t helped Southern California, rainfall is down again.


11 posted on 02/19/2016 7:12:17 PM PST by Mike Darancette (Obama Rules of Engagement: Hands up Don't Shoot)
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To: Ernest_at_the_Beach

You cannot have upwelling without downwelling. The Pacific was cooling, not warming. No downwelling means less solar warming and more energy getting blown off via evaporation. The Pacific warms when downwelling brings solar energy to the deep Pacific pool. Apes see the colder than average upwelling and think the Pacific is cooling. Stupid species, we are.


12 posted on 02/20/2016 2:00:31 AM PST by justa-hairyape (The user name is sarcastic. Although at times it may not appear that way.)
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