Those categories, the Saffir–Simpson hurricane scale, were introduced by the National Hurricane Center in the 1970s. Originally the scale was meant to convey both wind and water destruction but was simplified in 2010 to focus solely on wind hazards, while storm surge and precipitation risks are now communicated separately.

The scale is open-ended with Category 5 storms being the top with sustained winds greater than 157 miles per hour (70 m/s).  This open-endedness originated from the belief that the cumulative impact of wind, surge, and rainfall in a Category 5 event could utterly destroy any structure. But Category 5 may no longer be enough.

A new study suggest that we need a Category 6 that categorizes storms greater than 192 miles per hour (86 m/s).  Numerous storms have already reached wind speeds comparable to those in in the Category 6 range. In the past nine years, five storms have surpassed the hypothetical Category 6 threshold. Notably, the most intense of these, Hurricane Patricia, struck Jalisco, Mexico while the others occurred in the Western Pacific, including Haiyan and Goni which hit heavily populated areas of the Philippines. Haiyan, considered by some as deserving of a Category 6 designation, caused extensive damage and casualties in the Philippines. Another storm, Meranti, caused damage in the Philippines and Taiwan before making landfall in eastern China, resulting in severe flooding.

In addition, increases in Emanuel’s Potential Intensity (PI) index indicate that human influence on the climate system has elevated the risk of such storms reaching Category 6 levels. You can think of hurricane as engine that transport that energy, i.e. heat, from the ocean surface to an outflow at the boundary between the troposphere from the stratosphere.  The PI measures the strength of this hurricane engine. Looking at data from 1979 to 2018, the authors found that the likelihood of storms reaching Category 6 strength has increased significantly due to global warming. Comparing the periods from 1999 to 2018 and 1979 to 1998, almost three times more instances of storms exceeding the Category 6 threshold occurred. The authors note, “Overall, the chances of PI exceeding the category 6 threshold have more than doubled since 1979.”

Additionally, climate model simulations conducted by the authors predict further increases of these Category 6 hurricanes. The authors demonstrate that when they run long-term simulations using three advanced global climate models, they all predict the greater occurrence of Category 6 storms in conditions hotter than what we have today. Even if we manage to meet the relatively modest global warming goals outlined in the Paris Agreement, these simulations still show a significant rise in the likelihood of Category 6 storms happening.

The post The Rise of Category 6 Storms in a Warming World first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Introduction

The Ocean Cleanup, brainchild of Dutch inventor Boyan Slat, was in the news again this past week after announcing that in addition to the fact that their system is unable to collect plastic as intended, it suffered a mechanical failure. “Wilson” is currently being towed to Hawaii, where it will undergo repairs and upgrades, presumably to be towed back out to the garbage patch for a second trial.

I am not a mechanical engineer, so I don’t intend to comment on the details of their mechanical failure. I am, however, a sea-going oceanographer. Which means that I am used to the sorts of situations with scientific research equipment that was so succinctly paraphrased by Dr. Miriam Goldstein:

Designing for physics

But beyond the engineering, there are the questions of what the *physics* are that TOC are relying on for their system to be successful. Some of you may recall that the original design was to moor (i.e. *anchor*) their device in 6000m (20000 feet) of water, and let existing ocean currents sweep garbage into the U-shaped structure. Thankfully, they realized the challenges associated with deep-ocean moorings, and abandoned that idea.

The latest design iteration (misleadingly called “System 001”, as though they haven’t built and tested any other previous to it), is to have a freely-drifting system, avoiding the use of anchors. TOC claim that under the influence of current, wind, and waves, their design will drift *faster* than the plastic — causing it to accumulate in the U, making for easy pickup. They summarize the concept with a little explainer video on their website, with a representative screen shot below:

Based on a quick Twitter rant that I had after thinking about all this for a few minutes (see here), I wanted to explain out the various points that have either a) been missed by TOC design team, or b) deliberately excluded from their rosy assessment of how they expect their system to actually collect garbage. What follows is a “first stab” at a physical oceanographic assessment of the basic idea behind “System001”, and what TOC would need to address to convince the community (i.e. scientists, conservationists, etc) that their system is actually worth the millions of dollars going into development and testing.

The premise

As outlined in the video, the premise of System001 as a garbage collection system is that through the combined action of wind, waves, and currents, the U-shaped boom will travel faster through the water than the floating plastic, thereby collecting and concentrating it for eventual removal. This appears to be based on the idea that while both the boom and the plastic will drift with the current, because the boom protrudes from the water (like a sail), it will actually move faster than the surface water by catching wind.

There are some issues with this premise. Or, at least, there are some real aspects of oceanography that have either been ignored or missed in thinking that such a system will behave in the predictable way described by TOC. I’ll try and outline them here.

Stokes drift

Any of you who may have had an introduction to ocean waves may have heard that during the passage of a wave, the water particles move in little circles (often called wave orbital motion). While not a bad “first-order” description, it turns out that for real ocean waves there is also some drift in the direction of wave propagation. This drift is named after Gabriel Stokes, who first described it mathematically in 1847 (see wikipedia article here).

The amount of drift depends nonlinearly on both the amplitude and the wavelength of the wave. For example, for a 0.5m amplitude wave with a wavelength of 10m and period of 10s (something like typical ocean swell), the drift velocity is about 10 cm/s right at the surface.

Of course, the Stokes’ solution describes the motion of the water parcels being moved by the wave. For those water parcels to then have an effect on anything in the water, one would need to consider the various components of force/impulse/momentum (i.e. our buddy Sir Isaac Newton). Needless to say, it seems obvious that a smallish piece of neutrally buoyant plastic will respond to the Stokes drift much more readily than a 600m long floating cylinder with a large mass (and therefore large inertia).

This alone could be enough to quash the idea of a passive propagating collection system. Mr Slat?

Ekman currents

While we’re talking about long-dead European fluid mechanics pioneers, any study of the effect of winds and currents wouldn’t be complete without a foray into the theories proposed by Swedish oceanographer Vagn Walfrid Ekman in 1905. What Ekman found was that when the wind blew over the surface of the ocean, the resulting current (forced by friction between the air and the water) didn’t actually move in the same direction as the wind. The reason for this is because of the so-called “Coriolis effect”, whereby objects moving on the surface of the Earth experience an “acceleration” orthogonal to their direction of motion that appears to make them follow a curved path (for those who want to go down the rabbit hole, the Coriolis acceleration is essentially a “fix” for the fact that the surface of the Earth is non-inertial reference frame, and therefore doesn’t satisfy the conditions for Newton’s laws to apply without modification).

Anyway — the consequence is that in an ideal ocean, with a steady wind blowing over the surface, the surface currents actually move at an angle of 45 degrees to the wind direction! Whether it’s to the left or right of the wind depends on which hemisphere you are in — I’ll leave it as an exercise to determine which is which. And what’s cooler, is that the surface current then acts like a frictional layer to the water just below it, causing it to move at an angle, and so on, with the effect being that the wind-forced flow actually makes a SPIRAL that gets smaller with depth. This is known as the Ekman spiral.

The actual depth that the spiral penetrates to depends on a mysterious ocean parameter called Az, which describes the vertical mixing of momentum between the layers — kind of like the friction between them. What is clear though, is that a small particle of plastic floating close to the surface and a 3m deep floating structure will likely not experience the same wind-forced current, and therefore won’t move in the same direction. Hmmm … that’s going to make it hard to pick up pieces of plastic.

What is a “Gyre” anyway?

The final point I wanted to make in this article (I have more, which I’ll summarize at the end for a possible future article), is to try and give a sense of what currents in the ocean (including in the “gyre” or in the region often referred to as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”) actually look like. The conception that there is a great swirling current 1000’s of km across is true only when the currents are averaged for a very long time. At any given instant, however, the ocean current field is a mess of flows at various space and time scales. An appropriate term for describing typical ocean flow fields is “turbulent”, as in an oft-viewed video made by NASA from satellite ocean current data.

To illustrate this, I took some screenshots of current conditions from the wonderful atmosphere/ocean visualization tool at earth.nullschool.net showing: ocean currents, surface waves, and wind.

These images illustrate the potential problem with TOC idea, by highlighting the fact that the wind, wave, and current fields of the ocean (including even in the “quiet” garbage patch) are highly variable spatially and temporally, and are almost never aligned at the same period in time. What’s more, is that the currents and waves at a given time and location are not always a result of the wind at that location. Eddies in the ocean are generated through all kinds of different processes, and can propagate across ocean basins before finally dissipating.

Similarly, surface waves have been measured to cross oceans (i.e. the famous “Waves across the Pacific” study pioneered by the transformative oceanographer Walter Munk).

Other issues

Following the “rule of three”, I tried to hit what I consider to be the biggest concerns with TOC system design and principle, from my perspective as a physical oceanographer. However, there are other issues that should be addressed, if the system as designed is really believed by the TOC team to be capable of doing what they say. And really, it seems like a crazy waste of time on behalf of everyone involved to have spent this much time on something if they aren’t sure it will even work theoretically … not to mention the money spent thus far. So, part of me *has* to believe that all the dozens of people involved care deeply about making something that might actually work, and they have studied and considered all the effects and potential issues I (and others) have raised.

Anyway, the other issues are:

• What is the actual response of the system to a rapid change in wind/wave direction? Wind can change direction pretty quickly, especially compared to ocean currents. What’s to prevent a bunch of accumulated plastic getting blown out the open end of the U after a 180 degree shift in wind but before the system can re-orient?
• What about wave reflection from the boom structure itself? It is a well-known fact that objects (even floating ones) can reflect and “scatter” waves (scattering is when the reflected waves have a shorter wavelength than the original ones), and it seems like this could create a wave field in the U that might actually causes drift *out* of the system.
• The idea that all wildlife can just “swim under” the skirt (because it’s impermeable) is not supported by anything that I consider to be rigorous fluid mechanics, aside from the fact that much of what actually lives in the open ocean are non-motile or “planktonic” species. There are a lot of communities in the open ocean that float and drift at the surface, and I see no way that if the System collects floating plastic as it is designed that it won’t just sweep up all those species too. The latest EIA brushed off the effect of the System on planktonic organisms by stating that they “are ubiquitous in the world’s oceans and any deaths that occur as a result of the plastic extraction process will not have any population level effects”. But that doesn’t take into account that the stated mission is to deploy 60 such systems, which are estimated to clean the garbage patch of surface material at a rate of 50% reduction every 5 years. It stands to reason that they would also clean the Pacific of its planktonic communities by the same amount.

The post The (ocean) physics of The Ocean Cleanup’s System 001 first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Sort of.

On August 21 2017, the moon passed in front of the sun, the sky darkened, the temperatures dropped, and the zooplankton thought it was night. This triggered their daily migratory response and they headed to the surface of the sea. And data from oceanographic buoys off the Oregon Coast recorded all the drama! Leave it to marine scientists to so conveniently deploy OOI, a permanent, highly instrumented, cabled oceanographic observatory, directly in the path of the eclipse.

Bio-acoustic sonars detect particles and zooplankton floating in the water. Like mechanical dolphins, sonars send out a beam of sound that bounces off all the little bits of stuff floating in the water. When the sound returns to the sonar, the signal is decoded and shaped into a vertical map of sound-reflecting stuff in the water. And sound-reflecting zooplankton are part of that map.

In sonar imagery, zooplankton are easily identified as the bright reflecting bands. When the eclipse happened, you can see that band start to rise, just like it does every dusk. Of course an eclipse isn’t night. Within an hour the zooplankton mob realized they had made a terrible, terrible mistake and descended again.

Kudos to Jonathan Fram at Oregon State University for setting up the sonar to watch this awesome migratory spectacle. Was it truly an oceanographic calamity? Only if you were one of the thousands stuck in traffic after the eclipse.

Source:

August 21 Eclipse-Related Data from the Endurance Array

The post What actually happened in the sea during the solar eclipse! first appeared on Deep Sea News.

-Space Oddity (Bowie)

A few weeks ago I took a visit to one of my favorite places in Los Angeles, The Huntington Library. Usually, I go because I am obsessed with the immaculate gardens and the 260 copies of “The Origin of the Species” in different editions and languages that the library houses. But this past visit had me excited for a different reason entirely.

As I came into the front entrance, I beheld “The Orbit Pavilion.” And without any background at all, I was like what in the heck is that big shiny thing??

Answer: One of the more interesting pieces of science communication I have seen in a while.

Created by Visual Specialists Dan Goods and David Delgado from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, The Orbit Pavilion is a Natiloid metal enclosure, with an inner lattice structure comprised of speakers.

For 19 Earth Science satellites, composer Shane Myrbeck created a unique sound track based on the data of their mission.  As the satellites orbit the earth in real time, their noises are broadcast through the speaker systems transmitting back to earth the crashing of a wave, a tree branch moving, a frog croaking. Each, an auditory representation of drought, hurricanes, ocean currents, and more. For the International Space Station, a sound track of human voices to represent the only current satellite with a human presence on board.

I found the experience uniquely visceral and an interesting medium to make the seemingly intangible satellites into something more real.

Double upside…I had Bowie stuck in my head the rest of the day…”Commencing countdown engines onnnnn…”

The post Can you hear me, Major Tom? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

But if you were in a 20 m fishing boat and the wave was breaking it would look a little more like this:

In some ways, this giant wave was created by the perfect storm. A cold front passing through the North Atlantic created strong winds over 40 km/hr. In the open ocean, these winds can blow over a long distance uninterrupted. The longer the fetch length, the bigger the wave. All these features combined to make a mondo wave set.

But is it the biggest wave? Depends on what kind of wave you are talking about. On the surface of the ocean? NOPE. That was a 29 meter wave recorded by a ship in 2002. Swell breaking on shore? NOPE. Breaking waves over 30 meters (100 ft) have been seen AND surfed in Nazaré, Portugal. And lest not forget my Ph.D. pretties, internal waves? NOPE AGAIN. These waves that occur in the deep sea can easily be over 200 m tall! While this isn’t the biggest wave, it is still record breaking and impressive. I’m just glad I’m not that flailing buoy that measured it!

The post Big wave story is big first appeared on Deep Sea News.

On the second day of Christmas NASA Earth Science gave to me:
Two working jet engines,
and advance warning of Hurricane Activity.

On the third day of Christmas NASA Earth Science gave to me:
three prong power,
two working jet engines,
and advance warning of Hurricane Activity.

On the fourth day of Christmas NASA Earth Science gave to me:
four weather satellites,
three prong power,
two working jet engines,
and advance warning of Hurricane Activity.

On the fifth day of Christmas NASA Earth Science gave to me
five meter waves,
four weather satellites,
three prong power,
two working jet engines,
and advance warning of Hurricane Activity.

On the sixth day of Christmas NASA Earth Science gave to me
six non-toxic oysters,
five meter waves,
four weather satellites,
three prong power,
two working jet engines,
and advance warning of Hurricane Activity.

On the seventh day of Christmas NASA Earth Science gave to me
seven seas to sail in,
six non-toxic oysters,
five meter waves,
four weather satellites,
three prong power,
two working jet engines,
and advance warning of Hurricane Activity.

On the eight day of Christmas NASA Earth Science gave to me
eight less viruses to die from,
seven seas to sail in,
six non-toxic oysters,
five meter waves,
four weather satellites,
three prong power,
two working jet engines,
and advance warning of Hurricane Activity.

On the ninth day of Christmas NASA Earth Science gave to me
nine giant zucchinis,
eight less viruses to die from,
seven seas to safely sail in,
six non-toxic oysters,
five meter waves,
four weather satellites,
three prong power,
two working jet engines,
and advance warning of Hurricane Activity.

On the tenth day of Christmas NASA Earth Science gave to me
ten cups of water,
nine giant zucchinis,
eight less viruses to die from,
seven seas to safely sail in,
six non-toxic oysters,
five meter waves,
four weather satellites,
three prong power,
two working jet engines,
and advance warning of Hurricane Activity.

On the eleventh day of Christmas NASA Earth Science gave to me
eleventh hour rescues,
ten cups of water,
nine giant zucchinis,
eight less viruses to die from,
seven seas to safely sail in,
six non-toxic oysters,
five meter waves,
four weather satellites,
three prong power,
two working jet engines,
and advance warning of Hurricane Activity.

On the twelfth day of Christmas NASA Earth Science gave to me
twelve hundred degree cooling,
eleventh hour rescues,
ten cups of water,
nine giant zucchinis,
eight less viruses to die from,
seven seas to safely sail in,
six non-toxic oysters,
five meter waves,
four weather satellites,
three prong power,
two working jet engines,
and advance warning of Hurricane Activity.

THE END.

We’ve reached the end of this song, but we have also may have reached the end of NASA Earth Science too. In case you haven’t heard, NASA Earth Science may be on the chopping block. Yeah NASA Earth Science studies change, but it also figures out how we can safely live and move about this complicated environmental system that exists on our planet. Our way of life has been ridiculously improved by pointing the science lens inward from space as well as outward. If we lose NASA earth science, we lose all the verses in this song. If these are products that make your life better and safer, then support NASA Earth Science by sharing all the good things it does for you.

Thanks! *steps off tiny soapbox*

The post The Twelve Days of Christmas – NASA Earth Science Edition first appeared on Deep Sea News.

What did you do this weekend? Well if you were NASA, you successfully launched NOAA’s brand-spanking new weather satellite GOES-R. Packed with six instruments, this geostationary satellite will be parked over the western US taking all the datas. GOES-R literally has science eyes on the back of its head, with two instruments pointed at the sun, two instruments checking out the weather in outer space, and the last two pointed at earth. Actually scratch that, it’s like the all knowing eye for weather good.

But as an oceanographer, my favorite instrument has got to be the earth-spying Advanced Baseline Imager. It measures all the sea surface temperatures.  All those maps with colorful whirls of warm and cold water? This satellite makes the measurements that makes that. Say that three times fast, or in this case every 15 minutes.  Plus, they put this instrument on earth science steroids for 2016. The ABI monitors 16 different bands of light. That’s a whopping 11 more than its predecessor, adding up to a grand total of 25 different types of data.

Now before you get too excited about all the datas, you are going to have have to chill for year before getting it. Scientists need this time to make sure the data is correct and accurate. One does not simply trust data from a new instrument. But after that one year, it will be fully operational and the data will go live.

But wait…there’s more! *CUE INFOMERCIAL OOHS AND AAHS*. GOES-R is only the first of 4 new weather satellites NOAA is planning on launching. This whole program will extend the US’s weather forecasting abilities until 2036, or right until Justin Bieber hits middle age (at which time both will likely need a reboot). And through cooperative data sharing agreements with other countries that have launched their own weather satellites, this satellite also improves global weather forecasting. Although I can not make any guarantees this will stop people from grumping about weather forecasts. Sorry weather people.

But seriously, satellite oceanography is a wonderful marriage of earth and space science. It gives the big picture of how things are changing everyday on the earth. How do you think we found the BLOB people? Or when there is going to be an El Niño? Satellites, that’s how. Looking forward to the launch of many more!

For more info check out NOAA/NASA’s GOES-R site. 

RELEASE THE SATELLITE!

The post Wherever it GOES, I GOES, we GOES. NOAA and NASA launch another satellite acronym into space. first appeared on Deep Sea News.

My tortured emotions aside, it looks like the recent warming is the result of another, albeit successful, equatorial Kelvin wave that caused downwelling across the equator and letting that warming the waters off South America. And you I would be remiss if I didn’t include that the atmosphere decided to cooperate too. Thanks for being a team player wind anomalies!

But there’s a bit of bad news for California. This wimpy El Niño probably won’t trigger more rain and some relief from the drought they’ve been having. Although I dare say the climate predictions, which do factor in contributions from ENSO along with lots of other variables, are looking pretty for the northwest and hell, even the east coast!  Anyway, we’ll see how this all develops and let’s hope that El Niño won’t break my heart again.

* I’m totally griping about the recent spate of predictions, but I know predicting the fate of El Niño is really a very difficult job. It’s a complex set of interactions between the ocean and atmosphere that we are still learning about. In short, hat’s off to all the scientists trying to figure it out and inform the world about it.

SOURCES:

http://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/enso/march-2015-enso-discussion-el-ni%C3%B1o-here

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_advisory/ensodisc.html

http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf

http://iri.columbia.edu/our-expertise/climate/forecasts/enso/current/?enso_tab=enso-cpc_plume

The post Are the ocean and atmosphere finally cooperating and is El Niño really here? Probably. first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Few things give me greater joy than a model.  No not those waifs that strut the fashion runways but mathematical models.  Sure my pulse increases with the mention of deep sea, body size, food (in the scientific sense), snails, or combination thereof.  Stop you had me at gigantism. But model with projection plots, equations, and altered assumptions…o’ baby.  But a model that combines food, deep sea, body size…mercy.

Earlier this year, Daniel Jones and colleagues published a model that has done just this.  I’ve been one wanting to write about this for a while but wanted the model to age a bit and the come back to it like a fine wine.  The premise of model is simple.  What happens to the total amount of deep-sea life under climate change?  If you took all the critters in the deep oceans and weighed them (we call this total biomass) the weight would be 110,000,000,000 kg (242,508,488,403 pounds).  This is the equivalent of 8,661,017 big yellow school buses, 18 times the number of them in the U.S. right now.

The model of Jones and colleagues predicts that by 2100 that amount will reduced by 5.2% under continued climate change. That is a loss of life greater than the weight of 45,000 of those big school buses.

Let’s take step back and discuss how you would, and how they did, build this model.

First: You need to predict what is occurring in the upper ocean with several different models.  How much plankton will be produced?  How wills this decline with climate change?  As many of you know there are several climate models as related to the oceans.  The safe bet would be to use multiple and compare the predictions of the lot.  Jones and colleagues use five:  Climate Model 5 – Medium Range, Climate Model 5 – Long Range, Earth System Model – Long Range, Community Earth System Model (v.1)–Biogeochemistry, Climate Model 5, Canadian Earth System Model, Earth System Model – Modular Ocean Model version, and Global Environment Model 2 – Carbon Cycle.  These all yield predictions of how the amount of carbon will change on the ocean’s surface.

Second: You need to calculate how much of this will sink into the deep oceans as marine snow.  The authors use a handy little equation called the Martin curve that predicts how carbon sinks to a given depth.  The equation is based on actual data (a statistical predictive model) based on sediment traps, basically marine snow rain gauges, from all over the oceans and several depths.

Third: You need to predict the deep-sea biomass that could live off the predicted marine snow.  In another, super sweet paper by Wei and colleagues they produced the equations for this.  This is super simple, you just gather a bunch of data for the biomass for a different spots on the seafloor and then measure how much carbon is sinking.  Badda-booom equation.

Fourth: Very importantly you got to keep up with all the slop.  Each of these 5 models predicts something slightly different.  All the equations all some error associated with them.  Those need to be carried through to the final predictions.

Even with the errors and varied predictions, in every single model the deep-sea biomass decreased with time.  The total biomass loss at the end of the century could be 5.2 Megatons even in the best-case scenario the projection still are near a 4 Megaton loss.  Deeper waters at abyssal (>3 km) and hadal depths (>6 km) take the biggest hits.  In one well-known deep-sea study site, the Porcupine Abyssal Plain, the losses are predicted to be 38%.  85% of deep-sea canyons and 82% of seamounts will experience biomass losses.

In retrospect, perhaps I don’t love models so much after all.  Thanks Daniel.

Jones, D., Yool, A., Wei, C., Henson, S., Ruhl, H., Watson, R., & Gehlen, M. (2014). Global reductions in seafloor biomass in response to climate change Global Change Biology, 20 (6), 1861-1872 DOI: 10.1111/gcb.12480

Wei CL, Rowe GT, Escobar-Briones E, Boetius A, Soltwedel T, Caley MJ, Soliman Y, Huettmann F, Qu F, Yu Z, Pitcher CR, Haedrich RL, Wicksten MK, Rex MA, Baguley JG, Sharma J, Danovaro R, MacDonald IR, Nunnally CC, Deming JW, Montagna P, Lévesque M, Weslawski JM, Wlodarska-Kowalczuk M, Ingole BS, Bett BJ, Billett DS, Yool A, Bluhm BA, Iken K, & Narayanaswamy BE (2010). Global patterns and predictions of seafloor biomass using random forests. PloS One, 5 (12) PMID: 21209928

The post The predictions of this model kills my love of models. first appeared on Deep Sea News.

In response to my second obsession, I give you this animated GIF of that same typhoon clipped from one of my favorite visualizations of atmospheric and ocean data, http://earth.nullschool.net/.

But tracking the atmospheric winds isn’t why I was at http://earth.nullschool.net/. I call that child’s play. I was there to find me a cold wake. And did I ever!

The colors in the animated gif above represent the sea surface temperature anomaly. Red means warmer than average water, while blue means colder than average. As Neoguri moves northwestward, evolving from a tropical storm to a super typhoon, you can see the black and blue cold wake forming behind it (sort of looks like Typhoon Neoguri socked it to the ocean). Ferocious winds mix the upper ocean, bringing cold water from the briny deep to the surface, cooling the ocean surface and forming a cold wake.

This is just the start of typhoon season in the Pacific. Typhoons are destructive and deadly. These images make you appreciate their immense power, altering not only the air around them but the water underneath them. Neoguri was the first storm to intensify to a super typhoon and won’t be the last, along with the tell-tale chilly trail.

The post Tracking the cold wake of a super typhoon first appeared on Deep Sea News.