Ridiculously Resilient Ridge

[morganism]

Daniel Swain of weather west fame.

Remote linkages to anomalous winter atmospheric ridging over the northeastern Pacific

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017JD026575/full

"Severe drought in California between 2013 and 2016 has previously been linked to the persistence of atmospheric high atmospheric pressure over the Pacific Ocean (nicknamed the "Ridiculously Resilient Ridge"), which prevented winter storms from reaching the coast over several consecutive years. "

[Neven]

I couldn't find a separate thread for this, so I'll let it stand. But I've changed the title as separate threads on papers coming out will clog the forum very fast (and the title contained a typo).

[morganism]

New insights into the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge & North American Winter Dipole

http://weatherwest.com/archives/5982

1) Atmospheric pressure patterns similar to the Triple R are now occurring more frequently than they did in previous decades.

2) The unprecedented magnitude and persistence of recent West Coast ridging can be traced (at least in part) to regionally-accentuated warming of the lower atmosphere.

As is often the case in scientific endeavors, these early findings raised more questions than answers. These lingering questions motivated us to continue our analyses, which resulted in the two new scientific papers discussed below. (And additional work remains in progress.)

[Jim Hunt]

Stefan Rahmstorf is "tweeting" about this topic:

https://twitter.com/rahmstorf/status/938686201065811968

California drought linked to sea ice loss in the Arctic via Rossby waves in the atmosphere.

[A-Team]

California drought linked to sea ice loss in the Arctic via Rossby waves in the atmosphere.

The focus of the forum seems too narrow. Perhaps something about rapid onset of climate change on the exquisitely sensitive western margin of North America with the ocean affected as much as the air. No need to wait for 2020 much less 2100, it's here now.

The Cvijanovic 2017 article is open source, quite readable and light years ahead of weather west (correlation is not causation; see also p-hacking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_dredging).

There's a LATimes piece about it too. It is a different notion from the J Francis papers, being a two-stage teleconnection from Arctic ice loss to tropical convection to stationary North Pacific geopotential ridge development which blocks Californian and indeed Southwestern precip.

(As in the Southwest summer monsoon was disrupted, it hasn't rained since Aug 3rd and temperatures have averaged 8-20ºF too high since March, attributable to a stationary high over the Great Basin when the NWS dares step out of their daily weather trivia box.)

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01907-4
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-climate-california-20171205-htmlstory.html

[morganism]

Starting up again, lots of cold waves headed for the NE

New insights into the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge & North American Winter Dipole

https://weatherwest.com/archives/5982

"Other work has suggested that unusually warm ocean conditions in the “extratropical” Pacific (i.e. the so-called “Warm Blob” in the Gulf of Alaska) may also be linked to the persistent ridge—though there’s considerable evidence that the atmospheric Triple R caused the oceanic Blob, rather than the reverse"

[morganism]

The Ridiculously Resilient Ridge returns…again

https://weatherwest.com/archives/8692

"In the past, I’ve cautioned that the existence of a “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge”-like feature is really only discernible in retrospect, when we can be certain that there was actually multi-month persistence of anomalously high mid-tropospheric pressure (geopotential heights). Well, I just looked back at the dismal 2020-2021 season, and…it’s back. "

It’s worth noting that this persistent North Pacific ridging and subsequently very dry California winter was well predicted by the seasonal models this year (which is not always the case!). It’s a predictive success that will unfortunately have seriously implications for the deepening drought across California and the broader West."

[morganism]

"SST Blob in the eastern pacific responsible for oppressive heat in NW. Once the cool SSTs off the west coast warm up, it is game on for major heat everywhere. Stay tuned and cool!

https://twitter.com/realwxforecast/status/1411776147579457539

"A 600dm ridge (recently called a "heat dome" in the media) is beginning to show up in the models across California and desert Southwest. Another extreme western U.S. heat wave is looking probable later next week.

[morganism]

Strong, persistent West Coast ridge developing; warmer and much drier for most of CA

https://weatherwest.com/archives/12616

In the coming days (and probably for the next 2-3 weeks), a persistent ridge of high pressure will set up shop just west of the West Coast–effectively blocking the jet stream and bringing an end to the December parade of cold storms across California. There is strong multi-model ensemble agreement regarding the overall persistence and (more importantly) positioning of this ridge, which will very likely keep most or all of California somewhat warmer and much drier than average for mid-January over the next 2 weeks. 2-week dry spells are not unusual in California, and indeed seem to have a slight climatological preference for the month of January. So this multi-week ridge, in and of itself, is not especially unusual for this part of the world. How long it persists into late Jan, Feb, and beyond is more important from a seasonal and drought-busting (or not) perspective (more thoughts on that below). All in all, though, it appears this will be a prolonged period of fairly benign weather across California and much of the rest of the West. After the December deluge, and enormous Sierra Nevada snow accumulations, this pattern will cause statewide snow water equivalent “percents of average” for the date to fall precipitously–from about 133% of average for the date (as of today) to around or perhaps even below 100% of average for the date by late Jan."

[morganism]

(...)"it looks very dry and warmer than average essentially statewide. The reason? Well, it’s the same old story: an increasingly resilient ridge of high pressure keeps re-developing and re-strengthening just west of the West Coast, in a perfect position to deflect the Pacific storm track. This is, of course, a familiar refrain: it’s highly reminiscent of the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge pattern of recent years. While I’m not quite ready to pull the adverbial modifier trigger yet, we’re almost there if this thing persists through much of February (as appears likely). "

https://weatherwest.com/archives/12924

[morganism]

"That is what even a short but very active storm track can do to the "Blob". This would play a role in our Weather in January and February in SW BC when paired with a La Nina, if it keeps trending West like this."

https://twitter.com/Brad604/status/1592043975602745344?cxt=HHwWgMDRifLjiZgsA



Brad Atchison  @Brad604
For those that don't get what I mean. Cold waters right off our Coast and a La Nina were why Vancouver was able to have a White Christmas, some of the coldest temperatures seen in decades, and a years worth of Snow in about 7 days. It makes it easier for Arctic Outbreaks."

[morganism]

(Not sure if this is related, but sure seems like the diversion of heat has something to do with it.)

The race to stop starfish from melting into goo

A mysterious disease causing sea stars to waste away isn’t just a disaster for the aquatic invertebrates. It may end up making climate change worse, too.

The first hint that climate change might be playing a role came by accident. Maintenance staff at a University of Washington lab mistakenly turned off a valve to an outdoor tank with sunflower stars.

“It was a sunny afternoon,” said Drew Harvell, a marine ecologist at Cornell. With no cool water, the temperature in the tank spiked — and the starfish began wasting away. “That, to us, was a clue.”

In a 2019 paper, Harvell and her colleagues showed that declines of sunflower sea stars in the Pacific peaked after marine heat waves, suggesting rising ocean temperatures made the epidemic worse.

She still believes a strain of bacteria, virus or other pathogen is the root cause of the disease. “There are many cases where infectious diseases are worse under warming conditions,” she said.

But Ian Hewson, another marine ecologist at Cornell, thinks wasting isn’t caused by an infection at all. His own recent experiments suggest a change in the environment — specifically, a spike in nutrients that fueled bacteria growth and lowered oxygen levels around seas stars — may be responsible for the outbreak.

“It’s not a definitive, smoking-gun cause,” he said. “It’s our best guess as to what was going on.”

Regardless of the causes of starfish wasting, we are already seeing the effects of losing the sunflower star. As it disappears, the sea urchins it once preyed on have run riot, decimating the kelp that make up massive submarine jungles that provide food and shelter to hundreds of species.

The towering organisms also sequester carbon, mitigating climate change. Their blades slow ocean currents, helping prevent coastal erosion, and are home to abalone and other commercially valuable species."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/03/04/sea-star-wasting-disease-starfish/


Disease epidemic and a marine heat wave are associated with the continental-scale collapse of a pivotal predator

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aau7042

[Bruce Steele]

Morganism, I wrote about the starfish in the extinction tread.

92
Consequences / Re: The Holocene Extinction
« on: July 28, 2022, 01:37:48 AM »
Kassy, I know several of the co-authors on the paper. I need to talk with one of them about what I think the research paper is saying. Here is my plain English version.
 Warm water decreases O2 availability. Starfish that have soft skin with folds and places that can trap sediments and reduce water circulation at small scales near their skin are more susceptible than smooth hard skinned starfish. The soft folded skin allows certain bacteria that break down organic matter to build up near the skin of the starfish where they reduce O2 and increase pCO2. This deprives the starfishes ability to respire through their skin and causes small lesions . The lesions provide an entry for vibrio and other pathogens to attack the starfish. 
 To me it seems like OA at the small scale right up against the skin of the starfish. I am worried the same processes can also cause skin lesions in sea urchins but that is pure conjecture on my part.
The problem seems bigger every  time it returns. If it isn’t a specific disease but rather a combination of environment stressors then fixing the problem means stopping our carbon experiment.
Fat chance for a lot of echinoderms.
Here is a link to the starfish disease paper
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2020.610009/full

[kassy]

The discussion Bruce mentions is here:

First report of deadly disease raises concerns for Europe's starfish

Bruces first post below that is also interesting for historical background.

I am sure i read something very similar to your description but i think that was from scientists looking into the big American outbreak.

[Bruce Steele]

Kassy, The nearshore reef ecosystem plays a sirens call to me. I spent forty years diving, some years I was in the water 5-8 hours 200 days a year. I am getting old now but I still want to put on my wetsuit and go get a better look at what has happened. I am waiting until the next big El Niño kills the purple urchins and the kelp gets to recover. I will be in my seventies but I plan on commercially diving again. If I am wrong and the kelp never returns then I won’t either. Nobody else likes my plans but for me the sirens sing.

[morganism]

A Bruin in the Forecast
Combining a folksy delivery with the power of social media, UCLA’s Daniel Swain has emerged as a generation’s voice on the urgency of combating climate change.

"Climate change continues to accelerate the frequency of extreme weather events. With it, the words we use to describe them are getting wackier. “Snowmaggedon,” “bomb cyclone,” “thundersnow” — all are now staples of the Weather Channel chyron. But what about “haboob”? “Megacryometeor”? The dreaded “zud,” anyone?

As a Ph.D. student at Stanford University in 2012, Daniel Swain made his own contribution to this modern lexicon amid an epic drought in California. The term he coined, “ridiculously resilient ridge,” had a surprisingly colloquial ring to it.
(...)
That ridiculously resilient ridge — essentially, an atmospheric wall that emerged to block the West Coast from normal weather fronts — produced a severe drought, the worst California has seen in a hundred years, if not in a millennium. Swain quickly became a go-to source in the media for sizing up devastating weather. “There were a ton of stories and people wanting to understand it,” Swain recalls. “I took the opportunity without knowing where it would lead.”

Swain’s academic appointment with IoES involves a roughly 50/50 split between scientific investigations into the context and character of extreme events (like floods, droughts, wildfires and storms) in a warming climate and the sustained, public-facing science communication that he’s become known for.

“Most of our academic institutions and universities are not set up to value public-facing engagement in the way that they probably should be,” he says. “I’ve probably written tweets that more people will read and meaningfully interact with than will ever read the sum total of all the scientific papers I will ever write for the rest of my life.”

“The average person in the United States can’t name a living scientist,” Swain says. “I don’t think that’s the fault of people so much as it is just a failing of scientific institutions to integrate themselves with society at the level that we really should be.”

Thanks to one ridiculously resilient researcher, that climate is changing."

https://newsroom.ucla.edu/magazine/daniel-swain-scientist-climate-change?taid=641d123e1e537d000148eb28