#U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

[edsonjnovaes]

Mergulhadores encontram 57 toneladas de lixo em ilha remota

Mergulhadores encontram 57 toneladas de lixo em ilha remota

“A quantidade de detritos marinhos que encontramos neste lugar remoro, é chocante”, diz Mark Manuel, gerente de operações da Coral Reef Ecosystem Division da NOAA, em comunicado sobre a limpeza. Transforming discarded nets into energy – CNN. 1 de abr. de 2013 Hawaii turns derelict fishing nets into electricity. CNN’s Kyung Lah explains. That’s 114,000 pounds, or a daily average of 203 pounds…

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Zoë Schlanger at The Atlantic:

In the United States, as in most other countries, weather forecasts are a freely accessible government amenity. The National Weather Service issues alerts and predictions, warning of hurricanes and excessive heat and rainfall, all at the total cost to American taxpayers of roughly $4 per person per year. Anyone with a TV, smartphone, radio, or newspaper can know what tomorrow’s weather will look like, whether a hurricane is heading toward their town, or if a drought has been forecast for the next season. Even if they get that news from a privately owned app or TV station, much of the underlying weather data are courtesy of meteorologists working for the federal government.

Charging for popular services that were previously free isn’t generally a winning political strategy. But hard-right policy makers appear poised to try to do just that should Republicans gain power in the next term. Project 2025—a nearly 900-page book of policy proposals published by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation—states that an incoming administration should all but dissolve the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, under which the National Weather Service operates. Donald Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, but given that it was largely written by veterans of his first administration, the document is widely seen as a blueprint for a second Trump term.

NOAA “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” Project 2025 reads. The proposals roughly amount to two main avenues of attack. First, it suggests that the NWS should eliminate its public-facing forecasts, focus on data gathering, and otherwise “fully commercialize its forecasting operations,” which the authors of the plan imply will improve, not limit, forecasts for all Americans. Then, NOAA’s scientific-research arm, which studies things such as Arctic-ice dynamics and how greenhouse gases behave (and which the document calls “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism”), should be aggressively shrunk. “The preponderance of its climate-change research should be disbanded,” the document says. It further notes that scientific agencies such as NOAA are “vulnerable to obstructionism of an Administration’s aims,” so appointees should be screened to ensure that their views are “wholly in sync” with the president’s. The U.S. is, without question, experiencing a summer of brutal weather. In just the past week, a record-breaking hurricane brought major flooding and power outages to Texas amid an extreme-heat advisory. More than a dozen tornadoes ripped through multiple states. Catastrophic flash flooding barreled through wildfire burn scars in New Mexico. Large parts of the West roasted in life-threatening temperatures. Facing any of this without the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would be mayhem. And future years are likely to be worse.

The NWS serves as a crucial point of contact in a weather crisis, alerting the public when forecasts turn dangerous and advising emergency managers on the best plan of action. So far in 2024, the NWS has issued some 13,000 severe-thunderstorm warnings, 2,000 tornado warnings, and 1,800 flash-flood warnings, plus almost 3,000 river-flood warnings, according to JoAnn Becker, a meteorologist and the president of the union that represents NWS employees. NOAA is also home to the National Hurricane Center, which tracks storms, and the Office of Marine and Aviation Operations, whose pilots fly “hurricane hunter” planes directly into cyclones to measure their wind speed and hone the agency’s predictions. NOAA even predicts space weather. Just this past May, it forecast a severe geomagnetic storm with the potential to threaten power grids and satellites. (The most consequential outages never came to pass, but the solar storm did throw off farmers’ GPS-guided tractors for a while.) Privatizing the weather is not a new conservative aim. Nearly two decades ago, when the National Weather Service updated its website to be more user-friendly, Barry Myers, then executive vice president of AccuWeather, complained to the press that “we work very hard every day competing with other companies, and we also have to compete with the government.” In 2005, after meeting with a representative from AccuWeather, then-Senator Rick Santorum introduced a bill calling for the NWS to cease competition with the private sector, and reserve its forecasts for commercial providers. The bill never made it out of committee. But in 2017, Trump picked Myers to lead NOAA. (Myers withdrew his nomination after waiting two years for Senate confirmation.)

Funding for many of NOAA’s programs could plummet in 2025, and the agency already suffers from occasional telecommunications breakdowns, including a recent alert-system outage amid flooding in the Midwest. It is also subject to political pressures: In 2019, the agency backed then-President Trump’s false claim (accompanied by a seemingly Sharpie-altered map) that Hurricane Dorian was headed for Alabama. Private companies might be better funded and, theoretically, less subject to political whims. They can also use supercomputing power to hone NOAA’s data into hyperlocal predictions, perhaps for an area as small as a football stadium. Some, including AccuWeather, use their own proprietary algorithms to interpret NWS data and produce forecasts that they claim have superior accuracy. (Remember, though: Without NWS data, none of this would happen.)

[...] The NWS also has perks that a private system would be hard-pressed to replicate, including a partnership with the World Meteorological Organization, which allows the U.S. access to a suite of other countries’ weather models. International collaboration proved crucial in 2012, when Hurricane Sandy was still churning in the Atlantic Ocean. Initially, the American model predicted, incorrectly, that the storm would turn away from the East Coast. But the European model accurately forecast a collision course, which bought emergency managers in the U.S. crucial time to prepare before Sandy made ferocious landfall in New Jersey.

Project 2025 could have an impact on how accurate and precise weather forecasts are delivered, since NOAA and NWS could be significantly altered.

This is one of many reasons why we must vote Blue up and down the line.

See Also:

Daily Kos: Project 2025 will affect every part of life. Even weather updates

[tomorrowusa]

Imagine if Hurricane Helene had struck Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina with little or no warning. The death toll would have been in the hundreds rather than in the dozens. That's the world which Donald Trump and Project 2025 want us to adopt.

Emphasis added...

Hurricane Helene has derailed the Republican presidential ticket’s campaign across the South, forcing Trump’s vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, to cancel several stops in Georgia. But the 20-foot storm surge–inducing, tornado-spawning weather event hasn’t yet changed Trump’s stance on his plan to tear down the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, root and branch. The climate agency, whose responsibilities include providing free weather forecasts as well as tracking and predicting hurricanes, would be completely gutted under Project 2025, the 920-page Christian nationalist manifesto that purports to be Trump’s second-term agenda. (Trump has haltingly and not particularly convincingly attempted to disavow Project 2025; a recently unearthed video features one of the project’s authors bragging that there will be “one-to-one mirroring” of the policies laid out in the document and Trump’s proposals.) “The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” the proposal reads on page 664. That would effectively privatize weather forecasts, forcing U.S. citizens to pay for weather subscriptions that would include national weather alert systems for emergencies like flash flooding, extreme heat, earthquakes, and others.

Just what we need – privatized forecasts beholden to Republicans with Sharpies. Politicians rather than scientists would have the final say on the forecasting we see.

Climate denial is behind this Trump/Project 2025 campaign promise. Fossil fuel companies are backing extremist Republicans. They don't want a federal agency which presents independent evidence of climate change caused by carbon emissions.

Beware of extremist proposals for privatization. In 1989 Margret Thatcher's Conservative Party pushed through Parliament the privatization of the water and sewage systems in England and Wales. Rivers and seashores are now dangerous thanks to raw sewage being dumped by private companies. This documentary was made before the Conservatives lost power in July.

MAGA Republicans pushing Project 2025 want to do to our weather what Thatcher's right-wing ideologues have done to waterways in the UK. Like Britain's rivers and streams, our weather forecasting would be full of poop under Trump Republican control.

Washington Post: Trump was the one who altered Dorian trajectory map with Sharpie

[meret118]

Hurricane Helene has derailed the Republican presidential ticket’s campaign across the South, forcing Trump’s vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance, to cancel several stops in Georgia. But the 20-foot storm surge–inducing, tornado-spawning weather event hasn’t yet changed Trump’s stance on his plan to tear down the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, root and branch.

The climate agency, whose responsibilities include providing free weather forecasts as well as tracking and predicting hurricanes, would be completely gutted under Project 2025, the 920-page Christian nationalist manifesto that purports to be Trump’s second-term agenda. (Trump has haltingly and not particularly convincingly attempted to disavow Project 2025; a recently unearthed video features one of the project’s authors bragging that there will be “one-to-one mirroring” of the policies laid out in the document and Trump’s proposals.)

“The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” the proposal reads on page 664.

That would effectively privatize weather forecasts, forcing U.S. citizens to pay for weather subscriptions that would include national weather alert systems for emergencies like flash flooding, extreme heat, earthquakes, and others.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

I asked chatgbt to make an image of Florida running out of homeowners insurance and flooded by a hurricane.

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 27, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Sep 28, 2024

Last night, at about 11:10 local time, Hurricane Helene made landfall in the Big Bend area of Florida, where the state’s panhandle curves down toward the peninsula. It was classified as a Category 4 storm when it hit, bringing winds of 140 miles per hour (225 km per hour). The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane wind scale, developed in 1971 by civil engineer Herbert Saffir and meteorologist Robert Simpson, divides storms according to sustained wind intensity in an attempt to explain storms on a scale similar to the Richter scale for earthquakes. 

The Saffir-Simpson scale defines a Category 4 hurricane as one that brings catastrophic damage. According to the National Weather Service, which was established in 1870 to give notice of “the approach and force of storms,” and is now part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a Category 4 hurricane has winds of 134–156 miles (209–251 km) per hour. “Well-built framed homes can sustain severe damage with loss of most of the roof structure and/or some exterior walls. Most trees will be snapped or uprooted and power poles downed. Fallen trees and power poles will isolate residential areas. Power outages will last weeks to possibly months. Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months.” 

Hurricane Helene hit with a 15-foot (4.6 meter) storm surge and left a path of destruction across Florida before moving up into Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky with torrential rain, flash floods, high winds, and tornadoes. A record level of more than eleven inches of rain fell in Atlanta, Georgia. At least 45 people have died in the path of the storm, and more than 4.5 million homes and businesses across ten states are without power. The roads in western North Carolina are closed. Moody’s Analytics said it expects the storm to leave $15 to $26 billion in property damage.

Officials from NOAA, the scientific and regulatory agency that forecasts weather and monitors conditions in the oceans and skies, predict that record-warm ocean temperatures this year will produce more storms than usual. NOAA hurricane scientist Jeff Masters noted that Helene’s landfall “gives the U.S. a record eight Cat 4 or Cat 5 Atlantic hurricane landfalls in the past eight years (2017–2024), seven of them being continental U.S. landfalls. That’s as many Cat 4 and 5 landfalls as occurred in the prior 57 years.”

President Joe Biden approved emergency declarations for Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina before Helene made landfall. Tennessee governor Bill Lee, a Republican, did not ask for such a declaration until this evening, instead proclaiming September 27 a “voluntary Day of Prayer and Fasting.” Observers pointed out that with people stuck on a hospital roof in the midst of catastrophic flooding in his state, maybe an emergency declaration would be more on point. 

After a state or a tribal government asks for federal help, an emergency declaration enables the federal government to provide funds to supplement local and state emergency efforts, as well as to deploy the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to help save lives, protect property, and protect health and safety. Before Helene made landfall, the federal government placed personnel and resources across the region, ready to help with search and rescue, restore power, and provide food and water and emergency generators. 

The federal government sent 1,500 federal personnel to the region, as well as about 8,000 members of the U.S. Coast Guard and teams from the Army Corps of Engineers to provide emergency power. It provided two health and medical task forces to help local hospitals and critical care facilities, and sent in more than 2.7 million meals, 1.6 million liters of water, 50,000 tarps, 10,000 cots, 20,000 blankets, 70,000 gallons of diesel fuel, and 40,000 gallons of gasoline to provide supplies for those hit by the catastrophe. 

FEMA was created in 1979 after the National Governors Association asked President Jimmy Carter to centralize federal emergency management functions. That centralization recognized the need for coordination as people across the country responded to a disaster in any one part of it. When a devastating fire ripped through Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the day after Christmas in 1802, Congress agreed to send aid to the town, but volunteers organized by local and state governments and funded by wealthy community members provided most of the response and recovery efforts for the many disasters of the 1800s. 

When a deadly hurricane wiped out Galveston, Texas, in 1900, killing at least 6,000 residents and destroying most of the city’s buildings, the inept machine government proved unable to manage the donations pouring in from across the country to help survivors. Six years later, when an earthquake badly damaged San Francisco and ensuing fires from broken gas lines engulfed the city in flames, the interim fire chief—who took over when the fire chief was gravely injured—called in federal troops to patrol the streets and guard buildings. More than 4,000 Army troops also fed, sheltered, and clothed displaced city residents. 

When the Mississippi River flooded in 1927, sending up to 30 feet (9 meters) of  water across ten states, including Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, killing about 500 people and displacing hundreds of thousands more, President Calvin Coolidge appointed Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover to coordinate the federal disaster response and pull together the many private-sector interests eager to help out under federal organization. This marked the first time the federal government took charge after a disaster. 

In 1950, Congress authorized federal response to disasters when it passed the Federal Disaster Assistance Program. In response to the many disasters of the 1960s—the 1964 Alaska Earthquake, Hurricane Betsy in 1965, and Hurricane Camille in 1969—the Department of Housing and Urban Development established a way to provide housing for disaster survivors. Congress provided guaranteed flood insurance to homeowners, and in 1970 it also authorized federal loans and federal funding for those affected by disasters. 

When he signed the Disaster Relief Act of 1970, Republican president Richard Nixon said: “I am pleased with this bill which responds to a vital need of the American people. The bill demonstrates that the Federal Government in cooperation with State and local authorities is capable of providing compassionate assistance to the innocent victims of natural disasters.”

Four years later, Congress established the process for a presidential disaster declaration. By then, more than 100 different federal departments and agencies had a role in responding to disasters, and the attempts of state, tribal, and local governments to interface with them created confusion. So the National Governors Association asked President Carter to streamline the process. In Executive Order 12127 he brought order to the system with the creation of FEMA.

In 2003, after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S., the George W. Bush administration brought FEMA into its newly-created Department of Homeland Security, along with 21 other agencies, wrapping natural disasters together with terrorist attacks as matters of national security. After 2005’s Hurricane Katrina required the largest disaster response in U.S. history, FEMA’s inadequate response prompted a 2006 reform act that distinguished responding to natural disasters from responding to terrorist attacks. In 2018, another reform focused on funding for disaster mitigation before the crisis hits.  

The federal government’s efficient organization of responses to natural disasters illustrates that as citizens of a republic, we are part of a larger community that responds to our needs in times of crisis.

But that system is currently under attack. Project 2025, a playbook for the next Republican administration, authored by allies of the right-wing Heritage Foundation and closely associated with Republican presidential candidate Trump and vice presidential candidate Ohio senator J.D. Vance, calls for slashing FEMA’s budget and returning disaster responses to states and localities. 

Project 2025 also calls for dismantling the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and either eliminating its functions, sending them to other agencies, privatizing them, or putting them under the control of states and territories. It complains that NOAA, whose duties include issuing hurricane warnings, is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.” 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:

The United States District Court for the District of Maryland has tossed a flawed environmental assessment that grossly underestimated harms to endangered and threatened marine species from oil and gas drilling and exploration in the Gulf of Mexico.  

The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) prepared the assessment known as a biological opinion—BiOp for short— in 2020 under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). NMFS is a federal agency within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). 

The biological opinion is required to ensure that drilling and exploration for fossil fuels in the Gulf does not jeopardize endangered and threatened species, and is a prerequisite for oil and gas drilling permits auctioned by the U.S. Department of the Interior. 

That same year, Earthjustice, a national nonprofit, filed a suit challenging the biological opinion on behalf of Sierra Club, the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth and the Turtle Island Restoration Network. The American Petroleum Institute, Chevron and several other groups representing the oil and gas industry intervened as defendants in the case. 

The environmental groups argued the biological opinion underestimated the potential for future oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico and did not require sufficient safeguards for imperiled whales, sea turtles and other endangered and threatened marine species from industrial offshore drilling operations.

The Gulf of Mexico is home to a range of threatened marine species protected under the ESA, including the endangered Rice’s whale, which exists nowhere else on the planet. 

It also caters to much of the nation’s oil and gas extraction under federal waters known as the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). This includes a region known as the Gulf OCS that experiences a high volume of ship traffic to production platforms, tens of thousands of active wells and thousands of miles of underwater pipelines. 

In its Aug. 19 ruling, the district court agreed with the environmental groups that the biological opinion violated the law in multiple ways. Among other deficiencies, it found the opinion wrongly assumed that a catastrophic oil spill like the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon will not occur despite NMFS’ own finding that such a spill can be expected. 

The court declared the 2020 BiOp unlawful and ordered NFMS to produce a new biological opinion by December 2024.

“The new opinion should come along with more protections for the Gulf’s threatened and endangered species that are already struggling to survive in the face of an onslaught of threats, including existing oil and gas activity, climate change and others,” said Kristen Monsell, oceans program litigation director for the Center for Biological Diversity. 

[thepastisalreadywritten]

By Marcia Dunn

Updated 9:45 PM, 11 May 2024

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — An unusually strong solar storm hitting Earth produced stunning displays of color in the skies across the Northern Hemisphere early Saturday, with no immediate reports of disruptions to power and communications.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a rare severe geomagnetic storm warning when a solar outburst reached Earth on Friday afternoon, hours sooner than anticipated.

The effects of the Northern Lights, which were prominently on display in Britain, were due to last through the weekend and possibly into next week.

Many in the U.K. shared phone snaps of the lights on social media early Saturday, with the phenomenon seen as far south as London and southern England.

"There were sightings from top to tail across the country,” said Chris Snell, a meteorologist at the Met Office, Britain’s weather agency.

He added that the office received photos and information from other European locations including Prague and Barcelona.

NOAA alerted operators of power plants and spacecraft in orbit, as well as the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to take precautions.

“For most people here on planet Earth, they won’t have to do anything,” said Rob Steenburgh, a scientist with NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center.

The storm could produce northern lights as far south in the U.S. as Alabama and Northern California, NOAA said.

But it was hard to predict and experts stressed it would not be the dramatic curtains of color normally associated with the northern lights, but more like splashes of greenish hues.

“That’s really the gift from space weather: the aurora,” Steenburgh said.

He and his colleagues said the best aurora views may come from phone cameras, which are better at capturing light than the naked eye.

"Snap a picture of the sky and there might be actually a nice little treat there for you,” said Mike Bettwy, operations chief for the prediction center.

The most intense solar storm in recorded history — in 1859 — prompted auroras in central America and possibly even Hawaii.

“We are not anticipating that but it could come close," NOAA space weather forecaster Shawn Dahl said.

This storm poses a risk for high-voltage transmission lines for power grids, not the electrical lines ordinarily found in people’s homes, Dahl told reporters.

Satellites also could be affected, which in turn could disrupt navigation and communication services here on Earth.

An extreme geomagnetic storm in 2003, for example, took out power in Sweden and damaged power transformers in South Africa.

Even when the storm is over, signals between GPS satellites and ground receivers could be scrambled or lost, according to NOAA.

But there are so many navigation satellites that any outages should not last long, Steenburgh noted.

The sun has produced strong solar flares since Wednesday, resulting in at least seven outbursts of plasma.

Each eruption, known as a coronal mass ejection, can contain billions of tons of plasma and magnetic field from the sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona.

The flares seem to be associated with a sunspot that’s 16 times the diameter of Earth, NOAA said.

It is all part of the solar activity ramping up as the sun approaches the peak of its 11-year cycle.

NASA said the storm posed no serious threat to the seven astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

The biggest concern is the increased radiation levels, and the crew could move to a better shielded part of the station if necessary, according to Steenburgh.

Increased radiation also could threaten some of NASA’s science satellites.

Extremely sensitive instruments will be turned off, if necessary, to avoid damage, said Antti Pulkkinen, director of the space agency’s heliophysics science division.

Several sun-focused spacecraft are monitoring all the action.

“This is exactly the kinds of things we want to observe,” Pulkkinen said.

[htr2a]

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced last month that the world's coral reefs were in the throes of a fourth mass bleaching event

60.5% of the world's reef area has been affected and that number is still rising.

Corals in the Atlantic Ocean have been hit hardest by soaring ocean temperatures, with 99.7% of the basin's reefs subjected to bleaching-level heat stress in the past year.

One assessment, published in April 2024 found there had so far been between 50% and 93% coral mortality at Huatulco, Oaxaca, in the Mexican Pacific.

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/more-than-60-worlds-coral-reefs-may-have-bleached-past-year-noaa-says-2024-05-16/

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

Hurricane Debby Hits Florida

Hurricane Debby made landfall near the town of Steinhatchee, Florida, at 7 a.m. Eastern Time on August 5, 2024, as a Category 1 storm. As it moves northeast, the storm is forecast to stall over the U.S. Southeast and deliver torrential rainfall.

This GeoColor image was captured by the ABI (Advanced Baseline Imager) on the GOES-16 (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-16) at 3 a.m. Eastern Time, four hours before Debby made landfall. The satellite is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which includes the National Weather Service (NWS). NASA helps develop and launch the GOES series of satellites, which observe Earth from about 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers) above the equator.

Debby developed into a tropical storm on August 3 in the Gulf of Mexico, becoming the fourth named storm of the 2024 hurricane season. Bands of intense rainfall soon began to lash western Florida, dumping over a foot (30 centimeters) of rain near Sarasota between August 3 and 4.

By August 5, Debby had grown into a Category 1 storm with sustained winds of around 80 miles (130 kilometers) per hour at the time of landfall. As of 11 a.m. Eastern Time that day, over 207,000 homes were without power, according to PowerOutage.us. NWS forecasts called for the storm to bring 10 to 20 inches of rain and “life-threatening” storm surge of up to 10 feet to parts of the Big Bend region, where Florida’s panhandle curves to meet the peninsula.

“There’s a lot of warm water and low vertical wind shear in the Gulf of Mexico right now, which are two key ingredients for storm intensification,” said Patrick Duran, a hurricane expert at NASA’s Short-Term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) project, based at Marshall Space Flight Center. Vertical wind shear is the difference in the speed and direction of lower-level and upper-level winds. High shear rips the tops off of developing hurricanes and weakens them, while low shear allows storms to build.

NASA’s SPoRT team focuses on improving weather forecasts using satellite data from NASA and NOAA. Duran uses the ABI instrument on GOES satellites in his work to look at fine-scale structures in clouds and find the center of a storm’s circulation. ABI’s infrared bands are used during the day and night to look at the depth of a storm’s convection and how it is developing.

Debby hit the same stretch of sparsely populated land as Idalia, which came ashore as a Category 3 hurricane in August 2023. Though Debby is weaker than Idalia, its slower pace means it could unleash “potentially historic” rain across the Southeast, according to the NWS. Forecasts indicate that from August 5 to 10, parts of southeast Georgia, coastal South Carolina, and southeast North Carolina could see 10 to 20 inches of rain, with up to 30 inches possible in some places.

NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using GOES 16 imagery courtesy of NOAA and the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS). Story by Emily Cassidy.

[jennifer-hamilton-wb]

Favorite animal (not organism) and why GO!

All animals are organisms, but regardless, probably siphonophores. They're so cool, appearing a single animal while truly being a colony of thousands of small multicellular Zooids. They're so long and elegant, while having a haunting air to them, their bodies stretching off out of view into the inky black void of the ocean. Makes the horror writer part of me happy. They have such diverse and distinct morphology, and they're bioluminesent, which is always a standout feature of any organism. The diversity in body plans is so crazy. A Portuguese man o' war with it's large floater sacs...

(NOAA, 2005) looks nothing like a Praya Dubia, with it's long snaking bioluminescent structure

(Haddock et al. 2003) Which looks nothing like Apolemia, with it's coiled, wool-like body

(MBARI, 2005)

Image Citations (APA7): U.S. Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (2005). Portuguese man-of-war (Physalia physalis) [Photograph]. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Portuguese_Man-O-War_(Physalia_physalis).jpg Haddock, S.H.D.; McDougall, C.M.; Case, J.F. (2003) Praya Dubia [Photograph]. Bioluminescence Web Page. https://biolum.eemb.ucsb.edu/organism/pictures/praya.html Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. (2005). Woolly Siphonophore (Apolemia lanosa) [Photograph]. Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Woolly siphonophore. https://www.mbari.org/animal/woolly-siphonophore/

[kp777]

By Jon Queally

Common Dreams

July 1, 2024

"The climate crisis is here. This is an emergency. Politicians need to start acting like it."

Meteorologists, climate campaigners, and extreme weather experts expressed shock and horror Sunday as Hurricane Beryl exploded into an "extremely dangerous" Category 4 storm as it headed into the warm waters of the southern Caribbean with a level of intensification characterized as unprecedented.

The National Hurricane Center on Sunday morning called it a "very dangerous situation" due to "potentially catastrophic hurricane-force winds, a life-threatening storm surge, and damaging waves" for the numerous mainland and island nations in Beryl's path.

According to the NHC, the Windward Islands of St. Vincent, the Grenadines, and Granada will be the first at highest risk from the storm as well as St. Lucia and Barbados. People on those islands and elsewhere in the region were told that all preparations for the storm "should be rushed to completion" without delay.

Weather Underground reports that subsequent locations that may face Beryl's wrath later this week could be Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, Belize and Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, though noted "there's uncertainty in that exact track" of the hurricane as detailed in the following graphic:

Possible storm tracks for Hurricane Beryl. (Source: Weather Underground / wunderground.com)

Citing records going back to 1851, the Washington Post reported Sunday that there "is no precedent for a storm to intensify this quickly, nor reach this strength, in this part of the ocean during the month of June."

Eric Blake, a hurricane expert, said that Beryl on Sunday was "rewriting the history books in all the wrong ways," as he urged people in its path to "be very safe and take this hurricane seriously" as "very few will have experienced a hurricane this strong" on those islands.

"This is unreal," said Nahel Belgherze, a journalist focused on extreme weather. "Hurricane Beryl continues to defy all known logic, now becoming the first June Category 4 hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Basin. I can't even stress enough just how completely absurd that storm is."

"The climate crisis is here," said the Sunrise Movement in a social media post showing the extreme power and historic nature of Hurricane Beryl. "This is an emergency. Politicians need to start acting like it."

The group took the opportunity to re-share its petition calling on President Joe Biden to "declare a climate emergency" as a way to unlock federal funds and escalate the government's response to the crisis of fossil fuels that are the main driving of surging global temperatures.

In May, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicted that the 2024 hurricane season—which officially runs from June 1 to the end of November—would be "extraordinary" and "above-normal," largely due to rising ocean temperatures attributable to human-caused global warming couple with La Niña conditions.

[currentclimate]

In 2023, the levels of those heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere reached historic highs, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Carbon dioxide, in particular, which is the most abundant and important of the greenhouse gases produced by human activity, rose in 2023 by the third-highest amount in 65 years of recordkeeping, NOAA said.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Allison Fisher at MMFA:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that predicts changes in climate, weather, oceans, and coastlines and provides data that informs lifesaving forecasts such as tracking hurricanes, is in the crosshairs of Project 2025, the conservative battle plan for a potential second Trump presidency which describes NOAA as a “colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” But researchers have pushed back on these charges and defended NOAA’s climate data and meteorological work — while forecasters are predicting an “extremely active” Atlantic hurricane season and experts say this summer could rival last year’s record heat. Project 2025’s call to dismantle NOAA by eliminating or privatizing key functions of the agency is the endgame of years of attempts by conservatives and right-wing media to attack the credibility of the agency and the veracity of the data it produces. It also illustrates that the conservative plan is not just to dismantle U.S. climate policy, but also to scrub the climate data that underpins it.

Project 2025’s chapter attacking NOAA was penned by Thomas Gilman, a former Trump Commerce Department official who recommends that the agency “should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.” Among other recommendations for how NOAA “should be broken up and downsized,” Gilman’s chapter for Project 2025 calls for the National Weather Service to “fully commercialize its forecasting operations”; demands that research from the National Hurricane Center and the National Environmental Satellite Service be reviewed to ensure it is “presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate”; and suggests the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research “should be disbanded” as “the source of much of NOAA’s climate alarmism.” [Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, 2023]

Experts say Project 2025’s cuts to NOAA could have devastating impacts on climate research and weather forecasting. E&E News notes: “The National Hurricane Center’s mission is centered on informing and warning the public about potentially deadly storms, and as part of that work, it has connected the effects of climate change to hurricane intensity. The brushback it gets in the Project 2025 playbook speaks to past insinuations from Republicans that government agencies are manipulating data to make climate change appear worse.” Speaking to The Guardian, former NOAA official Andrew Rosenberg said the agency “basically reports the science as the scientific evidence accumulates and has been quite cautious about reporting climate effects,” adding, “It’s not pushing some agenda.” And meteorologist Chris Gloninger said Project 2025’s recommendations are “a sign that the far right has ‘no interest in climate truth.’” [E&E News, 4/10/24; The Guardian, 4/26/24]

Project 2025 has plans that would adversely affect weather gathering operations if Convicted Felon Donald Trump gets back in again.

[tomorrowusa]

^^^ This one didn't amount to anything. But I thought it would be interesting to take note of the first time I noticed any tropical disturbances during the 2024 Atlantic Basin Hurricane Season. That was Friday morning May 24th. Okay, it's still technically the pre-season but NOAA went into seasonal mode on May 15th at their tropical cyclone site.

This is expected to be a more active than usual season.

This hurricane season could be among the worst in decades, NOAA warns

Warm waters across the tropical Atlantic in May 2005 prompted warnings of an active hurricane season ahead. A record-smashing 28 storms formed, including Hurricane Katrina. Nearly two decades of global warming later, those late-spring ocean temperatures are cool compared with today’s record-hot waters. Government meteorologists issued a seasonal forecast Thursday that predicts that storms could develop at frequencies and with ferocity comparable to some of the worst seasons in the past 19 years. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecast — which calls for 17 to 25 tropical storms, eight to 13 hurricanes and four to seven “major” hurricanes — underscores how dramatically the environment has shifted and increased the risk of destructive weather. The prediction is the most aggressive outlook the agency has ever made ahead of the start of hurricane season.

Yes, climate change is the main suspect.

Warming is allowing major storms to form significantly earlier during hurricane season, and also encouraging more to undergo rapid intensification more frequently in parts of the Atlantic basin such as the western Caribbean Sea. A study found that a growing number of tropical cyclones around the world have undergone what researchers called “extreme” rapid intensification, with their maximum sustained winds increasing by 57 mph or more within a 24-hour period.

The author mentioned that 2005 was a "record-smashing" season. But he did not mention that the 2005 record was itself smashed in 2020.

2020 Atlantic Hurricane Season

In 2020 we went all the way to Hurricane Iota in mid November.

Donald Trump was probably already too busy planning his coup in mid November 2020 to notice Hurricane Iota. But if he is returned to power he is essentially declaring war on Planet Earth.

No more going wobbly in climate fight, Trump supporters vow

Trump’s campaign utterances, and the policy proposals being drafted by hundreds of his supporters, point to the likelihood that his return to the White House would bring an all-out war on climate science and policies — eclipsing even his first-term efforts that brought U.S. climate action to a virtual standstill. [ ... ] Meanwhile, many of his former staffers are building out a comprehensive plan to decimate both climate policy and regulations on fossil fuels. And Trump allies expect that the former president would fill his next administration with officials who are even more hostile to efforts to address global warming.

Donald Trump is an enemy of the planet. The only way to defeat this real-life James Bond villain is to vote for Joe Biden.

[meret118]

This summer, people across the U.S. will have a new way to keep track of dangerous heat headed their way through a new heat warning system called HeatRisk. The tool, developed by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), will be used by National Weather Service offices across the country to give people an understanding of when heat goes from uncomfortable to dangerous.

[tearsinthemist]

The levels of the crucial heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere reached historic highs last year, growing at near-record fast paces, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Carbon dioxide, the most important and abundant of the greenhouse gases caused by humans, rose in 2023 by the third highest amount in 65 years of record keeping, NOAA announced Friday. Scientists are also worried about the rapid rise in atmospheric levels of methane, a shorter-lived but more potent heat-trapping gas. Both jumped 5.5% over the past decade.