Although she's doing a slow fade right now, globally the atmosphere is still behaving as if she's still there and this is part of the legacy, or the hangover, from La Nina. |
Essentially what happened was that quantitatively we had our fingers on the pulse of the global oceans for the first time in history. We collected more data in the first year than they had in the previous century of data. |
Firefighters also spent part of the afternoon battling a 25-acre blaze near Lake Elizabeth in northern Los Angeles County. It's a classic Santa Ana, arriving right on schedule. |
I always say, the way you spell fire is F-U-E-L. There has been a lot of fuel building here, with the big drought and the big rains. |
I call her the little lady with the big dry punch. |
If we look out into our future, global warming will have a longer impact, which makes it somewhat scary. |
It's a classic Santa Ana, arriving right on schedule. |
Just because you had a warm week, don't blame it on global warming. In actual fact we had a very cool spring, summer and fall. |
Much has been made of these little storms, but they've been sort of disappointing in terms of rainfall. Last winter we had a lot of rain, but this winter, essentially it's been cool and dry - with a little excitement throw in. |
Often a high pressure system drives the winds. The winds come off the mountain passes, the air heats up and becomes very dry and can be very strong. |
Really, the ocean is simply the fuel tank for these great hurricanes, and right now, I would characterize the South Atlantic as high octane. |
The hurricanes naturally tend to move from east to west because of the rotation of the Earth. The northern part of the hurricane moves faster than the southern part of the hurricane, so they tend to move across the Atlantic toward the Caribbean and the United States. |
The magic number is 80 degrees Fahrenheit. What we are seeing in the Atlantic right now is temperatures that are 82 to 86 degrees Fahrenheit, almost two to four degrees above their normal temperatures. |
The past three years have been a very large disturbance in the climate force. The Pacific is really the mother of these global climate systems -- and there has been a fundamental switch in the climate in the past two years. |