More on the moistening of the Indian Ocean

Thought I'd make an update on yesterday's post on the state of the Indian Ocean and the MJO. It seems that convergence has become stronger in todays 12Z GFS run. Vertical motion has also begun to dominate a good  area of the equatorial zone in the Indian Ocean, as seen in the figure below (see a loop of the latest couple of days) 

Moisture convergence avergaged over 5 degrees S- 5 degrees N. Dashed lines indicate vertical motion.

Moreover, the plot below (which I started compiling yesterday), is showing a slowly increasing trend in convergence over the region. While there aren't enough samples yet to clearly state if this is a real trend, it is definitely something to be on the lookout during the next couple of days.

Sum of  positive moisture convergence for the last 7 GFS runs over the area covering from 40-100 degrees longitude and -15-15 degrees latitude

Spotty regions of strong mid-tropospheric convergence is still visible in the region, with some amount of symmetry close to 60 degrees longitude. This is the area where the Rossby wave-like feature was present yesterday.

A closer look at the non-divergent winds and vorticity shows that this feature has become better defined. In fact, you do not have to decompose the winds any longer to observe this feature. There is also a fair amount of symmetry in the strength and position of the vorticity centers (Click here for a pdf version of image and here for a loop). The southern hemisphere portion still has stronger vorticity and more convective activity though. Energy fluxes from wave activity has also increased equatorial convection, making the double ITCZ pattern a little blurred. Additionally, westerly winds have greatly increased in area coverage over the last day over the whole  domain, as compared to previous days. An active phase appears to have started!

NOAA CPC analysis is saying that a new MJO has definitely initiated over the region, as shown below. This would make it the third MJO in a row, following the September one and the stronger mid-late October MJO.

Constructed Time-Longitude diagram of OLR anomalies from CPC

Current prediction is forecasting for this regime to remain over the Indian Ocean over the next two weeks. Let's see what happens. The folks over at the Maldives must be thrilled to see a second MJO over their area since the beginning of DYNAMO on October 1. This is great news and hopefully a lot of useful information about this event will come out of it!

Moisture and the Madden-Julian Oscillation

This post is a little more focused on what I do for a living here in Seattle.
If you want to read something basic (and funnier I guess) of this topic, stay tuned
to read the following chapters of my series "The Tropics, my home", which I will
continue updating soon!

Lately I've been hearing a lot of buzz on a phenomenon that we like to call the
Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO), mainly because of an ongoing field campaign called
DYNAMO / AMIE where a lot of very smart people are trying to figure out why
this massive phenomenon happens and the why of its peculiar behavior. They have
field catalogs, constant observations and some of them are writing out their daily
experiences through a blog!

DYNAMO Logo. It's pretty isn't it!

Now to me this is a major event simply because this is the topic of my graduate research. If you do not know what the MJO is, and have some sort of interest in it, then the shortest, somewhat incomplete, definition I have for you is the following:

"It's a center of deep and stratiform convection (lots of big clouds) that is flanked by suppressed convection (lack of big clouds). It changes the speed and direction of the tropical wind field and propagates to the east slowly"

I think that's as simple as I can get it to be. The best way to make you get a feel for this thing is by  showing a picture of it, so here it is

You see that big cluster of clouds close to the Maritime Continent and Australia, that's what we call an active phase of the MJO. That massive thing there has a period of 30-90 days, with some break periods at times.

So why is that thing you see there of so much interest to the meteorology/climate community?? I can give you several reasons right off the bat!
1. The MJO is huge! You can have a cluster of clouds associated with this covering a large fraction of the tropics.
2. It modulates rainfall. In other words, that cluster of clouds in the picture can bring a ton of rain!
3. Also modulates hurricane activity in pretty much every basin.
4. We kind of don't know why it happens!

There you have it! Four good reasons why we would like to understand this thing! And good understanding means good forecasting! It's for the good of humanity (and the advancement of science)!  Ok that might be a little of an exaggeration, but it keeps me motivated on days in which I just look at plots!

If you are not interested in the current state of this event and such stop right here and I will see you in my next blog!

So what's going on right now? We had an active MJO over the Indian Ocean during late October, and that phase should be right now over the eastern Pacific/Atlantic Ocean (see CPC's latest discussion ). It appears that a new active phase might be initiating in the Indian basin. We will see if it begins when the older phase completes the global circuit or not.  Right now what's very apparent is a double Intertropical Convergence Zone, which has been mentioned several times now.

Latest Meteosat 7 IR image- obtained from NRL

What's really remarkable is that convection seems to have been deepening the last couple of days, with mid tropospheric moisture convergence becoming more intense in some spotty regions. Some of these changes are due to wave activity around the region.

For comparison I am attaching the following plots of moisture convergence from the GFS analysis:
November 4
November 7
November 12
November 18
Latest    Satellite Overlay

Moisture convergence from the GFS run. Vectors depict the corresponsing irrotational wind. 

Maybe even more importantly, cross sections are indicating moistening at several pressure levels
November 1 (active phase near 90 degrees)
November 11
November 21

Now lets look at the satellite images and take a guess at what's going on.  The latest raw winds
show good easterly flow nearly everywhere, except right at the equator, where we see some westerly flow. There is also some circulation going on on the area of strong convection. It looks like we may have some wave activity going on! Those westerly winds near the equator have been attributed to Kelvin Waves

850 hPa Heights and wind vectors. Click here for a better resolution version (in pdf)

If we decompose the wind field and just plot the non-divergent part we get a different story

850 hPa nondivergent winds and vorticity. Click here for a pdf version  

This plot shows another gyre in the northern hemisphere, and in the middle of the two gyres is a fairly strong westerly wind burst. This hints at the possible presence of an Equatorial Rossby Wave. I have not seen anyone else point out at this up to this moment, but it does have all the features of it. On the other hand, it could just as well be vorticity induced by the cloud features themselves.

Lastly, a 200 hPa height plot shows some curves in the heights in the southern hemisphere, possibly belonging to Rossby Waves. We are usually interested in watching these troughs and ridges moving around because of the possibility of momentum being fluxed into the tropics. This constitutes an important piece of one of the theories of MJO initiation.

200 hPa winds and heights. Click here for a pdf version.

So the question remains, is this an MJO starting? It appears that not yet, although there's a good deal of wave activity going on in the region, so it is likely pretty close. Anomalies in the area are already beginning to go negative in the region. The real question might be: is activity in the area moistening up the Indian Ocean and setting the stage for a new MJO? Well I think we might know the answer to that in the coming days!

Daily OLR anomalies from NOAA

The tropics, my home, pt 1. An experience learned from teaching kids

It’s been a good while since I’ve made a blog entry. You know sometimes you’re so busy you don’t have to do much, and ideas for blogs or poems just seem to hide away in some corner of the head.  Well today I feel like writing something entertaining but at the same time a little on the educational side. We’ll see how this comes out.  So I was at this outreach activity the other day at an elementary/middle school that focused on science and the environment. The kids were amazing (for once many new how clouds formed)! There was something that kinda stayed in my head: None of the kids knew where Puerto Rico (PR) was!!

So before I start ranting, if you the reader don’t know where PR is either, here is is! It’s the square-ish island. Notice that is on the same sea where Cuba is! 

Ok let the ranting being. First, I will ask the reader: Have you ever been to a tropical island, or anywhere between the tropic of Cancer and Capricorn that isn’t the Atacama Desert.  Well if you have then you might relate well to this story

You are walking around the streets of your favorite city, you’re sweating, it’s like 90 degrees and humidity is well above 70%. It feels muggy and you want to go to a store to enjoy their air conditioning. You look up to the sky; it’s sunny with a bunch of little puffy clouds we like to call cumulus. You smile; even though it’s hot and you’re sweaty it’s still a wonderful day. Ten minutes later a terrible thing happens; you’ve been assaulted by nature. Hundreds of thousands of giant droplets are falling towards you and everyone else in the streets. You’re getting soaked. The little puffy clouds that you saw a bit ago suddenly turned into a thunderstorm and began to pour on you.  You frown and run towards a corner where you don’t get wet. A bunch of people gather here, including an old man that has a large umbrella. He tells you that he already knew this was gonna happen because he saw the avocado trees this morning and somehow realized that their appearance meant inches of rain.

The mystery of the avocado tree and weather.

If you have lived through this, then you have definitely lived the tropical experience.  Living in PR seemed like that more often that anyone would like.   When it rains, it really rains! It can be every day, or on seemingly random days. Some days you will get a fraction of an inch, other days you get 5-6 inches in a single downpour. It almost feels random, and for many years that was the general consensus.  The tropics, the islands there, were the most crazy place for rain.  Even the scientific community of the mid 20^th century thought that rainfall in the tropics was just plain random.

A cumulonimbus ruining a nice day at the beach.

Now let me be clear, this is in no way similar to what we see in the mid latitudes.  Weather in the mid-latitudes, particularly if you live in what the US calls the Midwest (for whatever reason they call it like that, I do not know why it has this name), can be really nasty.  They get sudden temperature changes, snowstorms, tornados, and other things too.  We don’t get these things in the tropics…

Well some may argue the tornado thing,  but it’s not nearly the same thing. Check out the links below for some “extreme” weather (an EF0 tornado and some hail) and the more extreme reactions.

Back on topic, instead we get rain, lots and lots of rain, and the occasional tropical cyclone (those terrible guys that like to leave paths of destruction but look so pretty in space). To me, it’s the most amazing weather on Earth! But the reasons why I will explain on the next chapter. I wrote enough nonsense for now!

The Gale

Gales, strongs winds, whatever you want to call them. The idea of having both caressing breezes and terrible storms, both coming from our blessed air we breathe, has always been one of my favorite topics of discussions. It makes us belief that our dynamic atmosphere has attitude, just like people do. This is today's topic...

As people get older, they certainly go through transformations. For example, we start perceiving things differently. This is particularly true when you reach important moments in life, either good or bad. Some more stubborn and fickle people, need a couple of these experiences to get a chance. I am definitely an example of this

When I started graduate school I sincerely thought of things very differently. I thought I was strong, smart, great, all these things that I overestimated about myself. It has been a transformation in every sense. My pride has taken a step down in recognition of this group of elite people called graduates as well as faculty; who are just outstanding in every way: academically and personally.

My dreams have become a little more generalized. I now know that specific places I would like to work at are not necessarily where I will really end up.

So why work for it anyways? Isn't the simpler life and health what many of us want? Higher education is in no way a step to achieving this objective. On the contrary, it tends to make life more adventurous and hectic at times. So I guess we do it because we want to. This experience might end up in complete disappointment, but I can definitely not think about it right now. I guess that in a way it's like a relashionship: it takes great dedication and love, and you can try as much as you like, but it is not always a sure thing, it can lead you many places, some that may end up giving you a world of pain. There needs to be something very specific, very unusual, which I will not discuss because it is way out of my knowledge, that you need to find the spot of your dreams. I can, actually, mention one: your attitude. A dear friend told me about this: your attitude will define almost everything. I cannot describe in words how right she was. You need a strong, dedicated, ambitious and perseverant attitude towards life to be at least a step closer to reach your dreams. This is a remarkably strong driving force, like a gale or a storm, but you need to feed it continuously or it will die off, just like storms do.

So I guess that is pretty much it, I am gambling my future away. But it is like many other things in life, you just don't know. If we didn't have efficient weather prediction, it would be like short time weather changes too (at times). Once again, a despaired but also hopeful runs out of things to say. These have been days that are heavy on my heart, but I must not give up, I must work hard and enjoy the things that have been given to me. Just a little bit of personal thoughts

Angel

“Restless- Pt 1”

“Our cherub transforms into an instrument

Of four cords, the greatest tool ever forged

Our traitor will be hands that perpetually play each note

Without rest, together they are but just one song

Omega and its companion musician of the cords”

The last few verses, a translation of the poem “Incendio en el Cielo” (“Fire in the Heavens”, the closest translation I could think of) which I wrote about a year and a half ago, is a piece of a series of poems that have the theme of incorporating interactions between wind and fire, and its eventual conclusion  “La Arrasada”  (“The Scorching”). I believe it makes a fitting introduction for my first real blog entry. 

Truth be told I’ve been feeling sort of depressed lately, and when these feelings invade an individual, they tend to seek isolation.  From these days of being by myself I have had the time to rethink many things, restate and reorganize my priorities.  You see, there exist a group of people in our world that are just born with a curiosity to learn more about the environment that surrounds us. These curiosities can range from volcanoes to oceans to the vast ranges of weather phenomena that our planet has. If you haven’t realized it yet, we live in a beautiful, unique planet (or, statistically, one that has very low probability of having a nearly identical twin somewhere in the universe., even though, truth be told, there is an estimate of about 10^50 stars in our universe, so who knows?  … oh physics).

So back on topic, there are people that are born with a natural curiosity to learn more about nature, our environment and the things that make out planet so unique. I guess (or at least I have written in many essays) I am one of those people. When I was a little kid, I found it to be so amusing to see a bunch of trade cumulus clouds appear in the sky, at about 10 in the morning. It looked like an ant invasion, so many of them, all of a sudden, looking puffy and white, like cotton candy. Of course, by the time the afternoon came, they’d become a thunderstorm and it would be raining like crazy. No umbrella or poncho could save you from this downpour. If you are not convinced, there was this one time when I was 10 that I got caught in one of these rain events while I was walking home.  The strong winds managed to blow away both my umbrella and my poncho! After that I would just wait until it got clear again. Then at night we would get invaded by those pesky flying ants, but that’s another story!

So I was always looking at the sky, looking at the TV (especially the Weather Channel, loved the tropical update at 10 before the hour) and had my little maps. The internet was not yet as big as it is today for me, for I had no internet or dial up (remember the dial up sound!).  It was very clear that this was the path I wanted in life: the atmosphere! In reality, fulfilling this dream is not as simple as it looked.  It is so complicated that we will probably never be able to completely understand it, and there will probably never be enough computer capacity to model every single detail about it (at least not in this generation, or the next)!

So, why even bother with something that is seemingly impossible to do. Our atmosphere,  as well as all the other components of our Earth, are so important to our everyday life, people don’t even have a clue at times. It pretty much defines our daily activities, and can go as far as defining cultures and communities. Just take two places, say Alaska and Hawaii, see the difference? 

You may not realize it, but we Earth scientists have a responsibility. We are responsible, to some extent, for your life, your safety, and the safety of your loved ones. We want you to be safe and sound in the case of any natural disaster that happens. And we want your future to be even safer than it ever was! That is why there are thousands of scientists around the globe doing constant research. If we were not doing something important for you (you can disagree), we will not be getting the money for it. We are not getting money to make big parties in San Francisco, Cancún or the Maldive Islands (although that would be fun and you’d be invited). I dream that someday my family could be as safe from any dangers as possible, and I really want to contribute for a safer tomorrow.  In the last few years I have seen so many natural disasters, from earthquakes, to hurricanes, to tornado outbreaks, just waning away the candles of so many lives. Witnessing each event comes with a feeling of guilt, of anguish, of being powerless. I feel that we could always do something to lessen all this, but losses always come, be it our fault or not. We do seem to always get the short end of the stick though. 

It is not just our task to keep you safe, but yours as well. I know your new SONY flat-screen is great and all, but I am sure that SONY can make a new one for you if you lost it. They cannot, however, make a new you.  Our mother Earth can be as brutal and unforgiving as we, at times, can be. Even though she has cared for all life in her precious womb, people need to realize that our planet is just as fine in taking away our lives as she is giving it to us. In other words, we need to be aware, and prepared about all the things that can happen. 

This has been my strife, my life, pretty much my everything. It runs in my blood like the DNA of every single event that lead to the creation of our latino (Puertorrican) community, and to who I am today. It is a raging firestorm, yet an instrument, both fused together into this harmonious melody, just like the poem I described above. I am not alone in this, we are many. Some are seeking the lost tune of thunder, others the song of earth. But just like fire can be, restless and fierce, it can be choked down as well. I live my day to day giving it my all, to reach the things that I want without much rest. Every once in a while I stop and can’t go any further and am forced to take a breather. After some time of neglecting most of the things I should not, I came to the realization that this is what I want. I want to write, everything from poems to stories to just plain thoughts! I love to do this, and I love that people can take their time to read it. It is fun, and we all learn!  It nothing less than a pleasure to be at your service, to be a tool of exchanging the things we know (hence the blog title), to extend my hand to everyone.  Like my fictional character above, I hope to also be an instrument, but not a musical one, but at least one of entertainment!

Fluxes- Communication

Hi all! For those of you who don't know me, my name is Angel F Adames-Corraliza, I am a grad student in Atmospheric Sciences in U. of Washington. I'm originally from the town of San Sebastian, Puerto Rico.

I've been thinking for a fairly long time about starting a new blog.  The urge to start one finally became too strong as I needed an outlet for some of my more serious thoughts. So here I am.

Now why do I want to do this? For starters, every once in a while I like write poems and stories (Usually in Spanish, what a wonderful language! But am trying out English too), and needed a nice atmosphere for them. So all my poems are going to move here (eventually). I will put on the title if the blog is a poem, a story or in which language it is, maybe...

Second, it is a good place to communicate, to exchange messages, and for learning (you as well as me). That's why I chose the name "Fluxes". Not only does it have a direct connection to my favorite topic ever (the atmosphere if you have not noticed yet, but that's okay I'm oblivious to many things in life). But the term has this communication feeling to it. I felt that it was a good, short name (people love short names btw, like Shaq, steel and cash), so it went.

I invite you to relax, share and just message me or anything, on any topic you wish to discuss with me. This blog is all about communication, outreach and sharing! I will try to make updates at least once a week on a broad range of topics