Changing Jet Streams May Alter Paths of Storms and Hurricanes

Changing Jet Streams May Alter Paths of Storms and Hurricanes

The Earth’s jet streams, the high-altitude bands of fast winds that strongly influence the paths of storms and other weather systems, are shifting—possibly in response to global warming. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution determined that over a 23-year span from 1979 to 2001 the jet streams in both hemispheres have risen in altitude and shifted toward the poles. The jet stream in the northern hemisphere has also weakened. These changes fit the predictions of global warming models and have implications for the frequency and intensity of future storms, including hurricanes.

Christina Archer and Ken Caldeira, of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford, tracked changes in the average position and strength of jet streams using records compiled by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the National Centers for Environmental Protection, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The data included outputs from weather prediction models, conventional observations from weather balloons and surface instruments, and remote observations from satellites. The results are published in the April 18 Geophysical Research Letters.

Jet streams twist and turn in a wide swath that changes from day to day. The poleward shift in their average location discovered by the researchers is small, about 19 kilometers (12 miles) per decade in the northern hemisphere, but if the trend continues the impact could be significant. “The jet streams are the driving factor for weather in half of the globe,” says Archer. “So, as you can imagine, changes in the jets have the potential to affect large populations and major climate systems.”

Storm paths in North America are likely to shift northward as a result of the jet stream changes. Hurricanes, whose development tends to be inhibited by jet streams, may become more powerful and more frequent as the jet streams move away from the sub-tropical zones where hurricanes are born.

The observed changes are consistent with numerous other signals of global warming found in previous studies, such as the widening of the tropical belt, the cooling of the stratosphere, and the poleward shift of storm tracks. This is the first study to use observation-based datasets to examine trends in all the jet stream parameters, however.

“At this point we can’t say for sure that this is the result of global warming, but I think it is,” says Caldeira. “I would bet that the trend in the jet streams’ positions will continue. It is something I’d put my money on.”

WEATHER NOTE

Tracking Tornado Damage From Space

Reported August 2008

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- This year, dozens of communities around the U.S. are recovering from devastating tornadoes -- storms that have caused millions of dollars worth of damage to homes, businesses and crops. After every reported tornado, it’s the job of the weather service to track its path, and estimate the damage, but since tornadoes can travel hundreds of miles and touch down multiple times, that’s not always easy. Now, there may be a solution -- from space!

NASA meteorologist Gary Jedlovek, Ph.D., studies tornadoes and their devastation from pictures taken hundreds of miles away. He’s discovered that high-resolution satellite data that can help forecast tornadoes can also track the damage they leave behind.

“What we’ve discovered in the process of analyzing the satellite data is that we can also see the damage path of scars from where severe weather events such as tornadoes have occurred,” Dr. Jedlovek told Ivanhoe.

Using satellite images of Earth’s surface, land use and vegetation, Dr. Jedlovek developed a mathematical model to identify storm damage on the computer. The result, high definition images that track a tornado’s path of destruction, whether it’s in a city or a forest far off the beaten path -- areas where damage can go undetected.h

“We can help the National Weather Service forecasters understand the length, the width and the intensity of the tornado that produced that particular damage path,” Dr. Jedlovek said.

Information that can help communities clean up and rebuild, and help forecasters get a better understanding of the storms themselves.

“Obviously the more we know about tornadoes the better job we can do about understanding what forms them and predicting them,” Dr. Jedlovek noted.

The NASA satellite technology has now been incorporated into weather service computer systems to help the weather service improve their damage estimates, and measure the magnitude of tornadoes after they occur.

The American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

MARITIME NOTE

Underwater, a disturbing new world

A Tribune team follows researchers to the bottom of Lake Michigan as they try to explain the rapidly shifting ecosystem

By James Janega

Chicago Tribune reporter

July 30, 2008

OFF ATWATER BEACH, Wis.—This place should be an underwater desert.

But as the three researchers wearing scuba tanks and lead weights drop through the water, the landscape of rounded stones 30 feet below is disturbingly full of strange, new life.

In just a few years, the gravel and white boulders that for centuries covered the bottom of Lake Michigan between Chicago and the Door County, Wis., peninsula have disappeared under a carpet of mussels and primitive plant life.

The change is not merely cosmetic. In the last three years or so, scientists say, invasive species have upended the ecology of the lakes, shifting distribution of species and starving familiar fish of their usual food supply.

Signs of the shift have been hard to ignore. Mats of dead, smelly algae wash ashore on Lake Michigan from Chicago to the Straits of Mackinac, castoffs of a vast underwater expanse seen from boat decks and from hilltops at Sleeping Bear Dunes in Michigan. Fishermen haul it up in their nets, dubbing it "lake moss."

Multiple strains of E. coli bacteria and botulism spores thrive in the new underwater garden, leading scientists to suspect they are contributing to beach closings and the widespread deaths of migratory birds. Meanwhile, fishermen notice the lake trout, salmon and whitefish are getting skinnier each season.

The rapid shift has researchers scrambling to understand what is happening and how widely the impact will be felt.

"The lake is changing faster than we can study it," said University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee researcher Harvey Bootsma, whose small team of researchers hunts explanations from this new lake bottom in weekly dives off the Wisconsin shore.

Adaptation possible

Some ecologists and fishery managers say the Great Lakes may adapt, noting that some fish seem to be eating the most common invasive species. But experts also say the species are fueling change in the lakes at a rate far faster than they have ever seen.

"We don't necessarily know all the impacts, but we know enough to know that they are being catastrophic," said Cameron Davis, president of the Alliance for the Great Lakes. "The ecological balance of the Great Lakes is at a tipping point. And the question is: Can they recover? Or can we act quickly enough to help them recover?"

None of the key species leading the change—mussels, algae and round gobies—are new arrivals. The zebra mussel famously invaded Lake Michigan two decades ago, and its cousin, the quagga mussel, wasn't far behind.

But in the last handful of years the quagga has taken off with alarming speed, exploding across the lake floor.

While zebra mussels like to attach themselves to rocks and man-made structures, the quaggas can colonize sandy bottoms deeper in the lakes. Between them, the species filter lake water ceaselessly, making it so crystal clear that light can penetrate far deeper than before.

That change has allowed a native species of algae called cladophora to run rampant. It now can grow in 30 feet of water, twice as deep as a decade ago, and its waving tendrils cover vast offshore areas.

Round gobies, an invasive fish species from the Black Sea willing to eat the mussels, love this new environment. They breed prolifically and are now the most abundant fish species found in many parts of the lake.

Together, these species have not only altered the clarity of the water but also devoured and filtered out the nutrients that used to sustain plankton and shrimplike diporeia at the base of the lake's food chain, starving what larger fish are left.

To be sure, the Great Lakes ceased to be a wholly native ecosystem long ago. Atlantic alewives sneaked into the lakes in 1873. People began stocking rainbow trout and chinook salmon shortly after the alewives, and added brown trout and coho salmon to the mix by 1933.

By the 1950s, the most important fish in the native food chain—lake trout, ciscoes and spiny sculpins—were nearly gone in the lower lakes and severely reduced in Lakes Michigan and Huron. Still, scientists say perch, salmon and the alewives on which they foraged formed a relatively stable ecosystem until the invasive mussels began devouring key microscopic nutrients.

"Now all the forage fish are way down in Lake Michigan and Lake Huron," said Henry Vanderploeg, a Great Lakes ecologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "There's a crisis. The mussels are really messing up the food chain."

It's possible fish will weather the changes. Fishermen have caught lake trout that had gobies in their stomachs, and smallmouth bass in Lake Erie have doubled their size in 10 years by feasting on gobies, said Marc Gaden, spokesman for the Great Lakes Fisheries Commission.

There also are signs Lake Michigan whitefish have been eating zebra and quagga mussels. "That's now the new food source," Gaden said.

Fishermen worry about catches, said Dan Thomas, president of the Great Lakes Sportfishing Council.

"They're one half the size they were in the 1970s and 1980s," he said. Big chinook might be a dozen pounds now instead of 30, he said. Coho are 10 pounds, not 18. Whitefish are numerous enough, but still much skinnier.

New aquatic order

Even alewives, a once-plentiful invasive species eaten by stocked salmon, have retreated to the north end of Lake Michigan, Thomas said. He blames mussels for chasing them off. "The food chain is gone," Thomas said.

To be exact, a new food chain has settled, said Brenda Moraska Lafrancois, aquatic ecologist in Minnesota with the National Park Service.

The changes are easy to see. From 20 deep feet of water out to 40 feet or more, mussels cover the lake floor in a crunching layer as brittle as breakfast cereal. On their shells fronds of algae wave in the water, forming a carpet the lush green of a tropical forest. Darting sand-colored gobies complete the picture.

"The first time that I dove in Lake Michigan, I was shocked at the amount of biomass down there," said Moraska Lafrancois. It just "wasn't native. Nearly everything I looked at was an invasive species in and of itself, or was facilitated by one."

A half-mile from the Wisconsin shore, Bootsma dove into 30 feet of water from his research boat, the R/V Osprey, to visit experiments on the lake floor with marine biology students Julie Barker of Niles and Jim Weselowski of Winnipeg, Canada.

The gray-green water is a strange world suffused in a swaying glow; Barker said the team learned last year that cladophora followed the light. Now they want to know what feeds the algae. Nourishment from phosphorous may pour into the lake from rivers, or it may come from the mussels, which produce waste like any living thing.

There is urgency to learn.

"Every year we have new species," Bootsma said. "That changes the way the lake works."

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