MONTHLY NEWSLETTER OCTOBER 2019
Woods Hole Research Center An “interesting” winter shaping up Dr. Jennifer Francis WHRC Senior Scientist
New Arctic carbon campaign to expand permafrost science, inform international policy by Miles Grant
So far 2019 has been a blockbuster year for extreme weather in the U.S. and elsewhere around the northern hemisphere. January brought an intense “polar vortex” to the Midwest, marked by persistent, record-breaking cold, along with near-record snowfalls in the Sierra Nevada and parts of the Rockies. Spring unfolded with a pair of floods in the mid-Atlantic region along with intense “bomb cyclones” exploding over the U.S. heartland, resulting in catastrophic flooding. Adding insult to injury was a prolonged spate of tornadoes and severe thunderstorms in the same region, leaving many farmers unable to plant their submerged fields. Summer unleashed record-breaking heatwaves in the southeast United States, Europe, and Alaska that fueled wildfires and the second largest melt of Greenland’s ice sheet. As hurricane season fired up, we watched in horror as Cat-5 Dorian threatened the east coast of Florida with “the big one,” but instead stalled over the northern Bahamas, wreaking destruction like an atomic bomb. Rare tornadoes ripped through Cape Cod in August, and nascent tropical storm Imelda—barely noticed in headlines—inundated the Houston area, still recovering from the wrath of Harvey, with over three feet of rain. A winter-like September storm brought over 40 inches of snow to parts of Montana, breaking yet more records. Extreme weather happens, but this year has been freakish by any metric. Will this rash of events continue through the coming winter?
With initial funding from a new $2.4 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, WHRC is launching a major campaign to gain new understanding on how quickly permafrost regions are changing and what that means for global climate projections.
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Predicting how weather might behave a season in advance is challenging, but some factors tip the odds toward particular weather regimes in certain areas. Traditionally the existence of El Niño or La Niña—a large-scale temperature pattern in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean—has been a useful predictor, but new studies suggest that it has become less reliable in recent decades as
The Arctic Carbon Monitoring and Prediction System is being launched in conjunction with the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and will deliver crucial new research to inform upcoming international climate negotiations. WHRC will lead the scientific aspects of the work, with the Arctic Initiative at the Belfer Center overseeing the policy components.
The first steps in expanding WHRC’s Arctic monitoring took place this year in Alaska’s Yukon-Kuskokwim River Delta when scientists installed two new flux towers, which monitor the exchange rates of trace gases, funded in part by the Moore Foundation’s grant. The first was installed during the summer 2019 Polaris Project expedition and the second was installed during a follow-up trip by WHRC scientists this month. The towers will measure carbon uptake by plants and emissions from plants and soils, including from thawing permafrost, sending realtime data via satellite back to WHRC’s Falmouth campus.
WHRC is an independent research organization where scientists study climate change and how to solve it, from the Amazon to the Arctic. Learn more at www.whrc.org.