An El Niño For California!

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

10:14 am

Last year, climatologists were warning us that we could have one of the biggest El Niños in history, perhaps one even rivaling the legendary El Niño of 1997-1998. Those forecasts never verified, but you wouldn’t know that by our weather this past winter. El Niño winters are generally warmer and drier than normal in the Pacific Northwest, and boy oh boy were we warm. While we had near-normal rainfall, most of this rainfall occurred in short, heavy spurts due to warm, subtropical systems soaking the area. All of this made for, as I’m sure you are well aware, a less-than-optimal ski season.

Precipitation and temperature departures from average. Credit: Climate Prediction Center's El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Diagnostic Discussion

But this winter, it looks like a real El Niño may be in store. While I normally hate El Niños (I’m a skiing fanatic), I’m actually hoping a strong one arrives this year. Why, you might ask? 

One word. California.

Folsom Lake. Credit: California Department of Water Resources

The above picture shows pictures of Folsom Lake, a reservoir 25 miles northeast of Sacramento in Northern California. The picture on the left is from July 2011, and the picture on the right is from January 2014. During July 2011, the reservoir was at 97% total capacity and had 130% of its average capacity for that date. For January 2014, the reservoir was at 17% total capacity and had 35% of its average capacity for that date. I can't even tell if the reservoir reaches the dam in the foreground. The lack of water in California is frightening. Jerry Brown, the governor of California, has called for a 25% reduction of water usage in 2015 compared to 2013 levels, and numerous measures are being put in place to ration water. The latest, a "tiered" measure where the more water you use, the more you would pay per gallon, was recently ruled unconstitutional this past Monday. 

This is the kind of stuff that drives me crazy. There seems to be a common theme in American society of being unable to take action on a pressing environmental issue because it will violate some peoples’ rights. When a situation gets really, really serious, taking swift action is more important than finding a perfect solution. What's more important... having people who use large amounts of water pay unfair sums of money for using it (while farmers get off for free and Nestle (Arrowhead) illegally pumps their water from California’s national forests and sells it to drought-free states for a profit), or continuing to watch California's water supply dwindle? In my opinion, when there is a crisis, it is more important to get an imperfect solution in place that can be edited later than take no action at all. The lack of urgency towards mitigating environmental crises in politics confounds me. But that is a topic for a different blog.

So if California won't help themselves, will Mother Nature come to the rescue? I am cautiously optimistic that she will. But before we discuss how the current El Niño will unfold, let's take a look at the effects of past ones for the continental U.S. I hope you like pictures. :)

Typical climate patterns for the U.S. during El Niño winters. Credit: Climate Prediction Center/NCEP/NWS/The COMET Program

During El Niño years, the jet stream that comes off the Pacific and brings us our big storms tends to shift to the south. As a result, we tend to be warmer and drier, while California tends to be cooler and wetter. This pattern is not unique to the West Coast; during El Niño years, the entire northern and southern tiers of the U.S. follow a similar trend.

The maps below show the composite precipitation and temperature anomalies during El Niño years over the states. Of particular note is the sharp gradient in precipitation between the Cascades and the Sierra Nevada. With warmer and drier-than-normal conditions, the Cascades are often starved of snowfall, while the Sierra Nevada get absolutely crushed.

Composite Precipitation Anomalies (inches) during El Nino years. Credit: NOAA

Composite Temperature Anomalies (F) during El Niño years. Credit: NOAA

Now that we’ve got that covered, we’re ready to take a look at El Niño's current status. But before we do that, let’s quickly review our El Niño “regions.”

Credit: NOAA's National Climatic Data Center

El Niño occurs in the tropical Pacific, and there are different Niño "regions" that are used as an indicator of El Niño strength. They are all important, but Niño 3.4 is the one that is generally the most representative of an El Niño event. The graphs and maps below show the temperature anomalies in these regions over time. All of the pictures below were retrieved from the Climate Prediction Center's latest El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) diagnostic discussion.

SST anomalies from all of the Niño regions

SST anomalies over the tropical Pacific

As you can see, sea-surface-temperatures (SST) were above average for the entire winter, but for the tropical Pacific to be in an El Niño state, the SST must have a 3-month average of at least 0.5 °C above normal. We barely, barely made El Niño criteria this past winter, but as you can see, all of the Niño regions are warming rapidly, and we are now solidly in weak El Niño conditions.

Changes in ocean temperature at depth along the Equator

Warming is also very apparent at depth, as the positive temperature anomalies have increased throughout the water column in the central and eastern Pacific. 

The majority of models are on board for an El Niño event. There are three charts I like to look at: the "Probabilistic ENSO Forecast" from the Climate Prediction Center (CPC) and the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), an IRI/CPC compilation of Niño 3.4 SST predictions from different dynamical and statistical models around the world, and the Niño 3.4 SST predictions from the CPC’s own CFSv2 (Coupled Forecast System Model, version 2). As the Probabilistic ENSO Forecast chart below shows, there is a 60-70% chance of the El Niño lasting through 2015, and our chances of a La Niña developing (cooler-than-normal waters in the tropical Pacific) are small.

Graph showing the probabilities of an El Niño, Neutral, or La Niña event for the rest of 2015

The IRI/CPC’s dynamical/statistical model compilation shows all but one model forecasting above-average SST for the rest of the year, with the majority predicting El Niño conditions. The thicker lines are the averages of given models, and these also denote weak-to-moderate El Niño conditions for the rest of 2015.

Niño 3.4 SST anomalies as predicted by different dynamical and statistical models

The CFSv2 also shows a moderate El Niño developing. The solid black line is the measured SST in Niño 3.4 thus far, the colored lines are forecasts from different "ensemble" members; i.e. forecasts using slightly different initial conditions, and the dashed line is the average of these ensemble members. 

Niño 3.4 SST Anomalies from the CFSv2 model

For a more visual depiction of what this graph represents, take a look at the sequence of images below. These images are based on the above predictions from the CFSv2 model and show what the SST throughout the tropical Pacific are forecast to look like as we head into 2015.

Visual evolution of the El Niño as predicted by the CFSv2 model

In conclusion, an El Niño is already developing, and models are pretty confident that it will continue to strengthen and persist throughout 2015 into next winter. The effects of El Niño for North America are most pronounced during our winter, so if California gets buckets of rain this summer, don't drop down on your knees and praise El Niño just yet. On the other hand, if California is getting swamped in the middle of the winter, well, you'll know who to worship. 

Charlie

The Future of The Earth

Wednesday, April 8, 2015
12:07 pm

Edvard Munch's The Scream

As the picture above insinuates, the future is not good.

Now, when I'm talking about the future, I'm not talking about 100 years from now (although that's pretty bad too). I'm not even talking about 1,000 years from now. No, I'm talking in the realm of 7,000,000,000 (seven billion) years from now. When stars age, they gradually become bigger and brighter before finally becoming "red giants" where although they have the same mass, their volume is significantly larger. In seven billion years, the Sun may actually expand to a point where it engulfs the Earth. The Earth is currently 93 million miles, or 1 astronomical unit (AU), away from the sun (give or take 1.5 million miles depending on the season, as the Earth has an elliptical orbit and is further away from the sun during the Northern Hemisphere summer than the Northern Hemisphere winter). The diagram below has the sun with a diameter of 2 AU, meaning it has a radius of 1 AU and just barely engulfs the sun. Seeing as the sun is only 0.01 AU right now, this diagram shows that the sun as a red giant will be approximately 200 times wider, and using the formula for volume:

V

=

4

3

π

r

3

Where r = radius and pi (the Greek letter) is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter (approximately 3.14), the volume of the sun as a red giant is predicted to be approximately 8 trillion times greater than the sun's current volume. They don't call it a giant for nothing. And the red color comes from the surface gradually cooling as it increases in volume.

Sun as a red giant compared to its current state. Credit: Oona Räisänen

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Obviously, the Earth is kinda screwed if it becomes part of the sun. But we've got a number of hazards to watch out for before then.

Throughout the Quaternary Period (2.58 million years ago to the present), ice ages have been controlled by Milankovitch Cycles, which are changes in the Earth's orbit (eccentricity), axial tilt (obliquity), and amount of "wobbling" that the Earth's axis undergoes, kind of like a spinning top (precession). The exception, of course, is global warming due to increased greenhouse gases since the Industrial Revolution. However, regardless of any effects of from current anthropogenic global warming and greenhouse gas emissions, the Earth will likely enter its next ice age in 50,000 years (Berger and Loutre, 2002). If humans are still around by then and we haven't solved the carbon dioxide problem, an ice age may not occur. Additionally, we would be able to avoid an ice age altogether if we pumped enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to create an increased greenhouse effect to offset the decrease in solar radiation.

By 500,000 years, the Earth will likely have been hit by an asteroid 1km in diameter, assuming humans aren't still around and can't explode it in space or find a way to avoid it completely by delaying its impact (thermonuclear weapons are good for something!) (Hall and Ross, 1997), (Bostrom, 2002). By 1 million years, the Earth will have likely experienced a volcanic eruption similar in magnitude to the eruption of the Toba supervolcano 75,000 years ago, which was, as the picture below shows, much, much larger than the famed Mt. St. Helens eruption of 1980.

Photo Credit: USGS

Of course, now all that remains of Toba is a beautiful lake. However, it still has a magma system under the lake, so while it is a dormant volcano that is not erupting, it has the potential to erupt again, and thus is not extinct (Oregon State University). You wouldn't know it by looking from the tranquil picture of the crater lake below, but when Toba does erupt again, the results will be catastrophic, and the Earth will be plunged into a volcanic winter for approximately a decade with a period of cooler temperatures lasting for up to 1,000 years

Lake Toba. Photo Taken by A.M. & K.D. Hollitzer in 1996. Retrieved from Oregon State University Volcano World

NASA Landsat satellite image of Lake Toba. Credit: NASA

I've come across a lot of scary stuff in the Earth and space sciences, but the part I'm going to describe to you next may just be the scariest of all. And it's because it's our fault.

In 2 million years, coral reef ecosystems are expected to have finally completely recovered from ocean acidification. When I heard this, I was astounded. Two million years? That's an unfathomably long time from now. We're putting carbon dioxide into our atmosphere at an unprecedented rate, and we know that it is going to have drastic effects on sea life. Just look at the picture below! A note of caution... scientists aren't completely certain about how quickly global warming and ocean acidification will destroy coral reefs, so take the photograph with a grain of salt. Alarmists like to show this stuff for shock value. But the bottom line is that increased carbon dioxide will lead to increased ocean acidity and temperature, and this will decimate coral reefs around the world

The Effects of Ocean Acidification and Temperature Rise on Coral Reefs. Retrieved from Furman University's Ocean Acidification Page

The graph below is from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC's) 5th Assessment report, and shows different carbon dioxide concentration scenarios. If we continue releasing CO2 at the rate we are currently doing so, we will reach 500 ppm in a couple decades. Just think... a couple centuries so start the dissolution of coral reefs, and 2 million years to rebuild them. I promise to have more blog posts on ocean acidification in the future, as I believe it is a subject that does not get as much attention as it should, mainly in the media but also in our educational institutions. In fact, ocean acidification was hardly discussed in any of my atmospheric science classes at the University of Washington, including those on climate.

CO2 Emission Scenarios from the IPCC 5th Assessment Report. Retrieved from Wasatch Weather Weenies Blog

A variety of interesting geological things will happen shortly after (in geological time). 10 million years from now, the East African Rift valley will finally spread open far enough to form a new ocean, (Haddock, 2008), and 50 million years from now, California will have slid up to Alaska and been subducted into the Aleutian Trench (Garrison, 2009). By 100 million years, we will have likely been hit by one of those huge asteroids like the one that killed the dinosaurs (Nelson, 2014). By 250 million years, the continents will likely have drifted together to form another supercontinent analogous to "Pangea," the supercontinent that existed 200-300 million years ago. However, this supercontinent will have likely broken up 450 million years from now (Williams and Nield, 2007).

But things really start to get interesting 600 million years from now. And by interesting, I mean depressing.

Dead Plants in Pots. Retrieved from Wikipedia.

As I stated before, stars gradually become brighter as they age. 600 million years from now, the sun is expected to become bright enough that there will be enough heat the atmosphere to evaporate a significant amount of water vapor and thereby cause heavy rain throughout the Earth. As this heavy rain falls, it combines with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to make carbonic acid. This acid erodes the landscape through a process known as weathering. Eventually, this process, is expected to take the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere to a point below the vast majority of photosynthesizing organisms will die (Heath and Doyle, 2009). Normally, carbon dioxide would be continuously added to the atmosphere via volcanism, but so much water will have evaporated from the Earth's surface that rocks will become so hard that plate tectonics, the primary drivers for volcanism, will cease (O'Malley-James et al., 2012).

This process will continue, and by the next 200 million years, all photosynthetic life will be gone and multicellular life will die (Heath and Doyle, 2009).

One billion years from now, the sun will have become 10% more luminous. This doesn't sound like that much, but the average temperature of the Earth will now have risen to 116 degrees Fahrenheit (it's 61 degrees right now). And that's with next to no CO2 in the atmosphere! Why so hot? Well, this increase in solar radiation will also spur a "runaway greenhouse" where the oceans evaporate entirely (Schröder and Smith, 2008). Water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, and no single-celled organisms will be doubting that one billion years from now. In fact, eukaryotic life is expected to become extinct 1.3 billion years from now, with only prokaryotic life remaining (Franck et al., 2005). Prokaryotic life can be thought of "the most basic life there is."

And the news just keeps getting worse. By 2.3 billion years from now, the Earths outer core is predicted to freeze (Waszek et al., 2011). The outer core is currently liquid, and is responsible for creating the Earth's magnetic field. Without a magnetic field, our atmosphere would be blown away. By 2.8 billion years, our average surface temperature has risen to 296 Fahrenheit, enough to wipe out all life (O'Malley-James et al., 2012). By 3.5 billion years, Earth will be as hot as Venus (Hecht, 1994).

Five billion years from now, the sun will evolve into a red giant (Schroeder and Smith, 2008), and as previously stated, after 7 billion years, it will likely grow large enough to swallow the Earth. And that will be the end of our (not so blue) planet.

What the Earth might look like when the sun is a Red Giant. Retrieved from Wikipedia.

So what can humans do to stop this madness from happening?

Well, first of all, I believe we'll likely be extinct in the near future. Thermonuclear war is a very real possibility, and as crazy as it may sound, we have to be very careful or artificial intelligence may be able to develop some sort of sentience and destroy us. If we were alive 600 million years from now and wanted our dear plants to still be alive, we'd preferably see if we could move our orbit further away from the sun. But if we aren't around, this process is inevitable.

You think that's depressing? I don't think you want to know about the proposed "heat death" of the universe. I'll write about that soon.

References:

Berger, A & Loutre, MF (2002). "Climate: an exceptionally long interglacial ahead?". Science 297(5585): 1287–8. doi:10.1126/science.1076120.PMID 12193773.

Bostrom, Nick (March 2002). "Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards". Journal of Evolution and Technology 9 (1). Retrieved 10 September 2012.

C. D. Hall and I. M. Ross, "Dynamics and Control Problems in the Deflection of Near-Earth Objects,"Advances in the Astronautical Sciences, Astrodynamics 1997, Vol.97, Part I, 1997, pp.613–631.

 Franck, S.; Bounama, C.; Von Bloh, W. (November 2005). "Causes and timing of future biosphere extinction". Biogeosciences Discussions 2 (6): 1665–1679.Bibcode:2005BGD.....2.1665F. doi:10.5194/bgd-2-1665-2005. Retrieved 19 October2011.

Garrison, Tom (2009). Essentials of Oceanography (5 ed.). Brooks/Cole. p. 62.

Haddok, Eitan (29 September 2008). "Birth of an Ocean: The Evolution of Ethiopia's Afar Depression". Scientific American. Retrieved 27 December 2010.

Heath, Martin J.; Doyle, Laurance R. (2009). "Circumstellar Habitable Zones to Ecodynamic Domains: A Preliminary Review and Suggested Future Directions".arXiv:0912.2482.

Hecht, Jeff (2 April 1994). "Science: Fiery Future for Planet Earth". New Scientist (subscription required) (1919). p. 14.

Lunine, J. I. (2009), "Titan as an analog of Earth’s past and future", European Physical Journal Conferences 1: 267–274, doi:10.1140/epjconf/e2009-00926-7.

Nelson, Stephen A. "Meteorites, Impacts, and Mass Extinction". Tulane University.

O'Malley-James, Jack T.; Greaves, Jane S.; Raven, John A.; Cockell, Charles S. (2012)."Swansong Biospheres: Refuges for life and novel microbial biospheres on terrestrial planets near the end of their habitable lifetimes". arxiv.org. Retrieved 2012-11-01.

Schroder, K. P.; Connon Smith, Robert (2008). "Distant Future of the Sun and Earth Revisited". Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 386 (1): 155–163.arXiv:0801.4031. Bibcode:2008MNRAS.386..155S. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2008.13022.x.

"Toba, Sumatra, Indonesia". Oregon State University.]

Waszek, Lauren; Irving, Jessica; Deuss, Arwen (20 February 2011). "Reconciling the Hemispherical Structure of Earth's Inner Core With its Super-Rotation". Nature Geoscience 4(4): 264–267. Bibcode:2011NatGe...4..264W. doi:10.1038/ngeo1083.

"When humans faced extinction". BBC. 2003-06-09.

Williams, Caroline; Nield, Ted (20 October 2007). "Pangaea, the comeback". New Scientist.

Why Do People Deny Anthropogenic Global Warming?

Tuesday, March 31, 2015
11:27 am

Why do people deny global warming?

While it is a hypothesis and not a scientific law, this hypothesis has verified since the dawn of the industrial revolution, with the Earth warming nearly 1 degree Celsius since then. Take a look at the picture below, which shows the increase in temperature since the the dawn of the Second Industrial Revolution.

Credit: NASA Earth Observatory

Additionally, this hypothesis is grounded in scientific laws, particularly those pertaining to how infrared radiation escapes from the atmosphere. The picture below shows atmospheric absorptivity windows; i.e. how much of a certain wavelength that a given gas absorbs. When carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere, the wavelength "bands" below for carbon dioxide (those grey things) increase in magnitude and get slightly broader, meaning that more radiation is absorbed. Since the wavelengths that these bands are in are in the infrared spectrum, this means that the absorbed radiation is in the form of heat, and the planet is warmed. Of course, there are many, many feedbacks in the climate system and additional things that humankind has released into the atmosphere such as aerosols that tend to cool the climate, but the net effect of the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is to warm the atmosphere, as the increasing concentrations of these gases increases the absorptivity of infrared radiation and makes it harder for heat to escape.

Credit: Robert A. Rohde for the Global Warming Art project.

Take a look at the carbon dioxide measurements at Mauna Loa from 1960 to 2014. BTW, according to co2now.org, concentrations were at 400.26 ppmv (parts per million volume) this past February, so we've crossed the 400 mark. Cool! (or warm)

Credit: NOAA. Retrieved from the University of Washington Press Blog

Finally, if that wasn't enough, the ice cores retrieved from Vostok, Antarctica provide a very clear relationship between greenhouse gas levels and temperatures. Notice how CO2, methane (CH4), and solar insolation line up nearly perfectly with temperature measurements.

Credit: U.S. Global Change Research Program

I could go on and on with evidence. As the latest IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report says, "warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia." As the picture above shows us, the carbon dioxide concentrations now are likely higher than they have been in the past 400,000 years.

In the face of all this evidence, why do, according to a 2008 Gallup poll, 58% of the public deny that global warming is caused by human activities?

Well, I believe they are a multitude of reasons, but I think they all lead back to one general reason: accepting climate change doesn't fit their agenda. It's not that these people are stupid; Richard Lindzen, a professor at MIT renowned for his work on atmospheric thermodynamics, denies that climate change exists (he also denies that smoking cigarettes causes cancer and allegedly smokes them in his office). Why? Because he's a contrarian. Also, the fact that he gets lots of money from oil companies doesn't discourage him either. Between 2002 and 2010, conservative billionaires secretely donated 120 billion to 100 organizations to cast doubt on anthropogenic global warming (Goldenberg, 2013), and I would suspect that this is just so that they could gain support for any economic plans they had that would emit greenhouse gases (and thus get more money). Yes, a lot of it's about money. But a lot of it also has to do with people not wanting to change how they live. I believe that this unwillingness to reduce carbon emissions subconsciously leads to global warming denial as a defense mechanism so that people don't have to change their lifestyles. There's no need to worry about carbon dioxide emissions from your yacht if global warming doesn't exist, right?

If there's one thing I've learned about America, it's that we love rebels and mavericks. We love Dirty Harry, Indiana Jones, and Rocky Balboa. We love all the Founding Fathers. And boy oh boy do we love Rush Limbaugh, the host of the most-listened-to radio talk show in the United States, and Fox News, America's most-watched cable news station for 13 years and counting. In short, there's nothing America likes more than a tenacious white man. And if you are a tenacious white man who denies global warming by bringing a snowball to congress, you might as well be a true American hero.

Credit: C-SPAN2

The thing is, many of these conservative badasses love to stand up to these scientists and deny that global warming is caused by humans. And to be honest, you've got to give them some credit for their bravado; it takes some serious balls to deny the scientific consensus on global warming. The cards are definitely stacked against them.

Would you trust this guy?

But ironically enough, that just might be why so many Americans don't believe in global warming. Many people cannot trust these scientists, and that is completely understandable considering how the media portrays many of them. Have you ever seen "The Nutty Professor"? But they can relate to these climate change deniers because the deniers allow them to live out a fantasy persona of being the aforementioned "true American hero." Of course, you've got so many deniers now that there are millions of these heros throughout our beautiful nation.

So, what do us enlightened folk do with these heros? How do we show them the path to salvation?

Well, I personally think that providing evidence of global warming is a moot point. They've heard it all before and they'll just pass it off as liberal socialist agenda. Rather, you should tell them why you think they don't believe in global warming. Ask them what they have to gain from denying global warming. Ask them if any of their idols deny global warming. If accepting global warming doesn't fit their agenda or lifestyle, why would they want to believe it in the first place? If you can make them realize that their personal agenda is the deciding factor in their decision of whether something is true or not, you may be able to reach into the scientific side of things and show them some evidence. Do not make alarmist claims; in my opinion, global warming alarmists are only slightly better for society than global warming deniers, and the margin is very slim. One of the biggest claims of the past couple years is that Hurricane Sandy was caused by global warming. This claim has no scientific evidence to support it; in fact, according to a paper by Barnes et al., events like Sandy are actually expected to become less likely in the future.

Time for me to wrap up, it's getting late. What are your thoughts on global warming deniers? Go ahead and comment below!

Charlie

Snow at Snoqualmie Pass

Monday, March 30, 2015
4:28 pm

No, this isn't an early April Fools joke.

Snow actually is going to make a return to Snoqualmie Pass tomorrow.

Consider this: Snoqualmie Pass is "supposed" to have picked up 350 inches by now based on their five-year average, but to date they have only picked up 84. They've only picked up 10 inches since the beginning of February (six inches in February, four inches so far in March). In fact, March had been snow-less until the 24th, when Snoqualmie Pass picked up an inch.

But things are taking a turn for the snowier. An upper-level trough will settle over our area and direct cool, unstable air from the Gulf of Alaska into our region. Although the higher sun angles this time of year will still allow temperatures to heat up into the mid-50s, the air aloft will be considerably cooler, and this translates to steep lapse rates (decreases in temperature with height) and therefore relatively low snow levels. Take a look at the 72-hour snowfall valid 5:00 pm Thursday! Several inches over Snoqualmie, with much more at Stevens.

Valid 05:00 pm PDT, Thu 02 Apr 2015 - 84hr Fcst: Retrived from UW mm5rt modeling site

The reason there is so much more snow at Stevens is because a Puget Sound Convergence Zone is predicted to form and dump a lot of snow over there. However, if this zone moves south, it will drop this precipitation (almost certainly in the form of snow) over Snoqualmie Pass. If that happens, Snoqualmie Pass will see more snow in a day than they've received in 2.5 months! In the below 3-hour precipitation chart below, you can clearly see a convergence zone that has been pushed back into the Central Cascades.

Valid 11:00 pm PDT, Tue 31 Mar 2015 - 42hr Fcst: Retrieved from the UW mm5rt modeling site

Even more snow looks to fall in the days ahead, as more relatively cool disturbances from the northwest will slide on into our area. Going 84 hours ahead to hour 168 in our chart, you can see that there is still a significant amount of snow forecast throughout the Cascades with snow levels well below Snoqualmie Pass.

Valid 05:00 am PDT, Mon 06 Apr 2015 - 168hr Fcst: Retrieved from the UW mm5rt modeling site

If these forecasts hold, Snoqualmie Pass should see over a foot this coming week. Needless to say, operations won't be resuming until the autumnal equinox has come and passed, but it's still nice to be reminded that it does indeed snow there.

The record for minimum snowfall at the pass was set back in the winter of 1976-1977 when a measly 191 inches of snow fell. It's almost a given that we will break that at this point; we would need 107 more inches to tie it, and the most snowfall measured past April first for any year since records started being taken at Snoqualmie was 97 inches, all of which occurred in April. This occurred directly after a record-setting March total of 221 inches. Talk about some serious spring skiing!

Part of me is hoping that the snow that we do see will be minimal, because I'd like to keep the snow total for this year at or below 91 so that we can break the previous record by three digits. I'll settle for keeping this year's total under 100, though. Nevertheless, the snow will still be a very, very welcome sight for many, myself included, and I'll post some pictures in my next blog!

- Charlie

Thermonuclear Energy

Tuesday, March 4, 2014
12:15 a.m.

Back in high school, I wrote a post on nuclear energy. It was the most-read post for a long time on this blog. It has since fallen to 2nd place behind "Mt. Rainier Weather." However, they are very close in views, so there are brief times when it reclaims first place. Although it pains me to admit it, the reason why these two posts (and many of my top posts) have so many views is not because they are popular or well-written but simply because the images on the post appear on Google Images, allowing curious websurfers to visit the source of the picture (my blog) if they so choose. Let's just pretend I'm a internationally-known weather celebrity whose posts are celebrated throughout the world without the help of Google Images, though. It sounds better.

I wrote this post soon after the Fukushima meltdown in Japan. I knew it would be a controversial post; I was actually defending fission power. Nuclear fission is the cleanest type of non-renewable power source available, and is the most feasible for large-scale electric production. Hydroelectric dams can produce a fair amount of electricity (that's why our electric bills here in Washington are so cheap), but wind and solar don't produce much. And what about solar at night or when it's foggy? And have you ever seen a wind farm full of non-rotating windmills? It's pretty pathetic. The destruction of nuclei in nuclear fission releases vast amounts of energy for very small amounts of fuel, and since no combustion is involved, no carbon dioxide is emitted. You also don't get those particulates that you often get from combustion, especially the combustion of low-quality coal. Nuclear waste can be stored safely, and the U.S. has not had an accident since Three-Mile Island. Excepting the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986, nobody has ever died as a result of radiation exposure from a nuclear power plant, disaster or not. In fact, nuclear has one of the lowest accident/failure rates of any engineered design.

As I'm sure we all know, however, the accidents, when they occur, have the potential to be very serious. This isn't McDonald's, and you're not making the mistake of giving your customer a Big Mac instead of a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. The site of the Fukushima nuclear meltdown is still highly radioactive, and cleanup will take 40+ years and tens of billions of dollars. In addition, some of the land will be unfarmable for centuries. Sure, coal power is dirty and inefficient, but there's no danger of a coal plant failure grossly contaminating the surrounding area to the same extent of a nuclear plant.

Three Mile Island, and particularly Chernobyl, occurred due to human error. The guys at Chernobyl had limited knowledge of nuclear engineering and physics, and ran the reactors with many of the safety systems turned off. In addition, there were many engineering flaws with the reactor in the first place. All these flaws have been fixed in future plants, and there is essentially no chance that an event like this could ever happen again. I thought that the Fukushima plant would have been much more advanced because it was a nuclear plant in a developed nation in the 21st century, but engineering-wise, it was found to fail the most basic of safety requirements by several nuclear safety agencies and that there was no way it could ever withstand an earthquake or tsunami.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that all of these accidents could have been easily avoided with more care and preparation. You do NOT want to skimp on safety when it comes to nuclear energy. If you want to read my previous post on nuclear energy, you can do so here.

Alright, that's my spiel on fission power. Let's move onto fusion power, or thermonuclear energy.

Front page of the New York Times, December 7, 1960. Retrieved from Alex Wellerstein's Restricted Data Nuclear Secrecy Blog

Little Boy. A bomb so powerful, it single-handedly destroyed Hiroshima. And Fat Man, an even more powerful bomb that ended the most horrific war our civilization has faced. These nuclear weapons relied on nuclear fission just like the nuclear reactors used today. However, within a decade, a new type of bomb, a thermonuclear bomb, was developed. Whereas the previous nuclear fission bombs got their energy from the breaking apart of heavy elements, these new bombs vastly increased the efficiency of doing this and obtained additional energy by fusing light ones together. The result was a much, much more powerful bomb. The first thermonuclear bomb ever detonated was 750 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The Russians developed these weapons not long after the Americans did. It's easy to see why living in the Cold War era must have been an unsettling time.

Before we go any further, let me give you a quick debriefing on mass-energy equivalence. It might sound a little technical, but I guarantee you are at least somewhat familiar with it.

That's Einstein's mass-energy equivalence formula. It says that the amount of energy in something is equal to its mass multiplied by the speed of light squared. The formula says all types of weird things... for example, if you add energy to an object, its mass will increase by a tiny amount even though no matter has been added. Likewise, it says that when mass is lost, as it is in nuclear fission and fusion, tremendous amounts of energy are released. This is because the amount of mass lost is multiplied by the speed of light squared (c^2), and as you can see at the bottom of the picture above, c^2 is quite a large number!

Now that we've got that settled, let's take a look at how nuclear fission and nuclear fusion work.

Nuclear fission works by by bombarding an atom with a free neutron, causing it to briefly add a neutron to its nucleus. However, this bombardment renders the new nucleus unstable, and the nucleus splits into both lighter elements and releases free neutrons. 

The most common starting fuels for nuclear fission that we use are uranium and plutonium, and the below diagram shows what happens when you bombard a uranium-235 nucleus with a free neutron. It turns into a uranium-236 nucleus but soon splits into krypton and barium while releasing three free neutrons, which go on to bombard other uranium-235 nuclei. As you can see, this creates a chain reaction that grows very quickly. Massive amounts of energy are released by these free neutrons, and the reaction produces photons (the explosions create fireballs that light up the entire sky) that release energy in the form of gamma rays. In a bomb, all of this happens at once in a manner similar to the example below. In a fission reactor, this reaction is controlled so that for every 2 or 3 neutrons released, only one must be allowed to strike another uranium nucleus. If it is less than one, the reaction will fizzle, and if it is more than one, you will sizzle (it will grow into an uncontrolled reaction and you could be exposed to dangerous levels of radiation). These uncontrolled reactions cannot sustain themselves in a nuclear power plant like they can in a bomb, so you aren't in danger of setting off an explosion of that magnitude, but they can fry people nearby and deliver fatal dosages of neutrons and gamma rays.

Simple diagram of nuclear fission. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fission

I'm a pacifist. Well, kind of. There's nothing I like more than watching nuclear test videos. The "atomic cannon" is a classic. It's only 15 kilotons, but this allowed the cameras to be placed much closer to the explosion. They also have astonishingly high resolution for 1953. Take a look at the video below!

That said, I'd be here forever if I talked about how both fission bombs and fission power work. So let me give you an overview of the latter.

Reactors and Cooling Towers at the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station: retrieved from Wikipedias' nuclear power page.

One thing I like to visualize when thinking of how much power a nuclear plant produces is the amount of steam that goes through those cooling towers. I mean, look at that stuff. It would be an interesting atmospheric science project to study if the massive amounts of heat and moisture released from these cooling towers have ever sparked convection and possibly even thunderstorms that otherwise would not be there nearby.

The general premise behind nuclear power is to control a nuclear reaction so that it heats water into steam and drives a turbine, producing electricity. To do this, enriched uranium is generally formed into 2.5 cm long pellets with a dime-size diameter. These pellets are lined up into long rods, which are then collected together into bundles. These bundles are submerged in water inside a pressure vessel to prevent them from overheating. A nuclear meltdown is when these rods overheat, melt, and create a steam explosion. It is NOT a massively uncontrolled reaction that causes runaway fission to occur and and fry the city.

Control Rods

In addition to the water, control rods are used to prevent a meltdown. These rods are made of elements that are non-fissionable and can absorb neutrons. Boron, silver, indium, and cadmium are a few examples. These rods are inserted into the bundles using a mechanism that can raise or lower them, and raising or lowering the rods allows the operators to control the rate of the reaction. The control rods are raised out of the uranium bundle to increase the rate of reaction by allowing fewer neutrons to be absorbed and vise versa.

Finally, the water is heated to steam and then spins a turbine. This turbine is connected to a generator, and when the turbine spins, it also spins the generator, producing power. You can't hold on to that steam forever, so you gotta send it through these huge cooling towers sooner or later. I'm sure many of us associate those cooling towers with nuclear power plants.

Alright. Now that we've got all that out of the way, let's talk about what I originally intended this post to be solely about: thermonuclear energy.

"Thermo" is a prefix for heat. Thermometer, thermodynamics, thermochemistry are just a few examples. I once told a girl she was hella thermo and asked her if she wanted to spend an evening  at Super China Buffet with me. Didn't work... she obviously wasn't cool enough for me. But thermonuclear? What's not thermo about regular nuclear? That steam is coming out at 450 degrees Celsius, and the hottest part of the reactor runs at 600 degrees. That's enough to vaporize a man in seconds. However, a successful thermonuclear reactor requires temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius.

OK, let me repeat that last sentence, since I kind of sneaked it in there. 

A successful thermonuclear reactor requires temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius.

Folks, that would probably even vaporize Chuck Norris. Now do you see where the "thermo" prefix comes from? At well over 150,000 times hotter than a fission reactor, you better believe a thermonuclear reactor deserves its title.

Thermonuclear energy is acquired through nuclear fusion, which in many ways is the opposite of fission and is what powers stars. Whereas fission involves the breaking apart of heavy elements such as uranium or plutonium into smaller ones and the release of energy in the process, nuclear fusion involves the "fusing" of light elements, such as hydrogen, into larger ones, such as helium. Theoretically, any element can be fused, and that's how our elements on the periodic table up to iron were created. Anything higher was created in a supernova. On Earth, we can't fuse heavier elements because we don't have the immense gravitational forces and pressure associated with stars. However, we can fuse hydrogen into helium. Let me give you a brief overview of how that works.

The most common type of hydrogen atom has one single proton and one electron. For the fusion reactors currently being tested, we take two different types of hydrogen atoms, or isotopes: deuterium and tritium. Deuterium, often known as "heavy hydrogen," is hydrogen with one neutron in addition to the one proton and electron, and tritium, which is very rare naturally but can be synthesized from lithium, has two neutrons, a proton, and an electron. Any atom that has one proton is a hydrogen atom.

Anyway, for any sort of fusion reaction to occur, the nuclei must be squeezed together. The main obstacle they have to overcome is that the protons are positively charged (neutrons have no charge). Like charges repel, so fusing an atom requires overcoming the repulsive force between the protons in the nucleus.

To overcome this, you need two things: extremely high temperatures (100 million degrees Celsius, as stated above) and incredibly high pressure (the hydrogen atoms need to be within one quadrillionth of a meter). The sun does this using the force of gravity to compress the matter into its core, which is where the fusion takes place. Since we don't have a prodigious amount of matter at our immediate disposal, we need to apply energy from magnetic fields or lasers.

I talked about deuterium-tritium reactions, but ideally we'd eventually be able to rely on deuterium-deuterium reactions. Deuterium is easier to extract from seawater than tritium is to create from lithium and is far more plentiful. The only problem is that D-D fusion requires much higher temperatures to ignite, with the absolute minimum required being 400 million degrees Celsius compared to a minimum of 45 million degrees for D-T fusion. Any engineers in the house?

Speaking of engineering, there are two types of fusion reactors that are currently being explored: magnetic confinement and inertial confinement. Let's now take a look at how those work.

Magnetic Confinement

A magnetic confinement reactor is a reactor that uses electric and magnetic fields to heat and compress electrified hydrogen gas (hydrogen plasma). The main magnetic confinement reactor that scientists from all over the world are collaborating on is located in France and is called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER).

Credit: Matt Farrell, University of Illinois

The picture above shows a highly simplified schematic of a magnetic confinement chamber. Notice how the main chamber is in the shape of a big donut. This shape is called a toroid, and it happens to be the most efficient shape for confining this plasma. A magnetic confinement chamber in this shape is called a topamak. Toroids have many useful applications in electromagnetics; I know for certain that many of the alternating current transformers I have in my audio amplifiers are in the shape of toroids.

Toroidal power transformer in my Sansui G9000DB stereo receiver

The picture below gives a little more in-depth version of the parts that make up a tokamak. I'll list them below.

Credit: ITER

The vacuum vessel: confines the plasma and keeps the reaction chamber in a vacuum

Neutral beam injector (aka: ion cyclotron system): heats plasma by injecting particle beams from the accelerator into the plasma

Magnetic field coils (poloidal, toroidal): magnets that use their magnetic fields to confine the plasma and allow fusion to occur

Transformers/Central solenoid: supply the magnetic field coils with the massive amounts of electricity needed for them to maintain their extremely strong magnetic fields

Cooling equipment (cryostat, cryopump): the magnets generate a lot of heat, so the cryostat and cryopump cool them

Blanket modules: absorb free neutrons and excess heat from the fusion reaction

Diverters: remove excess helium formed from the fusion of deuterium and tritium from the chamber

____________________________________________________________

The fusion reaction becomes initiated when neutral particle beams, electricity, and microwaves from various accelerators heat a mass of hydrogen gas. When this gas is heated to a sufficient temperature, it turns into plasma. Plasma is the same type of substance that stars are made out of and is regarded as the fourth state of matter (regardless of what your elementary science school teacher may have told you, there are more than just three phases of matter!). Power is supplied to the transformers to create a magnetic field (a flowing current of electricity creates a magnetic field around it), and under this extremely strong magnetic field, the plasma is compressed and fusion takes place. Well, at least that's the idea.

Inertial Confinement

While magnetic confinement works by magnetically compressing the hydrogen ions in close proximity to each other for a given amount of time, inertial confinement works by fuse them so fast that the ions are not able to overcome their inertia and move apart, leading to the name "inertial confinement." When I think of inertial confinement reactors, I often get this image of this kid shoplifting a candy bar from a store at night and running away before being surrounded by police pointing a bunch of flashlights at him. Except, in this example, the "kid" is a pea-sized pellet containing deuterium and tritium and the "flashlights" are dozens of incredibly powerful laser beams. The biggest inertial confinement reactor in the world, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in Livermore, California, contains 192 of these lasers. In the NIF, these lasers are housed within a 10-foot diameter rugby-shaped "target chamber" called a hohlfram. Much like the donut-shaped topomak, I suspect that the geometry of the hohlfram had to do more with efficiency than the engineer's favorite sport.

The lasers at the NIF will focus 1.8 million joules of energy onto the little pellet of deuterium and tritium, heating it and generating x-rays emanating from pellet. The deuterium and tritium will then turn into plasma as a result of the immense heat and radiation and compress until fusion occurs. Once this fusion occurs, the intense amount of heat and energy released from it will act to sustain fusion. We have not reached this point yet, but we are making progress; back in 2013, we generated a net gain in power produced for the first time in history.

Fusion process for an inertial confinement reactor. Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

The general mechanism for the generation of electricity for a topamak is the same as any fission or fossil fuel reactor; a reaction produces heat that boils water, creates steam, and drives a steam turbine, creating electricity. So yes, fusion reactors will still have those awesome steam towers.

But while steam towers are nice, they don't explain the full scope of the benefits of nuclear fusion power, especially when compared to fission. Deuterium is very common in the ocean, and tritium can be easily processed from lithium. Our current deuterium/lithium reserves would last us 60 million years, but if we used just deuterium (as we hope to in the future), our fuel reserves would last 150 billion years. To put things in perspective, that's almost 11 times the age of the universe. Even if we become an incredibly power-hungry civilization and last for five billion more years (until the sun dies), we will have hardly put a ding in these reserves. So for all practical purposes, fusion, particularly deuterium-deuterium fusion, is a renewable source of energy. Uranium, on the other hand, is rare and must be mined. Fusion reactors produce less radiation than conventional fission reactors, and while waste is produced, it decays on decadal timescales and is approximately as radioactive as coal ash after 100 years. Uranium and plutonium take thousands of years to degrade to safe levels. There's no danger of a runaway meltdown like there is in a fission reactor; fusion requires incredibly specific conditions to exist, and if these conditions are disrupted due to an external factor like a massive earthquake, the fusion will cease. And let's not forget about the prodigious amounts of power produced from fusion.

Is nuclear the fusion the answer for all of our energy problems? Yes and no. I believe that it is the "holy grail" of energy and something that we should aspire to, but with greenhouse gases accumulating as fast as they are, we need to invest in proven technologies that do not emit carbon dioxide. Many of the professors I have talked to at the University of Washington believe solar will be the leading energy source in a couple decades. One thing is for sure: we need to get off coal.

Charlie