In March, sea surface temperatures off the east coast of North America were as much as 13.8C higher than the 1981-2011 average.
"It's not yet well established, why such a rapid change, and such a huge change is happening," said Karina Von Schuckmann, the lead author of the new study and an oceanographer at the research group Mercator Ocean International.
"We have doubled the heat in the climate system the last 15 years, I don't want to say this is climate change, or natural variability or a mixture of both, we don't know yet. But we do see this change."
One factor that could be influencing the level of heat going into the oceans is, interestingly, a reduction in pollution from shipping.
In 2020, the International Maritime Organisation put in place a regulation to reduce the sulphur content of fuel burned by ships.
This has had a rapid impact, reducing the amount of aerosol particles released into the atmosphere.
But aerosols that dirty the air also help reflect heat back into space - removing them may have caused more heat to enter the waters.
I wish schools would teach math in hexadecimal and floating point numbers, rather than the cryptic base 10 math they commonly use that requires hours of painful learning non-sensible multiplication tables.
Hexadecimal math is so easy. You really have to memorize how to convert 16 hexadecimal digits into binary, then all binary math is super simple – every answer is just 0 or 1, carrying your digit to the next digit if necessary.
But then again, I am a proponent of adapting the KODAK calendar and Celsius, which are far simpler and more rational ways of tracking time and temperature.
The MIT group’s process involves taking a flexible silicone skin, shaped like the part it will eventually create, and filling it with a liquid resin. “You can think of them as balloons,” says Martin Nisser, an engineer at MIT, and another of the researchers behind the project. “Instead of injecting them with air, inject them with resin.” Both the skin and the resin are commercially available, off-the-shelf products.
The resin is sensitive to ultraviolet light. When the balloons experience an ultraviolet flash, the light percolates through the skin and washes over the resin. It cures and stiffens, hardening into a solid structure. Once it’s cured, astronauts can cut away the skin and reveal the part inside.
All of this happens inside the box that launched on November 23 and is scheduled to spend 45 days aboard the ISS. If everything is successful, the ISS will ship some experimental parts back to Earth for the MIT researchers to test. The MIT researchers have to ensure that the parts they’ve made are structurally sound. After that, more tests. “The second step would be, probably, to repeat the experiment inside the International Space Station,” says Ekblaw, “and maybe to try slightly more complicated shapes, or a tuning of a resin formulation.” After that, they’d want to try making parts outside, in the vacuum of space itself.?
To state the obvious: This has been an unorthodox Atlantic hurricane season.
Everyone from the US agency devoted to studying weather, oceans, and the atmosphere—the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration—to the most highly regarded hurricane professionals predicted a season with above-normal to well above-normal activity.
For example, NOAA’s outlook for the 2022 Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to November 30, predicted a 65 percent chance of an above-normal season, a 25 percent chance of a near-normal season, and a 10 percent chance of a below-normal season. The primary factor behind these predictions was an expectation that La Ni?a would persist in the Pacific Ocean, leading to atmospheric conditions in the tropical Atlantic more favorable to storm formation and intensification. La Ni?a has persisted, but the storms still have not come in bunches.