Re: [Phys-L] in the news: energy versus temperature

[John Denker <jsd@av8n.com>]

On 09/01/2017 03:32 AM, Folkerts, Timothy J wrote:

> This sounds like an interesting and plausible hypothesis.   But just 
> being interesting and plausible is not enough.  Do you have a 
> reference to share for data about change in temperature profile -- 
> particularly in the Gulf of Mexico?  Can you point to correlations 
> between persistence and temperature profiles?

Here is an accessible starting point:

> > Why do storms normally weaken—and why didn’t Harvey? As mentioned 
> > above, hurricanes feed and grow on warm ocean surface waters. But 
> > as they grow, their strong winds often pick up seawater, churning 
> > the oceans and moving the warmest waters deep below the surface. 
> > The same winds also bring newer, colder water closer to the 
> > atmosphere, which usually serves to drain energy and weaken the 
> > storm.
> >
> > That didn’t happen with Harvey. The hurricane churned up water 100 
> > or even 200 meters below the surface, said Trenberth, but this 
> > water was still warm—meaning that the storm could keep growing and
> >  strengthening. “

[...]

> > “The human contribution can be up to 30 percent or so of the total 
> > rainfall coming out of the storm,” he said. “It may have been a 
> > strong storm, and it may have caused a lot of problems anyway—but 
> > [human-caused climate change] amplifies the damage considerably.”

The above is quoted from:
  https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/did-climate-change-intensify-hurricane-harvey/538158/

----

If you want a more scholarly publication:

> Extreme Storms
> KEY FINDINGS
>
> Human activities have contributed substantially to observed
> ocean–atmosphere variability in the Atlantic Ocean (medium
> confidence), and these changes have contributed to the observed 
> upward trend in North Atlantic hurricane activity since the 1970s
> (medium confidence).

The above is quoted from the 1200-page
U.S. GLOBAL CHANGE RESEARCH PROGRAM CLIMATE SCIENCE SPECIAL REPORT
drafts of which have been leaking out, e.g.:
  http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/climate/2017/climate-report-final-draft-clean.pdf

---

See also the graph of ocean heat content (ibid).  It is more clear
and less noisy than some other indicators of climate change ... as
you would expect based on fundamental physics.  Energy should be
less noisy than temperature.

---

The importance of distinguishing energy from temperature should be
obvious, and in fact has been explicitly recognized for a long time;
here is a mention from 2005:

> > areas of the ocean where warm water pools extend deeper below the
> > surface than the seasonal surface warm water, and are then available
> > as ammunition for intensifying hurricanes passing overhead.

  https://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/katrina_seaheight.html

======================================

I could go on, but you get the idea.  There is a ton of this stuff.
It can be found using basic google.com and especially scholar.google.com.
Temperature-versus-depth data is expensive to obtain, but it does exist.