The bizarre phenomenon is responsible for extensive droughts in the West Coast and heavy snowstorms in the East Coast, a bold new study claims.
A big blob of warm water in the Pacific Ocean could be causing a spate of weird weather in the United States.
The West Coast’s crippling dry spell and the snowstorms that pounded the East Coast could be due to a long blob in the Pacific Ocean about 1,000 miles from the West Coast that stretched from Mexico all the way up to Alaska, according to a Christian Science Monitor report.
Scientists began to notice this giant circular mass of water as early as 2013 and into 2014. It was unusual in that it didn’t cool off as much as usual, and in spring 2014 it was actually as warm as it had ever been for that time of year, said Nick Bond, a climate scientists at the University of Washington and the co-author of the study examining the phenomenon.
This warm blob is about 2 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the typical temperature, which means that winter air that crosses the Pacific doesn’t cool down as much as usual, which results in dryer conditions for the West Coast.
Back in June 2014, Bond noticed that Washington state had gotten a pretty mild winter. He eventually noticed the blob, which is not only 1,000 miles long but also 300 feet deep. The blob has stuck around too, turning into more of a long, skinny sliver of water rather than a blob.
Bond’s study, which was published recently in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, asserts that the blob came about when a high-pressure ridge above the Pacific Ocean in the last two winters resulted in calmer seas, which prevented the transfer of heat to the cold air above and thus trapping it within this blob.
This has led to the drought conditions on the West Coast, and has further led to disrupting ocean ecosystems, as fish have been reported in different waters than usual because of the lack of nutrient-rich cold waters from deep in the ocean.
What about the East Coast winters? That can be blamed on the weird ocean temperatures as well, as a pattern of high surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific to the waters off coastal California sends cold, wet air to the Midwestern and East Coast states, while trapping hot dry air in the West.
