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Storm Warning for Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Clean-Up
Specialists working to contain BP disaster dealt new blow by opening of Gulf of Mexico hurricane season
The thousands of oil and ocean specialists working to contain the Deepwater Horizon disaster have a new potential problem to contend with: the official opening yesterday of the Gulf of Mexico hurricane season.
The site of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Forecasters have warned that 2010 will be a busy hurricane season. (Photograph: Jae C. Hong/AP) In keeping with the unfolding nature of
the crisis, where bad news has been compounded by yet more bad news,
2010 promises to be a busy hurricane season.
In the past few years the storms have been limited as a result of the giant weather pattern known as El Niño, but that is now subsiding.
Weather forecasters at Colorado State University predict an unusually high number of named storms – thunderstorms with a clear circular motion and wind speeds of at least 40mph. They expect 15 named storms, eight of which could be hurricane strength (at least 74mph).
Oceanographers are now looking at the likely impact of storms on the Gulf clean-up operation. For a start, the current efforts to contain and extract oil from the sea's surface are likely to be disrupted.
The more than 500 boats working around the stricken oil well would have to turn back to shore, and the hard containment booms protecting more than 100 miles of beaches and marshlands would be overcome by waves whipped up by strong winds.
More worryingly, storms could drive the oil far inland. Mark Bourassa, a specialist in oceans and weather at Florida State University, estimates that a hurricane or tropical storm could push oil up to 12 miles upriver – and deep into the grassy marshes that cover much of the Gulf shoreline and act as breeding grounds for fish and birds.
"The Gulf marshlands are particularly vulnerable and that could do great ecological damage," Bourassa said.
Hurricanes move in an anticlockwise direction in the Gulf, and those that strike to the west of the Deepwater Horizon well are likely to drive the oil onshore, while those that strike to the east are more likely to push it back out to sea. Florida will be particularly vulnerable to storms sweeping the pollution in its direction.
The high winds and big waves could also vastly extend the surface area over which the slick extends, making the clean-up all the more difficult.
32 Comments so far
Show AllDeja-Vu? Originally meant for a double post by the editors, but I think it applies to the article too.
As mentioned earlier, we are in uncharted territory.
Oil stops evaporation; the gulf heats up. Hurricane blow the oil off the hot ocean and release a load of steam. Might mean a final boost before landfall?
We know how bad a hurricane can be; add oil to the mess and you got one oily mess.
Mother Nature is going to spread BP's toxic shiploads of 'cover up' chemicals far and wide. I think BP will simply walk away from their catastrophy and let it destroy the Gulf and East Coast states.
did anybody see the gusher coming from the ocean floor
Friday night and Sat morning with nothing attached to it?
I know i saw it for several hours.
Actually, it made for "riveting" viewing on Sat around noon. I watched BP try to cut the riser at the top of the BOP when they dropped the saw into a tangle of piping below. Unbelievably, the robot operators managed to retrieve the saw and continued cutting. I was impressed.
Just my point, that is what they are
doing tonite, cutting the risor from the BOP.
They give no time frame on the video.
Friday night, after the junk shot top kill,
one of the ROVs either got away from them,
or they hauled it to the top, whatever the case,
we saw the camera come from the bottom to the top,
the whole way up until you could see it bobbing on the
top of the water, eventually you was it retrieved.
Then they gave us another camera shot from down below,
it was volcano of oil coming from the ocean floor,
nothing at all was attached to it, the volume was at least
five times that of the oil we have seen spewing out of the
end of the rizor. They showed this image for at least four hours.
I haven't seen it since. It was from the ocean floor.
I have concerns that Friday , the BOP blew off the well head
and they aren't telling us, I know what I saw.
This what they are doing tonite may be nothing but an animation.
I hope not, but I know the volcano that they showed Friday night.
I just wish the weather researchers would fight their impulse to achieve their "5-minutes-of-fame" in their rush to announce predictions of the forthcoming hurricane season. These twits are usually wrong (look at the last 20 years of their predictions versus reality), which of course provides meat for the climate-change denialists. These fame-seekers drive me nuts.
I'm not a weather forecaster, but I intuit that the oil on the Gulf waters will temper the coming hurricane season. Why? Temperature drives weather, but the "ferocity" of the weather is driven by moisture content. Intuitively, the oil will reduce evaporation from the Gulf, which will do much to mitigate the ferocity of a hurricane. But I could be very wrong!
Remember, you read it here first!
Hurricanes track across the warm waters in the Atlantic, across the Carribbean Sea; building up energy along the way...
Weather forecasters are a lot like politicians: they lie and lie, yet most people trust them, listen to them and love them.
Unlike politicians, weather forecasters have no motivation to lie. At their worst, they may not recognize some of the strengths and weaknesses of their models.
Joe
The oil is not as surface borne as it normally would be, due to the use of dispersants and the depth of the leak. If it is discontinuous on the surface, but in large concentration near the surface, evaporation can still occur, but the storm tide will carry large amounts of oil inland. This is the worst case scenario as I see it.
The oil sheen is building up sea surface heat now. The oil sheen will be gone by the heart of hurricane season, and then the royally hotter sea surface will put humidity out with a terrible vengeance. Unprecedented sea surface temperatures and no oil. That's the problem.
Tracking the Oil:
ESRI data - GIS overlay of stuff; eg; photos, tweets, news stories. Check boxes to left to see sensitive sites and shoreline. (overlays)
http://www.esri.com/services/
disaster-response/
gulf-oil-spill-2010/index.html
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
I got a changed or dead link message on this link.
Google:
esri gulf disaster
You don't even need quotes/ comes up at the top.
This is the same site but a cleaner design; I like better than the above.
http://mapapps.esri.com/disasters/
oil-spill/gulf-2010/index.html
Dang that Google is good!
Cornelius [reading from the sacred scrolls of the apes]: "Beware the beast Man, for he is the Devil's pawn. Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours. Shun him; drive him back into his jungle lair, for he is the harbinger of death." -- Planet of the Apes
BP's cannibal parasite psychopath CEO Tom Hayward said in a recent interview that there were "no underwater plumes" of oil in the Gulf; that all the oil was on the surface. One category 3 to category 5 hurricane rolling up in the wrong direction could paint the coast a mile or two inland with oil in some areas. Big hurricanes draw moisture and energy up from the sea. We'll be able to see it on satellite imagery from Earth orbit. Chinese civilization: We can see the Great Wall from space. Amurkan techno-barbarism: We may see an oil slick covering one or more State's entire coastlines from space. Somehow this all feels like Slim Pickens riding down the bomb to start WWIII in Dr. Strangelove.
The BP motto for the possibility of oil spill was a variation of IBG-YBG.
BP will go through the motions till this quiets down, then bribe Congress to stick the taxpayers. Then there will be bonuses all around.
They will pay chump change towards a absurdly low estimate of damage, and next to nothing towards lost income for fishermen and other laborers who lost jobs.
They will deny any illness brought on by spill or cleanup until way after the victims are dead.
I read earlier that this disaster is the US's karma for all of the oil companie's, coal coke and all other companies raping literally and unliteraly of SO many countries. The recent story of Niger here today finally made the light of day. Anyone read about what is going on in Brazil? What humans have done to this planet in the name of greed is unbearable for me. It is the poor and defenseless that suffer. But most of all it is the animals that break my heart. Humans have been at war for all yime. If there is a god maybe it has decided to throw in the towel. We never learn.
The sea surface temperature near the U.S. Gulf shore has shot up over the past 5 weeks from 2 degrees Celsius below seasonal average to 3 degrees Celsius above seasonal average. The oil sheen cutting evaporation is probably part of the cause. If true, the Gulf of Mexico sea surface temperatures threaten to get far worse in 60 more days.
The real hurricane story is in the data that NOAA scientists compiled:
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/tafb/atl_anom.gif
Not in the standard NOAA public relations feed ignoring any possible connection between BP and disasters.
Thank you, Paul. I've been worrying about this.
Here's another reference for anyone interested in monitoring SST. They post a new chart daily:
http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/data/sst/
If the spill cuts evaporation, won't that reduce the strength of the storms?
http://www.paulmurray.id.au
"If the spill cuts evaporation, won't that reduce the strength of the storms?"
Good question Paul,
I studied weather flying for a living most of my adult life. I'm going to say no, if the storm forms in the ITCZ like most of them do. Moisture/evaporation might happen way out before the thing gets to the slick. When it shows up in the Gulf, it will already be a self-sustaining strong Tropical Cyclone; it's going to suck the visible slick off the surface. Hurricanes are formed by Exceptional Low Pressure and ocean surface heat. In the Atlantic, believe it or not, Caribbean cyclonic cells are many times formed from the eddies off African Mountains. This gives them rotation (disturbance). The temperature of the ocean surface gives them fuel because hot air rises. It's not uncommon in the ITCZ for embedded thunderstorms to exceed 60,000 feet because these huge vacuum cleaners have such incredible upward vertical momentum. They keep going all night even without the sun shining to provide convective heat.
From wiki:
Factors
Waves in the trade winds in the Atlantic Ocean—areas of converging winds that move along the same track as the prevailing wind—create instabilities in the atmosphere that may lead to the formation of hurricanes.
The formation of tropical cyclones is the topic of extensive ongoing research and is still not fully understood.[37] While six factors appear to be generally necessary, tropical cyclones may occasionally form without meeting all of the following conditions. In most situations, water temperatures of at least 26.5 °C (79.7 °F) are needed down to a depth of at least 50 m (160 ft);[38] waters of this temperature cause the overlying atmosphere to be unstable enough to sustain convection and thunderstorms.[39] Another factor is rapid cooling with height, which allows the release of the heat of condensation that powers a tropical cyclone.[38] High humidity is needed, especially in the lower-to-mid troposphere; when there is a great deal of moisture in the atmosphere, conditions are more favorable for disturbances to develop.[38] Low amounts of wind shear are needed, as high shear is disruptive to the storm's circulation.[38] Tropical cyclones generally need to form more than 555 km (345 mi) or 5 degrees of latitude away from the equator, allowing the Coriolis effect to deflect winds blowing towards the low pressure center and creating a circulation.[38] Lastly, a formative tropical cyclone needs a pre-existing system of disturbed weather, although without a circulation no cyclonic development will take place.[38] Low-latitude and low-level westerly wind bursts associated with the Madden-Julian oscillation can create favorable conditions for tropical cyclogenesis by initiating tropical disturbances.[40]
[edit]Locations
Most tropical cyclones form in a worldwide band of thunderstorm activity called by several names: the Intertropical Front (ITF), the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), or the monsoon trough.[41][42][43] Another important source of atmospheric instability is found in tropical waves, which cause about 85% of intense tropical cyclones in the Atlantic ocean, and become most of the tropical cyclones in the Eastern Pacific basin.[44][45][46]
Tropical cyclones move westward when equatorward of the subtropical ridge, intensifying as they move. Most of these systems form between 10 and 30 degrees away of the equator, and 87% form no farther away than 20 degrees of latitude, north or south.[47][48] Because the Coriolis effect initiates and maintains tropical cyclone rotation, tropical cyclones rarely form or move within about 5 degrees of the equator, where the Coriolis effect is weakest.[47] However, it is possible for tropical cyclones to form within this boundary as Tropical Storm Vamei did in 2001 and Cyclone Agni in 2004.[49][50] UNQUOTE
I've been in a number of "phoons"/hurricanes. Almost cost me my life in boats and planes a few times. Billboards and roof shingles hitting you at over 100 mph now sounds like nothing compared to a crude oil bath of millions of gallons mixed with toxic solvent....
I just can't even imagine what a hell that's going to be. Our canal where my house was was a toxic nightmare just from sinking boats and tons of debris that wound up in the water. The smell and humidity made you want to wretch after the double-southern eyewall clobbered us (the worst part of the storm).
And the scary part is, worst case: They may never get this Pandora's Box sealed again, so it's possible we'll have dozens of annual "Crude Hurricanes" poisoning everyone in the area just like the Niger Delta in Africa. When we are silent about torture and pollution happening to others overseas, we don't realize that these monster companies will soon be doing their dirty deeds inside our country to us, since they are used to it, and their despotic power is absolute.
How's this big federal government working out for us? Is it protecting us? They were the ones who were bribed via campaign contributions to approve this deep drilling.
TJ
Calm water with an oil coating preventing evaporation should heat up.
As soon as wind exposes the warm water, wouldn't it be just like the oil wasn't there; and the gulf was a few degrees warmer to boot?
I think you're right, NWBill,
Cat Five Hurricanes are simply a matter of, primarily, sea temperature, and as long as terrain, (e.g. Islands) or shear doesn't interfere with the cycle, water over 90 degrees means they are going to keep growing. The worst hurricane season in history nailed me with seven of them, and my boat was reading water 90 degrees with hull sensors making it impossible to cool my engines at high power. Nobody had ever seen it that high.
If oil on the surface acts like a solar blanket did on the surface of my swimming pool..... (a layer of bubble wrap on the surface), then yes, it's going to prevent evaporation and heat dissipation, the net result being higher ocean temps.
Not Good, that's for sure.
TJ
(As a boater, I used to be very careful not to spill any petro into the environment. I used to put up with dirty bilges and hand wipe them out as to avoid pumping bilge cleaner into the water (like big ships do all the time.)
I really feel betrayed by Corporate America.
Spill!! I wish the media would stop referring to this disaster as a "spill" and call it what it really is. A spill is when something -a finite quantity- is dumped into the water. The Alaska Exon oil situation was a spill. This is an open well that is spewing oil continuously into the ocean.
Call it what it is!
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Huh?
Allen Ginsberg you're not. If you are trying to write poetry you are trying way too hard
This post makes as much sense as the lies BP has been feeding the world for the past 44 days.
It's a 'bot, fellow CDers. Pay no attention.
I'm not a bot.
Maybe I missed it. Wouldn't a hurricane not only blow the spill around, wouldn't it literally pick the oily water up and rain it down inland? That to me would be an even worse disaster, more so than just exposing more beachline.
The time has come for "We the people" to take the power that the corporate oligarchy has usurped from us, back. We can accomplish this by means of a peaceful revolution. We must refuse to aid and abet their greed. Greed is all they care about.The raping and pillaging of our economy and environment will continue unless we fight back. They cannot function if we refuse to cooperate in our own destruction.It starts by doing little things such as not increasing our personal debt by using credit cards,which by the way, are legalized extortion.Don't buy overpriced goods,leave them on the shelves.Don't buy produce from supermarkets if you can support local farmers by buying at farmer's markets and co-
ops. There are millions of us who can,if we choose, to stop the madness going on around us. It won't happen overnight,but this mess didn't happen overnight either."We the people" have been asleep,we've allowed this to happen.
Let us now start a groundswell of opposition to the oligarchy. It must be peaceful.We can bring any power to a halt if we all believe in each other. We must stop them separating us. United they cannot defeat us.