Climate

An ongoing red tide is killing wildlife throughout Florida’s southwest coast and has left beaches littered with dead fish, sea turtles, manatees and a whale shark. Additional footage courtesy of Southwest Florida TV via Facebook.

bradenton.com - by Mark Young - August 24, 2018

The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission is reporting an outbreak of Trichodesmium, sometimes called a brown tide, in waters offshore of Manatee County.

It is a separate species but similar to the well documented Karenia brevis, a photosynthetic organism responsible for the persistent red tide hitting Manatee and other nearby counties along 130 miles of coastline. Concerns are now being raised that if the two blooms merge, it could essentially deepen an ongoing red tide.

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ALSO SEE RELATED ARTICLE HERE - WHAT IS A BROWN TIDE? SCIENTISTS FEAR FLORIDA RED TIDE COULD MERGE WITH NEW OUTBREAK TO CREATE SUPER BLOOM

Two weeks after a king tide flooded parts of Miami-Dade, Broward and Monroe counties, a heavy rain flooded this Miami neighborhood near Coral Way and Southwest 23rd Street on Oct. 6. Jenny Staletovich Miami Herald Staff

Florida has more to lose with sea rise than anywhere else in the U.S., new study says

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Union of Concerned Scientists - Underwater - Rising Seas, Chronic Floods, and the Implications for US Coastal Real Estate (28 page .PDF document)

miamiherald.com - by Alex Harris - June 18, 2018

Florida stands to lose more homes — and real estate value — to sea level rise damage than any other state in the nation this century, according to a new study.

By 2045, nearly 64,000 homes in Florida face flooding every other day. Half of those are in South Florida.

If you buy a house now, before your new mortgage is paid you might have to regularly do the rolled-up-pants, shoes-in-hand commute that has become an enduring image of sea rise.

Sea level rise contributions from ice melt in different areas, including Greenland (a), West Antarctica (b), East Antarctica (c) and median of global glaciers (d). Values are ratios of regional sea level change to global mean sea level change. Adapted from Kopp et al. 2015.

axios.com - by Andrew Freedman - June 14, 2018

News of Antarctica's accelerating ice melt garnered worldwide headlines yesterday, as scientists revealed that 3 trillion tons of ice has been lost to the sea since 1992 — mostly from the thawing West Antarctic Ice Sheet and Antarctic Peninsula.

Why it matters: The location of the ice melt is important for determining the future of coastal communities, according to climate scientists. And, due to West Antarctica melting, it turns out that the U.S. coastline will be hit extra hard . . .

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Hurricane Harvey over the Gulf of Mexico in August 2017. The storm stalled over Texas and dropped nearly 50 inches of rain in some places.  Credit NOAA/NASA GOES Project

CLICK HERE - STUDY - A global slowdown of tropical-cyclone translation speed

A new study shows that storms are staying in one place longer, much like Hurricane Harvey did last year.

nytimes.com - by Kendra Pierre-Louis - June 6, 2018

 . . . A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature focuses on what is known as translation speed, which measures how quickly a storm is moving over an area, say, from Miami to the Florida Panhandle. Between 1949 and 2016, tropical cyclone translation speeds declined 10 percent worldwide, the study says. The storms, in effect, are sticking around places for a longer period of time.

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