No Se Nada

Only three abstracts to bring out from last week's AGU email alerts, but one is a gem.

1- Infrasound events detected with the Southern California Seismic Network by E.S. Cochran and P.M. Shearer of Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Just a little boring-sounding paper, right? Yea, mostly, except they show how to detect military activity off the coast of southern California using seismic networks. They are processing seismic array data not for ground shaking but for infrasound acoustic energy propagating through the atmosphere in the 0.001-20 Hz range. They can't pinpoint an exact location of the energy sources picked up by the array, but can find a rough triangulation. Much of the energy they describe in this paper is regular/non-random, occurring between 8 am and noon local time, and sourcing in the general vicinity of Warning Area 291 off the San Diego coast. The paper seems to be an extension of some work trying to figure out what rocked windows in the San Diego area on April 4th.

Read that article and notice that the military says they weren't testing or blowing up anything in Whiskey 291 on April 4th. Now that Cochran and Shearer have shown regular sonic activity from WA-291, will the military keep to its story on "no activity" on April 4th? If they are telling the truth, then a big meteor came through that morning, big enough to rattle windows many, many miles away. If not, they are trying to keep quiet an unusually large explosion. Now why would they want to do that?

2- Southern Ocean warming due to human influence by John Fyfe of Environment Canada in beautiful Victoria BC. I don't usually post modeling papers but this looks good. The abstract:

I show that the latest series of climate models reproduce the observed mid-depth Southern Ocean warming since the 1950s if they include time-varying changes in anthropogenic greenhouse gases, sulphate aerosols and volcanic aerosols in the Earth's atmosphere. The remarkable agreement between observations and state-of-the art climate models suggests significant human influence on Southern Ocean temperatures. I also show that climate models that do not include volcanic aerosols produce mid-depth Southern Ocean warming that is nearly double that produced by climate models that do include volcanic aerosols. This implies that the full effect of human-induced warming of the Southern Ocean may yet to be realized.

3- Role of eastward propagating convection systems in the diurnal cycle and seasonal mean of summertime rainfall over the U.S. Great Plains by Jiang (Princeton) et al. Mostly for atm science and weather nerds, but the authors show that eastward-moving thunderstorms coming off the Rockies account for half to two-thirds of the rainfall received in summer on the Great Plains. Maybe not too surprising, but nailing that down is important for climate models because often thunderstorms or other convection cells are too small to be resolved in these models. This paper's results lead you to wonder whether climate GCMs are getting the precip picture right for the central Plains, or if they are getting the total precip right for the wrong reasons.