There's still not much news yet out of Wake Island, other than that there aren't any oil spills (um, why would there be?) But Hurricane/Supertyphoon Ioke left a different kind of, er, wake than its destruction of Wake. This incredible storm churned lots of cooler water up from below the ocean surface, as you can see in the sea surface temperature anomaly picture above from Remote Sensing Systems.
A storm's capacity to mix up the oceans is, of course, proportional to its power. And Ioke had a hell of a lot of power at its height. Some scientists have even speculated that this type of cyclone-induced ocean mixing plays a significant role in heat transport by the oceans, and therefore, in regulating global climate.
I'm not a scientist, but for me, looking at Ioke's dramatic cold wake helps make that idea believable.
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Wake is an emergency refueling point - definitely for planes, possibly also for US Navy ships, though maybe not any more.
So there'll be fuel tanks at the airport and possibly the port. Having those breached would be bad.
Cool picture.
Chris, thanks for that great link to Remote Sensing Systems page. You and your readers should know that clicking onto any dot along the Ioke path will access the SST anomoly for that date and place. Fascinating. Since I daily download global SSTs, I can pull up earlier SSTs before the cyclone reached that lat and lon and compare the impact of Ioke stirring things up.