1. sheril
  2. Ioke's Cold Wake, Part II

Ioke's Cold Wake, Part II

By cmooney on September 5, 2006.

The other day I showed you a pretty impressive image, from Remote Sensing Systems, of the cold wake left behind after Hurricane/Supertyphoon Ioke passed. The original image, dated Sept 1, is posted below:

i-2f836615800093aa0de35e6e1363876a-IOKEAnomalySept1.png

Pretty cool, no? But now look at this image, dated Sept 4:

i-70c840cbc19eef1ac9a7cc1c372b3a29-ioke_sst_anom_2006.png

Note how the cold wake has expanded dramatically--and how this has happened long after the storm has passed. Amazing, no?

I spoke with a scientist today who cited this phenomenon as proof that the cold wake left behind by a hurricane is caused by turbulent ocean mixing--drawing cooler water up from the depths--and not simply because the storm is sucking heat out of the upper layers of the ocean and pumping it into the atmosphere. If the latter were the explanation, you wouldn't expect the cold wake to become more pronounced well after the storm has passed.....

Tags
hurricanes

More like this

In Ioke's Wake
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…
Hurricane Dean's Cold Wake
It's always amazing to watch what a Category 4 or 5 hurricane does to the ocean it passes over. So lets go over to Remote Sensing Systems and look at the Caribbean before and after Dean passed. Here are the SST anomalies before Dean went through, on August 17th. Red means warm anomaly, blue means…
21 Cat 4-5 Storms for 2006?
Cyclone Monica on April 24, 2006, possibly the strongest recorded hurricane in the Southern Hemisphere. So: According to Jeff Masters, there were 21 Category 4 or 5 hurricanes globally in 2006. Zero of them were in the Atlantic, which makes the total number sound even more staggering. I actually…
Introducing Tropical Storm Barbara; New Research on Hurricane-Climate Feedbacks
Well, we've got a second named storm in the Northeast Pacific. As NHC forecaster James Franklin notes, this is an unusual (although not un-heard of) occurrence: THE DEPRESSION IS UPGRADED TO A 35 KT TROPICAL STORM. ONLY TWICE BEFORE...IN 1956 AND 1984...HAVE THERE BEEN TWO EASTERN NORTH PACIFIC…