Here's a satellite image of the Caribbean from early Friday morning:



Gustav's still moving northwest through the Caribbean, and set to enter the Gulf of Mexico by about midnight tonight, or early tomorrow morning. As you may have heard, everyone's getting ready for the worst-case scenario. Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal has already declared a state of emergency, and President Bush gave him a similar federal declaration. I'll be watching this one pretty closely over the next few days.

Another phenomenon that's manifesting itself over the coming days and weeks is the melting of the Arctic sea ice pack. As Al Gore noted in his speech the other night, the worst case scenario for melting of this sea ice has the Arctic ocean ice free sometime late in the term of the next president (but that's a worst case scenario). Certainly, the trend over time is towards less and less of the Arctic frozen. I follow the fluctuation of sea ice area on the website The Cryosphere Today (University of Illinois), which provides satellite data, graphs, maps, and animations of the areal extent of polar sea ice. Here, for example, is a graph showing the area of the Arctic Ocean covered by sea ice over the past year:



Last year, of course, it hit a record low, and there's still a few weeks to go before it starts freezing up again (mid-to-late September is the time of the minimum). Open Mind did an excellent post examining the trend here, although the pattern is also observable on this long-term graph from Cryosphere Today. Here's another one, from the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado, that gives a half-century of context to the graph above:

In case DC-area folks didn't hear about it, there's also been some recent flooding in the southwest. (Geoblogospheroids will be well aware of it already, thanks to excellent coverage from Lee Allison at Arizona Geology.) I swam in that canyon this summer, just above the confluence with the Colorado River, and so this caught my attention more than an equivalent story would have about flooding someplace I hadn't been.

In addition to these larger-scale phenomena, there's a more local kind of weather I'm watching too: it's actually started raining in DC, for the first time since I got back on August 1! (A perplexed Achenblog on this odd situation). Time to bust out the umbrella.

Labels: hurricanes, ice, news, rain, snow