[Coral-List] Sea Surface Temperature, bleaching, hurricanes and African dust
Gene Shinn
eshinn at marine.usf.edu
Thu Sep 21 18:22:27 EDT 2006
Those of you concerned about Atlantic/Caribbean sea surface
temperature, coral bleaching, and hurricane formation may find the
article by Kim Kavin in the October, 2006, issue of Power and Motor
Yacht p. 99, of some interest. The first few paragraphs of the
article are transcribed below. The remainder of the article, not
reproduced, is mainly about boat chartering.
(There was so much dust in the air in St. Thomas this summer that
Pamela Wilson could taste it. "You can hear it in my voice," she said
in early July. "I can't breathe."
For a lot of people, this would be an uncomfortable
inconvenience, but for Wilson, the implications were huge. As the
general manager of the charter firm Flagship in the U. S. Virgin
Islands, Wilson has the duty of scheduling charter vacations and
keeping the company's fleet of boats out of harm's way -and she
believed the dust had a lot to do with the impending hurricane season.
"When we have a lot of Sahara dust, we don't tend to get a lot
of storms," she explains. "When the sandstorms start in Africa and
move off the coast, that's when they become tropical lows. That's
what makes the depressions. If we get a lot of dust early in the
year, it seems to keep the number of storms down."
Scientifically speaking, the dust keeps sunlight from
penetrating the water, which keeps the water temperature cooler -
less than ideal for gathering storms. When Wilson was describing the
dust in the air, she also noted that the water temperature in St.
Thomas was lower than that in Florida and the Bahamas, where she, was
guessing the bulk of the late 2006 hurricanes would hit. She wasn't
alone. A growing number of insurance providers, yacht captains, and
charter brokers all believed the same thing-which is why an unusual
number of boats decided to stay in the Caribbean and offer charters
through October instead of cruising north to Florida, south to
Trinidad, or across to the Mediterranean to avoid traditional storm
routes.)
Coral-list readers will realize this magazine article is not
peer-review science and only describes what people in the Virgin
Islands have experienced each summer for the past 30+ years. However,
be advised that a NASA/NOAA project is underway in the Cape Verdi
islands off the west coat of Africa that is investigating the
meteorological relations between African dust and hurricane
formation. The project, to my knowledge, is not investigating the
viable microbes, insects, heavy metals, pesticides, short-lived
isotopes and nutrients in the hundreds of millions of tons of African
dust that cross the Atlantic each year. I expect we will be seeing
press releases and articles about results of this study in the near
future. Lets hope we do not experience the late season storms in the
Caribbean/Florida coral reef areas that have been predicted. Gene
>
--
No Rocks, No Water, No Ecosystem (EAS)
------------------------------------ -----------------------------------
E. A. Shinn, Courtesy Professor
University of South Florida
Marine Science Center (room 204)
140 Seventh Avenue South
St. Petersburg, FL 33701
<eshinn at marine.usf.edu>
Tel 727 553-1158----------------------------------
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