Break out the 5'10" step-up!
SURF:
Had some fun surf this week. Nothing big, but you could find waves if you did some hunting around the county.
FORECAST:
After the NW rolls through this weekend, it drops slightly on Monday.
WEATHER:
Nice weather will be on hiatus the next few days as a potent early season storm rumbles throught the Pacific NW this weekend. The Oregon coast actually had hurricane force winds of 99 mph last night. We'll just get the tail end down here with breezy W winds and maybe a chance of light showers Sunday night. For tomorrow, look for the clouds to stick around most of the day as the winds hit gusts of 20 mph. Look for more of the same Sunday while things start to clear out Monday. By Tuesday, high pressure sets up and we've got amazing weather the 2nd half of next week and offshore winds in the mornings.
BEST BET:
If we're lucky, W winds will hold off just long enough early tomorrow morning to get some semi-clean surf. If not, the solid swell this weekend will be blown out. Next chance is Tuesday with new NW and cleaner conditions.
NEWS OF THE WEEK:
If you enjoy surfing, you’ll like the news below. Remember back in elementary school, teachers taught us that the sun won’t last forever and will start to expand slowly in a few hundred million years and the seas will evaporate and the earth will fry. That news scarred me for life (my therapist now has a starting point for my behavior). Good news though: French scientists have found our imminent doom will be pushed back a few hundred million years and the end of the world is now about a billion years away. So have fun surfing this weekend- you got plenty of time. Here’s what the scientists had to say:
The natural increase in solar luminosity (i.e. the suns energy output)-a very slow process unrelated to current climate warming-will cause the Earth's temperatures to rise over the next few hundred million years. This will result in the complete evaporation of the oceans. Devised by French scientists from the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique, their model was able to simulate that liquid water will disappear on Earth in approximately one billion years, extending previous estimates by several hundred million years. The work not only improves our understanding of the evolution of our planet but also makes it possible to determine the necessary conditions for the presence of liquid water on other Earth-like planets.
Like most stars, the Sun's luminosity very slowly increases during the course of its existence. It is therefore expected that, due to higher solar radiation, the Earth's climate will become warmer over geological timescales (of the order of hundreds of millions of years), independently of human-induced climate warming, which takes place over decades. This is because the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere rises as the oceans become warmer (the water evaporates faster). However, water vapor is a greenhouse gas that contributes to the warming of the Earth's surface. Scientists therefore predict that runaway climate warming will occur on Earth, causing the oceans to boil and liquid water to disappear from the surface. Another consequence is that the greenhouse effect will enter a runaway state and become unstable, making it impossible to maintain a mild mean temperature of 59 °F on Earth. This phenomenon may explain why Venus, which is a little nearer to the Sun than the Earth, turned into a furnace in the distant past. It also sheds light on the climate of exoplanets.
When might this runaway state occur on Earth? Until now, this was difficult to estimate as the phenomenon had only been investigated using highly simplified astrophysical (one-dimensional) models, which considered the Earth to be uniform and failed to take into account key factors such as the seasons or clouds. Yet the climate models used to predict the climate over the coming decades are not suited to such high temperatures. According to some of these one-dimensional models, the Earth would start to lose all its water to space and turn into a new Venus within a mere 150 million years.
The French scientists now designed a three-dimensional model able to predict how the terrestrial environment would change under the effect of a significant increase in solar flux causing evaporation of liquid water into the atmosphere. According to this sophisticated model, the tipping point should occur when mean solar flux reaches approximately 375 W/m2 (present-day flux is 341 W/m2), with a surface temperature of around 158 °F (about 20 degrees hotter than Death Valley in the summer- so we can all go hide out there if needed) in approximately one billion years. The oceans will then start to boil and the greenhouse effect will increase until it enters a runaway state. This result pushes back earlier predictions for the complete evaporation of the oceans by several hundred million years.
This difference is due to atmospheric circulation: while transporting heat from the equator to the mid-latitudes, it dries these warm regions and reduces the greenhouse effect in the areas where it is most likely to enter a runaway state. Increased solar flux appears to intensify this atmospheric circulation, drying sub-tropical regions even more and stabilizing the climate for several hundred million years before it reaches the point of no return. In addition, this work shows that the parasol effect of clouds, in other words their ability to reflect solar radiation-which helps to cool the present-day climate-tends to decrease over millions of years compared to their greenhouse effect. The parasol effect is therefore likely to contribute to climate warming and destabilization.
These findings can also be used to determine the extent of the habitable zone around the Sun. They show that a planet can be as close as 0.95 astronomical units to a star similar to our Sun (i.e. 5% less than the distance from the Earth to the Sun) before losing all its liquid water. In addition, they demonstrate yet again that a planet does not need to be exactly like the Earth to have oceans. The researchers are now planning to apply this model to extrasolar planets in order to determine which environments could help them retain liquid water.
PIC OF THE WEEK:
There's been a lot of debate in the surf world if Nazare in Portugal is really a big wave spot or not. The knock against it is that the wave doesn't break top to bottom but is rather a slow roller, lessening the danger. My two cents: If I grabbed board, ran down to the beach, and saw this thing in the line-up, my vote would be YES it's a big wave spot. (I would then run back to my car and cry like a baby).
Keep Surfing,
Michael W. Glenn
Larger Than Life
Broke The Charger's Curse
I'm Doing Maneuvers They Haven't Even Named Yet
