Water Deeply: Is it still out there?īond: Yeah. So that’s a huge volume of considerably warmer-than-normal water. The warmer-than-normal water extends down to something like 300m (1,000ft) below the surface. It’s waxed and waned, but it’s been that way since early 2014. But there have been places where it’s been as much as 9F ( 5C) warmer. Typically, it’s been something like 2.7– 3.6F ( 1.5– 2C) warmer than normal. It’s been at least 1,000 miles (1,600km) across and, recently, quite deep. At other times, it’s kinda shrunk back down. It doesn’t have any real sharply defined boundaries, but it’s an area that, at times, has stretched from Baja California up to the Bering Sea. Nicholas Bond: It’s a large mass of water in the northeast Pacific Ocean that’s considerably warmer than usual.
Water Deeply: What exactly is the Blob? Washington’s state climatologist Nicholas Bond named the warm ocean mass now commonly known as “the Blob.” (Nicholas Bond) In June 2014, Bond named this persistent weather phenomenon, and later wrote the first scientific paper characterizing it. With the Blob back in play again, what does it mean for the winter ahead? To find out, Water Deeply spoke with Nicholas Bond, a research meteorologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and Washington’s state climatologist. But it is to blame for seriously disrupting the ocean food chain and for creating conditions that fed unprecedented algal blooms in the coastal Pacific. The Blob isn’t exactly to blame for California’s drought, though it certainly aggravated the problem. But no: The Blob came back, and it is again in position off the coast, threatening to smother normal coastal weather and ecosystem behavior. Since 2014, a mass of unusually warm water has hovered and swelled in the Pacific Ocean off the West Coast of North America, playing havoc with marine wildlife, water quality and the regional weather.Įarlier this year, weather and oceanography experts thought it was waning.
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