La Niña

As we prepare for the winter months, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has released its forecast for the 2024-2025 winter season, and it looks like Arizona might be in for a significant change. According to meteorologists, the state is likely to experience a warmer and drier winter than usual due to the influence of a developing La Niña weather pattern.

Understanding La Niña

La Niña is a climate phenomenon that occurs in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. Typically, trade winds push warm surface waters toward Asia, but when these winds are stronger than normal, they lead to cooler ocean waters in the Eastern Pacific. This shift in ocean temperatures can have widespread effects on weather patterns across the United States.

In Arizona, La Niña usually correlates with above-normal temperatures and below-normal precipitation. This year, however, NOAA indicates that the La Niña phenomenon may be on the weaker side. While moderate to strong La Niña events are more likely to cause significant dry spells, the current weak La Niña means that the impacts may not be as pronounced.

Is Drier Always Drier?

It’s important to note that not every La Niña leads to a dry winter. According to the National Weather Service, there remains a 10% to 30% chance of experiencing wetter than normal conditions this winter. This uncertainty highlights the complexity of weather patterns and the need for ongoing monitoring and analysis.

Factors Influencing the Forecast

The official winter outlook takes into account various factors beyond La Niña, including the latest climate models and the broader context of climate change. These elements play a crucial role in shaping the weather we can expect in the coming months.

As we move closer to winter, it will be essential for residents and visitors in Arizona to stay informed about potential weather changes and be prepared for a season that might not follow the traditional patterns.

Preparing for the Winter

For those living in Arizona, it might be worth considering how a warmer, drier winter could affect your plans, from water conservation efforts to outdoor activities. Staying updated with NOAA and local weather forecasts will be crucial as we approach the winter months.

As winter approaches, it’s clear that La Niña will play a key role in shaping the weather across Arizona. While there is still some uncertainty regarding precipitation levels, one thing is for sure: it’s going to be an interesting season ahead.

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Resources

• NOAA
• National Weather Service
• Climate Prediction Center
• 12 News Phoenix: https://www.12news.com/article/weather/noaa-expects-slowly-developing-la-nina-what-that-means-for-arizonas-winter/75-d82132c5-124f-4a94-92b7-b1aae5f43b0d

Stay warm and stay informed this winter!

The science section of our news blog STM Daily News provides readers with captivating and up-to-date information on the latest scientific discoveries, breakthroughs, and innovations across various fields. We offer engaging and accessible content, ensuring that readers with different levels of scientific knowledge can stay informed. Whether it’s exploring advancements in medicine, astronomy, technology, or environmental sciences, our science section strives to shed light on the intriguing world of scientific exploration and its profound impact on our daily lives. From thought-provoking articles to informative interviews with experts in the field, STM Daily News Science offers a harmonious blend of factual reporting, analysis, and exploration, making it a go-to source for science enthusiasts and curious minds alike. https://stmdailynews.com/category/science/

STM Daily News is a vibrant news blog dedicated to sharing the brighter side of human experiences. Emphasizing positive, uplifting stories, the site focuses on delivering inspiring, informative, and well-researched content. With a commitment to accurate, fair, and responsible journalism, STM Daily News aims to foster a community of readers passionate about positive change and engaged in meaningful conversations. Join the movement and explore stories that celebrate the positive impacts shaping our world.

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Newswise — Blame it on plate tectonics. The deep ocean is never preserved, but instead is lost to time as the seafloor is subducted. Geologists are mostly left with shallower rocks from closer to the shoreline to inform their studies of Earth history.

Signals from the Sea

“We have only a good record of the deep ocean for the last ~180 million years,” said David Fike, the Glassberg/Greensfelder Distinguished University Professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. “Everything else is just shallow-water deposits. So it’s really important to understand the bias that might be present when we look at shallow-water deposits.”

One of the ways that scientists like Fike use deposits from the seafloor is to reconstruct timelines of past ecological and environmental change. Researchers are keenly interested in how and when oxygen began to build up in the oceans and atmosphere, making Earth more hospitable to life as we know it.

For decades they have relied on pyrite, the iron-sulfide mineral known as “fool’s gold,” as a sensitive recorder of conditions in the marine environment where it is formed. By measuring the bulk isotopic composition of sulfur in pyrite samples — the relative abundance of sulfur atoms with slightly different mass — scientists have tried to better understand ancient microbial activity and interpret global chemical cycles.

But the outlook for pyrite is not so shiny anymore. In a pair of companion papers published Nov. 24 in the journal Science, Fike and his collaborators show that variations in pyrite sulfur isotopes may not represent the global processes that have made them such popular targets of analysis.

Instead, Fike’s research demonstrates that pyritte responds predominantly to local processes that should not be taken as representative of the whole ocean. A new microanalysis approach developed at Washington University helped the researchers to separate out signals in pyrite that reveal the relative influence of microbes and that of local climate.

For the first study, Fike worked with Roger Bryant, who completed his graduate studies at Washington University, to examine the grain-level distribution of pyrite sulfur isotope compositions in a sample of recent glacial-interglacial sediments. They developed and used a cutting-edge analytical technique with the secondary-ion mass spectrometer (SIMS) in Fike’s laboratory.

“We analyzed every individual pyrite crystal that we could find and got isotopic values for each one,” Fike said. By considering the distribution of results from individual grains, rather than the average (or bulk) results, the scientists showed that it is possible to tease apart the role of the physical properties of the depositional environment, like the sedimentation rate and the porosity of the sediments, from the microbial activity in the seabed.

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“We found that even when bulk pyrite sulfur isotopes changed a lot between glacials and interglacials, the minima of our single grain pyrite distributions remained broadly constant,” Bryant said. “This told us that microbial activity did not drive the changes in bulk pyrite sulfur isotopes and refuted one of our major hypotheses.”

“Using this framework, we’re able to go in and look at the separate roles of microbes and sediments in driving the signals,” Fike said. “That to me represents a huge step forward in being able to interpret what is recorded in these signals.”

In the second paper, led by Itay Halevy of the Weizmann Institute of Science and co-authored by Fike and Bryant, the scientists developed and explored a computer model of marine sediments, complete with mathematical representations of the microorganisms that degrade organic matter and turn sulfate into sulfide and the processes that trap that sulfide in pyrite.

“We found that variations in the isotopic composition of pyrite are mostly a function of the depositional environment in which the pyrite formed,” Halevy said. The new model shows that a range of parameters of the sedimentary environment affect the balance between sulfate and sulfide consumption and resupply, and that this balance is the major determinant of the sulfur isotope composition of pyrite.

“The rate of sediment deposition on the seafloor, the proportion of organic matter in that sediment, the proportion of reactive iron particles, the density of packing of the sediment as it settles to the seafloor — all of these properties affect the isotopic composition of pyrite in ways that we can now understand,” he said.

Importantly, none of these properties of the sedimentary environment are strongly linked to the global sulfur cycle, to the oxidation state of the global ocean, or essentially any other property that researchers have traditionally used pyrite sulfur isotopes to reconstruct, the scientists said.

“The really exciting aspect of this new work is that it gives us a predictive model for how we think other pyrite records should behave,” Fike said. “For example, if we can interpret other records — and better understand that they are driven by things like local changes in sedimentation, rather than global parameters about ocean oxygen state or microbial activity — then we can try to use this data to refine our understanding of sea level change in the past.”

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Source: Washington University in St. Louis

The science section of our news blog STM Daily News provides readers with captivating and up-to-date information on the latest scientific discoveries, breakthroughs, and innovations across various fields. We offer engaging and accessible content, ensuring that readers with different levels of scientific knowledge can stay informed. Whether it’s exploring advancements in medicine, astronomy, technology, or environmental sciences, our science section strives to shed light on the intriguing world of scientific exploration and its profound impact on our daily lives. From thought-provoking articles to informative interviews with experts in the field, STM Daily News Science offers a harmonious blend of factual reporting, analysis, and exploration, making it a go-to source for science enthusiasts and curious minds alike. https://stmdailynews.com/category/science/

Chantal Nguyen, University of Colorado Boulder

Most of us aren’t spending our days watching our houseplants grow. We see their signs of life only occasionally – a new leaf unfurled, a stem leaning toward the window.

But in the summer of 1863, Charles Darwin lay ill in bed, with nothing to do but watch his plants so closely that he could detect their small movements to and fro. The tendrils from his cucumber plants swept in circles until they encountered a stick, which they proceeded to twine around.

“I am getting very much amused by my tendrils,” he wrote.

This amusement blossomed into a decadeslong fascination with the little-noticed world of plant movements. He compiled his detailed observations and experiments in a 1880 book called “The Power of Movement in Plants.”

In one study, he traced the motion of a carnation leaf every few hours over the course of three days, revealing an irregular looping, jagged path. The swoops of cucumber tendrils and the zags of carnation leaves are examples of inherent, ubiquitous plant movements called circumnutations – from the Latin circum, meaning circle, and nutare, meaning to nod.

Circumnutations vary in size, regularity and timescale across plant species. But their exact function remains unclear.

I’m a physicist interested in understanding collective behavior in living systems. Like Darwin, I’m captivated by circumnutations, since they may underlie more complex phenomena in groups of plants.

Sunflower patterns

A 2017 study revealed a fascinating observation that got my colleagues and me wondering about the role circumnutations could play in plant growth patterns. In this study, researchers found that sunflowers grown in a dense row naturally formed a near-perfect zigzag pattern, with each plant leaning away from the row in alternating directions.

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This pattern allowed the plants to avoid shade from their neighbors and maximize their exposure to sunlight. These sunflowers flourished.

Researchers then planted some plants at the same density but constrained them so that they could grow only upright without leaning. These constrained plants produced less oil than the plants that could lean and get the maximum amount of sun.

While farmers can’t grow their sunflowers quite this close together due to the potential for disease spread, in the future they may be able to use these patterns to come up with new planting strategies.

Self-organization and randomness

This spontaneous pattern formation is a neat example of self-organization in nature. Self-organization refers to when initially disordered systems, such as a jungle of plants or a swarm of bees, achieve order without anything controlling them. Order emerges from the interactions between individual members of the system and their interactions with the environment.

Somewhat counterintuitively, noise – also called randomness – facilitates self-organization. Consider a colony of ants.

Ants secrete pheromones behind them as they crawl toward a food source. Other ants find this food source by following the pheromone trails, and they further reinforce the trail they took by secreting their own pheromones in turn. Over time, the ants converge on the best path to the food, and a single trail prevails.

But if a shorter path were to become possible, the ants would not necessarily find this path just by following the existing trail.

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If a few ants were to randomly deviate from the trail, though, they might stumble onto the shorter path and create a new trail. So this randomness injects a spontaneous change into the ants’ system that allows them to explore alternative scenarios.

Eventually, more ants would follow the new trail, and soon the shorter path would prevail. This randomness helps the ants adapt to changes in the environment, as a few ants spontaneously seek out more direct ways to their food source.

In biology, self-organized systems can be found at a range of scales, from the patterns of proteins inside cells to the socially complex colonies of honeybees that collectively build nests and forage for nectar.

Randomness in sunflower self-organization

So, could random, irregular circumnutations underpin the sunflowers’ self-organization?

My colleagues and I set out to explore this question by following the growth of young sunflowers we planted in the lab. Using cameras that imaged the plants every five minutes, we tracked the movement of the plants to see their circumnutatory paths.

We saw some loops and spirals, and lots of jagged movements. These ultimately appeared largely random, much like Darwin’s carnation. But when we placed the plants together in rows, they began to move away from one another, forming the same zigzag configurations that we’d seen in the previous study.

We analyzed the plants’ circumnutations and found that at any given time, the direction of the plant’s motion appeared completely independent of how it was moving about half an hour earlier. If you measured a plant’s motion once every 30 minutes, it would appear to be moving in a completely random way.

We also measured how much the plant’s leaves grew over the course of two weeks. By putting all of these results together, we sketched a picture of how a plant moved and grew on its own. This information allowed us to computationally model a sunflower and simulate how it behaves over the course of its growth.

A sunflower model

We modeled each plant simply as a circular crown on a stem, with the crown expanding according to the growth rate we measured experimentally. The simulated plant moved in a completely random way, taking a “step” every half hour.

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We created the model sunflowers with circumnutations of lower or higher intensity by tweaking the step sizes. At one end of the spectrum, sunflowers were much more likely to take tiny steps than big ones, leading to slow, minimal movement on average. At the other end were sunflowers that are equally as likely to take large steps as small steps, resulting in highly irregular movement. The real sunflowers we observed in our experiment were somewhere in the middle.

Plants require light to grow and have evolved the ability to detect shade and alter the direction of their growth in response.

We wanted our model sunflowers to do the same thing. So, we made it so that two plants that get too close to each other’s shade begin to lean away in opposite directions.

Finally, we wanted to see whether we could replicate the zigzag pattern we’d observed with the real sunflowers in our model.

First, we set the model sunflowers to make small circumnutations. Their shade avoidance responses pushed them away from each other, but that wasn’t enough to produce the zigzag – the model plants stayed stuck in a line. In physics, we would call this a “frustrated” system.

Then, we set the plants to make large circumnutations. The plants started moving in random patterns that often brought the plants closer together rather than farther apart. Again, no zigzag pattern like we’d seen in the field.

But when we set the model plants to make moderately large movements, similar to our experimental measurements, the plants could self-organize into a zigzag pattern that gave each sunflower optimal exposure to light.

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So, we showed that these random, irregular movements helped the plants explore their surroundings to find desirable arrangements that benefited their growth.

Plants are much more dynamic than people give them credit for. By taking the time to follow them, scientists and farmers can unlock their secrets and use plants’ movement to their advantage.

Chantal Nguyen, Postdoctoral Associate at the BioFrontiers Institute, University of Colorado Boulder

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

STM Daily News is a vibrant news blog dedicated to sharing the brighter side of human experiences. Emphasizing positive, uplifting stories, the site focuses on delivering inspiring, informative, and well-researched content. With a commitment to accurate, fair, and responsible journalism, STM Daily News aims to foster a community of readers passionate about positive change and engaged in meaningful conversations. Join the movement and explore stories that celebrate the positive impacts shaping our world.

https://stmdailynews.com/category/stories-this-moment

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