International Date Line Research Articles

Changes in the spatial structure of strong and moderate El Niño events under global warming

In this study, we examine how the spatial structures of strong and moderate El Niño events have changed due to global warming using the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) coupled general circulation models (CGCMs) based on a historical run and a Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP)4.5 run. The centre of the maximum anomalous sea surface temperature (SST) in the moderate El Niño has shifted significantly westward from the historical run to the RCP4.5 run; however, this is not seen with the strong El Niño events. Further analysis indicates that the centre of the maximum anomalous SST in the moderate El Niño with a negative Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) phase shifted westward around the international dateline from the historical run to the RCP4.5 run. This is in contrast to the moderate El Niño, which shows a positive PDO phase. We also briefly discuss a possible mechanism on the change in the spatial structure of moderate El Niño with a negative phase of PDO from the historical run to the RCP4.5 run.

Surface pathway of radioactive plume of TEPCO Fukushima NPP1 released <sup>134</sup>Cs and <sup>137</sup>Cs

Abstract. 134Cs and 137Cs were released to the North Pacific Ocean by two major likely pathways, direct discharge from the Fukushima NPP1 accident site and atmospheric deposition off Honshu Islands of Japan, east and northeast of the site. High density observations of 134Cs and 137Cs in the surface water were carried out by 17 cruises of cargo ships and several research vessel cruises from March 2011 till March 2012. The main body of radioactive surface plume of which activity exceeded 10 Bq m−3 travelled along 40° N and reached the International Date Line on March 2012, one year after the accident. A distinct feature of the radioactive plume was that it stayed confined along 40° N when the plume reached the International Date Line. A zonal speed of the radioactive plume was estimated to be about 8 cm s−1 which was consistent with zonal speeds derived by Argo floats at the region.

Distribution of 137Cs and 134Cs in the North Pacific Ocean: impacts of the TEPCO Fukushima-Daiichi NPP accident

Impact of the TEPCO Fukushima-Daiichi NPP accident, FNPP1, to the North Pacific Ocean occurred through two pathways, namely direct release and atmospheric deposition to wide ocean surface. We collected more than 100 seawater samples in the North Pacific Ocean in April and May 2011 by seven commercial ships as VOS. Since the sample volume was 2 l each, we measured radiocaesium activity at Ogoya Underground Facility to obtain reliable activity. 137Cs was detected at all stations and 134Cs was detected at most of the stations in the North Pacific Ocean. The 137Cs activity ranged from around 1 to 1,000 Bq m−3 with activity ratios of 134Cs/137Cs close to 1 which is a signature of radiocaesium originated from the FNPP1 accident. At east of the International Date Line north of 40°N in the Pacific Ocean in April 2011, the 134Cs activity ranged from 2 to 12 Bq m−3.

Low-frequency variations of the Eastern Subtropical Front in the North Pacific in an eddy-resolving ocean general circulation model: roles of central mode water in the formation and maintenance

Temporal variations (1960–2005) of the Eastern Subtropical Front (ESTF) in the North Pacific are investigated using historical-run output data of the eddy-resolving Meteorological Research Institute Community Ocean Model, forced by atmospheric reanalysis dataset. Simulated ESTF is distributed in a region of zonal band of 24°N–30°N east of the International Date Line, and is located at the southern boundary of the central mode water (CMW) north of the front. The ESTF intensity clearly shows an interdecadal variation with a timescale of about 20 years. This variation is associated with that in the potential vorticity of CMW, which originates in the CMW formation region farther north about 3 years earlier due to changes in the surface wind forcing.

Eastward Journeys: Literary Crossings of the International Date Line

The fantasy of turning back the clock by journeying eastward across what we today call the International Date Line appears in the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, Rudyard Kipling, and James Joyce, all of whom create characters who make, or contemplate making, such time-defying journeys. Uneasily yoking together the past and the present in the same physical space, the date line served as a flashpoint for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates over whether time was productively rooted in local and regional values and experiences or was universally abstract and placeless. Drawn along a part of the globe that the West regarded as distant, exotic, and racially and culturally inferior, the date line is conveniently ignored in the works of these authors, who transplant what might otherwise be universal anxieties of modernity onto an exotic locale outside the regular view or interest of empire and global commerce. This essay explores how authors have used the fantasy of the eastward journey across the date line to manage the temporal deviancy bound up with the date line’s paradoxical character by domesticating it, projecting it onto vilified spaces and populations, or reclaiming it as an intrinsic rather than extrinsic element of modernity.

International Dateline -- Books Read by Apprentices

International Dateline -- Books Read by Apprentices

Wavelet analysis of the convectively-coupled equatorial waves

The spatial and temporal distribution characteristics of the main convectively-coupled equatorial waves were analyzed with the OLR data provided by NOAA and the method of wavelet analysis. The results indicate that the wavelet analysis can effectively distinguish MJO, Kelvin, ER, TD, and EMRG wave and the characteristics of their activities in 1992. The propagation speeds of MJO and ER wave are the slowest, following by Kelvin and TD wave and with MRG the fastest. The MJO from the Indian Ocean to the West Pacific Ocean, the Kelvin wave near the International Date Line, the ER and the TD wave around the West Pacific Ocean and the MRG in the eastern of the International Date Line have the biggest wave amplitude. The MJO in boreal winter and spring, the Kelvin wave in boreal spring and summer, the ER wave in boreal autumn, and the TD wave in boreal summer are active. The WMRG wave activates in boreal autumn, whereas EMRG wave appears year-round. These spatial and temporal characteristics agree well with the results of relevant theoretical studies, indicating that the wavelet analysis in the time-frequency domain is another effective method to reveal the evolution of convectively-coupled equatorial waves.

Land’s End

Land’s End

Shore Protection against Sea Level Rise and Tropical Cyclones in Small Island States

AbstractThe abrupt phase shift of the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) resulted in several cyclones during 2004–2005 in the Southeast Pacific and east of the International Date Line. During a four-week period in February 2005, cyclones Meena, Nancy, Olaf, and Percy struck the Cook Islands. Because these cyclones were stronger than Cyclone Sally in 1987, which is reputed to have caused the most damage to Rarotonga in the past, the government was well prepared for the storm and its effects. Evacuation shelters were set-up throughout the island and no injuries or casualties were reported. In contrast, the storm surge and high waves of Sally devastated houses, shops, and the airport on the seafront in north Rarotonga. Since Sally, the government of the Cook Islands has worked together with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) to specifically protect the shoreline from storm surge; the outcome of their work provides scientific information regarding vulnerability to future hypothetical cyclone e...

Boundary Layer and Cloud Structure Controls on Tropical Low Cloud Cover Using A-Train Satellite Data and ECMWF Analyses

Abstract The Cloud–Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observations (CALIPSO), CloudSat radar, and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) cloud data on the A-Train constellation complemented with the European Centre for Medium-Range Forecasts (ECMWF) analyses are used to investigate the cloud and boundary layer structure across a 10° wide cross section starting at 5°S near the international date line and extending to 35°N near the California coast from March 2008 to February 2009. The mean large-scale inversion height and low-level cloud tops, which correspond very closely to each other, are very shallow (∼500 m) over cold SSTs and high static stability near California and deepen southwestward (to a maximum of ∼1.5–2.0 km) along the cross section as SSTs rise. Deep convection near the ITCZ occurs at a surface temperature close to 298 K. While the boundary layer relative humidity (RH) is nearly constant where a boundary layer is well defined, it drops sharply near cloud top in stratocumulus regions, corresponding with strong thermal inversions and water vapor decrease, such that the maximum (−∂RH/∂z) marks the boundary layer cloud top very well. The magnitude correlates well with low cloud frequency during March–May (MAM), June–August (JJA), and September–November (SON) (r 2 = 0.85, 0.88, and 0.86, respectively). Also, CALIPSO and MODIS isolated low cloud frequency generally agree quite well, but CloudSat senses only slightly more than one-third of the low clouds as observed by the other sensors, as many clouds are shallower than 1 km and thus cannot be discerned with CloudSat due to contamination from the strong signal from surface clutter. Mean tropospheric ω between 300 and 700 hPa is examined from the ECMWF Year of Tropical Convection (YOTC) analysis dataset, and during JJA and SON, strong rising motion in the middle troposphere is confined to a range of 2-m surface temperatures between 297 and 300 K, consistent with previous studies that show a narrow range of SSTs over which deep ascent occurs. During December–February (DJF), large-scale ascending motion extends to colder SSTs and high boundary layer stability. A slightly different boundary layer stability metric is derived, the difference of moist static energy (MSE) at the middle point of the inversion (or at 700 hPa if no inversion exists) and the surface, referred to as ΔMSE. The utility of ΔMSE is its prediction of isolated uniform low cloud frequency, with very high r 2 values of 0.93 and 0.88, respectively, for the MODIS and joint lidar plus radar product during JJA but significantly lower values during DJF (0.46 and 0.40), with much scatter. To quantify the importance of free tropospheric dynamics in modulating the ΔMSE–low cloud relationships, the frequency as a function of ΔMSE of rising motion profiles (ω < −0.05 Pa s−1) is added to the observed low cloud frequency for a maximum hypothetical low cloud frequency. Doing this greatly reduces the interseasonal differences and holds promise for using ΔMSE for parameterization schemes and examining low cloud feedbacks.

International Dateline -- Books for All: from Blyton's Secret Seven to Wittgenstein's Investigations

International Dateline -- Books for All: from Blyton's Secret Seven to Wittgenstein's Investigations

When You Least Expect It

My brother Jeff's voice on the cell phone said, Julie, it's Mom. It was one of those calls you never want to receive. Some people think that being a physician insulates us from the impact of such a call, but when it involves your own family, the emotional shock still runs very deep. My mother had end-stage Alzheimer disease. She had been in a nursing home for four years and virtually noncommunicative for the past three. She and my father had had several conversations over the years about how they wished to live the final days of their lives, usually sparked by the death of one of their parents or an event in the news. She was a vibrant, intelligent woman who never would have wanted to end up in a state of severe dementia, completely dependent upon others, being spoon-fed, unable to wear her Isaac Mizrahi fashions because they were impractical nursing home attire--clothes too fashionable to be stained by the drippings of mashed food that might not successfully stay in her mouth. She was unable to read any of the books that were constantly piled on her night table, nor any of the multiple Chicago newspapers she had once read every day. She would never have wanted to be in a situation where she could not interact meaningfully with her family. My son was born last year, and she did not know he existed. In her current state, and based upon her clearly expressed wishes, my father had the physician sign a do-not-resuscitate order. When I received the call from Jeff about our mom, I was on vacation with my family. We had just arrived at the swimming pool. My husband could tell from my face that I needed some time on the phone, so he splashed with the kids while I spoke with my brother. Ironically, my father was also on vacation, taking the trip of a lifetime, hiking in New Zealand. He was the primary decision-maker for my mother, living near the nursing home and visiting her regularly. He paid attention to every detail to ensure that she received the best care. Jeff, who also lived near our mom, was watching over her in my father's absence. He told me that over the past few days she had developed a fever. The staff nurse at the facility had asked Jeff over the phone if she should send Mom to the hospital for evaluation, but this clinical pattern had occurred many times before without incident and without necessitating a hospital visit. He expected a routine, self-limited illness like anyone might experience. When he walked into her room that morning to visit, he found her skin warm with a low-grade fever. She appeared to be asleep in the bed made with sheets from home, neatly tucked, beneath selected pictures of our family and her earlier travels. Jeff saw that the staff were now giving her oxygen through a tube in her nose. had asked again when he arrived if she should be sent to the hospital, but they gave him no indication that this illness was any more serious than her previous ones. By the time I received Jeff's phone call, he had been home from his visit for a few hours. He told me that he had just received another call from the center, and that Mom had deteriorated. Her fever was higher, and her breathing increasingly labored. The staff were not able to wake her. Again, they asked for authorization to send her to the hospital. Jeff wanted my help with this decision. Our father was twenty-one hours away over the International Date Line on his hiking tour, and my brother's copy of his itinerary showed that he was not scheduled to reach a hotel where we could contact him for another two days. They said her oxygen level is 65 percent, Jeff told me. I gasped. Jeff is an attorney, a very smart man, with a general working knowledge of many medical issues, but from his tone I could tell that he did not understand the life-threatening implications of this number. Was her breathing really failing so rapidly? Was she in shock? I told my brother that if that number was true, then her death would come very soon. …

An Extratropical Air–Sea Interaction over the North Pacific in Association with a Preceding El Niño Episode in Early Summer

Abstract Using data for the month of June from 1951 through 2000, this study examined the air–sea interactions over the North Pacific after El Niño matured during the preceding fall season. The principal findings of this work are the following: 1) a coherent region near the international date line (IDL) in the extratropical North Pacific revealed an area of significant negative correlations (SNCs) between the preceding November sea surface temperature (SST) in the Niño-3 region and the June SST in the North Pacific. Also, two indexes of the June Okhotsk high show a significant positive correlation with the November SST in the Niño-3 region during the 1963–2000 period. 2) The strong southeastward wave flux from the upstream area of the Okhotsk Sea over much of the North Pacific in the midlatitudes is associated with a strong preceding El Niño event, the development of the Okhotsk high, and a negative 500-hPa geopotential height/SST anomaly around the coherent region. The stationary wave propagation plays a major part in maintaining the low SSTs in the coherent region and suppressing the northward progress of the subtropical high. This process partially bridges the connection between the central equatorial Pacific warming (CEPW) and the East Asian summer monsoon. 3) A wave train–like anomaly in the SST (tilted northwest–southeast) was established and maintained in the North Pacific during the summer of 1998. This coincided with the direction of the atmospheric Rossby wave propagation as the strong southeastward wave flux was scattered over the midlatitude North Pacific. This event provides solid evidence that Rossby wave propagation plays an important role in forming an oceanic temperature wave train in the extratropical Pacific through the barotropic process.

Ode to John Berryman, and: Ode to Archibald MacLeish, and: Ode to Wallace Stevens

Ode to John Berryman, and: Ode to Archibald MacLeish, and: Ode to Wallace Stevens Marcia Southwick (bio) Ode to John Berryman Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so— —John Berryman If life is so boring, why would anyone care that Reggie Jackson, in 1977, hit three home runs to win the World Series for the Yankees? Or why would people get excited about spaceships landing on the moon? Life isn’t boring, friends, if you’re a researcher just about to get a grip on tropical storm & fire disaster patterns, or if you’ve gathered statistics for ten years on the mating habits of aquatic insects & are about to publish the results. Life is only boring, friends, if you sit around expecting ball lightning to pass through your living room. [End Page 169] Your body relaxes, causing your hypothalamus to stimulate your pituitary gland into secreting so many hormones that your sense of well-being turns into torpor & sloth. You sit on the couch all day. I should know. What if, like me, you don’t notice a mouse scaling the draperies & by the time you see it, it has already gnawed a hole in the ceiling while clinging to an electrical wire? Would that excite you? To be bored, friends, is to get your paw stuck to a glue board, your eyes staring up, beady & joyless. A mouse has no aspirations as it chews the upholstery, or eats its way through a cereal box, whereas we, friends, have every opportunity not to rip open sacks of flour or shred books, & to search for meaning. Also, once you’re dead & you can’t say words, such as wheel, oyster, sister, Water Department, etc., life is boring & you can’t even say so. Ode to Archibald MacLeish A poem shouldn’t mean, but be . . . —Archibald MacLeish Be what? A thought that deserts us to follow a silverfish slipping beneath a pile of linen or a cockroach as it figures out a maze? (It must stay in the light so as not to receive an electric shock if it heads into the dark.) A thought doesn’t mean much, but it can do what spiders do. By a method called ballooning, spiders can float on a silken dragline of their own [End Page 170] spinning. Like dragonflies, thoughts can hover. Dragonflies flap two pairs of wings at once, timing the stroke of the hind pair to meet the oncoming air before the front pair have been disturbed. Thoughts, like earthworms, can consume 40 times their own weight & can leave compressed castings behind them as they go— for us, the castings take the form of poems. I agree with you. A poem should be & its thoughts have meaning because at the bottom of them are things as ancient as the fossils proving that whales once had legs, lost them, & rolled back into the sea. Ode to Wallace Stevens for Landt Dennis The world is ugly, and the people are sad— —Wallace Stevens A drainage worker from Coco Beach has just climbed through spider-filled pipes, strapped a 435-pound manatee to a stretcher & delivered it in stable condition to Sea World. Is this ugly or sad? There’s sadness & ugliness of course. McDonald’s is extending north into the Arctic circle & straddling the international date line, spreading all the way to New Zealand and Western Samoa. A shopkeeper in Lincoln, Montana, sells Home of the Unabombert-shirts because Ted Kaczynski had ridden his bicycle daily down Main Street. The Dahoney Eye & Tissue Bank of Los Angeles has harvested corneas from the dead without permission from families. [End Page 171] And two twelve-year-olds, Johnny & Luther, have led the Army of God through the jungles of Thailand. They seized the Burmese embassy & convinced their followers that they were backed by an invisible army of 200. That’s sad. And yet some people find beauty in things like the flared rim of a Riedel whiskey glass, which fully disperses the complex bouquet of a rare 1951 single malt. Others are happy excavating cockroach fossils, dating back 30 million years, in the coal mines of Rhode Island. You found happiness writing poetry...

International Dateline -- American University in Cairo (AUC), New Campus, New Library

International Dateline -- American University in Cairo (AUC), New Campus, New Library

One Time Fits All: The Campaigns for Global Uniformity (review)

Reviewed by: One Time Fits All: The Campaigns for Global Uniformity Alexis McCrossen (bio) One Time Fits All: The Campaigns for Global Uniformity. By Ian R. Bartky. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007. Pp. xxv+292. $49.95. To start with a personal aside: In the mid-1970s, when National Bureau of Standards employee Ian Bartky was preparing a report for the U.S. Congress about whether year-round daylight saving time would save energy, it happens that I was often poolside at the only hotel in the kingdom of Tonga; it was called the International Dateline Hotel. Retiring from the NBS in 1992 after thirty-one years of service, Bartky turned to publishing about nineteenth-century timekeeping. His first book, Selling the True Time: Nineteenth-Century Timekeeping in America (2000), explained how astronomical observatories developed commercial time services. His second he finished shortly before his death in 2007. It is titled One Time Fits All: The Campaign for Global Uniformity, and it clarifies the shared historical roots of daylight saving, the international date line, and world time zones. It makes a solid contribution to the history of timekeeping in North America and western Europe through detailed accounting of conventions, meetings, hearings, and agreements resulting in Greenwich as the prime meridian, an international dateline, twenty-four world time zones, and daylight saving. One Time Fits All stands in contrast to the work of social and cultural historians, like myself, about the lived experience of new (and old) temporal regimes. The International Dateline Hotel, in my view, is an important artifact in the lived experience of modern time. We need to know about both origins and experiences, and it is thanks to Bartky that we now know [End Page 252] about the origins of contemporary timekeeping conventions that extend throughout much of the world. The book opens with an elegant overview of how the loss of a day while sailing from west to east troubled navigators, sailors, and, chroniclers; not knowing the correct day or date threw off religious rhythms and observances, particularly Sunday observance, while also interfering with accurate account keeping. The informal establishment of the international date line, a “conventional line” where oceangoing travelers change the day so as to create a continuous and uniform sense of time and history, solved this discomfiting calendrical confusion. Chapters 2 through 9 follow scientists imbued with various measures of nationalism, pragmatism, and utopianism as they sought to hammer out an agreement about where to initiate the numbering of the earth’s longitudinal division. The highlight of the story comes in 1912 when, soon before sinking, the crew of the Titanic received a warning from a French steamship about a colossal iceberg: the wireless telegram used the Greenwich meridian to indicate the time, but the Paris Observatory meridian for its longitude. After the disaster, the previously recalcitrant French government decreed that all French nautical documents would use the English prime meridian. And thus it was not conventions of scientists engaged in reasonable debate and exchange that brought the world around to using a single prime meridian, but a senseless disaster that Bartky tells us had nothing to do with the warning’s use of two different meridians. What of the world’s time zones? In 1925, England, France, and the United States officially agreed to divide the world into twenty-four time zones that corresponded to longitude, which Bartky assures readers “undoubtedly provided the impetus for other countries to adopt zone time as their legal time on land” (p. 157). But not all countries did adopt zone time, a point Bartky passes over. The Anglophone tendency to divide territory into arbitrary spatial and temporal units is clear: the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia all have multiple time zones. Russia’s whopping eleven time zones are also of note, as is Brazil’s recent decision to cut back to three time zones from four. In contrast, China and India each have a single national time. The global history of time zones is waiting for investigation, as are contemporary computer networks, the internet, and radio and wireless technology, all of which subscribe to the fiction (or convention) of worldwide uniform time. The tale...

WorldWideWalks: mapping the 'mixed realities' of physical and virtual space-time

New media 'walk projects' raise critical questions about their 'walkabout' – the acquisition of knowledge through kinesthetic experience and the very different 'flyabout' – an experience, which allows human beings to fly in virtual space. Walking and flying characterise key aspects of actuality and reality. Insofar as the sense of reality begins with the body and its perceptual apparatus, the apparatus that interfaces with the body can both limit and expand the cognitive parameters of that passage. Outside the apparatus, arbitrary borders can shape meaning. For example, when crossing the International Dateline on a jet the traveller ruptures the calendar. Focusing on a series of walk art projects, this paper investigates how the parameters both inside and outside the apparatus shape the viewer?participant's identity.

International Dateline -- PEER: A European Project to Gather Evidence on the Effects of Widespread Open Access Publishing

International Dateline -- PEER: A European Project to Gather Evidence on the Effects of Widespread Open Access Publishing

From Disgust to Desire: Changing Attitudes toward Beringian Mushrooms

From Disgust to Desire: Changing Attitudes toward Beringian Mushrooms. Separated by national borders and the International Dateline, the native communities inhabiting the Bering Strait regions of Russia and Alaska share a common natural environment, myriad cultural similarities, and long-standing social ties. Their subsistence diets also are similar, except that wild mushrooms are revered on the Russian side of the Bering Strait (Chukotka) and are feared and avoided in Alaska. This paper explores the origins of this dietary difference and probes the social dimensions of food and cuisine with respect to the culinary utilization of wild mushrooms.

2008 Remington Lecture: Honor bound to lead: Don't be satisfied with the status quo when there are so many possibilities ahead.

Ladies and gentlemen, honored guests. It is wonderful to be here. Looking out and seeing so many cherished family members, dear friends, and long-time colleagues, some of whom have traveled far distances—even across the international dateline or the equator— just to share this moment, fills my heart to bursting. I will hold the memories of this evening in my heart forever.