"Snowy winters across Europe and Asia will be followed by summers
during which the amount of fish food in the Arabian Sea will
skyrocket."

In 2004 NASA funded Goés and his colleagues, at Bigelow Laboratory for
Ocean Sciences, Maine, to map nitrate concentrations in the world's
oceans. It seemed their technique didn't work for the Arabian Sea.
Nitrate levels during July-August were too high.

Goés analyzed the satellite chlorophyll observations back to 1997 and
realized that there was a 350 percent increase in chlorophyll
concentration in the Arabian Sea in 7 years!

Nutrients eventually become scarce and growth subsides until a fresh
source of nutrients arrives. Winds explained the increased upwelling
and cool sea surface temperatures for the period:

In Southwest Asia, in the summer, -June to August, the winds blow from
the ocean toward the land, bringing heavy rains and the surface waters
are pushed toward Asia.

In the winter, winds blow from land to sea. The seasonal reversal has
dramatic effects on the Arabian Sea because the north is landlocked.

Cold water wells up along the coast of Somalia and the Arabian
Peninsula to replace waters pushed ashore. Reconstructed maps of
surface winds over the Arabian Sea confirmed such winds during the
southwest phase of the monsoon.

If phytoplankton increased between 1997-2004 because upwelling had
increased... and if upwelling had increased because monsoon winds had
picked up... why had the winds picked up?

The Southwest Asian Monsoon is a facet of the larger Asian Monsoon and
the cause of the Asian monsoon is that the Eurasian landmass and the
Indian Ocean warm and cool at different rates through the seasons.

In summer, the land surface gets hotter than the ocean and moist air
from over the ocean flows in to replace rising air.

In winter, the air over land gets colder than the air over the ocean.
Warmer air over the ocean rises, and cold air from the north blows in
to replace it.

The monsoon is driven by land/ocean temperature differences. Anything
increasing that difference could strengthen the monsoon. John Fasullo
published a paper supporting a link between the strength of the Asian
monsoon and the amount of snow cover in Europe and Asia.

In 1884 by H.F. Blandford proposed that before the monsoon, the snow
must melt; the less snow cover over the Himalayas, the sooner the
warming in the spring and the warmer it would get over the summer. But
the theory wasn't supported by modern satellite data.

Scientists couldn't find evidence of the relationship -or when they
did, their methods were quite questionable.

"In 2004, my colleagues and I published the results of an analysis of
snow cover in Eurasia since 1967. El Niño-La Niña cycles had the
biggest influence but Eurasian snow cover played a major role in the
monsoon intensity in non-El Niño/ La Niña years."

That established a relationship between snow cover in Eurasia and the
entire Asian monsoon from around 1970 to the present. There is a clear
decline in snow cover in Eurasia since 1997.

Goés and his team traced their way backward from what they thought was
a mistake to a surprising discovery of how complex Earth's land
surface, oceans, atmosphere and living creatures are. The intricacy is
amazing.

Increased phytoplankton helps fisheries. But decomposition uses up
oxygen. Huge increases in phytoplankton could be catastrophic. (Oman
have reported massive fish deaths in the area, in many cases preceded
by mass strandings following major blooms.)

Bacteria in oxygen-poor waters produce nitrous oxide; its heat-trapping
potential is about 300 times greater than carbon dioxide.

[What is its potential for the destruction of other greenhouse gasses?
Isn't it a powerful oxidant? M.M.]

The decline in Eurasian snow cover since 1997 may be strengthening
Southwest Monsoon rainfall along the western coast of India. This could
mean more intense rain and more frequent floods in Southwest Asia.

Furthermo
"Many people in Asia depend on snow melt for water. If glaciers
continue to melt, many high-altitude lakes could start overflowing,"
That can destabilize mountain slopes and trigger landslides. Drought
could prevail in those regions.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Stu...n/printall.php