Not just a problem for the Gulf

Oil to reach the Atlantic

The same problems that are currently facing residents of the Gulf coast and points inland – ruined fisheries, closed beaches, toxic air and rain – will become problems for residents of the Atlantic coast later this summer.

Not only will this be a problem for the coast, but it will also effect any land that receives rainfall originating in the Atlantic ocean – a huge swath of the eastern United States.

This model comes from the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Here’s some information about them:

“The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) was designed by a small group of innovative scientists, most of them university faculty members, as a creative response to major challenge that faced the nation in the years between the 1930s and late 1950s.

Departments of Meteorology had been established at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, and other U.S. universities in the 1930s. Their goal was to investigate scientifically the physical principles that were thought to define the behavior of the atmosphere.

Within a decade, military operations of World War II were unlike those of any previous wars-massive land, sea, and air assaults were highly dependent on weather conditions over vast regions from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific and from the poles to the tropics…

In 1960, NCAR began operations in Boulder, Colorado, as a program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) managed by the nonprofit University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). At the time it funded the creation of NCAR, NSF itself had been in existence only ten years.

Today, NCAR provides the university research and teaching community with tools such as aircraft and radar to observe the atmosphere and with the technology and assistance to interpret and use these observations, including supercomputer access, computer models, and user support.

NCAR and university scientists work together on research topics in atmospheric chemistry, climate, cloud physics and storms, weather hazards to aviation, and interactions between the sun and earth. In all of these areas, scientists are looking closely at the role of humans in both creating climate change and responding to severe weather occurrences.”