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The “red zone,” because of its great warmth and extraordinary rate of evaporation, is where the bulk of our world’s precipitation comes from. I’m pretty sure that the gross amount of evaporation grows exponentially with each added degree of warmth. Thus the darker shaded areas where temperatures are rising above 30C depict genuine floods of vapor origination, all of which have to go somewhere, and the only way for them to go is up. The surface air in those places is comparably warm, and since warm air likes to rise, with the aid of local wind currents, moving high up into the atmosphere (just like flying a kite) is no problem at all. That activity would certainly suggest the presence of low air pressure, and as a matter of interest this next map shows a close correspondence between the very warmest of surface water temperatures and the very lowest of air pressures that exist across all of the tropical oceans. In fact it’s hard to find anything other than some shade of blue over any of the tropical waters.
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Now I have one more map to show, and here is where things get really curious. Once all that water vapor rises high into the atmosphere, continuing in a non-stop sort of way, it can’t just sit there for long. It has to get out of the way of the oncoming stream, and there are only two real options. One is to get compressed and thereby condense right on the spot, form into clouds which can readily build up into massive thunderheads, and proceed to fall back into the ocean as rain. The other is to get swept up quickly and without ever stopping by a high altitude wind current, thence being positioned as a rider in a stream that heads off in a whole new direction. Those winds differ from the ones near the surface because they only move in a generally easterly way, along with either of a diagonal north or south bias toward the nearest pole. When that happens, as you can discover by observing numerous places on this map, the skies above the oceanic region of origin might well remain perfectly clear, sometimes for days on end. Condensation of the vapor may not even begin until the stream has traveled for perhaps hundreds or thousands of miles, often far over a continent, and in some cases only after riding on what is left of the airborne stream all the way to one of the polar regions. Those clear blue skies are real, and their key role in the workings of the entire climate system is one worth keeping in mind.
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The map that best shows the journey toward the poles is the one labeled Precipitable Water, which is loaded with things that have extraordinary interest and need more detailed explanation, not to mention the broader implications involving air temperatures everywhere. I will save that part for another day.
Carl