Climate Letter #1646

More about the Weather Maps, continued from yesterday, and as promised, the Precipitable Water map will be featured.  This map is at once the most loaded with information and the most difficult of all to interpret.  It is certainly the least attractive to look at, but once you get familiar with the content you should find it to be the most fascinating.  The role of precipitable water in meteorology is central, and media outlets like the Weather Channel do a great job of explanation.  It also has a distinctive role in climate science, which in my opinion is not well-explained, and beyond that, badly underestimated with respect to importance.  The reasons why I think that way can largely be seen just by studying information found in the Weather Maps, which I want to share with you. 
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Let me start by showing a typical map of global temperature anomalies for a single day, in this case today, which is much like any other day except that specific anomalies are never the same from one day to the next and keep jumping around all over the place in all sorts of shapes and sizes.  It is possible to predict how the anomalies will change for a few days out, but that’s about it—within a very short time the patterns everywhere are likely to have completely changed.  The only thing that is not likely to change much is the daily average global temperature change over a three-decade span since the 1979-2000 base period, today reading +0.6C, which generally fluctuates between extremes of +0.2 and +0.8.  (A decade from now, the way things are going, those extremes should both rise by about 0.2C.)
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Today’s map, like those every day, shows a number of regional anomalies, both hot and cold, ranging up to 10C and more.  Every so often you will see some as high as 20C—the same as 36F—and that’s really extreme.  The point I want to emphasize is that every anomaly you see, warm or cold, large or small, has its own explanation, and whenever it changes that too will need an explanation, one that can show a credible cause for the change.  I think that in every case around 99% of the cause will be found by studying the content of the precipitable water in the air above each individual anomaly.  One fraction of that content, if but not always present, and usually the smaller in terms of weight, is made of various bits of either liquid or icy water, while the larger part, always present in some varying degree, is just plain vapor.  Both fractions have their own independent effects on air temperature whenever they change, with vapor, through its prominent greenhouse effect, being responsible for the greatest amount of any net difference.  As I have previously stated in other letters, whenever the vapor content of the air doubles the effect enables an increase of about 8C (or possibly as much as 10C) in the air temperature on land surfaces below.  (Ocean surfaces increase much less because of the different way incoming energy is absorbed.)   And when vapor content falls in half, all numbers are reversed.  So let’s stop here and take a good look at a typical anomaly chart:       
 

The first thing to take note of in the PW map below is the extraordinary range of values, from less than one to more than 70.  (Each unit represents one kilogram of H2O per square meter of a vertical air column from the surface to the top of the atmosphere.)  When values show up at 50 or more you can almost be sure of the presence of heavy clouds and rainfall in the region, both of which have a cooling effect that may fully offset any warming influence from the vapor fraction.  Thus the greenhouse warming effect due to vapor by itself is largely confined to regions well outside of the tropical zone.  Indeed, as you can see from all the close-quarter activity in the atmosphere, in any region where values can be found that are less than 10 the possibility of doubling or quadrupling the PW value (or the reverse) within a short period of time is easily accomplished.  It happens every day, and that is exactly the reason why temperature anomaly swings of that magnitude happen all the time. 

The activity I spoke of all begins in places where spikes and bulges of PW are seen to emerge from the tropical zone of high evaporation and then proceed in a meandering sort of way toward one or the other pole, spreading out and also losing value as they do so.  Most of this is happening high in the atmosphere, at altitudes where jet stream winds are found and regularly play a role in shaping and finally ending each of these proceedings.  There is more to be said about all this, but maybe not today.

Carl

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