Climate Letter #1655

The web is very quiet today with respect to climate stories, making it a good day for studying the Weather Maps.  They never fail to have something of interest, not just about weather, but climate as well.  They even have things to say about mainstream climate science that scientists who don’t study them may easily overlook.  The most important of these has to do with the role of water vapor as a principal cause for large changes in air temperatures.  That role becomes vividly clear on a day-to-day basis, quite independently of other agents of change, so at the very least scientists should be fully open to ideas about how these effects might spill over into the future.  One problem is that their models could then be rendered practically helpless by all the complicated and nearly unlimited free-lancing that is exhibited at every level of vapor activity.  Today we will have some fun looking at maps of the Antarctic region, where everything tends to get exaggerated in ways that seem impossible by most standards.
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This first map gives you a picture of the pattern of high and low air pressure differences over the South polar region at altitudes between 5,000 and 6,000 meters, as extracted from this (always-temporal) link on April 13:  https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/DailySummary/#gph500  There is a somewhat similar pattern over the Arctic pole, but different in detail, and both of them make a variety of changes every day.  Air pressure in the upper atmosphere is interesting because it differs quite a bit from the pattern at the surface directly below, which means there is quite a bit of difference in the wind patterns and velocities that are generated.  More on that some other day, but for now just take note of the shape of the main central feature:
 
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Next, a map of Precipitable Water (Pwat) measurements over exactly the same area, same day.  Focusing on just the gray-toned area, you should have no trouble seeing how much the two maps have in common with respect to shape, in this case the shape of a pattern of considerable differences in the amount of water (as measured by weight in vertical columns) held in the air above a universal array of surface locations.  Weight changes range, for example, from 10 kg in the lightest brown ring to just 1 kg in the very dark core.  The core itself also holds changes which are not visible on the map, usually expressed in grams rather than kilograms, which at this season of the year probably drop to at least 250 gm and below—more on that later.
 
 

So why is there so much similarity in the shapes of the main features in these two maps?  Or, what is the connection between air pressure and precipitable water, the main component of which is just plain vapor in this part of the world?  There is really only one reasonable answer, and that is wind, specifically upper atmosphere winds, being those that follow courses established by air pressure patterns set up in the upper atmosphere rather than the winds that do their twisting and turning close to the surface where air pressure patterns are so different.  (Compare with maps of sea level pressure from elsewhere in the main website at your own convenience.) .

Now let’s take a look at what happened to surface air temperatures over Antarctica while the above actions were in place.  This map displays three regions of anomalous warming, two of which, the lower ones, are fairly large and show portions of warming that are close to 20C above normal.  With close examination you should be able to see from the map above that all three anomalies were consequences of the greenhouse effect created by overhead intrusions of relatively large amounts of water vapor—vapor that most likely originated from evaporation of tropical seas, was quickly lofted several miles upward, and then transported poleward by a combination of winds that happened to work things out quite successfully.  

How do you get an anomaly of 20 degrees C, when nothing changes except for the amount of overhead water vapor?  It’s easy in places where the Pwat measurement is normally around 1-2 kg, or even less, and is suddenly elevated to the 6-7 kg level we see in this instance, and if each and every double has the full potential (not always realized) of adding 10C to the air temperature of the surface directly below.  This is not often mentioned outside of these letters, but I think it is very real, and can be seen in one place or another every day on these incredible maps.  Today, by the way, the minimum actual temperature in the center of Antarctica is recorded on another map at about minus-50C.  I would wager that the corresponding water vapor was around 250 grams at the time.  I also can see a place where average land air temperatures varied from -30C to +5C over a distance of only about 100 miles, accompanied by three corresponding doubles in the Pwat measure as mapped, starting from a low at the 1 kg area border.

Carl

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