Every day, when I am ready to study the weather maps, the first thing I want to know is where the day’s highest temperatures are found, and who lives there. Inevitably I will see areas of some size that are quite well-populated and the people are suffering for at least a few hours from temperatures of 110-115F and higher. This is the link for direct access (a good one to bookmark) and it also lines up all the other map links needed for further study: https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/DailySummary/#t2max. The first step is to scroll down to the full global picture and look for places shaded in light gray to white. This is what you would see today:
The hot zones are both obvious and large, with dense populations in some. At the same time, in this same picture, there is something else that might catch your eye, and that is the giant chunk of red in the middle of central Asia. It doesn’t seem to belong there and might thus be worth investigating, so let’s do it. It only takes a click on the anomaly map link, then clicking over to one that looks lite this:
What shows up is rather amazing—an unbroken string of warm anomalies, almost as high as 20C in the center, running all the way from the top of the Indian Ocean to the North Pole. That seems unusual—so what’s going on? We’ll check out the Precipitable Water link, where clues are often found, and will not be disappointed. A lot of water is passing over the same areas where the anomalies are found, although not quite free of mystery, as will later be discussed.
The feature in focus is the heavy stream of PWAT that is headed toward the pole but oddly seems unattached to any body of water at its lower end, which is a physical impossibility that requires an explanation. But first, we do see an abundance of water in the remainder of the stream, enough to account for all the anomalies that are observed, even in places at the far end where the water content has thinned out so much. In the really far north, such as around the pole, only one kg of PWAT, when added to the usual amount in the air at this time of year, will be enough to cause a big jump in temperature. By contrast, as latitudes decrease, more and more concentration will be needed to get a similar jump. This particular show is giving us a good demonstration of the rule. More specifically, the rule goes like this: Any time the total PWAT level in the atmosphere doubles, the air temperature at the surface below, absent any kind of offsetting feature, will increase by 10 degrees C, all because of the extra supply of greenhouse energy. That same principle of doubling effect, so clearly observed on maps like these with respect to precipitable water—and by implication water vapor—could very well be applicable to every one of the greenhouse gases, but science does not provide us with any such information apart from one exception, carbon dioxide. On that score, when CO2 is measured in complete isolation, it has been calculated and tested exhibiting the power to raise air temperatures by 1.0 to 1.1C whenever the ambient level is doubled. The higher numbers we are more accustomed to seeing are created by combining the greenhouse energy of CO2 with that which is thought to be attributable to water vapor, being scored as one of several feedbacks, as if it were evenly distributed across the planetary surface the same way CO2 is. (I’ll have more to say about that practice at another time.)
An explanation is still required for why the heaviest part of the PWAT stream in the above chart appears to be disconnected from any source of evaporating water. One cannot assume that something of this magnitude “just happened,” or is in some way arising from continental land sources. Instead, I believe we can safely assign its origin in largest part to the Arabian Sea, with a good bit of extra help soon merging in from the Bay of Bengal, plus a smaller participation from a tributary seen to be entering the stream from the west, about half way along. Vapors arising from both of the two largest sources must almost immediately confront wide spreads of very high mountains, as much as five miles high in the Bengal case, before leveling out and becoming concentrated into the tighter and more coherent stream that will thereafter proceed northward. I think it can be shown that any time there is a situation like this in a high mountain area of the globe the loss of coherence will cause a temporary loss of the signal, and that is a point always worth remembering.
Carl