Today let’s focus on the Precipitable Water weather map, the one that looks exactly like a can of worms, or maybe a work by Jackson Pollack when he’s in a bad mood. There is an unbelievable amount of information on this map, comparable in some ways to the map of any large city or state, except that this one is only a short-term snapshot of things that are constantly evolving and changing. Every one of the thousands of features you see, down to the tiniest of them, represents part of something changing, while each and every of the larger ones must have its own story to tell. Where did it come from? What is causing the change? What, if anything, might it mean in terms of consequences? Here is a link to the mapsite, and right below is an image of the entire globe taken from the bottom half of the page as it appears today and would not generally differ much, except for details, on any other day: https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/DailySummary/#pwtr
I have previously explained quite a bit about many of the things I can see going on, with an emphasis on the importance of the bigger changes that keep happening. Separately, there is a good way to get an animated picture of the physical nature of those changes, which is hard to describe in words. At least I can provide a link to a useful website, produced by the University of Wisconsin, and a few recommendations about how to use it most effectively The link: http://tropic.ssec.wisc.edu/real-time/mtpw2/product.php? What I first recommend is that you take whatever time is needed to get familiar with all the tools of manipulation, which are quite plentiful, and play around with them. Five days is actually not a very long period of time for coverage, and yet it’s enough to provide a clear picture of how rapidly things unfold. If you stop the sequence at the end of the fifth day, and then open up a fresh version of the above chart from the U of Maine in a new window you should see plenty of similarity, noting that the latter is much superior with respect to the fine details needed for further study.
One of the most interesting things about the animated version is its ability to show differences in style of movement related to location and also the way changes occur in direction of movement. The heaviest material near the equator, all loaded up with thick clouds and raindrops, mostly moves toward the west after formation, just because most of its content exists at a low level and is under the control of prevailing winds blowing at the same level. This material does not do much in the way of shifting with respect to changes of direction of movement, nor does much change in the amount of material show up at any one location from one day to the next.
By contrast the lighter-weight material on either side is much more varied in appearance, much more mobile and has a greater tendency to keep losing mass. Its movement is always some combination of biases away from the equator and toward the east, unless something (never shown) gets in the way and alters the course. I think this material must represent the high-flying water I have been writing about, existing at an altitude where its streams are encountering another kind of stream at the same altitude, often bursting with powerful wind jets that do the pushing.
One more thing not to miss in the animated version is how the tail ends of those watery streams tend to sweep across large regions of landscape below and then disappear. When they are either entirely absent or have just gone away the amount of water that is left behind, mostly as vapor and mostly derived from local sources, tends to have its own set of characteristics. It does not show much in the way of animation, and total weights of it in the higher latitudes are never more than a small fraction of those existing in places close to the equator. (Note that the “weight” value, that I like to state in kilograms, is always the same as that given by other measurements taken in either millimeters or milliliters.)
Carl