Climate Letter #1686

Some things to clarify. The “thesis” I wrote about yesterday refers only to a single event. It purports to offer a reasonably complete story of how the existing major temperature anomaly in the Arctic came into being. The story has yet to be assembled into one written treatise but all of the separate pieces have been written up and are available to read in previous letters. Many of the pieces contain moving parts that have required independent explanations, and some of those explanations may seem to imply the creation of theories that are out of keeping with those that are familiar. Today I will see if I can put together a short list of possible theoretical discrepancies, all of which will need to be either corrected or defended before the principal thesis can be readily accepted. The theories themselves may indeed have implications that go beyond the intentions of the thesis.

Briefly, the thesis starts by making a comparison, between the north and south polar regions, of air pressure configurations at the 500hPa level, noting the rather large deterioration that has rather quickly taken place in the north. There is no theory given about the cause of the deterioration except to suggest that it could be heat-related and could involve the makings of a feedback loop, which is nothing more than a random thought for further investigation. The pattern of air pressure deterioration is then observed to bear a relationship to another phenomenon that is observed to be occurring at the very same time, involving significant irregularities in the strength and structural layout of high-speed jetstream jets in the north, while no such irregularities are detected in the south. I then noticed (all of this from weather map images) that practically all of the details of the jetstream irregularities matched up almost perfectly with details of the air pressure irregularities, virtual proof of an actual correspondence, and that the correspondence was maintained in spite of a difference of three miles in the altitudes of the available images. In the south the exact same type of correspondence was noticed, but without any sign of the existence of irregularities. Also, a general picture emerged of three separate jetstream pathways existing in both the north and the south, normally unbroken and concentric in the absence of excessive deterioration, with each pathway being the home of intermittent high-speed wind jets.

All of this jetstream information, while in some ways unfamiliar, is of interest and possibly useful but does not seem to lead toward any special theory of explanation.  However, the potential need for a new theory does come into play as soon as soon as one makes observations of the behavior of jetstream wind jets when they encounter and interact with streams of a different sort, made of high-flying precipitable water. This relationship is known to have precipitation effects, but an outcome related to air temperatures due to the particulars of these streams’ interactions has not been as well studied. I see considerable need for sound theories to be developed concerning the nature of those encounters, with special attention given to the any kind of unusual situation, such as the one now being investigated, where the formation of some jetstreams and their jets is rapidly deteriorating. My offhand observations have told me that there is a sort of battle going on between two armies, with the water streams acting as invaders of territory being defended by the jetstream jets, who have set up three principal lines of defense. The invaders keep looking for ways to breach those lines, and when the defenses have become weakened for some reason the outcome is sure to be affected. The invaders will more likely be successful in reaching their goal, which, for some reason, is apparently reaching the pole—just like Scott, Amundsen, Peary, etc.

The formation and development of these airborne water streams is plainly visible on the maps from start to finish, and I think they deserve much more attention than I can give them, from every possible perspective. My own limited perspective is occasioned by the fact that they are composed entirely of water vapor, the most powerful of all greenhouse gases, plus bits of material that is formed by the condensation of water vapor. The fact of condensation is of special interest because it happens while the vapor is up in the atmosphere. The italics indicate a recognition that there may be something different about the condensation being up there rather than on the more robust surfaces down below, and it may have significance.  This is certainly a subject worthy of the deepest theoretical attention, capable of proving that the most technical laws of physics apply equally in both situations.

I do want to promote a general theory of air temperature anomalies, as they appear at the surface of the Earth, at least in the mid-to-high latitudes.  The general idea is that the amplitude of anomalies in these latitudes are normally dominated by fluctuations in the amount of overhead precipitable water, subject to certain offsets of a regular nature, and that the degree of leverage provided by any size of such fluctuations tends to grow along with increases in latitude.  This will need more work to formulate property.  One of the key objectives will be the total replacement of existing theories which claim that movements of large masses of either warm or cold air are useful in accounting for temperature anomalies, which I do not believe to be an unquestionable reality.

Carl