Yesterday’s letter represents kind of a personal milestone, because I am just now becoming fully aware of the close connection between surface air temperatures and the total array of information of all types that we see on the 500hPa maps. I have been studying all kinds of connections among the different maps for quite some time, but not this one. Now I can immediately see how real the connection is, and its deep significance as well. The depicted phenomenon serves as a vital link in the establishment of a complete feedback loop, one that underlies the amplified warming of the entire Arctic region. The other components of the loop, which were easier to spot, have been previously identified and described by making other kinds of comparisons among the maps.
The “500hPa Geopotential Height” map was only added to the U of Maine collection about three years or so ago, and for a long time I just stayed away from it, as something utterly incomprehensible and probably irrelevant to the study of climate change. A year or two earlier I had felt the same way about the Precipitable Water map, which looks like nothing more than a big can of worms, and finally came to realize how important it was, so why not give this other silly-looking thing, so hard to visualize as a physical reality, a bit more effort? It is just now getting the needed clarity, coincidentally at a time of apparent historical crisis. I want to pass on everything I know about it, no matter how garbled and unpolished, as quickly as possible, to anyone willing to listen, because of its potential application toward helping us understand what is happening to the Arctic.
Almost everything I have learned about so far is contained in fairly recent climate letters. There is no nicely organized formal presentation to look at, with power point and all that. I just don’t have the energy or the time (now almost 90) to worry about such things. Perhaps it will all get done later, but for now this is it. All of the components of the feedback loop have been described and discussed at some length, except for this latest addition. Today I will try to give you a summarized full picture of the loop as a whole by naming its most critical components and describing their role, as pulled from what the maps keep telling us, in the fewest possible words.
Water vapor. This component emerges constantly from portions of tropical ocean waters, is lofted by updraft winds to high altitudes and then proceeds to head out across the middle and higher latitudes of both hemispheres on courses that tend to be guided and limited by prevailing winds, predominately those of the jetstream type. The vapors add a temporary but powerful greenhouse warming effect to any land or ice-covered surface they happen to be passing over.
Jetstream winds. The pathways they follow and the intermittently high-speed winds they contain are created on courses that run as isobars do along the slopes of bowl-shaped depressions in the atmosphere, which are situated due to air pressure variations over the mid-to-higher latitudes of each hemisphere. Their relative strength, for what seems to be the “purpose” of constraining the movement of incoming streams of water vapor, depends on variations in the depth of each of these depressions. The deeper a depression is, and thus the steeper the decline of its sloping sides, the sharper and stronger the jetstream passages and their winds will be.
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Surface temperature anomalies. These are highly variable, and at times quite large. Large anomalies appear and disappear mainly because of the greenhouse effect that occurs when large quantities of water vapor are passing overhead. (The effect can be offset by other factors, most commonly in the form of solar radiation albedo due to cloud coverage.)
Warm anomalies at the surface cause the associated air to expand, perhaps by a significant amount, which may be great enough to change the shape of floor of the hPa depression above, making the depression more shallow since the force moves up from below, thus weakening the jetstreams that course along its sloping sides, which allows more water vapor to pass through into regions that would otherwise be better protected, causing further amplification of the warm air anomalies below, etc., etc. That can surely be called a classic feedback loop, deserving the full attention of the scientific community. The one now in progress shows no sign of stopping, and is unlikely to be controlled by any human intervention that I know of. Today’s hPa map shows extensive new signs of deterioration just since yesterday:
Carl