There is a coin-shaped cool anomaly just to the north of Kazakhstan today that is interesting because it is so completely sealed off by warm anomalies. We’ll look for whatever may be causing this situation, and see if we can learn something.
A quick check of the temperature map show us that this area is actually a little bit warmer than everything directly to the north, even though the latter is loaded with warm anomalies of around 5C. The high polar region in its entirety has been this way for some time now, not cooling down the way it should be, and that in itself is a concern, but for today we’ll only search for reasons why the current polar temperature pattern has been extended so far to the South, as we see here:
High-altitude air pressure configuration is usually involved in things like this, so we’ll make its map our next stop:
I’m not sure what caused the green zone to take on that peculiar shape, but we do know that the yellow fringe of the green zone is home to a jetstream pathway, and that all jet winds in the north are getting stronger now than they were just a month ago. With the passing of summer heat the pressure configuration as a whole has sharper gradients and is getting more compact and better organized. We can in fact see strong wind jets in place on parts of the green zone fringe, and also some even more impressive legs within the regular red zone pathway that trails along the line of separation between light and dark red:
Whenever jet winds reach these higher speeds they serve as effective barriers to the movement of any high-altitude streams of water vapor that may be roaming around. This next image shows how vapors have piled up all along the outer edge of the downward-looping green-fringe jet wind we just looked at. Their added concentration was not great enough to produce clouds but it does closely correspond with the extended arc of strongest warm anomaly spots that can be seen in the top image. Further, it looks like a separate batch of vapor has managed to sneak into the top part of the cool area via a stream that has approached from the north and west, leaving some faint traces of warmth on the western edge of the cool anomaly.
In preparing this letter I made trips to both the Windy website and the animated precipitable water site to look for more details. The latter showed clearly that the vapors surrounding the lower part of the cool anomaly came from a stream that originated in the Mediterranean Sea. The vapor stream coming over the top had crossed the North Atlantic and traveled at length through the polar region north of Europe, bringing extra warmth everywhere it went.
Here are links to the three complementary sites that are the basis of this work:
–Today’s Weather Maps, from Climate Reanalyzer, provided by the University of Maine: https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/DailySummary/#t2max—Windy.com, an app produced in the Czech Republic: https://www.windy.com/—A Real-Time Product View of Total Precipitable Water, provided by the University of Wisconsin: http://tropic.ssec.wisc.edu/real-time/mtpw2/product.php
Carl