Climate change in the Arctic is almost certainly the biggest story of our time, spanning decades. It has surely been the biggest story of 2020, continuing to this day. I have been documenting information about this ongoing situation with a fair amount of regularity since last April, using what I believe to be a unique perspective that emphasizes the role of water vapor and certain processes affecting its behavior. Over the last six months I have been working to improve my understanding of this activity, with growing confidence that what I am seeing is real, and that further documentation might be of value to future students of this subject. Right now there exists what amounts to a genuine heatwave covering a large part of the Arctic Ocean, already more than two weeks old and still going strong. As long as it continues I want to do an analysis of where the heat is coming from on each day, in order to create and preserve a record, using these letters, of whatever sources are found and can be demonstrated.
Let’s begin today with a regular chart of today’s anomalies, which dominate a large portion of the entire Arctic region with exceptional warmth. The area on the Russian side of the ocean is the deepest and most durable of all. In the center of it you can see a section having an anomaly just under +20C, and this air is sitting immediately above water that is not yet frozen. How often do you see that? Doesn’t open water everywhere always pick off a sizable chunk of any excess of incoming energy and store it at depth, leaving the air above less warmed than it otherwise would be?
To find out where so much heat could be coming from we’ll go straight to the Precipitable Water map. This broader view is chosen because it shows so clearly not just the extraordinary amount of water vapor making a deep penetration close to the pole, but also the approximate location of the source of the vapor and the approximate route taken to where you see the end point today. I say approximate because the batch of vapor over the ocean just now was emitted several days ago from an area that was a little to the west of where current evaporation is happening, and the original travel route has also been shifted a little. (This kind of information is all provided on the animated website.) The entire stream that is visible today, all of it originating in the same part of the Pacific, is constantly making small changes while moving forward. It certainly contains an enormous amount of water, all heading toward the Arctic, but since these streams are subject to quick shifts in their course of travel we can only think in terms of the uncertain potential for how much of this water, or amounts that have yet to evaporate, will end up over the Arctic Ocean.
Vapor streams originating in the Gulf of Mexico and western parts of the Atlantic are responsible for much of the big warm-up over Greenland and several large parts of Canada, plus making entries at several points that add to warm anomalies deeper within the Arctic zone. The overall breadth and depth of the main source of evaporation for these streams is comparable in size to the major source previously noted in the western Pacific, both of them ready to produce much more action. A third important source of evaporation for streams is located in the eastern Pacific. Its one large stream has been cut off from reaching the far north by a powerful jetstream wind, as seen in the next image, but that could change at any time. The highly disorganized state of jetstream winds in general over the entire northern latitudes can be blamed for the large amount of successful penetration of streaming water vapor everywhere else.
Carl