Climate Letter #1836

I’ve been alerted to a website that has a full year (2019) of animation for global precipitable water (PW) in one brief video, which is kind of fun to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch. Seasonal changes are there to be seen, if you look closely, but not easy to pick out because of the high speed.  The key information you can glean from this longer-term animated view, for purposes I have in mind, is basically no different from that which was illuminated in the 5-day site reviewed yesterday, namely:  1. Concentrated streams of PW are constantly being formed in a limited number of spots along the fringes of the tropical belt in each hemisphere.  2. The streams in both hemispheres are all headed outward in a direction dominated by movement that is both eastward and poleward.  3.  The streams are constantly changing shape and losing concentration as they flow, completely breaking down and disappearing within a short number of days.  4. Virtually all global surfaces outside of the tropical belt are exposed to frequent but highly varying overhead passage of PW content carried in by a sequence of streams.   

Neither of these videos has much of anything to report apart from bare graphics, so we have to do a lot more digging to get a full explanation of what is going on.  Still, these bare graphics constitute information of a factual nature that cannot be obtained by direct observation or any other means.  Anyone who has an interest in any of the Earth sciences, including scientists themselves, should be urged to look at these images, keep them firmly in mind, hopefully gain some curiosity, and stand ready to both ask and answer a lot of questions. And maybe also be ready for surprises.  

Again, what is precipitable water?  No surprise there.  It’s practically all made of water molecules, and is the one primary source of every major form of precipitation.  But now let’s give some thought to the two main components, as determined by weight, wherever PW exists. First is water vapor, the one and only origin of PW and thus for awhile the only component.  Next, cloud bodies, which can include fog, the most basic product of water vapor’s common transformation, as conducted by condensation.  Water vapor happens to be the strongest, by far, of all the greenhouse gases, also differing from all such gases in a number of other ways that are highly irregular.  Cloud bodies are not composed of any kind of gas, but they do have certain gas-like properties, such as their preference to remain airborne.  Furthermore, cloud bodies, in common with water vapor and all the other greenhouse gases, happen to be potent carriers of their own set of greenhouse energy effects, which are not described in ordinary terms involving radiation bands.  And, much like water vapor, these are highly irregular carriers, which makes it difficult in either case to accurately measure their specific contribution to the overall greenhouse energy impact on Earth’s climate system.

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PW, in its entirety, contains virtually all of Earth’s water vapor and all of its cloud body material. The two are typically found living and working in varying degrees of combination, spatially characterized by a high degree of irregularity.  This makes PW Earth’s preeminent carrier of greenhouse energy effects, ahead of water vapor alone, which makes it pretty interesting stuff from a greenhouse standpoint, requiring its own peculiar category of classification.  Greenhouse energy has multiple regular-type carriers, all gaseous.  Water vapor should not necessarily be included in that class.  Greenhouse energy also has an unknown number of irregular carriers, only one of which, PW, is known to be critically important.  Water vapor is in all respects the senior partner in the PW combination, and that is where I think it belongs. The partnership generally seems able to express its greenhouse powers in a unified way, with a perhaps unexpected degree of consistency, regardless of its exact makeup at any one time and place.

The overall greenhouse energy impact of PW may be difficult to measure, but specific situations abound allowing local effects on air temperature to be analyzed with considerable clarity, based on reliable measurements. There was an example described in my letter of two days ago, made possible by the fact that atmospheric PW values in close regional proximity may tend to show sharp differences, all because of an irregular pattern of stream flow concentration, just as depicted in the animations.

Carl

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