There is something happening in North American weather today that is a bit different from the norm, and for me a real wake-up call. An ordinary small scale phenomenon that I pay little attention to has blossomed into something big. We’ll start with the anomaly map, showing a truly massive warm one that extends from the US southwest across Canada and then most of Greenland as well. Another anomaly that is very warm but not as large stretches northward from Alaska. There are many spots of warming near 20C included, each requiring an extraordinary amount of greenhouse warming that according to my theory can only be provided by high concentrations of precipitable water (PW):
As expected, both of the major anomaly areas involve substantial infusions of PW being carried over land from tropical sources of waters that have high rates of evaporation. This map has a good view of both infusions, plus a third prominent infusion, more to the north but less strong, approaching from the Atlantic off the east side of Greenland:
Right off the bat, the intrusion by a stream moving north from the Gulf of Mexico looks peculiar, because this stream, which is full of moisture, appears as if it might be propelled by winds coming from the east. That is not how jetstream winds do things, so let’s run a check on the jetstream map:
We can see regular jetstream winds moving eastward carrying PW across Alaska and into the polar Arctic. Another jet is doing the same thing east of Greenland. Still others are approaching the west coast of the US carrying minor amounts of PW. By contrast, the Gulf area only shows us a pathway that is heading from west to east, the usual way, and not even bearing much of a wind. That leaves us in a quandary, but there is one possibility to look for on another map:
Bingo! What we are seeing is a long and broad sweep of strong surface winds, at first moving from east to west, that have crossed the Caribbean Sea, where they could have picked up plenty of moisture, carried it across the relatively cool Gulf, then headed north into the heart of the US and kept on going as far as the Canadian border. Scattered quantities of PW continued on from there, presumably carried by lighter winds, finally contributing energy to the warming pattern that continues farther north, adding to a mix derived from several other sources, none of which are especially large individually.
I suspect that this very moist band of air moving across the US was never lifted to any level of upper altitude where wind effects change. Moreover, as we’ll see on the next map, it was never a producer of heavy clouds or precipitation. The minor snowfalls that appear in Canada most likely came from other sources. In the US, we see nothing but clouds and clear skies. In short, here is a case where massive quantities of PW entered the atmosphere and were transported overhead for a very long distance, just like those carried by jetstream winds, but without doing even a little bit of precipitating. On the other hand, this mass of PW has produced some exceptionally heavy warming at the surface, in amounts that look indifferent to the amount of clouding, for which PW’s own peculiar powers of greenhouse energy generation must be given the credit deserved. (Please let me know if there is an alternative explanation!)
There is one more interesting thing to take note of today, as pictured in the above jetstream map. That’s the pathway taken by the strong jet that emerges from the Caribbean and moves up the center of the Atlantic, until it suddenly makes a bend and heads in reverse for awhile, greatly weakened. The path again reverses and once more heads to the east and north later on. These strange movements can be attributed to an unusual pattern of air pressure configuration in the interior part of the red zone, which is quite visible on the next map. Jetstream winds are simply not allowed to depart from the pathways that nature creates for them. This is the same pathway that we previously saw crossing southern Texas and the Gulf. It had soon after moved closer to the green fringe pathway, whereupon the winds were at their intermittently strongest stretch of movement, before making the series of sharp bends.
Carl