Today’s Weather Maps, https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/DailySummary/#t2 published daily by the U of Maine, are a tremendous source of weather and climate information. Twelve different basic maps are featured (plus two with variations) covering a wide assortment of phenomena. If you sort through the contents of these maps, with an eye out for details, you are sure to find some interesting relationships. I spend quite a bit of my own time looking for them and at them. Some of these relationships go beyond being interesting—they are actually compelling, and yet they are not recognized, at least openly, by professional people who work in the sciences. I don’t think this is deliberate. I think these maps constitute sources of specific information that has been widely overlooked, some of it from a weather-related standpoint but especially from a climate standpoint. There are specific reasons for why surface temperatures around the globe keep changing from day to day—with emphasis on why the changes are bigger in the mid-latitudes than in the tropics, and bigger yet in the polar zones. The weather maps are very helpful in providing answers, by employing information of a kind that is entirely visual, not too technical, and requiring no special background in mathematics. Today I want to bring you up to date on how I see certain fundamental relationships that will end up as parts of a whole chain of relationships. We’ll start by bringing up a map of surface air temperatures for this day on the North American side of the Western Hemisphere, with a focus on the part that is below freezing:
Next we’ll turn to a map of high-altitude air pressure configuration, where the focus will be on the zone of blue shading. This zone represents the area covered by one specific weight of any defined column of air in the upper part of the atmosphere, in this case columns partitioned into two weights, each of them equal to one-half of the value of a total atmosphere. In the blue zone this amount of weight on top is able to press down deeper into the cushion of air below than it can anywhere else, because the air below that makes up the cushion is very cold and wants to do more to contract than do similar but warmer columns of air in other areas.
There is clearly a relationship between the observed area of this blue zone and the zone of below-freezing temperatures on the first map. The borders do not perfectly coincide, but come significantly close to doing so. Moreover, at least 90% of the second image is contained within the borders of the first. Keep in mind that there are around three miles of vertical air space separating these images physically, leaving plenty of room for other kinds of forces to interfere with transmission of the main effect. This relationship, as it stands, is real enough to suggest that it may mean something as part of a bigger picture. Now we’re ready to look at the next part of what is becoming a chain, in the form of jetstream wind activity, which is found to be governed by the shaping of the shaded values portrayed in the air pressure configuration:
Keep focusing on the blue zone, specifically on the outside border of the blue zone as delineated by a line of lightest blue shading. This line is placed roughly at the center of a unique pathway of faster-than-average wind movement in the upper atmosphere, forming the lesser-by-strength and innermost of three such pathways. The wind itself always stays on the prescribed course, in a relationship that upon close study comes remarkably close to perfection, constantly circling around its enclosed blue zone, and always headed toward the east. The actual speed of this wind is not constant. In some places it falls below 30 knots, making it unshaded on the map and thus not visible except for the isobar tracks of the pathway. The strongest of the wind increments appear when this pathway lies closest to the pathway of another major course of winds which has been created at another level of air pressure differential lying outside of the blue zone, which I’ll be discussing in a follow-up letter. For now, a significant point has already been made, showing how there is a genuine relationship between the location of this one jetstream pathway and its wind com ponent, as controlled by the shape of the blue zone, and the location, as well as the existence, of below-freezing air temperatures down at the surface. What will happen to the blue zone, this one jetstream pathway, and its wind if freezing temperatures disappear (again) in the late summer that lies just ahead?
Carl