I believe there are a few dozen readers of the Climate Letter, scattered around the world, who are getting interested in the various relationships that are regularly detected on the dozen different maps, plus regional close-ups, published every day by the U of Maine. These are the people I most want to reach with these weekday messages, hoping that some will pick up the slack and keep this unique set of ideas flowing if I become disabled. These ideas have the immediate power to transform everything we know about the cause of daily temperature changes on all parts of the planet, and offer at least a few suggestions about how these daily effects may be applied to broadening our knowledge about longer-range sources of climate change as well.
In today’s letter I’ll be promoting a simple exercise that makes it easy to compare existing circumstances at each of the two poles, where there is evidence of happenings that are of truly remarkable contrast. Many points of considerable interest can be noted right now. Following up with periodic inspections of this type over the course of future annual seasons is a good bet to turn up additional items of interest. The exercise only requires that the Weather Maps website be opened up twice, in separate toolbars, and then tuned to show each of the opposing polar zone maps at the same magnification. Then one can set up a full selection of the different map illustrations side by side for purposes of easy comparison with one quick click. I did this for the first time today, starting with jetstream configuration, which immediately revealed the following two images in a state of stark contrast:
Two things stand out at once in this comparison. One is that the jets as a whole have much more velocity in the south. Also, the set of strong jets that are positioned in a close and tight formation around this polar zone leaves open a jet-free spatial area that is much smaller and more compact, hence proving better protective, than the one in the north. Good reasons for the structural difference can be found by opening the 500hPa air pressure maps in each toolbar, with this rather startling result:
The green-zone perimeter jets in the north, with almost no help at all coming from the fragmented blue zone, are greatly inactivated. Red-zone jets are still active, with help in places that are close to the green zone, but these jets are for the most part quite far-removed from the polar zone, leaving all that open space available for allowing extra freedom of movement for any incoming amounts of precipitable water (PW) concentration (not shown today).
One more pair of maps is needed to provide evidence of how surface temperatures have responded to these circumstances, by congealing into opposite extremes. Remember, these are historical anomalies for just the one day, and as such they will not be reflective of any seasonal differences. Both anomalies have been like the ones today for an extraordinarily high number of days, due to the lasting nature of extraordinary circumstances that are evolving in both situations. I think the warming impact on the Arctic Ocean and its surroundings is the easier one to explain, and probably also the more worrisome of the two at this time.
Carl