Today’s Weather Maps are absolutely loaded with information. Each map contains an amazing amount of detail, every bit of which is obtained from instrument readings of things that are happening in the real world. Whenever a detail on one of the maps gets your attention it never hurts to open other maps and look for relationships at the same location. You may learn something that may be put to good use. This happened to me today when I became curious about a large and very cold temperature anomaly sitting over the northern border of Kazakhstan:
Some unusual cold anomalies, like the one in Texas last winter, are caused by an extreme shortage of precipitable water (PW) in the atmosphere above, so that possibility needed to be checked out. No way! All I can see on the PW map is a large amount of apparent excess over that very spot. That much PW, if properly calculated, should be adding perhaps 5C of anomalous warmth from its greenhouse energy effect:
Rain cloud albedo, which is known to be quite powerful in mid-summer, although exact numbers for calculating its cooling effect are less well-known, was the next possibility, and this time I could see a connection:
What puzzled me was the apparent strength of this particular rain cloud as a cooling agent. It appeared capable of not only offsetting at least 5C worth of greenhouse warming from the PW but an additional 10C worth of registered cold anomaly—a total of 15C of cooling. In order to do so, daily average temperatures that be as high as 20C in parts of this region would need to fall all the way down to around 5C for the occasion, or a quick drop of up to 27F for the day! I don’t have any real numbers in hand, but such things do happen, and the temperature map, while allowing only a rough estimate, tells us this may actually have been the case:
A measured value of 15 degrees for a cloud’s albedo effect seems like an inordinately high number. There are a lot of rain clouds out there that have albedo values of 5-10C but this one must have something special behind it. I opened more maps to look for explanations, and right away this one caught my eye:
Our subject rain cloud fits very nicely inside the borders of the loop of a jetstream wind that came down from the north and then turned back up. This wind would not be a carrier of PW but may have somehow had an effect, worthy of further study, on an existing amount of PW that became trapped inside the loop. As more of an aside, I also found the reason for why the pathway carrying this jetstream was located in this particular spot. It was simply tracking the perimeter of an extended “thumb” of green zone air pressure in a very regular way:
One more connection is worth showing on its map, even with no explanation, just because it has formed into a pattern that fits so tightly with the location of everything else we’ve looked at, and that is sea level pressure. Weather reporters are always reminding us about how low pressure tends to show up when rainfall is heavy, like it is here. Of all the relationships we are looking at I think of surface air pressure, both high and low, as the one thing that poses the most difficulty when one attempts to understand either its direct cause or direct effects from a physical standpoint. It does get involved in different situations, and at the very least must have a role that helps to make things happen in the manner observed.
Carl