Climate Letter #2111

I’ve found a new and better way to describe the greenhouse energy effects of precipitable water (PW). PW is a term that has little cognizance and stimulates little interest. You seldom hear it used by the media and scientists do not spend much time talking about it among themselves, or making it the subject of a journal study. There is no quick and easy way to define the meaning, because the wording is far-fetched to begin with. Most of what we call PW is not water, as such, and much of it does not even precipitate according to the common usage of that term. There is no consistency of PW’s components except that all of them are based on H2O in one state or another.

Yes, PW does have a greenhouse effect all its own, one that is large and easily demonstrated, but science has not become interested in investigating its importance. So maybe it’s time for me to switch gears, and right now should be a perfect time to do so. Instead of PW, I’m going to start writing about “the greenhouse effect of atmospheric rivers (ARs).” This term has recently gained new meaning, and new life. It has begun to appear more and more in the daily media, where it is used to describe sources of precipitation that are actually happening and have real public interest. Scientists who are weather-oriented are writing up studies for journal publication and so so are some scientists who are climate-oriented. An AR is an individual “thing,” and each one has a life of its own, temporarily occupying its own space and time. There are signs of growing population of ARs, as well as trends of increasing size plus tendencies to change locations, affecting where they unload their precipitation. These are matters that have real importance in climate science because of the way precipitation is deeply integrated with other climate features.

I think of ARs as especially exciting for reasons of a different kind. One is because they are composed entirely of PW, a changeable mixture of H2O molecules, with no exception. Next, ARs are relatively large in size, making the amount of PW they contain a significantly large portion of all the PW held throughout the atmosphere. Third, location. ARs are exclusively located at high elevations in the the atmosphere, and specifically appear over total portions of each hemisphere outside of the tropical belt. I had already found that varying amounts of PW existing in these very same global locations have a significant temporary effect on surface temperatures below, depending on movement into positions that add to the greenhouse effect of ambient PW that exists close to the surface.

It now seems likely that were it not for the outreach of ARs there would be almost no PW, or plain water vapor alone, in these high altitude locations. By way of comparison, the PW content of ARs has extraordinarily high concentrations by any standard, imparting considerable leverage to the total greenhouse impact upon addition to the amounts below. Huge temperature anomalies, recorded daily, are a common result.

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The highly concentrated PW in an AR is what establishes the potential for intense rainfall over continental interiors. The intermittency of intense rainfall is easily explained by the separation of individual ARs, their erratic courses of travel, and the inconsistency of condensation patterns. The greenhouse energy production of the PW content of an AR exhibits comparable behavior but without so much inconsistency—production is constantly tied to whatever amount of content is in place. From the point of view of any surface the greenhouse effect is intermittent mainly because of the separate and erratic flowing motion of all ARs, which have no such thing as a fixed riverbed.

I am confident that climate scientists will one day recognize a need to understand the special characteristics and impact of the greenhouse energy effects that are everyday properties of an AR’s PW content, alongside its precipitation effects, and of at least equal importance.

Carl

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