Climate Letter #1408

After almost six years of composing these letters I have decided to make a change in the presentation.  I will still be looking over all the new stories every day from a list of good sources, and pick out the ones that have particular interest for reposting, but then spend less time making comments.  That will leave me more time to work on and talk about something else that has growing personal interest and that I think deserves to be given more attention by others who have the same kind of interest in climate study.  That’s because I happen to like dabbling in climate science on my own accord, and have found a gold mine of information that should deserve a wider public audience but practically no one is out there doing the digging.  So why not grab a spade and see how it goes from there?

.

The gold mine is a site called Climate Reanalyzer, published every day by the University of Maine, in the form of Today’s Weather Maps, which is my main object of study.  The site also has a long list of other maps and data sets that are geared mostly to the interests of meteorologist/forecasters but altogether there is considerable relevance that goes beyond weather and into all aspects of climate study in general.  Here is their home link:  https://climatereanalyzer.org/.  The Weather Maps segment alone contains an incredible amount of useful information, such that once you become familiar with its content, and can compare what is seen on one map with views given by another one or more, you can start spotting things that have unique interest.

.

The maps all change every day, with no archiving readily available, so what I will do in the future is to save particular selected images and bookmark them for unlimited reading.  Meanwhile I would encourage you to open the basic map section as often as possible and give the most relevant ones a good look from different angles.  I have been doing this daily for the last several  years and find it fascinating.  I will soon provide some pointers for reading each map, with a few exceptions, that should help anyone get started efficiently.

.

Now, as a heads up, this journey has an underlying purpose.  I am working on a hypothesis that is derived from studying these charts, one that could conceivably create broader interest.  A month ago, in Climate Letters #1384-87, I went off on a tangent that focused mainly on readings from the Precipitable Water map.  It was pretty clumsy, which I have felt bad about, and want to make adjustments, but some of the points just might have been on to something important—that is, with reference to water vapor, which is widely recognized as the strongest of all greenhouse gases.  Scientists don’t talk much about water vapor, or its strength.  They commonly handle it as a feedback from CO2 warming, which is true, and as such they apply a formula intended to add its strength directly to the strength of CO2 when making climate sensitivity projections.  That practice should be questioned, and I will demonstrate some reasons why, almost completely derived from observing the weather maps.

.

https://phys.org/news/2019-04-green-plastic-production-easy.html