Climate Letter #1613

Note (02/14/20): Unfortunately, the top two images you see here do not correspond well with the text, because they are being updated daily by the publishing system and changes are rapid. I have no way of restoring the originals. My apologies for that, and I hope there will be a way to avoid such mistakes in the future. The bottom image, which remains properly dated, also happens to have a subject that shows practically no change at all from day to day! CC

This would be a good day to show what a difference the amount of total overhead water vapor makes in setting the surface air temperature of a given region of land. On the following Anomaly chart just focus on the center of North America, which is simultaneously experiencing both a massive heatwave and an even larger cold wave, almost side by side with not much in between. (Anything in blue will always be below average, and ruddy above.) Note that today the cold block has temperatures as much as 20C (36F) below normal while just a few hundred miles away to the east there is a large area where temperatures are hovering at up to 15-20 C above. How is that possible? The followup image, designated as Precipitable Water, shows the way to an answer. Precipitable water (PW) is a term regularly employed by weather forecasters who use it as their principal guide to expected precipitation, but not to temperature. It is measured in terms of the weight of all H2O molecules—per square meter—from the planetary surface to the top of the atmosphere. A major portion of that weight is comprised of just plain vapor, such that we can use the same numbers as a practical index for airborne amounts of the vapor by itself.

Forecast Image

With that in mind, we’re ready to take a look at the difference in the relative amount of water vapor over the same two regions that gained our attention above. The numbers today are ranging from just 2-3kg in the west to 30 or even 35 or 40kg in the ‘blue zone’ to the east. These are not anomalies; they are the real thing. (I dearly wish there were charts available showing the range of global anomalies for PW using the same base period as for temperatures, but they don’t exist. Maybe some day.) Anyway, I suspect that ‘normal’ or average water vapor today, or for the base period as well, would turn out to be right around 10 kg for the entire region we are observing, but with modestly higher numbers appearing as you move from north to south, and especially toward the coastlines in the southeast. When you get all the way up to the polar region normal water vapor in the winter can easily hang around 1-2kg, or less, but just 2-3kg is not at all normal for places like Nebraska. So what are the implications for today?

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Forecast Image

In previous letters I have advanced the idea that whenever the overhead water vapor of an on-land region is doubled, from any starting point, the additional greenhouse effect will add around 8C (up to a maximum of 10C) to the surface air temperature below. That number will always be lower with respect to ocean surface air, and will also be reduced by any significant amount of cloud cover or precipitation. The situation we see above, with vapor doubling twice from normal on one hand and halving twice on the other, causing paired temperature anomalies that reach totals of more than 30C, is fully consistent with this general idea. I actually think the same relationship exists everywhere, all of the time, although usually not so easily demonstrated.

Moving on, can we also explain what causes such an extreme difference in the way water vapor is distributed in the atmosphere? The best answer I can give starts with the idea that about 80% of all atmospheric water vapor originates from the evaporation of tropical ocean surface waters that have reached a temperature of around 27C or more, otherwise known collectively as the ‘warm pool.’ For good measure let’s throw in another map that shows just where those waters are presently located:

Forecast Image

The rate of evaporation from the warm pool is indeed great, and it is generally true that the produced vapor in large part is lifted into quite high levels of the atmosphere by strong updrafts of wind. At such levels there is likely to be a considerable amount of of rain-out, along with further, more advanced distribution of the remainder. How that distribution progresses all depends on prevailing upper-level wind currents, which are usually fairly gentle to begin with but eventually some or even much of the vapor may get picked up and carried away to all sorts of far off places by much stronger jet stream currents. Upper level winds of varying strength or direction can cause batches of vapor to become concentrated, or to spread out, or in some cases to be almost completely obstructed from entrance into areas that can be large in size. This kind of information can be determined visually through close study of the daily weather maps, like the ones above, published by the University of Maine at https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/DailySummary/#t2anom

Carl

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