12/8/16: Expect Air Temperatures 35-55F Above Normal Over Most Of Arctic Basin

[hatrack]

EDIT

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(A major warm wind invasion of the Arctic on Thursday is originating in the subtropical Pacific. A ridge in the Jet Stream extending all the way to the North Pole is pulling this big bulge of warm air north. As a result, extreme temperature departures and out of season sea ice melt for the impacted zones are likely. Image source: Earth Nullschool.)

As we can see in the image above, the flood of warm air has its origin around the 30 north latitude line. It flows directly over hundreds of miles of ocean, at times reaching a storm-force intensity near 70 mph. As it crosses into Siberia, the wind slows down. But it inexorably continues north, ever north — driven on by a serious pulse of atmospheric steam. By early Thursday, the leading edge of this warm air outburst from the Pacific side will have crossed the Pole and led to a flushing of Central Arctic air out into the Barents Sea and North Atlantic (you can view an animation of the predicted warm air pulse here).

This strong northward flood of warmth from the Pacific is running up under an extreme high amplitude wave in the Jet Stream that is bellowing out into the Arctic Ocean through the Bering and Chukchi seas. At its peak northward extent, the big Jet Stream wave is predicted to look something like this. And it is this severe contortion in the upper level wind pattern that has enabled this most recent extreme warm wind event to occur.

This pattern is now in the process of injecting above-freezing air temperatures into Eastern Siberia. By tomorrow, the warm air mass will encounter the coastal regions of the Chukchi and East Siberian seas. There, it will push temperatures as high as 2.5 C (37 F) over zones that typically see readings in the -20s to -30s (Celsius). As a result, temperatures will range between 20 and 30 C (35 to 55 F) or more above average for many locations.

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(Climate Reanalyzer has added a new color — white — for tracking extreme departures in temperature. In the positive anomaly column, we find departures hitting 30 C, or 54 F, above average for regions of East Siberia and the local Arctic Ocean.)

To be clear, these temperatures are highly abnormal. If a similar temperature departure happened in Gaithersburg, Maryland on December 8, it would produce 80 to 100 degree (F) readings. Of course, this anomaly is not happening in Gaithersburg. Due to a global warming related process called polar amplification in which the poles are more sensitive to alterations in rising greenhouse gas levels (due to fossil fuel and related emissions), extreme temperature anomalies tend to occur at the poles as rates of relative warming are 2-3 times faster in those regions. And the factors that we observe associated with this new Arctic warm wind event — powerful south-to-north meridional air flows coupled with extreme high amplitude waves in the Jet Stream — are also evidence of a number of weird new atmospheric circulation patterns that can tend to pop up as polar amplification intensifies.

EDIT

https://robertscribbler.com/2016/12/07/arctic-air-temperatures-are-set-to-hit-35-to-55-f-above-average-by-thursday-out-of-season-sea-ice-melt-possible-again/

[Auntie Bush]

1. What an ominous prediction for the poor polar bears.

[hatrack]

2. And poor us, and poor everybody - from puffins and polar bears to CEOs and celebrities

The world will not be the same - and by that, I mean the ability to predict little things like growing seasons and energy demand and public health and infrastructure failure.

Things are going to get very ugly very quickly, and there's very little we can do at this point to materially alter the course that we have allowed physics and chemistry to set for us.

[Auntie Bush]

3. Don't you mean the course that the RepubliCONS set for us?

[hatrack]

5. Not just the GOP death cult, though they're making things much worse than they could be

Last edited Thu Dec 8, 2016, 10:15 AM - Edit history (1)

But this is a disaster centuries in the making. It took hundreds of years and billions of people to pump enough carbon dioxide and methane and nitrous oxide and so on into the atmosphere to get to where we are now.

Thanks to ingenuity and hard work and technology and lots and lots of money, we've got this shit down . We're collectively pumping 35 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year, but it took a while to get here.

It was a collective choice, and understandable as hell. Who wouldn't want electricity? Who wouldn't want a car? Who wouldn't want a nice big house? It's only lately that we've begun to appreciate what the economic expression "externality" means.

As the saying goes, Rome wasn't destroyed in a day.

[Canoe52]

4. That's some weird sh!t going on up there.

Scares me.