(MORE UPDATES*) Discovery, Dot Earth blogs: What’s with all this arctic air blowing through..??
I know I know, this week’s weather and next decade’s climate norms are only barely coupled – but global-warming- schwarming my fingers are cold typing this and I’m in freakin’ California. Just put “arctic blast” in your news search engine and you’ll get a hint to how many teeth are chattering elsewhere in the top hemisphere – as this from Reuters on the blizzards in the UK, and this from ABC News on one of the US’s deepest, broadest cold snaps in memory.
As they ask on some of the more vulgar blogs, WTF??!!
Well well, at least two science writers have given it a go.
1) Check out Andrew C. Revkin‘s account at DotEarth of a wildly gyrating Arctic Oscillation, an atmospheric see-saw, as the reason. That is, it is the proximate reason – nobody seems sure at a deeper level why the index of this AO thing is so exceedingly negative right now. But the recent sloshings of cold air out of the far north are not the usual ones.
2) And at DiscoveryNews John Cox – ex-newspaperman, weather book writer, and occasional back up tracker at this site – provides further detail on the highs, lows, fronts, ENSO hijinks, and other atmospheric gyrations funneling air from up there where the sun isn’t shining on down to those of us where it is.
The Tracker, being a worrier and prone to blame global warming for lots of things (covering climate and AGU meetings for decades leaves me persuaded we’ve really messed up our planet’s meteorology), has a question. Somebody should ask it of an expert and I am just a blogger this morning – ie, a bloviator. Thus: if brutally cold air is scampering down from the Arctic so intently these days, is a corresponding warm air mass billowing from more temperate climes and toward the pole to replace it? And if so, zero sum and all that, does that mean that, while we’re staring gelidly at our frosty thermometers, the Arctic is correspondingly warming up a bit, unseasonably, and setting the stage for a worse ice melt this summer? I mean, were cold air to come at California from Hawaii, that could be a sign that global cooling is not just nutcase crazy. But if it comes squirting down from the Arctic where it is of course dreadfully cold this time of year no matter what the CO2 gauge says – what does THAT imply?
See? The skeptics are right – some of us non-experts in league with Al Gore can turn almost any atmospheric data into evidence for global warming. But that doesn’t make them correct, or us wrong. Shows nothing. My head hurts.
*UPDATE 1: Jack Williams, former USA today weather editor, has a welcome comment below. He mentions this post of mine, and goes way beyond it in a post he put up later today. It has pictures that show that the northern hemisphere does have big fronts of invading warm air into the Arctic to more or less balance the far north’s export blasts of cold air. Most important he tosses in a link addressing the other blizzard of our time: people who comment anonymously on news stories in a most colorful spluttering gallimaufry and how to respond to them, as seen by a Washington Post columnist, Gene Weingarten. Recommended reading.
*UPDATE 2: Thur Jan 7, AP – Malcolm Ritter, with Raphael Satter in London, Cara Anna in Beijing, Christine Armario in Miami: Experts: Cold snap doesn’t disprove global warming ; Makes vital point that in a warmer world we’ll still get the occasional record-breaking outbreak of cold. As for my question, it doesn’t answer it exactly, but Ritter notes that the extreme zig zag pattern of northern circumpolar jet streams right now is not only sending packets of record cold far to the south, but is bringing record warmth to parts of the north – such as to Alaska.
UPDATE 3: Washington Post Capital Weather Gang Blog – Andrew Freedman: Cold weather in a hot climate ; Introspective post that puts the recent cold together with rumination on journalism, news-telling, climate change politics, and the impossibility of relaying the news and making everybody happy at once.
- Charlie Petit
January 6th, 2010 at 3:39 pm
NOAA’s Earth System Reserch Lab is following this. Go to:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/images/fnl/sfctmpmer_01a.fnl.anim.html
(On the right side, go down to “Advance One” and click on either the “more than” or “less then” sign with a vertical bar (K and reverse K) and you can look one day at a time… From Dec. 30 today the areas of above average temps in the Arctic and near-Arctic cover larger areas than those with below average areas down where most of us live.
I think the fact that we haven’t seen this in the “mainstream” media have latched onto this probably reflects the former science writers who have been laid off. I’d love to find someone who gets this story.
Jack Williams
January 6th, 2010 at 3:43 pm
Excuses my typos in the post above… my brain is quicker than my fingers and eye for typos. The period of the maps is each day from Dec. 30 to today…. I should have deleted “have latched onto this” in the last graf.
January 6th, 2010 at 4:45 pm
I happened to interview a NOAA forecaster named Ed Olenic this Monday on El Nino, and he along the way he walked me through some of his graphs on the Arctic Oscillation.
I think his discussion of the power of the current AO might be a little easier to understand than the others I’ve seen, so I put it up on my site. The curious can see it at:
http://www.achangeinthewind.com/2010/01/arctic-oscillation-discussion-by-top-noaa-forecaster.html
By the way, Olenic said he suspects that there is a relationship between El Nino and the AO, but they haven’t been able to tease out the nature of that relationship as of yet.
Thanks for the John Cox link — very helpful.
January 6th, 2010 at 7:53 pm
[...] 6 Knight Science Journalism Tracker blog and saw that Tracker Charlie Petit is also searching for Arctic blast science [...]