Blog Archive

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Is the jet stream broken?

Dear Readers,

Some years ago, it seemed to me that, someday, the massive amounts of hot air being pumped out of the oceans in the Equatorial regions, subsequently transported to the poles of the respective hemispheres, would do two things.  (1) The poles would gradually warm up.  (2) The cap of cold air that sat up around the North Pole would weaken, dwindle, and eventually get pushed out of the way, i.e., to the south.  And then, of course, the winds that used to circle below that cap of cold air would go haywire.

I didn't actually think that this would all occur really soon, but there are signs that it might be.  This is starting to look like the shape of things to come.

Below is a link to a 30-day animation of global temperature anomalies -- it is easiest to focus on one geographical location and watch what happens there, for example, the northwestern provinces of Canada.  There you can see the cold has been pushed out of the Arctic and down into southern Canada.  (It takes a while to load.)

Link:  http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/images/fnl/sfctmpmer_01a_30frames.fnl.anim.html

Click on images to enlarge them.

Image from January 07, 2011:


Image from January 14, 2011:


Image from January 21, 2011:



Image from January 31, 2011:



Here is a graphic of today's jet stream:

Below is a depiction (from The Weather Channel) of current temperatures for February 1, 2011:

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

hi tenney, yes I also observe that with worry. we are living right in the affected zone up here in maritime europe. I could say the usual helpless things, but for now I´ll leave it at thanking you for keeping up this web news collection and raising awareness.

Tenney Naumer said...

Well, I did exaggerate -- it can't exactly be broken, but that Arctic air should not be down south like that.