Not enough driving winds to move them around. They need a nearby low pressure system to create wind. A large area of high pressure is like a fan pointing at the floor. It will tend to blow all other weather systems away, (floor dust moves away in all directions) which creates stable pockets of warm air, especially as cooler air from higher up warms when it gets compressed as it descends to ground level. A low pressure system is like a fan pointing up. It socks all other nearby systems closer, thereby creating large pressure differentials within shorter distances and that causes a lot of air to move around. They eventually collide and drift off in the confusion.
Watching the weather person tonight, it looks like the same old high pressure area that has hung around for the last 4 months is still there.
What can cause that? Its obvious that the main cause of weather extremes is high and low pressure areas and winds aloft and has nothing to do with gases. Do we not have a jet stream anymore?
The technical term is 'heat dome', and these remain in place until pushed out by an 'Alberta Clipper' or an 'Arctic Vortex'.
I am convinced that the sheer volume of BS jargon created by TV weather spokespeople is capable of changing weather patterns. Their hot air alone is a minor but significant contributor to global warming. (And why do they say 'your overnight'? It's not mine!)
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts."
Not a climate scientist but - the jet streams getting weakened, so its getting wavy and ill defined. The wobbly sections can "trap" a front over over a spot for an extended period (see PNW heat wave).
Whereas before the jet stream was general strong/tight (more or less circular), the weakened/wavy jet stream can cause regional issues.
Yes, that's the conclusion reached by a number of studies over the past roughly 8 years. Michael Mann and Jennifer Francis come to mind as two lead authors. Paul Beckwith does good (but somewhat dreary) breakdowns on YouTube of the current state of understanding. He's really one of the few scientists who can explain things quickly and in an understandable way, and without being scared to offer his own opinion.
I've been interested in climate change since my late dad explained it to me before he passed in 2010. He was an astrophysicist involved with solar system exploration at both NASA and the ESA, and promoted the Voyager programs long ago.
So, in short, initiated by the increase in global average temperature, the arctic sea ice is additionally suffering from the positive feedback of 'albedo' as ice coverage slowly drops - that is, higher surface heat absorption caused by the darker colour of water v.s. white ice during summer.
Greenland on the other hand is still very cold because it's primarily thick land ice. The northern polar jet stream is influenced by both the "cold centers" and the Earth's rotational axis. I expect that the offset position of Greenland has long contributed to the classic subtropical trough and ridge pattern seen across N. America, however with Greenland becoming predominantly colder the higher polar jet stream is more often elongated or broken up into two or three loops.
That combination of polar jet stream loops pushes the lower subtropical jet stream further towards the equator and it tends to stay in one pattern for some days. If you go to
and check out the jetstreams at an elevations of 70 and 250 hPa you can see this effect.
So, these unusually deep subtropical (Rossby) waves both pull cold arctic air down and hot equatorial air up, creating the bizarre combinations of extreme cold and hot weather the US has seen in the last few years. There's no plausible way this is going to improve because arctic sea ice is due to disappear entirely during summer no later than 2045; according to conservative studies presented at AGU conferences. Beckwith thinks it will be much earlier. We're basically watching the arctic dying in front of our eyes and not doing anything about it.
If you look at regional global average temperature anomaly by year, N. America is often neutral because of the unusual coldness, while the remainder of the globe indicates warming similar to the global average. The temperature extremes in N. America are of course wider but that doesn't show up in annual stats because it's averaged out.
The southern hemisphere is more stable thanks to the Antarctica which is roughly round and centered on the Earth's rotational axis.
Mercator projection exaggerates northern areas... just a feature of trying to put a spherical surface on a flat piece of paper.
Alaska is far larger than Texas, by a factor of approx 2.5x. A couple of decades back, I was working on a project in Northern Ontario and there were a couple of Texas 'pushers' on site. During one meeting I asked one of them, "Is it true that Clinton was going to cut Alaska in two and make Texas the third largest state?" He replied, "I wouldn't be surprised at anything that *ssh*le would do (I'm not trying to be political; it was just funny)."
Rather than think climate change and the corona virus as science, think of it as the wrath of God. Feel any better?
The winds and pressures are the gases. They are powered by heat which comes primarily from the sun and earthly sources though I don't know how much heat makes it from the core to the atmosphere.
air is a fluid, albeit compressible... by gas, I think he's referring to air, which is a mixture of gasses. Wind is caused by the flow of fluids from high pressure to a lower pressure.
Rather than think climate change and the corona virus as science, think of it as the wrath of God. Feel any better?
Maybe global warming is a good thing. A little extra CO2 insulation keeps our core molten and spinning. Otherwise, our atmosphere could simply blow away like Mars' did. Got to think long term here
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