Saturday, October 19, 2024

Old hurricanes inject the Arctic with energy

 


We have a difficult mechanics question here.  The past few years, our winters have been dominated by huge Arctic air flows, and cold blobs.  But, how can the Arctic keep doing this?  We must have conservation of mass.  What goes out, must come in.

In the winter, the Arctic becomes the Earth's big freezer.  We know that freezers just shift heat energy around.  The Arctic sheds heat through clear-air convection.  At the same time, it must be fed with heat energy, in order to cool the surrounding areas.  We can see this here, where the hurricane plumes are going to the elephant graveyard to die.  

The plumes shed the heat, but leave the moisture in the form of snow.  This is acting as a pump to get out the cold blobs.  The details have to wait for somebody to do physics here.  I have no clue.  Nevertheless, I feel it is essential for Arctic blobs to have a feed of tropical plumes.  This is just a big steam-punk machine of cold.

The other thing is that the Arctic oscillates.  Right now, it is in 'recharge mode', and has shown this pattern in the last few years.  It will be warmer than expected for a week or two.  Then, watch out.

You can see this with the anomaly plot, which shows the actual temperature, minus what is expected.


The Arctic is warmer than expected, but not really warm.


These are the minimum temperatures, which are more significant than daytime peaks.  When the Arctic is ready to blow, Greenland will hit 60 below.  This is my hypothesis that the Arctic is a giant 'headpond' of cold air, and it overflows down channels.  A sudden outbreak forms a blob, but we have had years with continuous flow.  This last happened over Siberia and Asia, and was ignored.

The hypothesis goes on that these outbreak channels move around and are formed by the topography.  Thus, the very cold air acts as water, and has floods.  My worst-case scenario is a continuous channel over the UK and Europe, giving a true Little Ice Age.  This is most likely to happen this winter.

But, the grasshoppers can dance, and not worry about physics.  Let's have a party!


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