The North Pole is Above Freezing

[BillTre]

Temperatures at the North Pole are above freezing!
Its winter at the north pole, and the sun won't raise there until March 20.

There is also a patch of ice free water north of Greenland!
Washington Post article here.

This used to be unusual.
The times they are a changing!

 

[berkeman]

Road trip!

 

[BillTre]

Take a boat!

 

[Evo]

Seems the Artic air moved to the UK

https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/europ...vel-chaos-in-britain-deaths-in-romania-poland

Commuters have been warned to expect travel disruption as a snowy blast dubbed "the Beast from the East" hits Britain. Some parts of the UK are set to feel colder than the Arctic Circle as freezing.

 

[davenn]

Seems the Artic air moved to the UK

yeah, because it's definitely freezing there
and parts of SE Europe have just gone through blizzard conditions as wellD

 

[dextercioby]

It's called sudden stratospheric warming. This splitted the Polar vortex and a mass of very cold air was thrown into Europe. This triggered Mediterranean cyclogenesis in the South and Atlantic cyclogenesis in the British Isles.

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/learning/learn-about-the-weather/how-weather-works/sudden-stratospheric-warming

 

[davenn]

It's called sudden stratospheric warming. This splitted the Polar vortex and a mass of very cold air was thrown into Europe. This triggered Mediterranean cyclogenesis in the South and Atlantic cyclogenesis in the British Isles.

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/learning/learn-about-the-weather/how-weather-works/sudden-stratospheric-warming

cool ... not something I was aware of

thanks
Dave

 

[Tom Kunich]

Temperatures at the North Pole are above freezing!
Its winter at the north pole, and the sun won't raise there until March 20.

There is also a patch of ice free water north of Greenland!
Washington Post article here.

This used to be unusual.
The times they are a changing!

Around 1955 the USS nuclear submarine Skate surfaced into clear water at the north pole. The following year the USS Nautilus did the same. The third year the Skate again surfaced but this time through a think coating of ice. Around 85 sextillion watts of power are rained down upon the Earth from the Sun. If it is colder in the lower latitudes due to weather patterns the heat has to go somewhere.

 

[davenn]

Around 85 sextillion watts of power are rained down upon the Earth from the Sun.

HUH ??

 

[Tom Kunich]

HUH ??

Let's see if I screwed up the calculation. 197 million square miles for the Earth's surface. That's 2,600,000 m^2 per mile^2 for 512 Trillion m^2 surface area. That's 512 quadrillion watts @ 1,000 watts/m^2 hitting the surface in the temperate zones for a close approximation for the entire surface. Somehow I must have gotten the wrong conversion factor doing it in my head.

This of course includes the quantity absorbed by the atmosphere. Radiation occurs near the land surface and is absorbed and can be re-radiated on warm days half towards and half away many times. Basically heat motion in the Troposphere is handled almost entirely by conduction and convection. In the Stratosphere almost entirely by radiation. Since the heated atmosphere reaches the Tropopause and into the Stratosphere via conduction the heat content of the atmospheric gases is below that of radiation and hence they have to be heated to the point of radiation by the Sun's emissions. This is why the atmospheric temperature rises between the Tropopause and Stratopause.

But this doesn't effect that fact that about the same amount of heat hits the surface of the planet every day. If it is colder than normal somewhere it has to be warmer than normal elsewhere.

In the Maunder Minimum (little ice age) - 1660 to be exact - a Portuguese ships captain left Japan and sailed through the Arctic Ocean to Portugal. Navigation in those days was latitude and speed. So he must have used only the Sextants reading of the Sun's angle and sailed directly through the Arctic Ocean. The idea that he could have somehow discovered the Northwest Passage is rediculous to those of us who have sailed small boats over distances. If memory serves it took several years for the first explorer to find and complete the Northwest Passage.

 

[davenn]

But this doesn't effect that fact that about the same amount of heat hits the surface of the planet every day. If it is colder than normal somewhere it has to be warmer than normal elsewhere.

that isn't a logical assumption and here is why ...

have you never seen a heat flow diagram for the Earth ?
just in case you haven't, here is one ...

Dave

 

[Tom Kunich]

If you don't understand the heat balance diagrams you probably shouldn't hold them up for discussion. That is only a crude representation of what is occurring and if you don't believe that atmosphere isn't a great deal more complex than that perhaps you should study it more.

For instance: that diagram shows a large part of the energy radiated. Firstly the heat from oceans is far too small to radiate and instead conducts into the atmosphere. That from land radiates but is caught almost entirely by H2O in my estimation within a meter and in other's view within 10 meters. So while the energy indeed is radiated, it almost immediately becomes trapped in the normal atmospheric gases and is conducted and not radiated into the upper layers.

https://atmos.washington.edu/~dargan/587/atmosphericstructure.pdf

You can see the linear temperature regression from the ground level to the stratosphere whereup it reverses.

 

[davenn]

If you don't understand the heat balance diagrams you probably shouldn't hold them up for discussion. That is only a crude representation of what is occurring and if you don't believe that atmosphere isn't a great deal more complex than that perhaps you should study it more.

hahaha Ohhhh dear ... straight for the jugular ... you have a wonderful sense of humour

https://atmos.washington.edu/~dargan/587/atmosphericstructure.pdf

You can see the linear temperature regression from the ground level to the stratosphere whereup it reverses.

you are not telling me anything I don't already know

 

[willem2]

But this doesn't effect that fact that about the same amount of heat hits the surface of the planet every day. If it is colder than normal somewhere it has to be warmer than normal elsewhere.

that isn't a logical assumption and here is why ...

I agree with that it isn't a logical assumption. If it is warmer than usual over here, because it is summer and there are no clouds, that doesn't have to make it cooler than usual elsewhere. If it's warmer than usual because, there is a wind from the south, there will have to be a wind from the north somewhere to compensate, but that does not have to result in the same amount of cooling. If it's colder than usual because there's snow on the ground, that does not produce warmer than usual temperatures anywhere else.

have you never seen a heat flow diagram for the Earth ?
just in case you haven't, here is one ...

I'm not certain what you meant with this heat flow diagram.

 

[Tom Kunich]

I agree with that it isn't a logical assumption. If it is warmer than usual over here, because it is summer and there are no clouds, that doesn't have to make it cooler than usual elsewhere. If it's warmer than usual because, there is a wind from the south, there will have to be a wind from the north somewhere to compensate, but that does not have to result in the same amount of cooling. If it's colder than usual because there's snow on the ground, that does not produce warmer than usual temperatures anywhere else.

I'm not certain what you meant with this heat flow diagram.

That is a high school science class representation of energy flow and the heat budget of the Earth. It is correct for as far as it goes. But it isn't detailed enough for people that do not have sufficient knowledge to understand exactly how heat transfer happens. For instance - 70% of the Earth is covered with oceans and they are not warm enough to radiate heat and in most cases not warm enough to have evaporative cooling. This means that the method by which there is a heat exchange is by direct conduction. The land areas can get warm enough that they radiate heat and also heat the adjacent air to the point of radiation. But this is trapped very rapidly in the H2O very close to the ground and then reverts to conduction.

That heat budget chart simply is a general display that gives a general knowledge with no specifics.

 

[willem2]

That heat budget chart simply is a general display that gives a general knowledge with no specifics.

At the start of this thread someone mentioned that it was unusually warm at the north pole, and then it was mentioned it was cold in Europe, your comment:

But this doesn't effect that fact that about the same amount of heat hits the surface of the planet every day. If it is colder than normal somewhere it has to be warmer than normal elsewhere.

seems to link these two.

I don't really see a reason for this to happen in general, and it was this I wanted to discuss, rather than everything wrong with the heat budget chart.

 

[rootone]

An unusual but not unprecedented weather event occurred,
Warmer air streaming toward the North pole led to displacement of cold air over Siberia.
The mass of air established as a high pressure system over Scandinavia producing cold Easterly winds over all of Europe.
It has happened before though and may or not be related to global warming generally

 

[Evo]

At the start of this thread someone mentioned that it was unusually warm at the north pole, and then it was mentioned it was cold in Europe, your comment:

I posted the sub arctic weather in Europe. I wanted to point out that it doesn't matter if one area is temporarily warmer or colder, somewhere else will also be warmer or colder. That's not what the discussions of climate science in this sub forum are supposed to be about. It's not supposed to be about the weather.

The cause for the warm weather in the Arctic as well as the cold air in Europe was a weather event explained in post #6

It's called sudden stratospheric warming. This splitted the Polar vortex and a mass of very cold air was thrown into Europe. This triggered Mediterranean cyclogenesis in the South and Atlantic cyclogenesis in the British Isles.

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/learning/learn-about-the-weather/how-weather-works/sudden-stratospheric-warming

 

[Borek]

Let's see if I screwed up the calculation. 197 million square miles for the Earth's surface. That's 2,600,000 m^2 per mile^2 for 512 Trillion m^2 surface area.

You lecture us on the heat balance, yet you forget to take into account fact only half of the Earth's surface is under the Sun at every moment? Funny.

 

[Evo]

People are posting without following the rules posted for Climate discussion, thread closed.