North Pole Experienced 4 C (40 F) This Week, in the Dead of Winter

A weather anomaly sweeping across the world could cause temperatures at the North Pole to reach nearly 4 C this week.

Texas, Australia and England are just a few of the regions that have seen a spate of extreme weather this month, including tornadoes, brush fires and flooding. Now, forecasters say the North Pole is seeing temperatures well above normal.

CBC North's resident meteorologist, Ashley Brauweiler, says the severe weather system that wreaked havoc in the U.S. and beyond is the reason.

"We have temperatures above zero near the poles and that's because the jet stream is bringing that warm air from the south up and along Greenland and Iceland. While storms here are normal, the strength of the storm isn't," Brauweiler said.

"They're seeing the same storms that were affecting the southern [U.S.] states."

At the North Pole on Thursday, temperatures are expected to hit 3 C. On New Year's Day it will be nearly 4 C.

link.

The North Pole, in the darkest time of the year, experienced warmer temperatures than parts of the SF Bay Area in California at night.  Consider that for a moment.

hat tip to Randy.

How Volcanic Eruptions & Sulfur can Effect Clouds

It has long been suspected that sulfur emissions can brighten clouds. Water droplets tend to clump around particles of sulfuric acid, causing smaller droplets that form brighter, more reflective clouds.

But while humans have pumped sulfur into Earth's atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, it's been hard to measure how this affects the clouds above. New University of Washington research uses a huge volcanic eruption in Iceland to measure the change.

The new study, to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, shows that sulfur emissions do indeed result in smaller cloud droplet size, leading to brighter clouds that reflect significantly more sunlight.

"This eruption is a chance to nail down one of the big uncertainties in climate models," said first author Daniel McCoy, a UW doctoral student in atmospheric sciences.

The study takes advantage of a unique geologic event. During six months from summer 2014 until early 2015, a crack in the Bardarbunga volcano seeped lava and sulfur gas. This was not one of Iceland's huge explosive eruptions that fill the skies with ash and shut down airplane routes. Instead it was a long, slow, low-elevation seep of sulfur emissions that produced an amount of lava second only to Laki in the recent history of Iceland eruptions.

The UW researchers looked at data for that region recorded by NASA's MODIS, or Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, instrument to measure the size of droplets in the marine cloud layer. While the volcano was spewing sulfur, the droplets were the smallest in the 14-year record of observations.

"You can see the effect over an entire ocean for a two-month period," McCoy said. "It was a pretty unique geophysical event within the satellite record."

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Heaven Glimpsed in China??? :)

What really probably happened.

Weather, Climate Extremes are Here to Stay Under Global Warming

In a paper published online today in the journal Scientific Reports, published by Nature, Northeastern researchers Evan Kodra and Auroop Ganguly found that while global temperature is indeed increasing, so too is the variability in temperature extremes. For instance, while each year's average hottest and coldest temperatures will likely rise, those averages will also tend to fall within a wider range of potential high and low temperate extremes than are currently being observed. This means that even as overall temperatures rise, we may still continue to experience extreme cold snaps, said Kodra.

"Just because you have a year that's colder than the usual over the last decade isn't a rejection of the global warming hypothesis," Kodra explained.

With funding from a $10-million multi-university Expeditions in Computing grant, the duo used computational tools from big data science for the first time in order to extract nuanced insights about climate extremes.

The research also opens new areas of interest for future work, both in climate and data science. It suggests that the natural processes that drive weather anomalies today could continue to do so in a warming future. For instance, the team speculates that ice melt in hotter years may cause colder subsequent winters, but these hypotheses can only be confirmed in physics-based studies.

link.

Saved (not quite) by a Watery Pseudopod

Hubble & Spitzer Image Weather of a Brown Dwarf

Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes have probed the stormy atmosphere of a brown dwarf, creating the most detailed "weather map" yet for this class of cool, star-like orbs. The forecast shows wind-driven, planet-sized clouds enshrouding these strange worlds.

Brown dwarfs form out of condensing gas, as stars do, but lack the mass to fuse hydrogen atoms and produce energy. Instead, these objects, which some call failed stars, are more similar to gas planets with their complex, varied atmospheres. The new research is a stepping-stone toward a better understanding not only of brown dwarfs, but also of the atmospheres of planets beyond our solar system.

"With Hubble and Spitzer, we were able to look at different atmospheric layers of a brown dwarf, similar to the way doctors use medical imaging techniques to study the different tissues in your body," said Daniel Apai, the principal investigator of the research at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who presented the results at the American Astronomical Society meeting Tuesday in Long Beach, Calif.

A study describing the results, led by Esther Buenzli, also of the University of Arizona, is published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The researchers turned Hubble and Spitzer simultaneously toward a brown dwarf with the long name of 2MASSJ22282889-431026. They found that its light varied in time, brightening and dimming about every 90 minutes as the body rotated. But more surprising, the team also found the timing of this change in brightness depended on whether they looked using different wavelengths of infrared light.

These variations are the result of different layers or patches of material swirling around the brown dwarf in windy storms as large as Earth itself. Spitzer and Hubble see different atmospheric layers because certain infrared wavelengths are blocked by vapors of water and methane high up, while other infrared wavelengths emerge from much deeper layers.

"Unlike the water clouds of Earth or the ammonia clouds of Jupiter, clouds on brown dwarfs are composed of hot grains of sand, liquid drops of iron, and other exotic compounds," said Mark Marley, research scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., and co-author of the paper. "So this large atmospheric disturbance found by Spitzer and Hubble gives a new meaning to the concept of extreme weather."

Buenzli says this is the first time researchers can probe variability at several different altitudes at the same time in the atmosphere of a brown dwarf. "Although brown dwarfs are cool relative to other stars, they are actually hot by earthly standards. This particular object is about 1,100 to 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit (600 to 700 degrees Celsius)," Buenzli said.

"What we see here is evidence for massive, organized cloud systems, perhaps akin to giant versions of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter," said Adam Showman, a theorist at the University of Arizona involved in the research. "These out-of-sync light variations provide a fingerprint of how the brown dwarf's weather systems stack up vertically. The data suggest regions on the brown dwarf where the weather is cloudy and rich in silicate vapor deep in the atmosphere coincide with balmier, drier conditions at higher altitudes -- and vice versa."

The Weather We Just Had

And may be about to have, it's all the fault of atmospheric rivers.