Extreme Jet Stream

[Kojima]

[Nancy's blog and ZetaTalk]

* ZetaTalk Accuracy, It Just Doesn't Stop!

http://www.zetatalk.com/index/blog0906.htm

Jet Stream
And what about the atmosphere?
Are we getting vortexes in the atmosphere, in the jet stream? We are indeed!
On Jul 15, 1995 the Zetas stressed that the warming oceans were cause by a warmer Earth core, not Global Warming, as heat rises.
And a warmer ocean of course affects the jet stream overhead.

ZetaTalk: Heralding, written July 15, 1995

http://www.zetatalk.com/poleshft/p24.htm

So we have air turbulence due to warmer oceans.
But a second and more important factor affecting the jet stream is an Earth wobble.

ZetaTalk: Weather Wobble, written Dec 6, 2004

http://www.zetatalk.com/index/zeta184.htm

On May 25, 2005 the Zetas detailed how Jet Stream tornados were caused by the Earth wobble, increasing since 2004.

ZetaTalk: Jet Stream Tornadoes, written May 25, 2005

http://www.zetatalk.com/index/zeta222.htm

We have stressed, at the very start of the ZetaTalk saga, that the weather would get increasingly extreme, with droughts and deluges occurring and switching about in an unpredictable manner, and that this included unpredictable changes in the jet stream. The jet stream is affected primarily by the rotation of the Earth, the slow roll, which pulls the Earth under her blanket of air and creates swirling in the temperate regions, the prevailing Westerlies, as cold air from the poles rushes to drop into voids created by this motion. The jet stream is affected secondarily by warm and cold spots, warm over land masses that are more quickly heated or cooled than the ocean, which can circulate and maintain a more even distribution within its depths. Hot air is lighter than cold, and rises, cold heavier and drops, thus the storm systems attempting to equalize the density of air. The temperature and density and direction of air masses can be determined, and thus the weatherman has historically offered predictions, but these predictions have become increasingly difficult, in part because of the Earth wobble which jerks the Earth about under her mantel of air, often at cross currents to the jet stream. … 

On May 26, 2006 scientists confirmed that they had no answer for the changes in the jet stream, which are in fact making droughts more intractable.

So do the Zetas have an explanation where the weatherman does not, and predicted this ahead of time?
That the Earth wobble so well documented by ZetaTalk fans pulls the Earth under its mantel of air, creating cross currents?
Hey, what can I say! Zetas RIGHT Again!

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* 94 in Alaska? Weather extremes tied to jet stream [AP; 25 June 2013]

FILE - People swim and sunbathe at Goose Lake in Anchorage, Alaska on Monday, June 17, 2013. Alaska's largest city and other parts of the state are experiencing a long stretch of higher than normal temperatures. The jet stream, the river of air high above Earth that generally dictates the weather, usually rushes rapidly from west to east in a mostly straight direction. But lately it seems to be wobbling and weaving like a drunk driver, wreaking havoc as it goes. The most recent example is mid-June where some towns in Alaska hit record highs. (AP Photo/Rachel D'Oro)

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FILE - In this Sunday, June 23, 2013 file photo, floodwaters inundate homes in Medicine Hat, Alberta. Alberta's municipal affairs minister says 27 communities are under a state of emergency as some areas begin to recover from flooding while others are still bracing for it. Scientists say the erratic jet stream has been responsible for downpours that have led to historic floods in Alberta. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Nathan Denette, File)

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FILE - In this Friday, May 2, 2013 file photo, rhododendrons at the Garden Center of Cub Foods in Stillwater, Minn. are covered in snow after an early May snowfall. The jet stream's odd meanderings kicked off May with upside-down weather: early California wildfires fueled by heat contrasted with more than a foot of snow in Minnesota. Seattle was the hottest spot in the nation one day, and Maine and Edmonton, Canada were warmer than Miami and Phoenix. (AP Photo/St. Paul Pioneer Press, Jean Pieri)

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FILE - This Thursday, May 30, 2013 image provided by KFOR-TV shows a bolt of lightning from storm clouds moving over Guthrie, Okla. The jet stream, the river of air high above Earth that generally dictates the weather, usually rushes rapidly from west to east in a mostly straight direction. But lately it seems to be wobbling and weaving like a drunk driver, wreaking havoc as it goes. (AP Photo/KFOR-TV)

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FILE - In this Thursday, May 2, 2013 file photo, smoke billows from a fire burning in Point Mugu State Park during a wildfire that burned several thousand acres in Ventura County, Calif. The jet stream's odd meanderings kicked off May 2013 with upside-down weather, including early California wildfires fueled by heat. (AP Photo/Mark J. Terrill)

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Rutgers University Climate Scientist Jennifer Francis talks about the jet stream in front of an animation of the fast flowing air current during an interview in Washington, on Friday, June 7, 2013. "It's been just a crazy fall and winter and spring all along, following a very abnormal sea ice condition in the Arctic," Francis said, noting that last year set a record low for summer sea ice in the Arctic. "It's possible what we're seeing in this unusual weather is all connected." (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

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Map shows the paths of the Polar jet stream; 2c x 3 inches; 96.3 mm x 76 mm;

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Lately, the jet stream isn't playing by the rules. Scientists say that big river of air high above Earth that dictates much of the weather for the Northern Hemisphere has been unusually erratic the past few years.

They blame it for everything from snowstorms in May to the path of Superstorm Sandy.

And last week, it was responsible for downpours that led to historic floods in Alberta, Canada, as well as record-breaking heat in parts of Alaska, experts say. The town of McGrath, Alaska, hit 94. Just a few weeks earlier, the same spot was 15 degrees.

The current heat wave in the Northeast is also linked. "While it's not unusual to have a heat wave in the east in June, it is part of the anomalous jet stream pattern that was responsible for the flooding in Alberta," Rutgers University climate scientist Jennifer Francis said Tuesday in an email.

The jet stream usually rushes rapidly from west to east in a mostly straight direction. But lately it's been wobbling and weaving like a drunken driver, wreaking havoc as it goes. The more the jet stream undulates north and south, the more changeable and extreme the weather.

It's a relatively new phenomenon that scientists are still trying to understand. Some say it's related to global warming; others say it's not.

=>[ Note: See Main Establishment Lies; "global warming" or "climate change" ]

In May, there was upside-down weather: Early California wildfires fueled by heat contrasted with more than a foot of snow in Minnesota. Seattle was the hottest spot in the nation one day, and Maine and Edmonton, Canada, were warmer than Miami and Phoenix.

Consider these unusual occurrences over the past few years:

— The winter of 2011-12 seemed to disappear, with little snow and record warmth in March. That was followed by the winter of 2012-13 when nor'easters seemed to queue up to strike the same coastal areas repeatedly.

— Superstorm Sandy took an odd left turn in October from the Atlantic straight into New Jersey, something that happens once every 700 years or so.

— One 12-month period had a record number of tornadoes. That was followed by 12 months that set a record for lack of tornadoes.

And here is what federal weather officials call a "spring paradox": The U.S. had both an unusually large area of snow cover in March and April and a near-record low area of snow cover in May. The entire Northern Hemisphere had record snow coverage area in December but the third lowest snow extent for May.

"I've been doing meteorology for 30 years and the jet stream the last three years has done stuff I've never seen," said Jeff Masters, meteorology director at the private service Weather Underground. "The fact that the jet stream is unusual could be an indicator of something. I'm not saying we know what it is."

Rutgers' Francis is in the camp that thinks climate change is probably playing a role in this.

"It's been just a crazy fall and winter and spring all along, following a very abnormal sea ice condition in the Arctic," Francis said, noting that last year set a record low for summer sea ice in the Arctic. "It's possible what we're seeing in this unusual weather is all connected."

Other scientists don't make the sea ice and global warming connections that Francis does. They see random weather or long-term cycles at work. And even more scientists are taking a wait-and-see approach about this latest theory. It's far from a scientific consensus, but it is something that is being studied more often and getting a lot of scientific buzz.

"There are some viable hypotheses," Stanford University climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh said. "We're going to need more evidence to fully test those hypotheses."

The jet stream, or more precisely the polar jet stream, is the one that affects the Northern Hemisphere. It dips down from Alaska, across the United States or Canada, then across the Atlantic and over Europe and "has everything to do with the weather we experience," Francis said.

It all starts with the difference between cold temperatures in the Arctic and warmer temperatures in the mid-latitudes, she explained. The bigger the temperature difference, the stronger the jet stream, the faster it moves and the straighter it flows. But as the northern polar regions warm two to three times faster than the rest of the world, augmented by unprecedented melting of Arctic sea ice and loss in snow cover, the temperature difference shrinks. Then the jet stream slows and undulates more.

The jet stream is about 14 percent slower in the fall now than in the 1990s, according to a recent study by Francis. And when it slows, it moves north-south instead of east-west, bringing more unusual weather, creating blocking patterns and cutoff lows that are associated with weird weather, the Rutgers scientist said.

Mike Halpert, the deputy director of NOAA's Climate Prediction Center, said that recently the jet stream seems to create weather patterns that get stuck, making dry spells into droughts and hot days into heat waves.

Take the past two winters. They were as different as can be, but both had unusual jet stream activity. Normally, the jet stream plunges southwest from western Washington state, sloping across to Alabama. Then it curves slightly out to sea around the Outer Banks, a swoop that's generally straight without dramatic bends.

During the mostly snowless winter of 2011-12 and the record warm March 2012, the jet stream instead formed a giant upside-down U, curving dramatically in the opposite direction. That trapped warm air over much of the Eastern U.S. A year later the jet stream was again unusual, this time with a sharp U-turn north. This trapped colder and snowier weather in places like Chicago and caused nor'easters in New England, Francis said.

But for true extremes, nothing beats tornadoes.

In 2011, the United States was hit over and over by killer twisters. From June 2010 to May 2011 the U.S. had a record number of substantial tornadoes, totaling 1,050. Then just a year later came a record tornado drought. From May 2012 to April 2013 there were only 217 tornadoes — 30 fewer than the old record, said Harold Brooks, a meteorologist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory. Brooks said both examples were related to unusual jet stream patterns.

Last fall, a dip in the jet stream over the United States and northward bulge of high pressure combined to pull Superstorm Sandy almost due west into New Jersey, Francis said. That track is so rare and nearly unprecedented that computer models indicate it would happen only once every 714 years, according to a new study by NASA and Columbia University scientists.

"Everyone would agree that we are in a pattern" of extremes, NOAA research meteorologist Martin Hoerling said. "We don't know how long it will stay in this pattern."

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* Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog: 

Extreme Jet Stream Bringing U.S. Record Heat, Record Cold, and Flash Flooding: Posted by: Dr. Jeff Masters on July 03, 2013

The jet steam is exhibiting unusual behavior over the U.S., a pattern we've seen become increasingly common in summertime over the past decade. There's a sharp trough of low pressure over the Central U.S., and equally sharp ridges of high pressure over the Western U.S. and East Coast. Since the jet acts as the boundary between cool, Canadian air to the north and warm, subtropical air to the south, this means that hot extremes are penetrating unusually far to the north under the ridges of high pressure, and cold extremes are extending unusually far to the south under the trough of low pressure. The ridge over the Western U.S., though slowly weakening, is still exceptionally intense. This ridge, which on Sunday brought Earth its highest temperatures in a century (129°F or 54°C in Death Valley, California), was responsible for more record-breaking heat on Tuesday. July 2. Most notably, Redding, California hit 116°, just 2° short of their all-time record. Death Valley had a low of 104°, the second hottest night on record since 1920 (the hottest was just last summer!) Numerous daily high temperature records were set in Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Montana, Oregon, and Washington. It was the opposite story in the Central U.S., where the southwards-plunging jet stream allowed record cold air to invade Texas. Waco, Texas, hit 58°F this morning (July 3), the coldest temperature ever measured in July in the city. Numerous airports in Texas, Nebraska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kansas, and Missouri set new daily record low temperatures this morning. And over the Eastern U.S., the northward-pointing branch of the jet stream is creating a potentially dangerous flooding situation, by pulling a moisture-laden flow of tropical air from the Gulf of Mexico over the Florida Panhandle north-northeastward into the Appalachians. Up to five inches of rain is expected over this region over the next few days, and wunderground's severe weather map is showing flash flood warnings for locations in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina.

Figure 1. Jet stream winds in the upper atmosphere at a pressure level of 300 mb on July 3, 2013. The jet had an unusually extreme configuration for summer, with a sharp trough of low pressure over the Central U.S., and equally sharp ridges of high pressure over the Western U.S. and East Coast. Image from the wunderground jet stream page.

Figure 2. Predicted precipitation for the 7-day period ending Wednesday, July 10, 2013. Image credit: NOAA/HPC.

Third extreme jet stream pattern of the past five weeks

This week's extreme jet stream pattern is the third time in the past five weeks that we've seen a highly amplified ridge-trough pattern that has led to extreme weather. The others:

1) The end of May and beginning of June, when the $22 billion Central European floods occurred. A high pressure ridge became stuck over northern Scandanavia, causing all-time May heat records--as high as 87°F--at stations north of the Arctic Circle in Finland. The high pressure ridge blocked low pressure systems from moving north, and a series of two low pressure systems dumped record rains over Austria and Germany, creating the highest floods ever seen on portions of the Danube River. The $22 billion price tag made it the 5th most expensive non-U.S. weather-related disaster in world history.

2) June 18 - 22, when a ridge of high pressure over Alaska broke all-time heat records in the state, with unofficial readings as high as 98°F. A low pressure system became trapped over Alberta, Canada, bringing the city of Calgary a $3 billion flood disaster. This was the most expensive flood in Canadian history, and third most expensive natural disaster of any kind for the country. The only more expensive disasters were a 1989 wildfire ($4.2 billion) and a 1977 drought ($3 billion.)

As I discussed in a March 2013 post, "Are atmospheric flow patterns favorable for summer extreme weather..., research published this year by scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in German found that extreme summertime jet stream patterns had become twice as common during 2001 - 2012 compared to the previous 22 years. One of these extreme patterns occurred in August 2002, during Central Europe's previous 1-in-100 to 1-in-500 year flood. When the jet stream goes into one of these extreme configurations, it freezes in its tracks for weeks, resulting in an extended period of extreme heat or flooding, depending upon where the high-amplitude part of the jet stream lies. The scientists found that because human-caused global warming is causing the Arctic to heat up more than twice as rapidly as the rest of the planet, a unique resonance pattern capable of causing this behavior was resulting. 

=>[ Note: See Main Establishment Lies; "global warming" or "climate change" ]

 According to an email I received from German climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf, one of the co-authors of the study, unusually extreme jet stream amplitudes likely played a role in the May - June Central European flooding event.

Tropical disturbance in the Gulf of Mexico

Yellow means caution: the National Hurricane Center (NHC) has drawn a yellow circle on their Graphical Tropical Weather Outlook around an area of disturbed weather in the Gulf of Mexico. In their 8 am EDT July 2 outlook, NHC gave the region a 10% chance of developing into a tropical depression or tropical storm by Friday. Satellite loops show only minimal heavy thunderstorm activity associated with the disturbance, which is suffering from high wind shear of 20 - 30 knots. Dry air due to the presence of an upper-level trough of low pressure over the Western Gulf of Mexico is also interfering with development. The upper-level trough is expected to weaken and pull to the north late this week, bringing more favorable conditions for development over the Southern Gulf of Mexico's Bay of Campeche by Friday. The atmosphere will moisten and wind shear may fall to the moderate range, 10 - 20 knots. The disturbance should move west to west-northwest, arriving near the Texas/Mexico border region on Monday or Tuesday. None of the reliable forecast models predict the disturbance will develop.

Elsewhere in the Atlantic

A large upper-level cold-cored low pressure system over the middle of the North Atlantic will move to the southwest during the week, and this low is expected to arrive in the Bahamas by Sunday and South Florida by Monday. Although the models do not show that this low will will acquire a surface circulation and develop tropical characteristics, it will be worth watching for development late this week.

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* Death Valley Claims A Heat Title Again [Earth Observatory; 4 July 2013]

The heat wave that gripped the western United States this week may have set an all-time record in Death Valley National Park, California. The air temperature rose to 129.2 °Fahrenheit (54 °Celsius) at the Furnace Creek Visitor's Center on June 30, 2013, possibly breaking the all-time record high June temperature for the United States (set in Volcano, California, on June 23, 1902). A sharp bend in the jet stream trapped a strong ridge of high pressure over the western U.S., leading to an extreme heat wave and record temperatures.

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See also;

* Wild Weather, the Wobble Effect

* Earth Wobble Mechanics