From NASA Goddard, something reminiscent of last year’s blocking high for the heat wave in Russia.
NASA Satellite Observes Unusually Hot July in the Great Plains
Andrey Savtchenko and Adam Voiland NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Much of the United States sweated through an unusually humid heat wave during July, a month that brought record-breaking temperatures to many areas across the Great Plains. As temperatures soared, NASA satellites observed the unusual weather from above.
The Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS), an instrument launched on the Aqua satellite in 2002, is unique in its ability to yield highly accurate data about the troposphere, the lowest layer of the atmosphere and the part that most directly affects life on Earth.
Hot temperatures struck Texas and Oklahoma particularly hard, AIRS observed. Large swaths of both of these states persistently experienced highs above 100° F (311 K) during the day for the month of July. Nights offered only minimal relief with low temperatures averaging close to 90° F (305 K) for the month. That’s about 20° F warmer, both day and night, than the average July temperatures for the past eight years of AIRS observations.
Night and day time temperatures during July were significantly warmer than has been typical over the last eight years. As seen in the top graphic, the heat remained anonymously over much of the country at night. (Credit: NASA/Goddard Earth Science Data and Information Center)
AIRS also offered clues about what may have caused the persistent heat spell. Domes of high atmospheric surface pressure (corresponding to the red colors in the figure below) normally intensify in the summer over both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, AIRS data shows they were abnormally strong in July.
An area of high pressure in the North Atlantic likely helped fuel the heat wave. (Credit: NASA/Goddard Earth Science Data and Information Center)
Meanwhile, AIRS data for the month of July (below) reveals a clock-wise vortex of winds (shown with arrows beow) driven by the high pressure in the North Atlantic. The vortex continuously pumped hot and humid air from the tropics through the heart of the Gulf of Mexico and into much of the continental United States throughout July.
Note the hot tropical air being pumped towards Texas and Oklahoma. (Credit: NASA/Goddard Earth Science Data and Information Center)
The jet stream, which typically produces loops around low-pressure areas that break off and brings cooler air and precipitation, offered little relief. As seen below, the flow of the jet stream (approximated by green and yellow) instead consistently bulged over the high-pressure aloft over the United States (shown in red).
Note the unusual bulge in the jet stream over the center of the country. (Credit: NASA/Goddard Earth Science Data and Information Center)
AIRS data are distributed by the Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. AIRS is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., under contract to NASA. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. GOES-5 is a product of the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at Goddard Space Flight Center.
Related Links
› NASA Data Reveals Anomalously Hot Summer
› About the Goddard Earth Sciences (GES) Data and Information Services Center (DISC)
› About the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS)
“The vortex continuously pumped hot and humid air from the tropics through the heart of the Gulf of Mexico and into much of the continental United States throughout July.”
There you have your problem. moist air is like a blanket. It does not let the heat escape from your body and in the same way it lets not escape the heat from the surface. People near a warm sea know the difference (I live in Barcelona) if the wind comes from sea or from land specialy during the night. If the night is warmer the day starts warmer so it is not difficult to get higher average temperatures. It is ‘bad’ for us but plants love it The problem for a plant is hot dry air.
We have had a high pressure region over the UK for the past few days with well below average temperatures and 8/8ths cloud cover due to— over convection. That is a new one on me since convection is a temperature controlled heat loss situation how ‘over convection’ occurs I have no idea. More like a quiet sun and less energy flowing down to the surface.
More blocking means a cooling global climate system.
Less blocking means a warming global climate system.
Measuring the point of balance where one segues into the other is the real task for the future.
In contrast, N Europe has had one of the coldest summers of the last 20 or 30 years.
Also, noticed on BBC Breakfast show. Presenter to weatherman:
“What’s happened to your Global Warming? – Oh, I am not supposed to ask that, am I?”
Typical of the Biased Broadcasting Corporation’s guidelines.
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Not to be a tool, but that isn’t a mercator projection. Greenland looks much, much larger in a mercator which maintains true bearing between any two points, making it outstanding for navigation. I’m pretty sure the above map a Miller Cylindrical which is similar to a mercator in that it is a cylindrical projection, but it compromises true direction (rhumb line) to reduce magnitude distortions at the high latitudes. Using inappropriate projections is a huge pet peeve of mine. It’s very, very easy to distort the truth with maps.
But yes, you’re correct in that it is a terrible projection to use for this purpose. There are numerous projections that are much more appropriate for displaying a continental map and there is software that can change projections in a matter of milliseconds these days. Back in the early days of computers changing projections was a monumental task.
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Anything is possible says:
August 31, 2011 at 6:19 pm
You’ve got to love the way the Mercator projection makes Greenland look bigger than the USA, when it is actually less than a quarter of the size. It lets Jim run amok with his pink crayon all over the Arctic, even though there is very little data up there…..
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Here’s a really good resource for map projections. Used the hard copy to train new employees back when I worked in a map library.
http://egsc.usgs.gov/isb/pubs/MapProjections/projections.html
I’m reading “Battle Cry Of Freedom”, a very thorough chronicle of the Civil War, penned by James McPherson. It covers the decades before and I am assuming, after the Civil War as well as the war itself. There is mention here and there of hot weather similar to the above. I would not say this is unusual. It is easily explained and happens not unusually during La Nina and La Nada conditions under the cold regime we apparently are in regarding ENSO long term oscillations. It includes the cold in the western portions of the US.
Here in Oklahoma, we set a national record in July, 2011 with an overall average temperature of 89.1F degrees, 2 degrees higher than Texas during the same month. 89.1F is the highest monthy average ever recorded in the US, beating out interestingly enough the old record set in the 1950’s by…Oklahoma.
I guess we just can’t catch a break.
Ken
The heat in the great plains may have been caused by the exceptionally dry winter we had here in Texas. Soil conditions in April resembled those normaly found only in August. Lack of humidity means increased solar insolation. By June the ground the ground was too hot to walk barefoot on and my tap water was warm enough to shower in without using hot water.
I concur, Ack. It isn’t the heat that has been terrible, it’s been the humidity.
This is what Piers Corbyn predicted was it not?
http://www.weatheraction.com/
See my special Piers corbyn page at the website
linked to the name “Axel” above. Click it now !
Choose Corbyn Vs Met Office page from the
Quick Page Menu button. (top left of each page)
Can we stop calling temperatures ‘hot’ or ‘cold’?
Temps are numbers, that is to say abstract objects,
not physical, heat-generating objects.
It’s the air that’s hot or cold, humid or dry.
Temps are high or low, which are merely metaphors for greater or lesser.
Interstellar Bill says:
September 1, 2011 at 9:30 am
Well said! But the idiom rules. We will never eliminate “The temperature here is freezing!” And that is OK with me. (TV meteorologists are another matter entirely. They should know better and speak better.)
Stephen Wilde says:
September 1, 2011 at 3:23 am
“More blocking means a cooling global climate system.
Less blocking means a warming global climate system.”
Do you have the evidence near at hand? In other words, could you elaborate a bit?
I planted a row of Leland Cypress as a wind break because I’m at 2200 ft. up on a ridge and the winter wind is a bear. In 6 years many of them are 18-20 ft. tall, they grow fast and are as tough as the Mohorovičić Discontinuity! The big ice storm of 2009 didn’t break them down. Heavy snowstorms and this drought didn’t bother them at all. They are a perfect snow fence, catching the blowing snow into a drift. I’m going to plant some more of them for sure.
Theo Goodwin says:
September 1, 2011 at 10:11 am
“Do you have the evidence near at hand? In other words, could you elaborate a bit?”
Sure, here you go:
http://www.irishweatheronline.com/news/environment/wilde-weather/the-sun-could-control-earths-temperature/290.html
As usual the extrapolation of some NE Canada and certain Northern Europe stations makes the whole Arctic have a supposed “positive anomaly.”
Yes, Texas gets hot in the summer, but it is unheard of (since record keeping started) for the Panhandle to be so hot for so long. This area varies in altitude from 2000 – 5000 feet and while we may get into the 100s for a few days, to go into the 100s for over 50 days (Amarillo) or close to 100 days (Childress, in the southeastern Panhandle just off the edge of the Llano Estacado Plateau) is exceedingly unusual. The drought has contributed to this heat and the two reinforce each other’s effects under the capping effect of that persistent high. The closest similar period I’ve found was in the 1850s-1860s, and that lasted almost 15 years, if the proxy data and peripheral records are correct. The 1950s are another similar episode, but even then there was more rain than the area has seen this water year.
I’m looking forward to a change!
Given its religious nature, global warming isn’t very omnipresent, is it? Texas one year, Moscow another, Victoria in Oz the year before.
Anyone would think it was just weather, rather than a well-mixed irreversible turning-up of the control knob.
I wish, oh how I wish, they would not say “than normal” when referring to weather. on a day when the sun is shining, what they call ‘Warmer than normal’ is warmer than an average of sunny days, rainy days, days with a low pressure cell, days with whatever else happening. Not warmer than a normal sunny day.
Is the weather finally cooling off in Texas? The long-range forecasts are predicting lower temps by the start of next week.
I’m smack dab in the center of the “heat wave” and while air temperature has been high the water temperature of Lake Travis is not abnormally high. It’s 88F at surface behind the dam (200 feet deep water there) and that’s quite normal for this time of year. I’ve seen it get to 89F in less remarkably warm summers.
The explanation for this dichotomy is pan evaporation rate. The abnormally warm air is also abnormally dry air. This raises the pan evaporation which cools the water.
This is little solace for the oppressive heat except for aquatic species which prefer cooler water but it underscores a very important point. The primary means of heating a deep body of water is sunlight during the day and the primary means of cooling is evaporation that goes on 24 hours a day.
This is true for deep inland lake whose shore I live upon and it’s true for the 70% of the earth’s surface covered by the global ocean. There is very little greenhouse gas effect over the ocean because of the different way that water is heated and cooled versus land. So-called downwelling long wave infrared reflected back to the surface by GHGs does not significantly slow down the rate of heat loss. DLIR is completely absorbed by a skin layer of water just a few micrometers deep. This absorbed energy doesn’t mix downward for a number of reasons including warmer water is less dense and rises to the surface to viscosity in the skin layer being the dominant force. All the DLIR does is raise the pan evaporation rate which actually helps cool the water by speeding up the transport of energy in latent heat of vaporization from surface to cloud where the energy is released.
This is behind so-called “missing heat” that should be in ocean according to GHG narrative but cannot actually be located. The so-called missing heat never entered the ocean in the first place but was rather transported very efficiently by water vapor rising to form clouds. Once that energy has been transported to the cloud layer then the DLIR coming from the cloud is actually impeded from reaching the surface by the GHGs between cloud and ground. GHGs are insulators and the same GHGs that insulate surface against IR cooling will also insulate the surface from DLIR coming from a warm cloud.
TXRed says:
September 1, 2011 at 2:30 pm
“Yes, Texas gets hot in the summer, but it is unheard of (since record keeping started) for the Panhandle to be so hot for so long.”
All due to a high pressure ridge that parks itself over Texas when the Pacific ocean surface is abnormally cool. Cool moist Pacific air coming in from left coast that would normally give us rain and cooler temperatures is shunted up over the top of Texas and thus it’s as abnormally cool and wet well above Texas as it is hot and dry within Texas.
Kind of hard to reconcile record cooling in the Pacific with record level of CO2 in the atmosphere isn’t it? That would cause cognitive dissonance in my mind but evidently for the AGW bandwagon it’s no problem to ignore the facts which contradict your beliefs.