A Sober Look At The Northern Polar Vortex

Sounds to me like the rapid cooling at the beginning of an ice age (or mini ice age) could be in part due to more stable polar vortices lasting several months each year. And could be linked to reduced sun spot activity as several have mentioned. Kind of scarry how fast we could enter another mini ice age if true.

crosspatch says: @ur momisugly January 7, 2014 at 11:12 pm
….I hear there is a flock of those vortices headed for North Carolina tonight…
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
They arrived. It was a nice brisk 10 °F (-12 °C) this morning. The average low for this time of year is 31 °F.

@Brian H.
Thank you for the explanation!

The 1st NASA image looks like a magnetically stirred beaker of milk.
Good job NASA!

Barry Cullen says: @ur momisugly January 8, 2014 at 5:50 am
The 1st NASA image looks like a magnetically stirred beaker of milk….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You are right! Maybe that is how they got the pixs ROTFLMAO

Jimbo says: @ur momisugly January 8, 2014 at 6:30 am

Embarrass, Minnesota, that experienced the lowest temperature in the nation on Tuesday: -37C (-35F).
That was colder than readings recently recorded on the Red Planet by the Mars Rover…

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Good grief! No wonder the Minnesotans are for Global Warming! link

TB
Since 1998 these SSW events have been more frequent , earlier and of greater impact [ last one only a year ago,[ january 2013 ] They happened every other year before . Does anyone have an answer why there is a more frequent pattern to them ? To me it appears that SSW is a cooling and rebalancing mechanism for the planet when excessive warm pockets of air build up.?
They may have been there all along [ unexplained cold winters during warm years ] , except we are now becoming aware of them . For example locally we had a near record very cold day. and the previous january record cold for that same day was 1945, the era of very warm years ]. So perhaps these SSW events are present as the globe moves from a warming planet to a cooling planet?

And what is the density of the air at 100 hPa supposed to drive 1050hPa polar air into lower latitudes? Notwithstanding that polar air driving south (north in the austral) happens on a continuous basis since it is atmopsheric circulation!

@TB… your Jennifer Francis Jet Stream pipe dream video is truly collector. The hemispheric flow video by the Met is also amazing stuff in which colder zones are designed as cyclones while warmer ones as anticyclones! I guess 1050hPa air coming from the pole must be called cyclone now…LOL

Interesting list of comments above. Polar vortices and Rossby waves are both chaotic turbulent phenomena. Hence they are (in one sense) nucleated or altered by the proverbial butterfly wing effect — a tiny perturbation that encounters favorable conditions for growth (that are, themselves, the result of solving chaotic equations over the system’s past). The the case of waves, it can do things like modulate the number/period/wavelength and amplitude of the waves (which are not always “pretty” — they can be a superposition of several “waves” happening all at once, and with chaos small changes can lead to e.g. period doubling or halving). The vortex is basically a wave that breaks off at the singularity.
These wave phenomena are caused by the interplay between differential regional warming and cooling, buoyancy, and the coriolis force. As the poles cool relative to their hemisphere, warm air is favorably transported poleward and cold air is favorably transported equatorward, warm air on top and colder air on the bottom. But it cannot go straight north or straight south — air from the equator is moving much faster to the east than air near the poles, and air from the poles is moving much slower than the earth and hence displaces towards the west if it can. Even air heading straight east or west at any given time cannot go in a truly straight line because the Earth is curved — it tries to follow a great circle and hence is “deflected” equatorward not by a real force but by geometry and kinematics. Each parcel of air is subject to not only buoyant forces that generally almost perfectly sustain it at an equilibrium height — until differential warming or cooling cause it to become more or less dense than its surrounding air parcels but pressure forces that balance laterally as well. Except where they don’t. Uplifting air and downfalling air self-organizes into enormous spirals that are coupled to all of the other spirals around them and patterns of high and low pressure emerge with forces driving winds from high pressure towards lower pressure.
Solving for fluid motion in a system like this involves solving Navier-Stokes equations at a fairly fine granularity. The granularity is important because of the butterfly effect — in a truly chaotic system, even tiny fluctuations can grow. Also, in a coarse grained simulation the mass transport part of the PDE solution will be poorly resolved with errors that all by themselves act like “fluctuations” and grow to substantially alter both the details and even the character of the solutions. This is one of the points where I think GCMs are truly broken — they use a lat/long coordinate system with gridding that distorts at the poles due to the spherical polar coordinate Jacobean so nearly all quadrature or ODE solution methods are going to truly suck on the grid. I hence don’t find it at all surprising that they do a terrible job at representing chaotic waves near the poles. I await the day somebody writes a GCM based on a rescalable icosahedral tesselation of the sphere that doesn’t treat the equatorial cells any differently or at any different scale than it treats polar cells. The computational tools to accomplish this and theory are all there — it’s just too difficult for the climate modellers to handle, I guess.
As it is, different GCMs applied to a toy planet consisting of an untipped water world do not even converge to the same general solution space. I have no idea how they would compare on a toy planet that is a featureless untipped rotating deformed sphere of solid, uniformly grey ground, but I would guess that similar problems would arise.
And then there is the Earth. Spinning, tipped, highly eccentric orbit, moving continents, a nearly unknown amount of highly variable background vulcanism, much of it occurring at the bottom of the 0 -10 kilometer deep 4 degree Centigrade variably salty ocean that covers 70% of its surface and that requires an entirely distinct (but coupled) set of Navier-Stokes equations to describe as it is differentially heated and evaporated at the surface. Its dynamics are totally different from that of the atmosphere — it is heated only at the surface, not the bottom or throughout the volume (via absorption), neglecting the pitifully small heat discharge through the crust at nearly all of the ocean floor. It is nearly stable to large scale thermally driven convection everywhere but in or near the surface freezing zone. Its major currents are driven as much by variations in salinity as surface water is evaporated as anything else. It currents are shaped and diverted by the land surface at the coasts and at the sea bottom and also build persistent large scale vortices driven by coriolis forces and a mix of thermal and salinity density changes and surface coupling to atmospheric movements. To further complicate life, the ocean-atmosphere coupling involves the substantial transfer of energy in the form of latent heat and the self-modulation of the radiative properties of the atmosphere and ocean with its water content in multiple phases. Ice, snow, clouds all have high albedo. Moist air can carry orders of magnitude more energy per unit volume around than dry air. Water vapor is a strong absorber in the LWIR bands associated with the normal range of Earth temperatures. Water transports substantial heat vertically and laterally and can nonlinearly alter both heating and cooling of the Earth as it is differentially heated by the sun.
Put it all together and even without wild cards such as possible magnetic or ionic modulation, the variation of our variable sun, possible interactions with a near-mythical ring of dark matter that “might” be circling or otherwise bound to the Earth (sorry, this is enormously speculative but no kidding, recent /. article somebody actually postulated such a thing in a talk at a recent physics conference — let’s just take it as a placeholder for possible “unknown physics”) you have a very, very difficult computational problem to solve. If you are trying to prove something with your solution — such as the inevitability of CAGW — it is all too easy to tweak the system to prove it. It may not even need tweaking — many physical models will, by their nature, have systematic errors in one particular direction only. It is no place for confirmation bias, and no place for the modellers to indulge any sort of hubris, such as the belief that their model is right before it is solidly and consistently confirmed by Nature.
It is important to understand that self-organized near-critical open systems often organize to become more efficient dissipators as they are more strongly driven, although it is difficult to make any blanket statement about chaotic solutions to strongly nonlinear dynamical systems. Water heated on the stove organizes into convective rolls where warmer less dense water on the bottom becomes unstable relative to cooler more dense water on the top. Small asymmetries in the bottom heating and top cooling cause one region to start to uplift and another to downfall, and a spontaneous heat engine is born of heated water circulating to the top, cooling by evaporation, falling back to the bottom, being heated again, rising up to the top, but doing so in an organized roll, not in a bunch of local up and down spots at arbitrary scale. The water has viscosity and hence is happier concentrating the region where it is moving in opposite directions to a single vortex line. However, as one heats it more strongly, one can break the single roll into multiple rolls, and the structure, number, and character of the rolls that occur depends strongly on the geometry of the pot, the details of the bottom heating source, and whether or not you give the water a stir while it is close to spontaneously organizing and hence nucleate many possible modes.
The Earth is capable of far more complex self-organizations, of course. I don’t find it at all surprising that the Eemian ended with strong warming spikes. As such a the system approaches a phase transition, it often experiences “critical slowing down” — the appearance of longer and longer lifetimes for what are usually transient modes. Things like the polar vortex nucleate and then stick, lasting far longer than one expects, but destabilize the system until when they break up they do so violently and the system reorganizes into something else completely different. In the case of the Earth, it could enter a mode that traps heat, but does so only as long as a particular circulation is maintained. It warms and remains warm, but of course the Earth continues along its Milankovitch progression and it has to remain warm with a steadily weakening driver. Eventually the peristent warm phase becomes highly unstable — it is mere hysteresis, as it were — and just the right fluctuation comes along, breaks the persistent warming behavior, and the system suddenly transitions into a strong cooling mode under conditions that favor its rapid growth.
If one numerically solves nonlinear dynamical systems that have known chaotic behavior in certain parametric regions, you can observe how delicate this sort of thing is. If you ODE solver is too coarse, you miss it entirely — you are left believing that the system will be well-behaved and “linearly” predictable across the chaotic regime. When you solve it with sufficient precision, what was a simple oscillation suddenly bifurcates and you find a rich, broad range of solutions where you thought there was just one.
The Earth puts such systems to shame. Simple nonlinear systems are just that — simple. The Earth is a veritable Rube Goldberg device. Every flip here produces a flap in Brazil later and vice versa as it propagates into the future, being selectively amplified or attenuated and transported to the next place to augment or cancel something happening there. I seriously do not think we are particularly close to being able to accurately or even qualitatively simulate it. We can get “Earth-like” climate simulations to work, but they don’t quite match the Earth, even in very simple ways, and they are not an adequate explanation of the LIA, the MWP, and much else. They rely on things like “arbitrary” modulation of unknowns such as volcanic aerosols to explain some of these past events when it is just as likely (IMO) that they are phenomena arising from pure internal nonlinear dynamics — chaotic modes becoming dominant and substantially varying the Earth’s efficiency at storing or losing heat.
Maybe in twenty or thirty years, we’ll have the computational tools and the observational data to make this work correctly. In the meantime, while GW since the LIA is an observational fact, the “A” contribution to it is very much an open question and the “C” hypothesis is always a chance — in any or all directions.
The point is that all by itself the Earth is perfectly capable of heating up or cooling down 2-4 C over an appallingly short time, without any help whatsoever from CO_2 — this is an empirical fact of the paleo climate record. It is an empirical fact that the Earth does heat and cool itself 1-2 C over a 0.5 to 2 century timescale (the recent climate record) without any help whatsoever from CO_2. It is a simple fact that the Holocene is old enough that it could be living on borrowed time, subject to the near-critical fluctuations either way that presage a phase transition to the glacial phase. The LIA was very likely precisely such a fluctuation, and this possibility is real enough that in the 60’s and 70’s it was advanced as an actual hypothesis for the contemporary cooling (anthropogenic, of course — everything is “our fault”:-).
In the old days, prophets used to prophecy various kinds of doom and destruction as a matter of course, and would be sure to clearly indicate that if they did happen, it was because of the sins of the people and how they angered the gods. In other words, doom was going to happen and it was going to be their fault and the doom itself was sufficient proof of this. Because “doom happens”, sooner or later one of their prophecies would come true. Because there was no penalty for a wrong guess (and a slick talker can always explain this as the gods generously giving us another chance, probably due to the good influences of the interlocutor please donate on your way out of the tent to keep it up) the wrong guesses were quickly forgotten and the doom indeed became sufficient proof that the people were sinful, the gods were angry, and above all, that listening to the priests and doing what they say (including, of course, donating generously — see the little box over there? could you drop a few shekels in on your way out? or do you LIKE the idea of boils on your wing-wang?) was the only way to rescue the situation from still worse doom in the future.
The sad thing is that the great climate debate is disturbingly accurately described by this model, on both sides. Yes, in NC we set cold records for the date yesterday and (I’m certain) today. Elsewhere, in association with the exact same vortex, warm records for the date were no doubt set. The vortex isn’t proof of global warming or global cooling. Vortexes happen. Hurricane Sandy wasn’t proof of global warming or global cooling. “Perfect storm” hurricanes happen. The ongoing all-time record deficit of cat 3 or better Atlantic hurricanes making landfall in the US isn’t proof of global warming or global cooling. Deficits happen (although this is the sort of thing that eventually might actually be proof of something or other, if anybody could possibly figure out what).
The best that we can say is this. Even if the GASTA continues to rise or spikes up, it isn’t proof of AGW. The Earth has the demonstrated capability to cause this to occur without our help. On the other hand, would be evidence consistent with the AGW hypothesis, and there is no question that we’re kicking a nonlinear system we do not understand, and cannot be shocked if it kicks back tenfold, any more than it is totally surprising that a kid’s snowball fight or a particularly loud sneeze can trigger an avalanch. If GASTA continues to remain level, fall, or rise very slowly, it isn’t proof that AGW is incorrect. The Earth has the demonstrated capacity to cancel completely any anthropogenic effect we’ve created so far — if it weren’t for CO_2 the 60’s cooling might have turned into a second glacial-ward plunge, LIA2 as it were, and it might be all that is holding off a descent into true Holocene-ending glaciation right now. Since we don’t have any idea how to predict or even realistically model the local dynamics of glacial-interglacial transitions, we cannot say. However, it isn’t strong evidence for the AGW hypothesis.
Lacking strong evidence for the hypothesis — given poor (to say the least) agreement between the models and reality, given a fair amount of obvious bias in the treatment of the temperature records upon which even our current perception of warming is based, given a truly unknown breakdown between anthropogenic and natural climate factors that we literally cannot decompose into “natural signal” and “human forcing” in a strongly nonlinear non-Markovian double coupled pair of unevenly driven Navier-Stokes equations solved on a tipped, rotating oblate spheroid irregularly dotted with continents that rise up to the stratophere and oceans that sink down even more deeply into continental rifts, the wisest course of action is not to panic. No matter what happens, nature could have made it happen all by itself and it won’t be our fault, as the only way we can meaningfully modulate our current anthropogenic influence is to commit mass suicide, a cure worse than any possible disease. We are no longer living in the dark ages, and we are not helpless against “the will of the gods”. We have technology, common sense, science, and human reason to combat natural or unnatural disasters as long as we keep our wits about us.
All things being equal, it would be good to transition from a carbon-based energy economy to one that relies far less on burning fossil carbon as a fuel. Maybe CO_2 is indeed harmless, or even beneficial. Maybe not. We’re still kicking a nonlinear system that we do not understand, which is as stupid as free-swimming with great white sharks. I’d do it to get from my sinking boat to the shore, sure, but go out and do it for “fun” or pretending that they are “magnificent animals” who won’t hurt us because we aren’t their natural prey? If you’re eaten in a case of mistaken identity (sorry mate, I thought you were a seal) or because some particular shark is having a bad day you’re just as dead.
Also, oil and coal are raw materials of enormous value when we don’t burn them, and indeed burning them is gradually depleting the raw material supply and will eventually come back to bite us in the pocketbook. We cannot possibly sustain human civilization on their backs for more than another century, giving us a comparatively narrow window to painlessly transition to longer term energy resources and eventually to a fully sustainable energy supply that will last longer than the human species will. Making a deliberate decision to pursue sustainable energy (at reasonable levels of investment) is simply part of becoming a mature global society.
However, in the shorter run we have two or three more pressing concerns. We have not yet achieved anything like global equity for the human species. The rich are vastly richer than the poor. The poor are stuck living in the 17th and 18th century; the rich live in the 21st. We are stuck in a world dominated by nationalism and worse, religionism, leading to medium scale regional warfare that never seems to quite disappear. We are stuck with a general disagreement over the correct basis for an equitable global, continental or national economy, and for pete’s sake, there are still Kings running things in some countries. What’s up with that? Haven’t we even settled on some sort of self-government meme? Even the threat of global nuclear war hasn’t disappeared, it has just gone underground, smoldering, awaiting a time when the chips are down and nuclear cards once again come into play. All of these things are far greater risk factors than unproven CAGW, and indeed in order to effectively combat CAGW should it prove to be a true hypothesis our first step is to get our global house in order and stop behaving like primitive tribes run by a corrupt priesthood and a small set of dominant families.
In my lifetime? I doubt it. In the lifetime of my kids? I still doubt it — if anything, I find them discouragingly disengaged. They live in the best of times that there ever was in the strongest culture that ever was, and yet they are comparatively hopeless, disenfranchised, marginalized. Maybe my grandchildren. But each generation has to fight its own battles.
rgb

there is no question that we’re kicking a nonlinear system we do not understand, and cannot be shocked if it kicks back tenfold, any more than it is totally surprising that a kid’s snowball fight or a particularly loud sneeze can trigger an avalanch.”
Umm, no. There is no tipping point in history caused by CO2. CO2 demonstrably has an insignificant effect on climate.