The death count in the USA with these events has been increasing. Now there are at least more than one hundred deaths and more like at least 125 deaths every time a major system comes through. This last one is no exception.
I have been tracking tropospheric vortices for 21 years or so. I have seen a maximum of seven at a time in the northern hemisphere but they were far smaller than the one that recently left the continent. That one was a monster that pulled equatorial air masses north and arctic air masses south. Let me see if I can find a discernible picture.
This is too large, so I will make it smaller. That is better.
That is its minimum. Kindly notice the peripheral clouds in Canada. It circulates around the center which is over Iowa. There is a picture of the maximum.
It was a funky storm. It oscillated in size. I believe it oscillated because it was carrying out heat transfer very differently than vortices of the past. Before mid-latitude vortices would migrate to the Arctic Circle and pull equatorial air masses north over the ice of the Arctic Ocean. But, this one handled heat transfer by mixing air masses from the north and south. That is why it was so turbulent.
The early vortices were fairly benign. I would watch them from the ground. Their movement was dictated by the Earth’s rotation. Their clouds looked like railroad tracks with gaps in between cloud masses. The cloud masses lined up as the vortex in the north pulled that air northward. The clouds were the exact same size and spoke to Earth’s steadfast physics. The moving air masses lined up with consistent borders. Dead center of this moving mass of clouds was another cloud structure that literally looked like a human backbone. I have records of it all.
The New York Times had a picture of one as it traveled north on their front page. It was Lower Manhattan with the heat transfer clouds over the Hudson River by estimate only. I don’t recall when that was, but, it was early on.
These cloud structures never rained. That wasn’t their function. They were heat transfer clouds and that is what they did and did it highly efficiently. At the time the Arctic was registering higher average temperatures consistently. Over time the ice in the Arctic Ocean diminished in size and age. We lost one year to five year ice every year. Now, there is just annual ice if we are lucky.
This past storm was highly volatile because of the mixing. The vortices didn’t do that before, but, Earth doesn’t have ice masses to draw on to cool the hotter air. The physics are similar, but, the dynamics far more dangerous.
In Traverse City, Michigan the temperatures measured to 72 degrees after three days of warming that started at 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Within 12 hours of reaching 72 degrees the temperature plummeted to 30 degrees F, the wind increased to 23 mph and it snowed.
The ground was nearly bare from the melting. Within one hour after the temperature dropped and the snow started, the ground was covered again. It has been frigid to 15 degrees Fahrenheit which is 17 degrees F below zero ever since. The snow stopped when the extreme temperatures settled in.
For clarity, the warming was caused by air being pulled directly from the equator. As the vortex moved east, it passed and the Arctic air mass came to settle over the land.
This is without a doubt a climate crisis. With escalating deaths due to severe mixing, it is a climate emergency. Just because life goes on doesn’t mean we can ignore Earth’s grave warnings.
Yeah. It is the “Day After Tomorrow.”
