Understanding the Effects of Global Warming on the Jetstream

I came across this great video that offers a very simple to understand explanation of how the jet stream works and why a warmer Arctic means crazy weather the rest of the world over. A lot of people don't seem to understand the correlation between global warming and one of it's side effects of longer, colder, snowier winters in the Northern Hemisphere. I hope this video clears up some confusion.

To summarize... if we think about air in vertical context, warm air is taller and cold air is shorter, so think of it like hills. Air likes to roll downhill so if the arctic air is warming it becomes taller causing colder air to roll down the rest of the Northern Hemisphere.

The above video is an excerpt of a longer video of a 40 minute lecture given by Jennifer Francis.

That first video is a really great explanation of how the jet stream behaves, I would encourage everyone to watch it.

S&F, I'll be watching the full video.

After watching the video, the last few years of weather started to make a lot more sense.

Thanks for expanding my understanding of nature.

~Namaste

PS - I'd change the title from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change" before your thread derails into a discussion about the difference rather than the content of your post, but that's just me.

Great video,.
I hope more view it,.
and try not to bark the "mans not the cause" statement,. cause it just doesnt matter at this point
the whys,. but how to adjust to the changes,. if we can

That is a really good video explaining the weather phenomena that we've been having. I've been watching the weather, including the jet stream, for years. A graphical summary of the effect on weather patterns would be here:

Typical:


What we have today:


It's been like that for a while. At first I thought that maybe we were in a La Nina but when I saw the extreme wobble in the jet stream, I knew that I'd never seen that before. Here's what El Nino and La Nina jet streams look like to show how what we have today is not La Nina or El Nino effects:

Last Halloween, I was taking my daughter out trick or treating here in Oregon. We were following behind a group of adults and when we arrived at a house with a blooming lily, one of the women remarked in a kind of hushed and shocked tone, ,"OMG, the lilies are blooming. That's so weird." My ears totally perked up because I thought, my god, my neighbors are actually noticing that something is wrong but no... Her friend remarked back "Oh they must have just planted it." and the first woman said "oh that's probably it". I was dumbstruck at the responses because it ignored the fully blooming 8 ft. tall clematis around the door. I guess most will rationalize anything even lilies and clematis in full bloom on a Halloween night in the Northern Hemisphere.

reply to post by SonOfTheLawOfOne

PS - I'd change the title from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change" before your thread derails into a discussion about the difference rather than the content of your post, but that's just me.

I appreciate your comment, I'm glad it was educational for you... that was my hope in making the thread, so thank-you for the smile.

However... I won't change the title. Climate Change is the result of Global Warming, in my opinion climate change cannot be discussed without discussing global warming. If other's can't make the mental leap into discussion that's on them.

Enjoy the lecture, it's very informative.

reply to post by Lil Drummerboy

cause it just doesnt matter at this point the whys,. but how to adjust to the changes,. if we can

Thanks for your reply, I think it's still extremely important to lower our GHG emissions. The sooner we do it and the more efficiently we do it, the less warming we'll have to deal with later. Lag will catch up with us very harshly but maybe we can bounce back if we cut emissions now.

reply to post by WhiteAlice


Great additional info thank-you. A lot of blame for extreme weather tends to fall on El-Nino and La-Nina, it's refreshing to see a post that acknowledges this can't be either. Your edit reasons made me laugh

I thought I might add a couple graphics for the educational effort of the thread ..and they're neat too.

National Surface Winds Map

That updates all the time and is extremely interesting during large weather patterns. What the winds do on a continental scale aren't' necessarily predictable as we'd first imagine anyway.

A couple YouTubes I also have here I thought might be helpful and directly related to global patterns and currents within the air/weather.





I'll stay out of the politics of it except to say that a previous poster is right, IMO. They pointed out that man made or natural really doesn't matter in the end, for understanding what is happening and what...if anything...can be done. If anything should be, for that matter. The wacky weather was something noticeable before Gore gave it a name though. NO question there. I'd noticed it myself enough to comment on in the late 90's. Things to understand, indeed.

I don't think there is anything that can be done at this point. I used to be a double science major. Was aiming to become an ecologist. I remember 20 years ago learning about global weather patterns and how they were changing. Plus a whole lot of gray area as to what they were going to change into. One thing that I remembered though was the predicted runaway effect where enough warming would have occurred to make it a self feeding problem. That said, some of this would have possibly happened because we certainly don't influence the sun or the earth's geomagnetic field, both of which are probably making matters worse as both are behaving oddly. It's pretty sad because everybody was so busy arguing about the problem that they spent more time focusing on that then actually trying to do anything about it.

We're going to be in big trouble in a few years if these weather patterns don't change. You can't have a vastly meandering jet stream without it affecting precipitation patterns. The hydrologic cycle, in its most basic form, is basically the air current picks up water from the oceans through evaporation and as it cools and gets more heavy once it gets over land, it rains. It rains mostly on the ocean facing side of mountains and beyond them, there is a rain shadow effect. That's why the interior of the continent is slightly drier than the coasts. Normally, the jet stream would be pushing across the continent in a shorter wobble that would basically disperse out rain across the continent. Thing is, if the path of the wobble in the jet stream lengthens, then it's traveling more north and south. That's more time for water to be dropped in a N-S pattern than west-east. Logically, I think that kind of explains drought conditions in the Midwest. Unfortunately, that's also our food belt. I'm deeply worried but admit that this is my slightly educated guess. One climatology course does not a climatologist make. I really hope I'm freaking wrong.

Originally posted by Kali74




However... I won't change the title. Climate Change is the result of Global Warming, in my opinion climate change cannot be discussed without discussing global warming. If other's can't make the mental leap into discussion that's on them.

Maybe there is mention of a jet stream associate, the gulf stream in the long video, I shall watch that now.

Originally posted by smurfy

Originally posted by Kali74




However... I won't change the title. Climate Change is the result of Global Warming, in my opinion climate change cannot be discussed without discussing global warming. If other's can't make the mental leap into discussion that's on them.

Maybe there is mention of a jet stream associate, the gulf stream in the long video, I shall watch that now.

Nope not a word, I suppose now I am obliged to listen to the even longer, (115 minute version) FFS.