How are the Arctic, Alberta Fires, Smokey Port Alberni skies, and US Tornadoes all connected?
The Jet Stream.
Here’s the Jet Stream modelled this morning. Red line is mine.
This rather bent-out-of-shape pattern has been a frequent topic on this blog. Search for “Rutgers” on this webpage and you’ll come up with these blog entries that end up detailing the progression of science on the issue.
2014 – Warm morning dry week. And real science debate.
2015 – Warm Arctic Cold Continent and Cyclone smashes Vanuatu – Arctic powers a drunken Jetstream – CO2 plateau signals path forward. and another and another Air Quality related one…
And finally one in 2018 – Sunny and Warm! – But Why? The Answer lies to the North.
Rutgers University is the home institution of Jennifer Francis who first published (with others) and popularized the idea that melting in the Arctic (caused by humanity) was causing the temperature difference between the mid and northern latitudes to decrease, and that made the jetstream do crazy stuff. There is a nice explanation at skepticalscience.
We have known for years that when the jetstream dips way down into the USA, it can cause severe tornado outbreaks. The jetstreams extreme wavy pattern was also implicated in creating the conditions for the devastating Fort McMurray fire.
So, here we are again. And we should expect this to happen again.
The Smokes Progression.
Here is the smoke’s progression over the past few days.
You can see that by yesterday a large amount of smoke was over the whole province. This morning, the smoke had lessened a little but combined with the morning fog/marine layer to keep things pretty thick.
Relief coming
The good news is the conveyor belt of jetstream air looping back around from Alberta to BC breaks down Wednesday.
And by Friday the west-to-east flow begins approaching the north coast. Things are still fairly stagnant on the south coast but this should definitely cut off any new smoke from coming our way.
By Sunday, the jet is right overtop of us.
That should bring cooler temperatures for next week.
Oh ya… data.
So I was working on this post on the bus this morning as I normally do. Overnight I got one of those dreaded “your data plan is full” messages from my friendly neighbourhood phone provider (cough TELUS cough)…. they’re all the same….
Anyway, I added a 1GB top up… should be lots for the family for the next few days! $22. Yuk. But you know, it’s 2019 and we don’t live in Europe where they DONT extort grand sums from you for data.
So I go back to making the post for the morning, I go onto the GOES 17 website to get the pretty smoke pictures above and BAM another text message. Your 1GB is up.
Turns out, that satellite website downloads very large files…
So this post cost $22. ? ? Sigh. Oh well. It’s a good one. 😉
Here is the satellite imagery website. Don’t click if you are on a data plan! ?
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