Antarctica is always a fun place to visit, especially at this time of year when there is no sunlight at all for months on end. It does get pretty cold, and in fact the record is around minus 89C, or -139F. .At this time of year there are places at high elevation near the center of the continent where the normal temperature around the clock is well into the minus-eighties for C. After many weeks of complete darkness and more to come what could possibly cause those places to become any warmer than that? Where would the heat energy itself come from? Let’s do some probing, starting with today”s temperature anomaly chart for this region:
What you are actually seeing is more than half of the entire continent engulfed by an anomaly ranging from 5C at the edges up to 20C in a few small spots. I have checked out the Windy website, which always has current temperature readings everywhere, and found that one of those spots was in a place of very high elevation. It read -65C, meaning normal had to be minus 85. So where did all the extra heat come from, considering the absence of sunlight, and that all the greenhouse gases, except for one, are virtually the same every day.? That one exception does have good records on its own chart, so let’s take a look:
How does this help? Well, if you get close to the screen you will see a circular shape near the middle that is shaded solid black, which means all of the area inside contains somewhere between zero and one kilogram of precipitable water (PWat) readings, if known. More exact readings could be made on the ground, if someone wanted to take the trouble, but no one does. What we do know is that a reading as low as 17 grams has been made at one location at a time of extreme cold, probably around minus 85C. Assuming PWat would be acting as a mostly normal and yet unusual greenhouse gas, what would happen if, for instance, you doubled the amount of its presence to 34 grams? I have often maintained that doing so should add 10C to the ambient air temperature, no matter whether the double were to happen here or on a sunny spring day in Siberia. Then if you doubled it again, in this case to 68 grams, that means you should see a temperature gain of 20C. Perhaps that is what actually happened here but we just don’t know about the doublings. I hope some day the idea will be thoroughly tested, to see how temperatures change if and when four more PWat doubles, as mathematically required, would take everything past the one kilogram box. This chart provides a suggestion:
Does minus 30 sound about right? Could that much total warming really happen just be doubling a tiny bit of water vapor six times over? It seems like a real possibility, from what is apparent according to the limited data right in front of our eyes. Antarctic temperatures are real, just as real as those in your own back yard, and real heat is needed to raise them. If PWat is not the source of that heat what other choices are there?
Now go back and look at the entire anomaly again, which clearly has two separate parts. The second part, to the right, was also demonstrably caused by an infusion of water vapor as it sliced across an edge of the continent. This time the vapor came in with a reading starting at 5kg, dropping to 4 and 3 and back as it did the slicing, all of which can be observed if you again take a close look at its downward pathway on the second chart. Again there are two doubles involved in this part of the anomaly, but this time actual temperatures shift from minus 30 to a few spots as high as minus 10, while PWat readings are registering changes from 1kg to an occasional high of 4.
Today we have “traveled” over a total of 75 degrees with a total of eight PWat doubles. Temperature-wise, we are more than half-way “home” to places that have seen record highs of plus 50C on another part of the globe. Things are sure to get more complicated as we leave this continent and its present darkness but we must give it a try. What will be the role for the remarkable PWat greenhouse gas under radically different circumstances?
Carl