>Ice and Drought is the Reason for the 09 Season

During work today I did some thinking regarding how I have seen the whole system play out for the past few months.

I have came to this conclusion….

1) Late season cold on the heels of a tough interior Canada winter created the COOL summer for much of the Northern tier of the United States, in part because of the slow ice-melt of Hudson Bay, the cold pool formed has spun cool air down into the US from the Plains to Northeast as a trough has dominated the eastern US.

2) Very dry to drought conditions ruled the Southern Plains (Texas-Oklahoma) for the first 6 months of the year, thus the HEAT CORE began and expanded over this region of maximum drought bringing extreme heat.

3) A wet spring has produced the fightzone between cool off Hudson Bay to hot out of the Southern Plains.

4) As the season progressed, after a trough over the Western US in late spring, the warming of the Equatorial Pacific has pumped the Pacific high all the way into Alaska bringing them major heat with 91 degrees recorded in Fairbanks.

5) The warming of the Pacific in relation to the lingering cold over central and eastern Canada has been responsible for the maridional jet, the contrasting air masses of both unseasonably warm in the south to cool in the north has strengthened the normally weaker, further north jet stream. I believe the warming Pacific has pumped the western ridge and the core of heat that is now pushing from Texas into the Rockies is in repsonse to the seasonal adjustments in the atmosphere.

I do strongly believe that the atmosphere is priming itself now for winter across the eastern half of North America as the lingering cool summer from Baltimore to Montreal is where the strongest cold will line up. It’s easier to get this section of the atmosphere where it’s already been cold (not far above the earth’s surface) to get cold fast as the sun lowers in the fall. We haven’t seen strong high pressure this year so the entire depth of the atmosphere over the eastern third has been colder than normal.

Even though the core of heat has started off over the southern plains, aided by drought conditions, high pressure dominance is normal here, but the West was slow to get hot because of a linger trough in late spring, now that the atmosphere has adjusted to the sun intensity and the high pressure cell has increaed into the upper-levsls, this will produce heat wave conditions across the deserts all the way up towards Boise. This expansion of the western heat pump means, slight cooling over Texas and also means we’re going to see a southward push of colder, more northely air out of Canada as the heat and cool need to balance themselves out.

By purely annalysing the set up already in play, when you push heat up western North America, you push deeper cold out of northern and eastern Canada into the lower 48 as this will bringing unusual cold into the Great Lakes and then possibly progress into the Northeast with time.

In between we continue to see major thunderstorms blow up along the frontal boundary which seperates the two contrasting air masses.

Thanks for reading.

– Mark