Polar vortex

Polar vortex over Quebec and Maine on the morning of January 21, 1985

A polar vortex (also known as a polar cyclone, polar low, frigid twister, or a circumpolar whirl^[1] ) is a persistent, large-scale cyclone located near either of a planet’s geographical poles. On Earth, the polar vortices are located in the middle and upper troposphere and the stratosphere. They surround the polar highs and lie in the wake of the polar front. These cold-core low-pressure areas strengthen in the winter and weaken in the summer due to their reliance upon the temperature differential between the equator and the poles.^[2] They usually span less than 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) in which the air is circulating in a counter-clockwise fashion (in the northern hemisphere). As with other cyclones, their rotation is caused by the Coriolis effect.

The Arctic vortex in the Northern Hemisphere has two centres, one near Baffin Island and the other over northeast Siberia.^[1] In the southern hemisphere, it tends to be located near the edge of the Ross ice shelf near 160 west longitude.^[3] When the polar vortex is strong, the Westerlies increase in strength. When the polar cyclone is weak, the general flow pattern across mid-latitudes buckles and significant cold outbreaks occur.^[4] Ozone depletion occurs within the polar vortex, particularly over the Southern Hemisphere, which reaches a maximum in the spring. The polar vortex phenomenon was described as early as 1853.^[5]

Identification

Polar cyclones are climatological features that hover near the poles year-round. Since polar vortices exist from the stratosphere downward into the mid-troposphere,^[1] a variety of heights/pressure levels within the atmosphere can be checked for its existence. Within the stratosphere, strategies such as the use of the 4 mb pressure surface, which correlates to the 1200K isentropic surface, located midway up the stratosphere, is used to create climatologies of the feature.^[6] Due to model data unreliability, other techniques use the 50 mb pressure surface to identify its stratospheric location.^[7] At the level of the tropopause, the extent of closed contours of potential temperature can be used to determine its strength. The horizontal scale of the vortex is frequently less than 1,000 kilometres (620 mi).^[8]

Duration and power

This section requires expansion. (June 2013)

Polar vortex and weather impacts due to stratospheric warming

Polar vortices are weaker during summer and strongest during winter. Individual vortices can persist for more than a month.^[8] Extratropical cyclones that occlude and migrate into higher latitudes create cold-core lows within the polar vortex.^[9] Volcanic eruptions in the tropics lead to a stronger polar vortex during the winter for as long as two years afterwards.^[10] The strength and position of the cyclone shapes the flow pattern across the hemisphere of its influence. An index which is used in the northern hemisphere to gauge its magnitude is the Arctic oscillation.^[11]

The Arctic vortex is elongated in shape, with two centres, one normally located over Baffin Island in Canada and the other over northeast Siberia. In rare events, when the general flow pattern is amplified (or meridional), the vortex can push farther south as a result of axis interruption, such as during the Winter 1985 Arctic outbreak.^[12] The Antarctic polar vortex is more pronounced and persistent than the Arctic one; this is because the distribution of land masses at high latitudes in the northern hemisphere gives rise to Rossby waves which contribute to the breakdown of the vortex, whereas in the southern hemisphere the vortex remains less disturbed. The breakdown of the polar vortex is an extreme event known as a sudden stratospheric warming, here the vortex completely breaks down and an associated warming of 30–50 °C (86–122 °F) over a few days can occur.

Sudden stratospheric warming events, when temperatures within the stratosphere warm dramatically over a short time, are associated with weaker polar vortices. These changes aloft force changes below in the troposphere. Strengthening storm systems within the troposphere can act to intensify the polar vortex by significantly cooling the poles. La Niña-related climate anomalies tend to favor significant strengthening of the polar vortex.^[13]

Climate change

Meanders of the northern hemisphere‘s jet stream developing (a, b) and finally detaching a “drop” of cold air (c); orange: warmer masses of air; pink: jet stream

Studies published since 2001 suggest a link between extreme weather and the polar vortex, in recent years more research identified interactions with Arctic sea ice decline, reduced snow cover, evapotranspiration patterns, NAO anomalies or weather anomalies which are linked to the polar vortex and jet stream configuration.^{[14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21]} However, because these are considered short-term observations (since ~13 years) there is considerable uncertainty in the conclusions. Climatology observations require several decades to distinguish natural variability from climate trends.

The general assumption is that reduced snow cover and sea ice reflect less sunlight and therefore evaporation and transpiration increases, which in turn alters the pressure and temperature gradient of the polar vortex, causing it to weaken or collapse. This becomes apparent when the jet stream amplitude increases (meanders) over the northern hemisphere, causing Rossby waves to propagate farther to the south or north, which in turn transports warmer air to the north pole and polar air into lower latitudes. The jet stream amplitude increases with a weaker polar vortex, hence increases the chance for weather systems to become blocked. A recent blocking event emerged when a high-pressure over Greenland steered Hurricane Sandy into the northern Mid-Atlantic states.^[22]

Ozone depletion

Southern Hemisphere Ozone Concentration, February 22, 2012

The chemistry of the Antarctic polar vortex has created severe ozone depletion. The nitric acid in polar stratospheric clouds reacts with chlorofluorocarbons to form chlorine, which catalyzes the photochemical destruction of ozone.^[23] Chlorine concentrations build up during the polar winter, and the consequent ozone destruction is greatest when the sunlight returns in spring.^[24] These clouds can only form at temperatures below about −80 °C (−112 °F). Since there is greater air exchange between the Arctic and the mid-latitudes, ozone depletion at the north pole is much less severe than at the south.^[25] Accordingly, the seasonal reduction of ozone levels over the Arctic is usually characterized as an “ozone dent,” whereas the more severe ozone depletion over the Antarctic is considered an “ozone hole.” This said, chemical ozone destruction in the 2011 Arctic polar vortex attained, for the first time, a level clearly identifiable as an Arctic “ozone hole”.^{[citation needed]}

Research

A study in 2001 found that stratospheric circulation can have anomalous effects on the weather regimes.^[14] A study published in 2004 found a mechanism to explain how the strength of the stratospheric polar vortex influences circulation in the troposphere. Researchers found a statistical correlation between weak polar vortex and outbreaks of severe cold in the Northern Hemisphere, the study was first reported in 2001.^[26][15] A 2007 study focused on the effects of polar cyclones on drought in Australia.^[27] In the past years more studies started to investigate a link between polar vortex and jet stream changes and extreme weather, after more pronounced anomalies have been observed. Many studies assess the connection of sea ice decline and responding interactions.^{[improper synthesis?][20][19][16][17][18][21]}

Outside earth

Hubble view of the colossal polar cloud on Mars

Other astronomical bodies are also known to have polar vortices, including Venus (double vortex—that is, two polar vortices at a pole),^[28] Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Saturn’s moon Titan.

Hot polar vortex

This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2014)

Saturn’s south pole is the only known hot polar vortex in the solar system. Infrared images have revealed that whereas temperatures on Saturn are normally −185 °C (−301.0 °F), temperatures on the vortex often reach as high as −122 °C (−188 °F), believed to be the warmest spot

Toyota Will Sell You a Hydrogen-Powered Car Next Year

 

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Toyota

After decades of big promises, false starts, and meager infrastructure, the first hydrogen fuel cell vehicle will go on sale in the United States next year. It’s coming from Toyota, which promises a range of 300 miles and a fill-up time of less than five minutes — once you’ve actually found a station that stocks the stuff.

The unnamed camo-clad engineering prototype that Toyota unveiled at CES looks remarkably similar to a Toyota Corolla. The automaker, which has spent the past year flogging the car in some of the hottest and coldest places on the continent, claims the emissions-free sedan will put out more than 100 kW (over 130 horsepower) and do zero to 60 in around 10 seconds.

“We aren’t trying to re-invent the wheel; just everything necessary to make them turn,” said Bob Carter, Toyota’s senior veep of U.S. auto operations. “For years, the use of hydrogen gas to power an electric vehicle has been seen by many smart people as a foolish quest. Yes, there are significant challenges. The first is building the vehicle at a reasonable price for many people. The second is doing what we can to help kick-start the construction of convenient hydrogen refueling infrastructure.”

Just how reasonable a price remains to be seen, because so far Toyota’s not saying what the car will cost, or even what it will be called. But the automaker says that, after a decade’s work, it has dramatically reduced the cost of building a fuel cell powertrain. Toyota estimates the cost of building a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle has fallen 95 percent since it built its first prototype in 2002, and according to Toyota spokeswoman Jana Hartline, Toyota will give consumers “a variety of options” when its hydrogen vehicle goes on sale. Given that the true cost of Honda’s FCX Clarity — which could only be leased, not bought — was estimated at well over $1 million, that’s a welcome reduction.

The technology’s other Achilles’ heel has long been the fueling infrastructure, or rather the lack of it. For that reason, Toyota will limit sales to California. Toyota has joined UC Irvine’s Advanced Power and Energy Program to map out where additional stations should be placed based on things like existing ownership of EVs and hybrids, population density and traffic patterns. Using that model, they say 68 stations in the San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego would be required at initial launch.

California currently has nine public hydrogen fueling stations, mostly around Los Angeles and San Francisco. Another 19 are under development, and the California Energy Commission has allocated $29.9 million for the next round of infrastructure development. All told, California has approved $200 million in funding to build hydrogen stations throughout the state in 2015. Another 20 stations are expected in 2016, with a total of 100 statewide by 2024.

A slow roll-out, to be sure, and something that Toyota plans to address on its own, with Carter saying, “Stay tuned, because this infrastructure thing is going to happen.”

arie University – mq.edu.au/PublicDiplomacy – Master of International Public Diplomacy. Study postgrad in 2014

2013 heat was off the charts Inbox x Tim Flannery – Climate Council via sendgrid.info 1:29 PM (1 hour ago) to me 2013 was officially Australia’s hottest year on record. We’ve spent the past few days getting the message out in the media about extreme heat and climate change. You can get all the details in our latest report Off The Charts. Please help us make sure as many people as possible make the connection between 2013’s record-breaking heat and climate change by sharing this eye-opening infographic with your friends. Thanks for your support

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Ocean acidification oaiccproject@gmail.com via google.com	1:04 AM (8 hours ago)
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Ocean acidification state in western Antarctic surface waters: controls and interannual variability (update)

Posted: 07 Jan 2014 05:57 AM PST

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George Monbiot news@monbiot.com via google.com	7:15 PM (3 hours ago)
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Dead Zone

Posted: 06 Jan 2014 12:33 PM PST

A shocking new bill threatens to make this country feel like a giant shopping mall.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 7th January 2014

Until the late 19th Century, much of our city space was owned by private landlords. Squares were gated, streets were controlled by turnpikes(1). The great unwashed, many of whom had been expelled from the countryside by acts of enclosure, were also excluded from desirable parts of town.

Social reformers and democratic movements tore down the barriers, and public space became a right, not a privilege. But social exclusion follows inequality as night follows day, and now, with little public debate, our city centres are again being privatised or semi-privatised. They are being turned by the companies that run them into soulless, cheerless, pasteurised piazzas, in which plastic policemen harry anyone loitering without intent to shop.

Streetlife in these places is reduced to a trance-world of consumerism, of conformity and atomisation, in which nothing unpredictable or disconcerting happens, a world made safe for selling mountains of pointless junk to tranquilised shoppers. Spontaneous gatherings of any other kind – unruly, exuberant, open-ended, oppositional – are banned. Young, homeless and eccentric people are, in the eyes of those upholding this dead-eyed, sanitised version of public order, guilty until proven innocent.

Now this dreary ethos is creeping into places which are not, ostensibly, owned or controlled by corporations. It is enforced less by gates and barriers (though plenty of these are reappearing) than by legal instruments, used to exclude or control the ever widening class of undesirables.

The existing rules are bad enough. Introduced by the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, anti-social behavour orders (Asbos) have criminalised an apparently endless range of activities, subjecting thousands – mostly young and poor – to bespoke laws(2). They have been used to enforce a kind of caste prohibition: personalised rules which prevent the untouchables from intruding into the lives of others.

You get an Asbo for behaving in a manner deemed by a magistrate as likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to other people. Under this injunction, the proscribed behaviour becomes a criminal offence. Asbos have been granted which forbid the carrying of condoms by a prostitute, homeless alcoholics from possessing alcohol in a public place, a soup kitchen from giving food to the poor, a young man from walking down any road other than his own, children from playing football in the street(3). They were used to ban peaceful protests against the Olympic clearances(4).

Inevitably, over half the people subject to Asbos break them. As Liberty says, these injunctions “set the young, vulnerable or mentally ill up to fail”, and fast-track them into the criminal justice system(5). They allow the courts to imprison people for offences which are not otherwise imprisonable. One homeless young man was sentenced to five years in jail for begging: an offence for which no custodial sentence exists(6). Asbos permit the police and courts to create their own laws and their own penal codes.

All this is about to get much worse. Tomorrow the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Bill reaches its report stage (close to the end of the process) in the House of Lords(7). It is remarkable how little fuss has been made about it, and how little we know of what is about to hit us.

The bill would permit injunctions against anyone of 10 or above who “has engaged or threatens to engage in conduct capable of causing nuisance or annoyance to any person.”(8) It would replace Asbos with Ipnas (Injunctions to Prevent Nuisance and Annoyance), which would not only forbid certain forms of behaviour, but also force the recipient to discharge positive obligations. In other words, they can impose a kind of community service on people who have committed no crime, which could, the law proposes, remain in force for the rest of their lives.

The bill also introduces Public Space Protection Orders, which can prevent either everybody or particular kinds of people from doing certain things in certain places. It creates new dispersal powers, which can be used by the police to exclude people from an area (there is no size limit), whether or not they have done anything wrong.

While, as a result of a successful legal challenge, Asbos can be granted only if a court is satisfied “beyond reasonable doubt” that anti-social behaviour took place, Ipnas can be granted “on the balance of probabilities”. Breaching them will not be classed as a criminal offence, but can still carry a custodial sentence: without committing a crime, you can be imprisoned for up to two years. Children, who cannot currently be detained for contempt of court, will be subject to an inspiring new range of punishments for breaking an Ipna, including three months in a young offenders’ centre(9).

Lord Macdonald, formerly the director of public prosecutions, points out that “it is difficult to imagine a broader concept than causing ‘nuisance’ or ‘annoyance’. The phrase is apt to catch a vast range of everyday behaviours to an extent that may have serious implications for the rule of law”(10). Protesters, buskers, preachers: all, he argues, could end up with Ipnas.

The Home Office minister, Norman Baker, once a defender of civil liberties, now the architect of the most oppressive bill pushed through any recent parliament, claims that the amendments he offered in December will “reassure people that basic liberties will not be affected”(11). But Liberty describes them as “a little bit of window-dressing: nothing substantial has changed.”(12)

The new injunctions and the new dispersal orders create a system in which the authorities can prevent anyone from doing more or less anything. But they won’t be deployed against anyone. Advertisers, who cause plenty of nuisance and annoyance, have nothing to fear; nor do opera lovers hogging the pavements of Covent Garden. Annoyance and nuisance are what young people cause; they are inflicted by oddballs, the underclass, those who dispute the claims of power.

These laws will be used to stamp out plurality and difference, to douse the exuberance of youth, to pursue children for the crime of being young and together in a public place, to help turn this nation into a money-making monoculture, controlled, homogenised, lifeless, strifeless and bland. For a government which represents the old and the rich, that must sound like paradise.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Anna Minton, ?2006. The privatisation of public space. The Royal Institution
of Chartered Surveyors.  http://www.annaminton.com/Privatepublicspace.pdf

2. http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/media/articles/pdfs/asbos-and-human-rights-2004.pdf

3. http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/pdfs/policy13/liberty-s-briefing-on-the-draft-anti-social-behaviour-bill-feb-2013-.pdf

4. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/apr/17/protester-receives-olympic-asbo

5. http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/pdfs/policy13/liberty-s-briefing-on-the-draft-anti-social-behaviour-bill-feb-2013-.pdf

6. http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/pdfs/policy13/liberty-s-briefing-on-the-draft-anti-social-behaviour-bill-feb-2013-.pdf

7. http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2013-14/antisocialbehaviourcrimeandpolicingbill.html

8. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/lbill/2013-2014/0066/lbill_2013-20140066_en_1.htm

9. See also: http://www.scriptonitedaily.com/2013/11/11/the-birth-of-a-police-state-uk-police-to-be-granted-sweeping-new-powers-2/

10. http://reformclause1.org.uk/files/opinion.pdf

11. http://www.theguardian.com/law/2013/dec/18/right-to-protest-anti-social-behaviour-crime-policing-bill