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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PKRBKR who wrote (916519)	1/22/2016 6:10:28 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572627

Based on this logic does it follow that the Sahara is now humid? It might. Might not. It depends on air and water currents. We've been over this before with the same stupid example you tend to drag up. Let's take a typical 85 degree summer day in a city like St. Louis with a typical humidity in the 60% range while in San Jose at the same 85 degrees is only 30% or less. How could this be yet San Jose is within spitting distance of the Pacific? Yeah, this one. Saint Louis is on a river, The Mississippi, you might have heard of it. Now the Mississippi doesn't drain snow pack in the mountains. So the water temperature is not too far below ambient air temperature in Saint Louis. Prevailing winds are not from Saint Louis to the river, so there is not that biasing factor. So Saint Louis should get a lot of humidity from the river. Now San Jose is somewhat different. While there is a nearby water source, two in fact, the Pacific Ocean there has a near shore cold water current, the California current. This keeps near shore and San Francisco Bay waters cold. This has a chilling effect on the air over said waters, lowering the available humidity over the land, which is a lot warmer. This also means that prevailing winds are from east to west, or from an arid area to the ocean. Given that the definition of an arid area is an insufficiency of water, a lower humidity is expected. In other words, only an ignorant moron would expect any different. Since you keep bringing this up as your killer argument... As to the snow. Washington DC is close to a coast. The Atlantic Coast, to be precise. Which not only does not have a cold water current just offshore, it is also experiencing warmer than usual surface waters in that area. Which, and it pains me that I have to spell this out, means that there is a larger than normal amount of moisture in close proximity to the DC area. Given that the Arctic has been experiencing greater than average increase in temperatures, atmospheric components like the Arctic Vortex, which is driven by the temperature difference between the Arctic and the lower latitudes, are weaker than usual. And that means incursions of polar air across the boundary of the Arctic Vortex are more common than usual. Not that this particular incursion is necessarily related to climate change, just that events like it are more common. Now when really cold air meets warm, very moist air, precipitation results. If the conditions are right, that precipitation can manifest as snow. If there is enough moisture in the air, record snow falls can be experienced. Which is what we have been seeing the past few years.