The gulf stream not the real heat conveyor ?

[Sirotnikov]

I see dannubis is making new friends each day.

[dannubis]

I choose my friends very carefully thank you...

just to make sure that i avoid friendly fire or unfortunate "accidents" if you catch my drift

[BlackCat]

Found the full article :

http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/gs/pubs/Seager_etal_QJ_2002.pdf

Being a meteorolog and/or oceanograph would be a good help when reading it

If I understand it right, then it's the summer heating of the ocean that are the prime source for the energy that is released during the winter, not the energy transport done by the gulf stream.

[Sirotnikov]

Originally posted by dannubis
I choose my friends very carefully thank you...

just to make sure that i avoid friendly fire or unfortunate "accidents" if you catch my drift

You could always avoid friendly fire by abdicating and never defending yourself.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Gatekeeper


Don't tell that to Venus.

Venus' atmosphere is considerably denser than ours.

[KrazyHorse]

Chegitz, you really don't know what you're talking about.

[Straybow]

Originally posted by Berzerker
I read recently about some paper from 1948 that claimed winds coming off N America were a big reason for a warmer Europe. Now I see why, colder winds come down the Rockies and over the Great Lakes cooling the northeast but then head out over the warmer Atlantic for Europe. But the gulfstream conveyor belt is still a big factor, if the northern Atlantic is colder the winds coming from the US wont carry as much heat to Europe. And judging by glacial extents during the ice age, Europe does seem to benefit from a warmer Atlantic even as ice sheets cover much of the northern hemisphere.

And somewhere in the north Atlantic the cooler arctic waters meet up with the warmer gulfstream. The further north these waters meet the warmer it is at higher latitudes. But during an ice age sea levels are much lower and the world's oceans and waterways are more restricted by geography so the effectiveness of distributing heat via water currents is lessened.

One of the theories about why we've seen ice ages over the last ~30 million years is that the rising Himalayas changed wind patterns

Note also the complementary diminishing of Appalachian & Ural ranges around the same time.

The jet stream was discovered in the '40s when planes were able to cruise above 10km. Before then nobody had theorized about large-scale atmospheric "guiding" mechanisms.

[snoopy369]

Living in Chicago tells me that the atmosphere is most definitely capable of traveling quite a distance and having an effect... in the winter particularly, a lot of our climate comes from whether the air masses coming at us are coming from the northwest (arctic air) or from the southwest (either pacific or gulf depending on the angle). The lake (a quite large body of water) has some effect locally, but does not come anywhere near the effect of the air masses moving in.

In any event, a lot of the question is not how much heat is stored in the water from the gulf, but how much heat is stored just in general (from the summer heating). The heat obviously comes from one or the other, but the former is 'transported' via water, while the latter is transported via air.

The problem is that the gulf stream is so much slower than air masses (my rudimentary guess is that water probably takes on the order of a couple of weeks to travel from the gulf to Europe). Something like 100km/day. (However, it slows dramatically after hitting Canada, to something like 0.03m/s or 7 km/day, as the North Atlantic Drift Current). We're looking at around 6,000 km, to England at least, so a drop of water from Florida would take at least 2 months to get there even at the 100km/day speed (which it does not maintain). I believe more realistically it actually would take an item dropped in the water in florida something like 1.5 years to get to europe with no wind assist (a small object).

Air on the other hand is more like 20-30km/h... and it doesn't have to go 6000 km to transport heat stored in the ocean to the land a few hundred km away