Arctic...It's warming twice as fast as the rest of Earth, but the reason may not

[astr0144]

Arctic's 'Layer Cake' Atmosphere Blamed for Rapid Warming

New culprit blamed for Arctic's rapid heating

It's warming twice as fast as the rest of Earth, but the reason may not be as cut-and-dried as first thought. 



The Arctic is leading a race with few winners, warming twice as fast as the rest of the Earth. Loss of snow and ice, which reflect the sun's energy, is usually blamed for the Arctic temperature spike.

But a new study suggests the Arctic's cap of cold, layered air plays a more important role in boosting polar warming than does its shrinking ice and snow cover. A layer of shallow, stagnant air acts like a lid, concentrating heat near the surface, researchers report today (Feb. 2) in the journal Nature Geoscience. [Images of Melt: Earth's Vanishing Ice]

"In the Arctic, as the climate warms, most of the additional heat remains trapped in a shallow layer of the atmosphere close to the ground, not deeper than 1 or 2 kilometers [0.6 to 1.2 miles]," said Felix Pithan, a climate scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany and lead author of the new study.

"[This] makes the Arctic surface rather inefficient at getting rid of extra energy, and therefore it warms more than other regions when the entire planet is warming," Pithan told Live Science.

The Arctic atmosphere looks like a layer cake compared with the tropics. In those regions, thunderstorms carry heat from the surface miles upward, where it then radiates out into space. But in the Arctic, air and heat at the surface rarely mix with air located high in the atmosphere, Pithan said.

"The Arctic atmosphere is much more inefficient than the tropics at getting rid of that extra energy," he said.



http://news.yahoo.com/arctic-39-39-layer-cake-39-atmosphere-blamed-160858894.html

[zorgon]

Worst winter storms EVER are not helping the case for saying Arctic Ice is melting

Few people understand it is based on an ANNUAL average

[zorgon]

Tell it to THESE folkes

[Norval]

hmmmm I could swear that I saw those pics somewhere else recently, , , 

[astr0144]

Yes Zorgon,

It is a mystery !

Could be natural cycles of the Earth & sun..

but then we see Coldest that I have seen in the USA for sometime.. yet they still telling us that the Artic /Earth is warming ! 

After being immune at one time to such suggestions from the likes of Al Gore & the Gov... I sometimes still forget and look at articles that are being posted on the Big websites...



LOLs Norval !, would that be somewhere on Peggy or a forum beginning with "A" or elsewhere ! 

hmmmm I could swear that I saw those pics somewhere else recently, , ,