By Jim Steele

Click-bait media, such as the Washington Post, fear mongered the headlines, “Scientists found the most intense heat wave ever”. Due to incessant media propaganda, alarmists falsely believed only rising CO2 concentrations can cause such extreme warming events, and that heat waves are deadly. Indeed, Antarctica’s March 2022 heat wave extraordinarily raised local temperatures at Dome C above its average on March 2022 by 40C (72F). Nonetheless, the heatwave only raised temperatures to (minus) -11.8C maintaining deadly cold temperatures.

Media’s climate narratives commonly suggest in our era of anthropogenic climate change such an unusual temperature heat wave puts us in uncharted territory and many admitted being baffled. However, a large group of objective climate scientists just published Wille et al (2024) The Extraordinary March 2022 East Antarctica: “Heat” Wave” Parts I & II, revealing all the natural weather dynamics that produced that “heat wave”.

As shown, (illustration A), at Antarctica’s Dome C (Concordia), today’s CO2 concentrations had maintained March temperatures to normally hover around -55C. But on March 18, 2022, temperatures spiked upwards by 40 C (72F) in a highly unusual warm event.

Although Antarctica is typically described as a “polar desert”, Wille et al (2024) showed that this Antarctica heatwave was driven by an “atmospheric river” (AR) that transported such abnormally abundant warm moisture it warmed air temperatures. Counter-intuitively it delivered both rain that melted coastal ice yet added enough snow and ice inland that the continent’s overall surface mass balance increased!

Graphic B, from the US National Weather Service’s model, shows for March 17th the moisture content of Antarctica’s atmospheric river that originated northwest of Australia. AR’s are relatively new to science, being first detected in the 1990s. We now know 5 or 6 AR’s are emanating from the world’s rainiest Intertropical Convergence Zone region (light blue) every day.

I inserted numbers representing the amounts of moisture, measured in kilograms per meter squared (each kilogram can deliver a millimeter of rainfall). About a fourth of the moisture leaving the equatorial region arrived at Antarctica’s coast. I also inserted a pink oval to outline the extent of the heat wave which received 15 times more moisture than normal for Antarctica’s coast elsewhere.

This heat and moisture transfer is a major dynamic that normally contributes to balancing the earth’s climate. As shown in graphic C, the tropics absorb more solar heat than it ever releases. Much of that solar heat is stored and then transported out towards the poles, with heat ventilating along the way, making those regions much warmer than local solar or greenhouse heating can possibly do. Think how the Gulf Stream warms Europe.

The atmospheric river exited the northeastern Indian Ocean, and when reaching the coast of eastern Antarctica brought both warmer temperatures and moisture to the coast. That in turn melted some coastal ice. However further inland, that atmospheric river delivered so much snowfall, Antarctica’s ice sheet overall gained ice.

The atmospheric river increased cloud cover. Those “warm” clouds radiated more longwave heat which warmed the surface below. Most people outside the tropics have experienced a similar dynamic as cloudy winter nights are much warmer than clear sky winter nights. Normally in Antarctica, March’s solar energy declines as the earth approaches the solar equinox, so that exiting (upward) longwave radiation dominates the energy budget driving Antarctica’s seasonal cooling.

In contrast, the atmospheric river brought so much moisture that downward longwave radiation dominated, warming the surface, and raising temperatures by as much as 40 C in some places. The atmospheric currents at the time trapped and circulated the resulting clouds which brought large swaths of east Antarctica the so-called heat wave.

Two natural climate dynamics have been shown to increase the amount of precipitable water vapor that supplies moisture to this region’s atmospheric river transport. One is the 2022 La Nina (graphic F) during which increased trade winds drove more solar heated waters into the western Pacific and Indian Ocean and increased convection. The Madden-Julian Oscillation (graphic D) further increased convection and the amount of water vapor injected into the atmospheric river’s “headwaters” and increased the number of moisture enhancing tropical cyclones.

The amount of precipitable water vapor has been blindly suggested by alarmists to be the result of global warming. But studies examining trends in Indian Ocean precipitable water vapor (Graphic E) suggest that La Nina oscillations better accounts for precipitable water vapor trends that correlate with ENSO, but not CO2 concentrations.

All the evidence suggests that 2 natural weather dynamics supplied an atmospheric river with excessive water vapor which warmed east Antarctica and added icy mass to the continent. This event educated blinkered climate scientists and the public, showing them how known natural dynamics can generate extraordinary warming events and why the science is not settled.