It's surreal how gratuitously you misquote me.webolife wrote: By the way, what is absurd about a 300 mph differential in relative wind speed [ie. the average speed of the jet stream with respect to the earth's surface from which it is gauged] due to the sphericity of the earth's surface?
What I am seeing here is an intellectual disconnect with reality. You didn't explain how a 300 mph wind is sustained along the tropopause or why it exists there. You brought up a few facts that are tangential to the issue. Yes the earth spins. Yes, there is a Coriolis effect. Yes, cyclonic movement is opposite in different hemisphere. Everybody knows all of this.webolife wrote: For a reader's reminder, the equatorial earth surface rotates eastward at 1600+ kph, while the mid to upper latitudes rotate eastward at around in the ranges of 700 - 1100 kph, a difference middling around 700 kph to a stationary observer at those latitudes. So a polarward moving parcel of air originating near the equator will start out at a high eastward speed and "overtake" the slower rotating earth as it moves toward the poles, ie. moving eastward at a faster rate than the rotating earth at the higher latitudes. Likewise winds originating in the higher latitudes lag behind the earth's rotation as they head toward the equator. This is a basic description of the Coriolis effect, commonly stated thus: Currents [wind and water] in the Northern Hemisphere veer to the right [and to the left in the Southern Hemisphere]. This is an almost entirely exigent consequence of simple inertia, oh... and simple convection. It explains the anticyclonic movement in air masses [ie. clockwise in the N Hem}, as well as the cyclonic movement at low pressure frontal systems as considered in the context of convection.
Even though I am sure it is inadvertent, by all appearances you are attempting to obfuscate the issue. All you are doing is stringing together observations that are related. You don't have a relevant point or an honest argument as far as I can tell.
The real issue here involves the question/mystery as to how this 300 mph flow maintains its coherence. Why/how does it avoid the friction that normally would spread this energy and reduce the flow to chaos?
Submission to Reader Comment Section of Ideas and Discoveries Magazine
Discover Something New
Ideas and Discoveries Magazine
http://www.ideasanddiscoveries.com/
My submission to Reader Comment Section:
(Published April, 2015)
A river that has no banks is not a river, it is a flood. Might the same be true for jet streams? If so, might this suggest an undiscovered plasma that facilitates the structural integrity that, like the banks of a river, makes the focused flow of jet streams possible? Your article on jet streams, entitled How Sick is the Jet Stream? February 2015, goes a long way to opening people's mind to the possibility that there is more to the atmosphere than just wind and water. On my own website, solvingtornadoes.com, I attempt to breath some life into these questions by drawing parallels between jet streams and tornadoes, even going so far as to suggest that the plainly observable cone or vortex of a tornado is evidence that substantiates the existence of this theoretical plasma. In my book entitled, Vortex Phase: The Discovery of the Spin That Underlies the Twist, I take it even further suggesting a simple solution to large, violent tornadoes. Thank you for providing graphic evidence that jet streams play a much greater role in our everyday lives than previously was even imagined.
James McGinn / Solving Tornadoes