On January 15, 2018, this plane
a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner set a record for a subsonic aircraft crossing the Atlantic.
It flew from New York to London in 5 hours 13 minutes, reaching ground speeds of up to 776 mph.
The day before, another plane had made the same run in 5 hours 20 minutes.
How was it possible for a subsonic passenger plane to make that kind of time?
The heart of the northern cold has shifted from the Arctic Ocean to Hudson's Bay.
The circumpolar winds used to flow in a fairly tight circle around the North Pole at zero latitude.
Now, with the heart of the cold over Canada, the Coriolis Effect is messing with the circumpolar winds and forcing them to spin much farther south than they used to.
They get all wiggly and wavy, too, and sometimes they get lost and trickle out.
Overall, they've slowed down significantly.
But occasionally the bands tighten up and get screaming.
That's what happened on January 15. The strongest winds were clocked at 264 mph.
You can see the jet stream band (use ctl shift - to shrink the image) on the right.
That's the band on the day the Dreamliner flew so fast to London.
In addition to getting to London faster, changes in a planet's Polar Vortex is a big deal by any measure.
This is likely to have other effects and we're all part of the experiment.
Here's Saturn's Northern Polar Vortex, perfectly centered around zero latitude, for comparison.
Yeah, it really is a hexagon. Freaky, huh?
Home
by Bob Kuczewski » Wed Sep 27, 2017 11:17 pm 
