The Weather Cycle

I have come up with a concept regarding the weather and have become more and more convinced that it must be correct.

Suppose we set up a system of interconnected gears. One of the gears will have a handle attached so that when someone turns it, all of the gears will turn. We could draw lines across each point where gears are joined and if all of the gears was the same size, with the same number of teeth, the lines would match up each time the system of gears went through one cycle.

But things would get complicated if the gears were of different sizes, with different numbers of teeth. The fewer the teeth on a gear, the faster it will turn. A gear with 12 teeth will turn twice as fast as one with 24 teeth.

If we had several interconnected gears, of different sizes, the starting lines would eventually line up again, but it might require an extended period of turning. However, we can safely say that any finite system of interconnected gears will return to it's starting line-up if the system is turned for long enough.

So, you may be wondering what on earth this has to do with the weather. The answer is everything.

The factors which create the weather are all cyclical in nature, just like a rotating gear. The rotation of the earth causes the temperature fluctuations associated with day and night, as well as driving the prevailing winds on a large scale. The revolution of the earth, which drives the seasons, is also cyclical in nature.

The evaporation and precipitation, which is the main component of weather, is cyclical as well. Water evaporates, but air gets thinner and cooler as we go higher in altitude until we reach a point where water vapor (vapour) condenses as tiny droplets on various particles of dust, smoke and, salt that act as condensation nuclei, forming clouds.

Eventually, these droplets become crowded close together so that they merge by hydrogen bonding into drops too heavy for the air to support and fall as precipitation, especially if sudden cooling takes place which lowers the ability of the air to hold water vapour (vapor).

This is a fairly simple process. The reason that weather is so complex is because the surface of the earth is messy. The distribution of land, sea, dust and, mountains is far from regular. It is further complicated by ocean currents moving warm and cold water around. Global warming is also having an increasing effect on the weather.

The result is that it is very difficult to forecast the weather much in advance.

Now, back to our gear system. No matter how complex we make the system of gears it must, as long as it is not infinte, eventually return to it's starting line-up. We can calculate just how many turns of the main gear, the one with the handle, will be required to bring this about.

All of the factors driving the weather are cyclic in nature, just like our gears. The messiness of the earth's surface complicates the weather greatly, but this messiness remains relatively constant over thousands of years and is not one of the cycles.

Weather is very much the product of the earth's rotation and revolution. Without this movement, the evaporation of the water and the movement of the air would reach a condition of equilibrium and remain there. But the movments of the earth continuously upsets any such equilibrium, and the result is the weather.

Today, I would like to introduce the idea that all weather on earth is a part of a long cycle which repeats itself over and over. Alternating storms and nice days are literally teeth in the gears. this does not only apply to large-scale effects like a warmer than usual winter, but to every local storm and nice day and also to warm and cold fronts. however, this does not apply all the way down to the molecular level so that repetitions of the weather cycle involve the same water molecules.

Warm and cold ocean currents, like the messiness of the earth's surface, complicate the weather cycle, and thus increase it's duration, but are not a part of the cycle. Just as the gear system would be simpler, and it's cycle much shorter, if all of the gears were the same size, the weather cycle would be much simpler if the earth's northern and southern hemispheres handled heat in the same way. But the southern hemisphere has a far higher proportion of water.

I do not have the length of the weather cycle, it may well be longer than a human lifetime, but this has got to be the way it is. The factors driving the weather are all cyclical. The other factors affecting the weather are complex, but constant. Global warming is an exception to this, but it is increasing at what is probably a constant rate. The weather must repeat itself, at some level.

The weather in every place, and on the earth as a whole, must follow a long-term cycle that we have not yet noticed. An understanding of this cycle would greatly assist in forecasting well in advance and also understanding how it is being affected by global warming. It may become apparent with the keeping of detailed weather records and the development of computer technology to search out patterns in data. Weather is another one of those things that seem random to us, but actually follows and orderly pattern we do not yet understand.