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There are two parts to the equation, the atmosphere and the sea, so I did a search on "japan sea temperature", and turned up this:

http://www.whoi.edu/science/PO/japan_sea/

 

Woods Hole are on the case, and inevitably, the US Navy. They had a plane out sampling the atmosphere, and a ship in the water. That's what I call a research budget eek.gif

 

There is a cold northern water body which meets a warmer southern body at the subpolar front. Low pressure systems spawn on this front, and track NW along it, pulling in cold air behind from the Siberian High. This air channels in over Vladivostock between the Russian and Korean mountains.

 

fig4_cartoon.gif

 

By giving up heat to the cold air, the southern water mass cools, the water masses mix, and they sink. Reducing the temperature difference also turns off the system spawning the lows, a negative feedback. It is quite possible that the volume of snow received is therefore limited by the amount of heat in store at the start each winter.

 

It's worth working through the abstracts at the bottom of the report.

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 Quote:
Originally posted by soubriquet:
It is quite possible that the volume of snow received is therefore limited by the amount of heat in store at the start each winter.
Interesting thought that...
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as an engineer (mining if anyone is interested) I'm interested to know myself, as we all know it has nothing to do with the temperature, there are many places across the globe consistantly much colder than Japan but Japan wins in terms of snowfall volume. sorry I can not help, but please post your results when you find out.

 

most gaijin in Japan studdied humanities so most probably aren't as interested, but I'm very interested. (not in any way an insult, just that people from different areas of study generally have different points of view)

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I hear Himaraya also causes. Usually at this latitude, a lot of places are most likely desert or steppe. But Himaraya keeps providing moist and cold air and the windblow brings it to Japan direction.

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 Quote:
Originally posted by RockyV:

most gaijin in Japan studdied humanities so most probably aren't as interested, but I'm very interested. (not in any way an insult, just that people from different areas of study generally have different points of view)
I studied humanities RockyV, but that doesn't limit my interest. In fact I am keen to see the results of this too. Choosing humanities over say engineering for me wasn't a case of not liking one, but more a case of which one I liked more. Would love to have been able to study more in the sciences, but chose the other path ;\)
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I've been doing a little digging around, and come up with some data. This image is sea surface temperature (SST) for October 20-27 2004. The colour coding is: magenta (0C), blue (6C), cyan (12C) and green (17C). It shows southern part of the Sea of Japan with a surface temperature of around 17C.

 

sstoct208bv.gif

 

By late February, most of the Sea of Japan is at 0C, with just the southern margin at between 6 and 12C.

 

sstfeb163ai.gif

 

source: NOAA, NASA, JPL

http://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/navoceano_mcsst/newnavoceano_browse.pl

 

If we look at the sub-surface, we see that last Friday, pretty much the whole of the Sea of Japan below 200m was 0-1C.

 

sojtemp200m4gf.gif

 

Nicely illustrated by a S-N section.

 

sojtvert19dq.gif

 

source: US Navy Naval Research Laboratory.

http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/altimetry/regions/reg_soj.html

 

It would be very easy to calculate the amount of heat lost, and convert that into volume of snow, but someone would have to pay me to do it. Regardless, it is clear that the cooling of the surface layer will reduce the potential to both generate low pressure systems, and to evaporate sea water.

 

If we look at the full SST plots (I'll switch to thumbnails, because this will blow the page format) we can take this a little further. We are looking for somewhere where arctic air masses depart the high latitude continents (so it will have to be an east coast) and cross a warm sea before striking land. There's only one candidate.

 

2004301n18n17isst4se.th.gif

 

When you also take into consideration the effect of the coastal mountain ranges concentrating the air flow into a focused blast rather than simply rolling diffusely off the continental edge, I think it reasonable to propose that some aspects of the Japanese climate are unique to Japan.

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Woah! Soub, this is obviously close to or in your field??

 

Akibun, Humanities is a very broad term for a wide variety of things like languages, literature, philosophy, history, economics, etc., etc. In Japanese it is probably closest to 文系 as opposed to 理系. Make sense? Most disciplines fall into the two very broad categories of humanities or sciences.

 

NPM, UWA. You?

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You've asked the question Bushpig, so I'll ask for your indulgence and try to be brief.

 

My area is sedimentary geology. Sedimentologists iterate between the past and the present. We study the processes and products of current "environments" (river, delta, desert...) in order to interpret the records preserved in sediments and sedimentary rocks. A major control on all Earth-surface processes is climate. To that extent climatology is in my field, but only as an enabling science.

 

In 1995, I was employed by the CSIRO to make a study of the landscape of The Pilbara on behalf of an iron mining company. I had a $250,000 budget. They gave me a nice shiny one of these.

 

x19952000024xv.jpg

 

For the really hard to get to places, I could call up this.

 

x19952000039td.jpg

 

The Pilbara landscape looks like this in winter.

 

xcs19955008eo.th.jpg

 

It looks like this in summer (40C+ and 90% humidity + sweatflies).

 

x19955000130ue.jpg

 

The presentation went well, with enough brass to make it seem like something out of MASH

 

x1995323pg.jpg

 

The result. They were looking for a sedimentologist to lead them to a hole in the ground. I was pointing to the tops of the hills and saying this where where your iron ore came from. They believed me, and closed their detrital iron exploration group. My continuation funding ceased immediately. Professional suicide.

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Nope. Without any project continuation, I was a long way out on a funding limb. I got to do a lot of interesting stuff around Australia, but when the budget cycle ended, I got the chop. I've tried pretty hard, but palaeoenvironmental reconstruction is a pretty hard trick to sell.

 

Although it would be nice to still have the career, I am thankful to have had the opportunity. Now I live in Yamagata, surrounded by mountains and snow. I'm grateful for that opportunity too. Japan has a fantastically dynamic landscape. It's Nirvana.

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