A Super Jet Stream Will Cross the Pacific this Weekend.

If you want to take a very fast flight across the Pacific from Tokyo to Seattle, book your ticket on Sunday.

Normally, such flights take about 8.5 hr.   But Sunday you will do it in well under 8 hours..perhaps as short as 7.5 hr--and I suspect the route will be more direct than normal.

The reason: a nearly continuous, strong jet stream across the Pacific.

As a reminder, a jet stream is a relatively narrow current of strong winds in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere, typically found between 25,000 and 40,000 feet above sea level.

To illustrate, here are the predicted winds (in knots) at around 38,000 ft (200 hPa pressure) at 5 PM PDT Sunday..  Reds and browns are the strongest winds-- with the most energetic winds of 150-175 knots (175-200 mph)


A balloon released from Japan could make it across the Pacific (roughly 4700 miles) in roughly a day in a half.  

The jet stream is the locus of clouds and storms and a map of predicted cloudiness (simulated satellite image) for 5 PM PDT Sunday shows the continuous ribbon of clouds across the Pacific.


To have some fun, I used the NOAA Hysplit system to calculate three-dimensional air trajectories, tracing the previous path of air reaching over Seattle at 3 PM Sunday at 8000 meters and 10,000 meters above sea level (see figure).  I plotted the air trajectories over the past 60 hours.  

The over Seattle on Sunday will have come from Japan!


From Mount Fuji to Mount Rainier in about 50 hours. And before that North Korea and Russia.

The airspace of our planet is very interconnected..... something we should never forget.






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