scholarly journals The Sensitivity of the Jet Stream Response to Climate Change to Radiative Assumptions

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 934-956 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhihong Tan ◽  
Orli Lachmy ◽  
Tiffany A. Shaw
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Albern ◽  
Aiko Voigt ◽  
Joaquim G. Pinto

<p>During boreal winter (December to February, DJF), the North Atlantic jet stream and storm track are expected to extend eastward over Europe in response to climate change. This will affect future weather and climate over Europe, for example by steering storms which are associated with strong winds and heavy precipitation towards Europe. The jet stream and storm track responses over Europe are robust across coupled climate models of phases 3, 5, and 6 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP; Harvey et al., 2020, JGR-A, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020JD032701). We show that the jet stream response is further robust across CMIP5 models of varying complexity ranging from coupled climate models to atmosphere-only General Circulation Models (GCMs) with prescribed sea-surface temperatures (SSTs) and sea-ice cover. In contrast to the jet stream response over Europe, the jet stream response over the North Atlantic is not robust in the coupled climate models and the atmosphere-only GCMs.</p><p>In addition to the CMIP5 simulations, we investigate Amip-like simulations with the atmospheric components of ICON-NWP, and the CMIP5 models MPI-ESM-LR and IPSL-CM5A-LR that apply the cloud-locking method to break the cloud-radiation-circulation coupling and to diagnose the contribution of cloud-radiative changes on the jet stream response to climate change. In the simulations, SSTs are prescribed to isolate the impact of cloud-radiative changes via the atmospheric pathway, i.e., via changes in atmospheric cloud-radiative heating, and global warming is mimicked by a uniform 4K SST increase (cf. Albern et al., 2019, JAMES, https://doi.org/10.1029/2018MS001592 and Voigt et al., 2019, J. Climate, https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-18-0810.1). In all three models, cloud-radiative changes contribute significantly and robustly to the eastward extension of the North Atlantic jet stream towards Europe. At the same time, cloud-radiative changes contribute to the model uncertainty over the North Atlantic. In addition to the jet stream response, we investigate the impact of cloud-radiative changes on the storm track response in ICON-NWP and discuss similarities and differences between the jet stream and storm track responses over the North Atlantic-European region.</p><p>In ICON-NWP, the impact of cloud-radiative changes on the jet stream response is dominated by tropical cloud-radiative changes while midlatitude and polar cloud-radiative changes have a minor impact. A further division of the tropics into four smaller tropical regions that cover the western tropical Pacific, the eastern tropical Pacific, the tropical Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean shows that cloud-radiative changes over the western tropical Pacific, eastern tropical Pacific, and Indian Ocean all contribute about equally to the eastward extension of the North Atlantic jet stream towards Europe because these regions exhibit substantial upper-tropospheric cloud-radiative heating in response to climate change. At the same time, cloud-radiative changes over the tropical Atlantic hardly contribute to the jet response over Europe because changes in atmospheric cloud-radiative heating under climate change are small in this region. As for the impact of global cloud-radiative changes, we also discuss the impact of the regional cloud-radiative changes on the storm track response over the North Atlantic-European region to climate change.</p>


Jet Stream ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 185-196
Author(s):  
Tim Woollings

Many aspects of climate change predicted by scientists are already appearing, with the structure and rate of warming generally proceeding as anticipated. But changes in wind patterns and circulation features such as the jet stream are much more uncertain. While the thermodynamic consequences of climate change have strongly affected the risk of several recent extreme weather events, we are only just starting to see hints of emerging dynamical changes to the jet stream.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xavier Fonseca ◽  
Gonzalo Miguez-Macho ◽  
José A. Cortes-Vazquez ◽  
Antonio Vaamonde

Abstract. In recent years, science has hardened the discourse on the emergency of global warming, pointing out that the next decades will be decisive to maintain the stability of the climate system, avoiding a cascade effect of events that increase the average temperature above safe limits. The scientific community warns that there are different tipping points that could produce a chain reaction in the global climate. One of them is related to the Jet Stream. But despite the importance of this air current in atmospheric dynamics in the Northern Hemisphere and the changes it is experiencing in the context of global warming, the public is still not familiar with this kind of physical concepts, nor with much simpler others. As concerns about the climate crisis rise, knowledge remains stagnant. To advance in the learning of the science of climate change, in general, and of concepts such as the Jet Stream, in particular, specific scientific communication formats are required that can successfully tackle the difficult task of explaining such complex problems to the general public. These formats should be included in the media because they are the main source for information on climate change and because their characteristics allow taking on the challenge. In this article we present a communication proposal existent in a newspaper published in Spain. We argue that this communication format represents a good model to disseminate climate science, educate readers and even to make physical concepts such as the Jet Stream accessible. We believe that this format conforms to and complies with the enunciation of Article 12 of the Paris Agreement, which calls on the signatory countries to promote education and training on climate change.


2013 ◽  
Vol 26 (14) ◽  
pp. 4930-4946 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon C. Delcambre ◽  
David J. Lorenz ◽  
Daniel J. Vimont ◽  
Jonathan E. Martin

Abstract The anthropogenic climate change impacts on the eddy–jet system include an intensified midlatitude jet stream and an elevated tropopause, as well as a poleward-shifted jet. While both responses are evident in phase 3 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP3) ensemble mean twenty-first-century projections, uncertainty in the poleward shift response is large enough that even the sign of the shift is not consistent among all models, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. The present analysis finds that twenty-first-century projections of the ensemble mean zonal wind change at 300 hPa predict a weakening and poleward expansion of the Pacific jet and an overall expansion of the Atlantic jet. In contrast with the direct zonal mean climate change signal of increasing midlatitude upper-level winds, zonal winds are projected to decrease in the core of the Pacific and Atlantic jets, with increasing zonal winds located primarily in the jet exit regions and the meridional flanks of the jets. Uncertainties in SST changes from the twentieth century to the twenty-first century between models are shown to impact modeled Northern Hemisphere jet stream changes. In particular, El Niño–Southern Oscillation–like mean winter SST changes explain 30% of intermodel variance of midlatitude zonal wind compared to the 8% explained by the domain-averaged warming SST signal. This suggests that a reduction of uncertainty in the tropical Pacific SST response to global warming will significantly reduce uncertainty in the Northern Hemisphere zonal wind response to climate change.


Author(s):  
Wesley Schouw ◽  
Prof. Gunter Pauli

This article introduces factors contributing significantly to climate change that have been largely neglected in both the scientific and popular press. These factors have immediate implications for public policy directed at slowing, halting and even reversing climate change and its effects. This article argues that in addition to the known contributions made by greenhouse gasses, climate change is also driven by shifts in the patterns of global atmospheric circulation which are influenced by persistent, large-scale vortices caused by the wake turbulence left by commercial air traffic. Because this traffic is highly concentrated along the most frequently traveled routes, the vortices aircraft create have transformed into semi-permanent atmospheric circulation which have widespread effects on how the atmosphere traps and releases heat. It is also possible that these changes alter the loss of water from the atmosphere. This would endanger all life on earth, not just the human population.


Author(s):  
Tim Woollings

A number of extreme weather events have struck the Northern Hemisphere in recent years, from scorching heatwaves to desperately cold winters and from floods and storms to droughts and wildfires. Is this the emerging signal of climate change, and should we expect more of this? Media reports vary widely, but one mysterious agent has risen to prominence in many cases: the jet stream. The story begins on a windswept beach in Barbados, from where we follow the ascent of a weather balloon that will travel all around the world, following the jet stream. From this viewpoint we can observe the effect of the jet in influencing human life around the hemisphere, and witness startling changes emerging. What is the jet stream and how well do we understand it? How does it affect our weather and is it changing? These are the main questions tackled in this book. We learn about how our view of the wind has developed from Aristotle’s early theories up to today’s understanding. The jet is shown to be intimately connected with dramatic contrasts between climate zones and to have played a key historical role in determining patterns of trade. We learn about the basic physics underlying the jet and how this knowledge is incorporated into computer models which predict both tomorrow’s weather and the climate of future decades. We discuss how climate change is expected to affect the jet, and introduce the urgent scientific debate over whether these changes have contributed to recent extreme weather events.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucrezia Terzi ◽  
Gerhard Wotawa ◽  
Paul W. Staten ◽  
Lan Luan ◽  
Axel Gabriel ◽  
...  

<p>Recent studies demonstrated how accurate beryllium 7 can be used as proxy to predict seasonal weather, in particular Indian monsoons, climate change patterns such as tropopause height changes, tropopause breathing and Jet Stream stalling.</p><p>Beryllium 7 studies also prove that climate change phenomena are not driven by solar flux or earth magnetic field but are only partially influenced by them.</p><p>In this work we will compare recent tropopause height data with Beryllium 7 in order to build a comparative scale between the 2 parameters, including a focus on QBO (quasi-biennual oscillation) to quantify the effect of QBO on the analysed beryllium 7 data.</p>


2021 ◽  
pp. 327-357
Author(s):  
Martin Stendel ◽  
Jennifer Francis ◽  
Rachel White ◽  
Paul D. Williams ◽  
Tim Woollings
Keyword(s):  

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