Droughts, floods from weird jet stream linked to Arctic heat
Something strange is going on, with more incidences of unprecedented heat waves, droughts and flooding happening in recent years, and based on the latest research, it’s looking more and more like climate change is to blame.
The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on the planet, due to global warming and the resulting changes it is causing to Earth’s climate. For 2016 alone, NASA recorded an average temperature anomaly in the Arctic of over three times what was observed at the equator.
According to a new study in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, headed by Penn State climate scientist Michael E. Mann, the jet stream is being locked into some strange, persistent patterns by this Arctic heat, and this, in turn, is fueling some of the extreme, unprecedented weather events we have been experiencing in the last few decades.
“The warming of the Arctic, the polar amplification of warming, plays a key role here,” Mann told Penn State News. “The surface and lower atmosphere are warming more in the Arctic than anywhere else on the globe. That pattern projects onto the very temperature gradient profile that we identify as supporting atmospheric waveguide conditions.”
Map of global temperature anomalies for 2016, compared to the 20th Century average. The Arctic was roughly 3.2oC above average vs 1oC above average at the equator. Credit: NASA GISS
There is a fairly simple premise that drives the activity of the jet stream: the speed of the winds in the stream is strongly influenced by how the temperature changes between the equator and the pole (ie: the temperature gradient).
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