Interesting article thats relates to Hurricane Sandy

[Derek Mallia]

A new paper was recently released and cited by a news article in the Washington Post in regards to the effects of climate change on the general circulation. Two papers suggest that flow regimes that support the western movement of TCs in the mid-latitudes will actually become less frequent as the earth heats up. This goes against the popular belief that climate change will heat the arctic faster than the rest of the planet thus decreasing the temperature gradient between the polar latitudes and the rest of the earth. Via thermal wind argument one can argue that this will slow down the jet stream which would result in more blocking pattern weather regimes. Obviously this was surprising to me as I am a firm believer of the later though our earth's atmosphere is a non-linear system so I guess anything is possible!


Haven't actually had the chance to read the journal articles that the news article references but I am sure I will be checking them out later this weekend.


Link: www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2013/09/04/whiplash-climate-change-to-make-sandy-like-paths-less-likely-study-says/

[Derek Mallia]

Thanks for the link, it will certainly be worth reading and perhaps will bring me up to speed with this "hot" debate!

[kgriffin]

Unfortunately, I think the Post's quote (I should say Capital Weather Gang, since they're pretty independent from the rest of the paper) from the article isn't the best. I haven't had time to actually read the whole thing (and more unfortunately, I probably won't get there either), but it seems to me that some of the work is being misinterpreted. I'm not sure where that misinterpretation is happening, but it definitely seems suspicious to me that a weaker jet stream would result in fewer blocking patterns, at least based on Rossby wave dispersion principles.

Of course, Sandy is/was such a rare event, so drawing comparisons to its track and stating a change in the frequency of such tracks is rather foolish when the current "frequency" is unknown!

[Sara Ganetis]

This post will be updated and act as a one-stop-shop for links to the various referenced articles if you wanted to quickly access them for a classroom, pub, or weather discussion!


The Feather-ruffling news article that most East Coast papers ran this week:
Original AP Article titled, "Sandy's 'freaky' path may be less likely in the future."

The Feather-ruffling scientific article that was quoted:
Barnes, Sobel, and Polvani, 2013: Model projections of atmospheric steering of Sandy-like superstorms. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, doi:10.1073/pnas.1308732110.

Selected Scientific Articles Exploring this Issue:
Francis, J. A., and S. J. Vavrus (2012), Evidence linking Arctic amplification to extreme weather in mid-latitudes, Geophys. Res. Lett., 39, L06801, doi:10.1029/2012GL051000.

• Essentially reanalysis data show slower zonal winds and higher amplified flow
  
• Jennifer Francis' talk at SBU.
  

Screen, J. A., and I. Simmonds (2013), Exploring links between Arctic amplification and mid-latitude weather, Geophys. Res. Lett., 40, 959–964, doi:10.1002/grl.50174.

• Trends are dependent on the metric that is used so therefore challenged Francis et al. 2012.
  

Carry on

[Derek Mallia]

Agreed Kyle, I think Nick Bassil was trying to make a point of this when I was talking to him earlier. For this reason I downloaded and printed the article for some leisurely reading while I'm up in the Wasatch Mountains tomorrow!

And thanks Sara for those links, you saved me some time! 3 less google searches for me to do today =P

[Derek Mallia]

Probably another paper that is worth reading though as I'm sure its all connected.