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| Global warming: New study shows links between melting Arctic sea ice and extreme weather in mid-latitudes |
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 SUMMIT COUNTY (Citizens Voice) -- More studies are showing that the massive loss of Arctic sea ice is going to have significant effects on mid-latitude weather.
With more solar energy going into the Arctic Ocean because of lost ice, there is reason to expect more extreme weather events, such as heavy snowfall, heat waves, and flooding in North America and Europe, according to a new report.
“What we’re seeing is stark evidence that the gradual temperature increase is not the important story related to climate change,” said Rutgers researcher Jennifer Francis. “It’s the rapid regional changes and increased frequency of extreme weather that global warming is causing.
As the Arctic warms at twice the global rate, we expect an increased probability of extreme weather events across the temperate latitudes of the northern hemisphere, where billions of people live,” she said.
The NOAA study, led by James Overland, Ph.D., of NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, Wash., shows that normal west-to-east flowing upper-level winds have been replaced by a more north-south undulating, or wave-like pattern.
This new wind pattern transports warmer air into the Arctic and pushes Arctic air farther south, and may influence the likelihood of persistent weather conditions in the mid-latitudes.
“Our research reveals a change in the summer Arctic wind pattern over the past six years.
This shift demonstrates a physical connection between reduced Arctic sea ice in the summer, loss of Greenland ice, and potentially, weather in North American and Europe,” said Overland, a NOAA research oceanographer.
Changes in the Arctic
The shift provides additional evidence that changes in the Arctic are not only directly because of global warming, as shown by warmer air and sea temperatures, but are also part of an “Arctic amplification” through which multiple Arctic-specific physical processes interact to accelerate temperature change, ice variability, and ecological impacts.
Before 2007, typical summer winds at the Arctic surface were more variable but tended to flow from the West.
Since then, the summer winds have been blowing more consistently from the south, through the Bering Strait, across the North Pole, and out toward the Atlantic Ocean, relative to the mean pattern in previous decades.
These winds transfer additional heat from the south toward the North Pole and push sea ice across the Arctic and out into the Atlantic Ocean, contributing to record losses of summer sea ice.
The 2012 Arctic summer sea ice minimum far surpassed 2007 as the lowest on record.
“Higher pressure over the North American continent and Greenland is driving these changes in the early summer wind patterns,” said Edward Hanna, Ph.D., of the University of Sheffield.
These shifts in winds not only affect weather patterns throughout the Arctic but are also thought to influence weather in Greenland, the United States, and western Europe.
Understanding such links is an ongoing area of research, the scientists said.
The effects of Arctic amplification will increase as more summer ice retreats over coming decades.
Enhanced warming of the Arctic affects the jet stream by slowing its west-to-east winds and by promoting larger north-south meanders in the flow.
Predicting those meanders and where the weather associated with them will be located in any given year, however, remains a challenge.
The study, the “Recent Shift in Early Summer Arctic Atmospheric Circulation,” was co-authored by scientists from Rutgers University in New Jersey, the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, and the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean, a partnership of NOAA and the University of Washington. It can be found online.
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