New Study: Big Jet Stream Waves Have Doubled Since The 1960s…
A new study has joined the growing mountain of evidence linking atmospheric shifts to prolonged spells of extreme winter conditions, particularly in North America and Europe, with these extreme patterns doubling since the 1960s.
These patterns often synchronize across the two continents, continues the paper, causing significant disruptions.
A new study, published this week in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society suggests that the atmosphere is being pushed around more than it used to be, resulting in long bouts of extreme winter cold.
The authors say they have identified giant meanders in the global jet stream that drive polar air southward, locking in frigid and/or wet conditions concurrently over much of North America and Europe, often for weeks at a time.
Such weather waves, they say, have doubled in frequency since the 1960s.
The jet stream flows within relatively straight boundaries, segregating cold polar air masses from the midlatitudes, but at times it can develop big ‘wobbles’.
Some scientists think these wobbles are increasing in size and frequency due to the correlating drop in solar output. Others say disproportionate Arctic warming is destabilizing the system; however, this theory suffers from a multitude of problems, including the fact that disproportionately warming poles would actually reduce the temperature difference between them and the lower latitudes, and therefore reduce extreme weather events, not intensify them.
Moreover, the theory doesn’t work in practice, either, because jet stream wobbles are also shown to be increasing in the Southern Hemisphere despite a cooling Antarctica.
Antarctica
Cooling has been the theme on Antarctic for the past 7 decades (likely the past 200+ decades, to be totally accurate), with extreme bouts of cold appearing to be increasing in recent years, including 2023.
On Jan 29 of this year, Vostok Station plunged to 48.7C (-55.7F) and in the process took out 1989’s historical January low (of -48.5C/-55.3F), making it the station’s coldest-ever summer temperature since its opening back in 1957.
On Jan 30, the Italian-French Concordia Station logged -48.5C (-55.3F). This tied the station’s lowest-ever January temperature, registered just last year. Here are Concorida’s coldest Jan lows in chronological order: -48C on Jan 28, 2012; -48.3C on Jan 31, 2012; -48.5C on Jan 30, 2022; and now -48.5C on Jan 30, 2023 — a trend appears to be emerging.
Prior to that, Antarctica suffered its coldest-ever ‘coreless winter’ in 2021 (April-Sept), and has posted colder-than-average months ever since, with the next four months finishing as The South Pole Station’s second-coldest Oct-Dec on record.
And looking further back still, Antarctica has been defying AGW Party orders for decades.
Official data reveals that East Antarctica, which covers two thirds of the South Pole, has cooled 2.8C over the past four decades, with West Antarctica cooling 1.6C. It stands that only a tiny slither of Antarctica (the Antarctic Peninsula) has seen any warming –statistically insignificant warming, at that– but there are no prizes for guessing which region the legacy media focuses on.
Rossby Waves
The aforementioned wobbles will often become amplified into symmetrical waves that then lock in place across the globe, somewhat similar to the vibrations that produce a constant musical pitch. These are sometimes called Rossby waves.
In a 2019 study, Kornhuber et al. showed that a repeating Rossby wave pattern known as a ‘wave-7’ –that is, seven giant peaks and seven matching troughs spanning the globe– draws warm, dry air from the subtropics up to the midlatitudes, causing concurrent summer heat waves and droughts in parts of North America, Europe and Asia.
The newer paper shows more or less the other side of the coin, that a winter pattern known as a ‘wave-4’ –four peaks and four matching troughs– tend to lock in place. The authors say that when this happens, the chances of extreme cold in the trough triples.
A recent major wave-4 iteration brought a Feb 2021 cold wave to much of North America, even to Mexico.
Temperatures fell as much as 50F below average as far south as the U.S. Gulf Coast, and a myriad of all-time records were slain. Parts of the Deep South were delivered rare snowfall, with the hardest southern state being Texas, where record cold paralyzed natural gas pipelines and other energy infrastructure, directly leading to some 702 deaths and $200 billion in damage.
The same pattern often hits on the other side of the Atlantic simultaneously, usually most most extreme in southwestern Europe and Scandinavia. A Jan-Feb 2019 event delivered deadly cold to the U.S. as well as an extreme freeze to both southern France and Sweden.
Similar events took place in Europe in 2013 and 2018.
According to the researchers, these concurrent waves occurred once each winter 50 years ago, but the average has now risen to twice a year, adding “to the growing evidence that extreme weather over North America and Europe are often synchronized,” said the study’s other author, Gabriele Messori of Sweden’s Uppsala University.
Forecasting
Pinning down the mechanism(s) would allow scientists to better predict future cold waves.
These winter waves are increasing, despite establishment rug-sweeping/explain-aways, and mainstream climate models fail to reproduce them in IPCC warming scenarios. In short, they shouldn’t still be occurring on our supposed linearly warming planet.
Read the day’s other article:
What is with this annoying video that appears in the middle of your stories about ocean warming?
Seems like someone is trying to sabotage you.
been like this for ages