The influence of Arctic amplification on mid-latitude summer circulation

By Dim Coumou, G. D. Capua, S. Vavrus, Lei Wang, Shih-yu Wang. Nature Communications, 2018

716 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Accelerated warming in the Arctic, as compared to the rest of the globe, might have profound impacts on mid-latitude weather. Most studies analyzing Arctic links to mid-latitude weather focused on winter, yet recent summers have seen strong reductions in sea-ice extent and snow cover, a weakened equator-to-pole thermal gradient and associated weakening of the mid-latitude circulation. We review the scientific evidence behind three leading hypotheses on the influence of Arctic changes on mid-latitude summer weather: Weakened storm tracks, shifted jet streams, and amplified quasi-stationary waves. We show that interactions between Arctic teleconnections and other remote and regional feedback processes could lead to more persistent hot-dry extremes in the mid-latitudes. The exact nature of these non-linear interactions is not well quantified but they provide potential high-impact risks for society. Accelerated global warming in the Arctic might have profound impacts on mid-latitude weather particularly in winter, although the evidence for an effect also in summer is also growing. Here Coumou et al. show that these interactions could lead to more persistent hot-dry extremes in mid-latitudes.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7afd260c18e87bbb0a124532f3f1492cae43e89a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atmospheric Science

1. M. Widmann
2. Mathieu Vrac
3. Douglas Maraun
4. S. Lange
5. Jakob Zscheischler
6. Erich Fischer
7. Alex J. Cannon

In Global and Planetary Change

1. Mathieu Vrac
2. M. Widmann
3. E. Bevacqua
4. Yimin Liu
5. Jilan Jiang
6. Douglas Maraun
7. Guoxiong Wu
8. A. V. van Loon

Citations in the corpus

• Why We Can No Longer Ignore Consecutive Disasters (2020, neutral): “Extreme weather events and their impacts are intensifying especially in the world's major breadbasket regions (Coumou et al., 2018).”
• Extreme heatwave over Eastern China in summer 2022: the role of three oceans and local soil moisture feedback (2023, background): “The sea-ice coverage and temperatures in the Arctic (Cohen et al 2014, Coumou et al 2018), development of atmospheric blocking (Dole et al 2011), and quasi-resonant amplification of synoptic-scale Rossby waves (Petoukhov et al 2013) have also been suggested as crucial influences on the mid-latitude…”
• Increased probability of compound long-duration dry and hot events in Europe during summer (1950–2013) (2019, background): “Such events have brought severe impacts to the affected regions and so it is important that efforts are made to better quantify their probability such that possible future changes in their occurrence may be better understood (Coumou et al 2018).”