Arctic warming, increasing snow cover and widespread boreal winter cooling

By Judah Cohen, J. C. Furtado, M. Barlow, Vladimir A Alexeev, J. Cherry. 2012

509 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The most up to date consensus from global climate models predicts warming in the Northern Hemisphere (NH) high latitudes to middle latitudes during boreal winter. However, recent trends in observed NH winter surface temperatures diverge from these projections. For the last two decades, large-scale cooling trends have existed instead across large stretches of eastern North America and northern Eurasia. We argue that this unforeseen trend is probably not due to internal variability alone. Instead, evidence suggests that summer and autumn warming trends are concurrent with increases in high-latitude moisture and an increase in Eurasian snow cover, which dynamically induces large-scale wintertime cooling. Understanding this counterintuitive response to radiative warming of the climate system has the potential for improving climate predictions at seasonal and longer timescales.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/94dc78364cac071161387e16d7e380b3822662a6

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Citations in the corpus

Key indicators of Arctic climate change: 1971–2017 (2019, methodology): “Observations of increasing Arctic snow cover in the fall period from the NOAACDR dataset (e.g. Cohen et al 2012) have been shown to be inconsistent with multiple lines of observational evidence and climate model simulations (Brown and Derksen, 2013,Mudryk et al 2017).”
A delayed oscillator model for the quasi-periodic multidecadal variability of the NAO (2015, unknown): “However, since the 1990s, the NAO has shown a significant decreasing trend (Cohen and Barlow 2005; Cohen et al. 2012).”
Persistent Extratropical Regimes and Climate Extremes (2015, background): “Several studies have suggested Rossby wave propagation as the mechanism by which the Arctic change influences Eurasia, although a stratospheric pathway is also possible via changes in upwards propagating wave activity and subsequent descending Northern Annular Mode anomalies [75, 76].”
Forcing of the wintertime atmospheric circulation by the multidecadal fluctuations of the North Atlantic ocean (2014, background): “While the positive phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) prevailed during the 1980s and 1990s (Hurrell et al 2003), negative values of the NAO index (also depicted through the Northern Annular Mode, NAM, index) have been observed during recent winters (Cohen et al 2012).”
Influence of the Gulf Stream on the Barents Sea ice retreat and Eurasian coldness during early winter (2014, background): “Several hypotheses related to the warm Arctic / cold continent pattern have been summarized by Vihma (2014) (e.g., effects of the stratosphere; Jaiser et al 2013, snow cover; Cohen et al 2012, Orsolini et al 2013, changes of atmospheric circulation; Zhang et al 2012, Liu et al 2012).”
Prevailing climatic trends and runoff response from Hindukush–Karakoram–Himalaya, upper Indus Basin (2015, background): “Such winter cooling is a result of falling tendency of winter time Arctic Oscillation, which partly driven dynamically by the anomalous increase in autumnal Eurasian snow cover (Cohen and Entekhabi, 1999), can solely explain largely the weakening (strengthening) of the westerlies (maridional flow) a”
How environmental stress affects starch composition and functionality in cereal endosperm (2014, background): “An interesting but neglected corollary is that higher temperatures in some regions can be directly linked to a cooling trends in other regions [75], and crops in the latter areas may be increasingly subjected to chilling stress.”