The relationship of winter season North Atlantic blocking frequencies to extreme cold or dry spells in the ERA-40

By T. Buehler, C. Raible, T. Stocker. 2011

176 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Atmospheric blocking is an important source of low-frequency variability. We apply a blocking detection and tracking method to ERA-40 data for the Atlantic-European region to assess linkages to extreme events, that is, cold and dry spells in the extended winter season (November-April). The method is feature-oriented, identifies 500-hPa geopotential height maxima, and connects them with a next-neighbourhood search in time. The analysis reveals a statistically significant decrease of number of blocking events over the period of ERA-40.Winters with an increased number of blocking events are associated with negative temperature anomalies over Central to Eastern Europe and dryer conditions, whereas Southern Europe experiences warmer and wetter conditions during such episodes. Using extreme value statistics we show evidence that cold spells, and to some extent dry spells, are strongly associated with extremes in blocking frequency. The number of cold spell days increases with the duration of blocking events indicating that cold spells need time to establish during blocking events, thus return periods of cold spells are longer than those for blocking events. This behaviour is not found for the relation of dry spells with blocking events. Still, blocking episodes have a higher occurrence of dry spells than climatology.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fa64752842dda43cfdfb4453f1055a631a161d51

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Citations in the corpus

Atmospheric blocking in a high resolution climate model: influences of mean state, orography and eddy forcing (2013, background): “Blocking patterns can persist for a long time, up to 20 days, leading to extreme high or low temperatures over a particular area (Buehler et al ., 2011).”
Cold winter extremes in northern continents linked to Arctic sea ice loss (2013, background): “Following low SIE in autumn, the winter SLP exhibits a significant response only in a region stretching from northern Europe into the Middle East, where SLPs increase (figure 2(a)), and bears some resemblance to the negative phase of the winter AO over the North Atlantic–Europe area.”
Persistent Extratropical Regimes and Climate Extremes (2015, unknown): “[1–5]).”
Review of Tropical‐Extratropical Teleconnections on Intraseasonal Time Scales (2017, background): “, Buehler et al., 2011; Dole et al., 2011; Masato et al., 2012). MJO-induced heating has been demonstrated to significantly perturb geopotential height in the midlatitudes through Rossby wave teleconnections to the tropics in both modeling and observational studies (e.g., Gloeckler & Roundy, 2013; H”
An Evaluation of the Large‐Scale Atmospheric Circulation and Its Variability in CESM2 and Other CMIP Models (2020, background): “Blocks are associated with extreme cold events in winter and heat waves in summer, through their effects on thermal advection and radiative fluxes (Buehler et al., 2011; Brunner et al., 2018; Pfahl & Wernli, 2012; Sillmann et al., 2011; Trigo et al., 2004).”
Bidimensional Diagnostics, Variability, and Trends of Northern Hemisphere Blocking (2012, background): “Moreover, considering the significant impact that blocking events may have on the weather and on the extreme events (Buehler et al. 2011; Sillmann et al. 2011), we will investigate the interannual variability and the trends of blocking and its associated diagnostics.”
Influence of blocking on Northern European and Western Russian heatwaves in large climate model ensembles (2018, background): “There is a well-known relationship between blocking and temperature extremes, which has been studied widely for winter (Buehler et al 2011, Sillmann et al 2011, Sillmann and Croci-Maspoli 2009) and spring (Brunner et al 2017, Cassou et al 2005).”