[New post] Arctic climate change may not be making winter jet stream ‘weird’ after all
oldbrew posted: "'New research is pouring cold water on once-hot theory' - WashPo. Researchers refer to 'overestimation'. (Weird in this context at least tends to mean something like 'not well understood'). - - - An influential, highly publicized theory — that a warming A"
'New research is pouring cold water on once-hot theory' - WashPo. Researchers refer to 'overestimation'. (Weird in this context at least tends to mean something like 'not well understood'). - - - An influential, highly publicized theory — that a warming Arctic is causing more intense winter outbreaks of cold and snow in midlatitudes — is hitting resistance from an ongoing sequence of studies, including the most comprehensive polar modeling to date, says the Washington Post.
The idea, first put forth in a 2012 paper by Jennifer Francis, now at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, and Stephen Vavrus, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is that two well-established trends — Arctic amplification (intensified global warming at higher latitudes) and depleted sea ice — can force the polar jet stream to dip farther south, thus causing more intense bouts of winter weather than might have otherwise occurred.
Over the past decade, this hypothesis sparked widespread public interest and scientific debate, as various high-profile cold waves and snow onslaughts hit North America and Eurasia, including a deadly, prolonged cold wave in Texas last February.
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