Anomalous Arctic warming linked with severe winter weather in Northern Hemisphere continents

Publish Date:  03 Oct 2024

Source: Nature Communications Earth and Environment

Resource Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01720-0

AER’s Dr Judah Cohen is the lead author on a recent Nature Communications Earth and Environment linking anomalous Arctic warming with severe winter weather in the Northern Hemisphere. This work extends a recently developed metric, the accumulated winter season severity index, from fixed observation datasets to global gridded reanalyses of temperature and snowfall. The research reveals a direct,  quasilinear relationship between anomalously high Arctic temperatures/pressures and increased severe winter weather, especially in northeastern continental regions downstream of maximum regional Arctic warming. Positive temperature trends in the Arctic are associated with positive trends in severe winter weather across the continents in mid- to late-winter, coinciding with an increase in stratospheric polar vortex disruptions. During the era of rapid Arctic warming, variability has decreased over the Arctic Ocean and Europe, but has increased in Canada, the Northern US and northeast Asia, indicating more pronounced shifts in weather conditions.