From California Institute of Technology:
Warm water causes extra-cold winters in northeastern North America and northeastern Asia
PASADENA, Calif.—If you’re sitting on a bench in New York City’s Central Park in winter, you’re probably freezing. After all, the average temperature in January is 32 degrees Fahrenheit. But if you were just across the pond in Porto, Portugal, which shares New York’s latitude, you’d be much warmer—the average temperature is a balmy 48 degrees Fahrenheit.
Throughout northern Europe, average winter temperatures are at least 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than similar latitudes on the northeastern coast of the United States and the eastern coast of Canada. The same phenomenon happens over the Pacific, where winters on the northeastern coast of Asia are colder than in the Pacific Northwest.
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have now found a mechanism that helps explain these chillier winters—and the culprit is warm water off the eastern coasts of these continents.
“These warm ocean waters off the eastern coast actually make it cold in winter—it’s counterintuitive,” says Tapio Schneider, the Frank J. Gilloon Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering.
Schneider and Yohai Kaspi, a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech, describe their work in a paper published in the March 31 issue of the journal Nature.
Using computer simulations of the atmosphere, the researchers found that the warm water off an eastern coast will heat the air above it and lead to the formation of atmospheric waves, drawing cold air from the northern polar region. The cold air forms a plume just to the west of the warm water. In the case of the Atlantic Ocean, this means the frigid air ends up right over the northeastern United States and eastern Canada.
For decades, the conventional explanation for the cross-oceanic temperature difference was that the Gulf Stream delivers warm water from the Gulf of Mexico to northern Europe. But in 2002, research showed that ocean currents aren’t capable of transporting that much heat, instead contributing only up to 10 percent of the warming.
Kaspi’s and Schneider’s work reveals a mechanism that helps create a temperature contrast not by warming Europe, but by cooling the eastern United States. Surprisingly, it’s the Gulf Stream that causes this cooling.
In the northern hemisphere, the subtropical ocean currents circulate in a clockwise direction, bringing an influx of warm water from low latitudes into the western part of the ocean. These warm waters heat the air above it.
“It’s not that the warm Gulf Stream waters substantially heat up Europe,” Kaspi says. “But the existence of the Gulf Stream near the U.S. coast is causing the cooling of the northeastern United States.”
The researchers’ computer model simulates a simplified, ocean-covered Earth with a warm region to mimic the coastal reservoir of warm water in the Gulf Stream. The simulations show that such a warm spot produces so-called Rossby waves.
Generally speaking, Rossby waves are large atmospheric waves—with wavelengths that stretch for more than 1,000 miles. They form when the path of moving air is deflected due to Earth’s rotation, a phenomenon known as the Coriolis effect. In a way similar to how gravity is the force that produces water waves on the surface of a pond, the Coriolis force is responsible for Rossby waves.
In the simulations, the warm water produces stationary Rossby waves, in which the peaks and valleys of the waves don’t move, but the waves still transfer energy. In the northern hemisphere, the stationary Rossby waves cause air to circulate in a clockwise direction just to the west of the warm region. To the east of the warm region, the air swirls in the counterclockwise direction. These motions draw in cold air from the north, balancing the heating over the warm ocean waters.
To gain insight into the mechanisms that control the atmospheric dynamics, the researchers speed up Earth’s rotation in the simulations. In those cases, the plume of cold air gets bigger—which is consistent with it being a stationary Rossby-wave plume. Most other atmospheric features would get smaller if the planet were to spin faster.
Although it’s long been known that a heat source could produce Rossby waves, which can then form plumes, this is the first time anyone has shown how the mechanism causes cooling that extends west of the heat source. According to the researchers, the cooling effect could account for 30 to 50 percent of the temperature difference across oceans.
This process also explains why the cold region is just as big for both North America and Asia, despite the continents being so different in topography and size. The Rossby-wave induced cooling depends on heating air over warm ocean water. Since the warm currents along western ocean boundaries in both the Pacific and Atlantic are similar, the resulting cold region to their west would be similar as well.
The next step, Schneider says, is to build simulations that more realistically reflect what happens on Earth. Future simulations would incorporate more complex features like continents and cloud feedbacks.
The research described in the Nature paper, “Winter cold of eastern continental boundaries induced by warm ocean waters,” was funded by the NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship, administrated by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research; a David and Lucille Packard Fellowship; and the National Science Foundation.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Wow. Really makes you wonder what we do know about weather/climate.
This one is interesting. A deeper understanding of why the climate behaves the way it does is always interesting. I was not aware that the gulf stream had been diminished as the source of the warmer European climate.
This scale of effect is also the same scale that causes hurricanes in the Northern Hemisphere to rotate counter-clockwise and the clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere. It is not an especially intuitive effect, but real none-the-less.
It would seem that this ties into the jet stream and the high pressures systems the nudge the direction of storms.
Nebraska is colder because those pressure effects pull much colder air from the north south. The reverse would happen in Europe where warmer air would be pulled northward.
So if the cooler effect caused 30% of the difference and the warming effect in Europe caused 30% of the difference and the Gulf Stream caused a portion (likely larger than 10%), then most of the temperature difference is explained.
Certainly not a the end word, but an interesting possibility.
Air masses in the Northern Hemisphere tend to travel west to east. Large continents tend to be hotter in the summer and colder in the winter than oceans. Lands to the east of large continents get more extreme temperatures than land to the east of oceans.
It is not surprising that rising warm air from oceans that are east of continents would add to the eastward flow of continental air (in the Northern Hemisphere). None of the above required reference to the Gulf Stream.
I think I learned this in Meteorology class in 1953. It’s nice the models agree.
Isn’t this kind of old news. At the high lattitudes, winds blow from west to east and near to the tropics the winds blow from east to west. Wasn’t that the early explores trick for traveling from the old world to the new world and back?
Jenny Sixpack says:
March 30, 2011 at 1:37 pm
I am confused.
Does this mean that for us in UK global warming will make it
a. hotter
b. cooler
c. wetter
d. drier
e. drownded
f. dessicated
g. None of the above
h. All of the above?
The answer is yes. Now what was the question?
coaldust says:
March 30, 2011 at 12:49 pm
“Using computer simulations of the atmosphere…”
I stopped reading there.”
Me too. As I read I was wondering when that phrase would show up. And when it did… I quit.
Jenny Sixpack says:
March 30, 2011 at 1:37 pm
I am confused.”
It’s simple. Global warming never affects weather. It only affects climate. Weather is unpredictable. But climate can be accurately predicted over decades and millennia to within 0.01 degrees Celsius using massive computers and massive amounts of tax dollars.
Nice theory they have, except it looks to me like the water off the cost of N.America is cold right now:
http://chiefio.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/sst_anom-29-mar-2011.gif
from the live chart at:
http://weather.unisys.com/surface/sfc_daily.php?plot=ssa&inv=0&t=cur
that I look at here:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/03/30/wheres-the-heat/
So that image up top is nice and warm, but now it’s nice and cold, and The East Coast is still nice and cold?…
“The next step, Schneider says, is to build simulations that more realistically reflect what happens on Earth.”
How about starting from observations of the reality?
Another atmospheric model based paper utterly debunked in “Dynamic Analysis of Weather and Climate” 2nd edition 2010, Springer by Marcel Leroux. Only Nature could publish such rubbish!
“In the simulations, the warm water produces stationary Rossby waves, in which the peaks and valleys of the waves don’t move, but the waves still transfer energy. In the northern hemisphere, the stationary Rossby waves cause air to circulate in a clockwise direction just to the west of the warm region. To the east of the warm region, the air swirls in the counterclockwise direction. These motions draw in cold air from the north, balancing the heating over the warm ocean waters.”
Utterly debunked by observation…
“Although it’s long been known that a heat source could produce Rossby waves, which can then form plumes, this is the first time anyone has shown how the mechanism causes cooling that extends west of the heat source.”
Here we are: the only purpose of this exercise was to link cold weather to hot SST which is in the Global Warming Rhetoric is always linked to GHG induced global warming. QED.
Jenny Sixpack says:
March 30, 2011 at 1:37 pm
“…Please can a real 100% Proof Genuine Gold Standard Verified Peer-Reviewed Climate Scientist – With All The Trimmings once and for all tell me exactly what I should worry about for the Spring/Summer season?
Worried Jenny from Weybridge…………”
Luckily, Jenny, because climate is driven by deterministic chaos linear trends have no meaning. As the IPCC brand of climate pseudo-science fails to recognise this fact, they don’t have a clue what weather/climate will manifest beyond a few days forward in time.
So no need to worry about what the future will bring, just have a good laugh at your friends needless fears :-))
Also: “The research described in the Nature paper, “Winter cold of eastern continental boundaries induced by warm ocean waters,” was funded by the NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship, administrated by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research; a David and Lucille Packard Fellowship; and the National Science Foundation.”
The Packard are know warmists supporting many groups…
“In the northern hemisphere, the stationary Rossby waves cause air to circulate in a clockwise direction just to the west of the warm region. To the east of the warm region, the air swirls in the counterclockwise direction. ”
Just watch a satellite animation of a cold air advection and one can clearly see their description is false.
So this explains the warm/cold theory? Besides the computer fiddling do they use any actual data? For example eastcoast sea temperatures over, say a decade and eastcoast land temperature at same period? Or are there no east coast sea temperatures to compare?
@Jenny Sixpack:
I worry,
I worry why,
I worry why I worry,
I worry why I worry why,
I worry why I worry
After Feynman “I wonder”
I’d always presumed there were separate rotating air masses over North America, North Atlantic, Eurasia, and North Pacific. All clockwise of course. The eastern boundaries are colder than the western in all of them. Differential heating (land vs. water) is what causes the separation into four distinct circulation regions and Coriolis force determines the direction of rotation. The inner part of the land regions is colder because land doesn’t absorb as much sunlight as water and the outer regions of the continents get a lot of warmth in the winter from being adjacent to the considerably warmer ocean.
Is this really new news? Or did these guys just spend a bunch of tax dollars to model what we mostly already knew. I doubt that any serious climatologist believed that the Gulf Stream was the primary cause of warmer winters on continents that border the east sides of the northern hemisphere oceans. In the eastern U.S. we’ve know since we arrived in America that it got much colder than Europe and that the cold air comes from the north. I’m sure the indigenous people knew it before we came. We’ve also known for a long time that hot air rises and that the air that rose has to be replaced by air from somewhere else. I think we’ve also know about ocean circulation for quite awhile.
The warmers are probably going to cite this research as new evidence that CO2 warming causes cooling. But CO2-caused global warming occurs mostly at the poles, which is where the colder air comes from. Even if CO2 warming caused hotter warm pools in the oceans, it should cause even more warming at the poles so the winters should get warmer.
It’s disturbing that the recent trend in climate research is to to conduct climate “experiments” by manipulating non-real computer models. Are researchers too lazy to look at actual weather trends to show the effect? I’d sure like to see more work on explaining these grand cycles in our climate and, more importantly, how they interact. In fine detail the climate approaches chaos but the effects of big ocean driven cycles like ENSO are very easy to see.
I’m skeptical that this new research is really new but I do like the direction. We need to understand the big climate cycles and how they interact before we can say we know much at all about how and why the climate changes over decades. I think much of the warming over the recent past might be due to climate cycles that caused the oceans to release accumulated heat and maybe reduced mixing between the air at the cold poles and the warm equator.
The AGW scare is based on (1) rapid heating from about 1980 to about 2000 and (2) the claim that “there is no other explanation.” The latter claim (2) is meaningless without a deep understanding of the grand cycles in the climate system. Obviously cycles like ENSO can have huge impacts on global temperature. Looking at Wikipedia global temperature charts, the 1998 el Nino caused about a 0.7°C spike in global temperatures. That spike is more than the total warming since about 1940, and it seems possible that much of the heat released in the 1998 el Nino is still lingering in the system.
The ocean driven climate cycles almost certainly affect both the amount of heat released from the oceans and amount of cold released from the poles. If cold air is trapped at the poles, it gets even colder and the rest of the world gets warmer. Mixing between polar air and equatorial air is probably highly variable and could have a big affect on global temperatures.
The two primary arguments in favor of recent warming being caused by man are models, which don’t capture climate cycle detail — we know the models are wrong we just don’t know how wrong they are — and “the lack of a better explanation.”
I think the better explanation argument hasn’t been sufficiently investigated. Links between solar activity and cloud cover may also exist but I think most if not all of the recent warming might be explained by the big climate cycles that probably fall in and out of phase over decade time spans.
– dT
This seems like an excessively complicated explaination of why the east coasts of continents are colder than the west coasts. Doesn’t it suffice to state that the east coasts have a continent upwind and west coasts have an ocean upwind?
Re: Jenny from Weybridge: “Does this mean that for us in UK global warming will make it …. ”
Answer: Yes.
Sorry. Couldn’t help myself. Cheers –
Jenny Sixpack – well said.
That is a reasonable approximation of the winter weather pattern we get here in northern Japan (Tohoku).
There is typically a blocking high stationary over central northern Asia, and a series of low pressure systems migrating north east off the Pacific coast of northern Japan. That draws in a north westerly (Arctic) air stream across the Sea of Japan, where it loads with moisture and warms. The result is a mega- lake effect and lots&lots&lots of snow. On average about 12 metres per winter in my town. Normally it starts snowing in late December, and tapers off by early April. This year the winter pattern has persisted late, and we had snow this morning.
This chart of actual US coastline water temperature at this very moment is quite interesting:
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/dsdt/wtg12.html
The northwest coastal waters are considerably warmer than the northeast coastal waters by about 10 degrees. Compare Eastport, Maine (45 degrees north latitude, 38F ocean temp) with Newport, Oregon (45 degrees north latitude, 51F ocean temp).
This would certainly explain the air temperature delta between the US left and right coasts – it follows coastal water temperature. The OP would have me believe the northwest coast water is colder than the northeast coast water which just isn’t true. At least not right now it isn’t.
Rats: “….tapers off by early March”.
The mechanism is not warm water off the eastern coasts, however this study does show how warm and cold waters interact in the variable climate system of the Earth.
One of the problems with some in climate science is the tendency to see one or the other, cold or warm, as separate entities when the reality is that warm and cold interact from causes that begin in space and appear as effects on Earth. So this study may be useful to clear up the confusion.
However, in the search for “mechanisms” via far too much reliance on computer simulations – the causes are not on Earth but are in space. So attempts to find mechanisms in treating “effects” as “causes” that are solely earth-based is a view that continues to chase its own tail.
The Sun drives the oceans of our planet and its cosmic rays are modulated by the movements of the planets, including the Earth, which some, unbelievably, continue to treat as if it were not a planet, but also flat at that.
“The next step, Schneider says, is to build simulations that more realistically reflect what happens on Earth. Future simulations would incorporate more complex features like continents and cloud feedbacks.”
It is very difficult, if not impossible, to construct future computer simulations that accurately reflects what really happens climate-wise on Earth.
Climate researcher Gerhard Gerlich ~
“It cannot be overemphasized that even if the equations are simplified considerably, one cannot determine numerical solutions, even for small space regions and even for small time intervals.
This situation will not change in the next 1,000 years regardless of progress made in computer hardware.
Therefore, global climatologists may continue to write updated research grant proposals demanding next-generation supercomputers ad infinitum.
As the extremely simplified one-fluid equations are unsolvable, the many-fluid equations would be more unsolvable, the equations that include the averaged equations describing the turbulence would be yet more unsolvable, if “unsolvable” had a comparative.
Regardless of the chosen level of complexity, these equations are supposed to be the backbone of climate simulations, or, in other words, the foundation of models of nature.
But even this is not true:
In computer simulations, heat conduction and friction are completely neglected, since they are mathematically described by second order partial derivatives that cannot be represented on grids with wide meshes.”
“There are so many unsolved and unsolvable problems in non-linearity.
And for climatologists to believe they’ve solved them with crude approximations leading to unphysical results that have to be corrected afterward by mystical methods — flux control in the past, obscure ensemble averages over different climate institutes today, excluding incidental global cooling data by hand — merely perpetuates the greenhouse-inspired climatologic tradition of physically meaningless averages and physically meaningless statistical applications.
In short, generating statements on CO2-induced anthropogenic global warming from computer simulations lies outside of any science.”
In my work as an astrometeorologist, I know that computer simulations on global climatology simply are not based on the astrophysical laws I used to forecast ENSO several years in advance of the 2009-2011 ENSO climate event.
It is also important to mind the words of theoretical physicist Freeman J Dyson:
“The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing in their own models.”
First sloth crap now this.
The authors of this paper should visit the Eastern Coast of Canada during the summer months – lets say Newfoundland – where the water is so cold only the tourists try going in. Such as +12-14 oC in the summer for water temperature.
Now head over over to France, similar latitude (46-47o).
http://www.surf-forecast.com/breaks/Le-Lizay-Ilede-Re/seatemp
+22 oC in the summer or 8-20 oC warmer.
Hmmm….
Internet 1, Caltech 0
Jenny Sixpack says:
March 30, 2011 at 1:37 pm
I am confused.
Does this mean that for us in UK global warming will make it
a. hotter
b. cooler
c. wetter
d. drier
e. drownded
f. dessicated
g. None of the above
h. All of the above
___
Yes, that’s what it mean.