Arctic - Warming in Arctic Affects Middle Latitudes — and Vice Versa
Artic Wire / Alaska Dispatch News
Yereth Rosen
April 19, 2016
When it comes to climate, what happens in the Arctic, scientists are fond of saying, doesn’t stay in the Arctic.
And it turns out that the reverse is also true: What happens in the middle latitudes can make for changes farther north.
That’s because of changes to the way water moves through the atmosphere and oceans — even rivers — and the transfer of heat with it, according to an emerging picture of how the climates at different latitudes interact.
The idea that the climates of the Arctic and lower latitudes are connected, once limited to scientific debate, has become increasingly mainstream. Recent research has supported the theory that Arctic warming is causing the jet stream to meander into a wavy pattern that affects weather events in temperate regions. And a study publicized earlier this year found the “chemical fingerprint” of Arctic water molecules in Northeast U.S. snowfall samples.
Meanwhile, with weather oddities grabbing headlines, including the recent spring snowstorms in the Northeast that hit while Alaska basked in record-high temperatures, the term “polar vortex” has become a fixture of public discourse.
But just as the warming Arctic is skewing weather in latitudes far to the south, warming conditions in Earth’s mid-latitudes are now cited as a source of new heat coming into the Arctic.
“There is a driver that’s outside the Arctic that at least gets things going,” said John Walsh, chief scientist at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
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