Under global climate change, the Earth’s climatic zones will shift toward the poles. This is not just a future prediction; it is a trend that has already been observed in the past decades. The dry, semi-arid regions are expanding into higher latitudes, and temperate, rainy regions are migrating poleward. In a paper that that was recently published in Nature Geoscience, Weizmann Institute of Science researchers provide new insight into this phenomenon by discovering that mid-latitude storms are steered further toward the poles in a warmer climate. Their analysis, which also revealed the physical mechanisms controlling this phenomenon, involved a unique approach that traced the progression of low-pressure weather systems both from the outside – in their movement around the globe – and from the inside – analyzing the storms’ dynamics.
Under global climate change, the Earth’s climatic zones will shift toward the poles. This is not just a future prediction; it is a trend that has already been observed in the past decades. The dry, semi-arid regions are expanding into higher latitudes, and temperate, rainy regions are migrating poleward. In a paper that that was recently published in Nature Geoscience, Weizmann Institute of Science researchers provide new insight into this phenomenon by discovering that mid-latitude storms are steered further toward the poles in a warmer climate. Their analysis, which also revealed the physical mechanisms controlling this phenomenon, involved a unique approach that traced the progression of low-pressure weather systems both from the outside – in their movement around the globe – and from the inside – analyzing the storms’ dynamics.
Prof. Yohai Kaspi of the Institute’s Earth and Planetary Sciences Department explains that the Earth’s climatic zones roughly follow latitudinal bands. Storms mostly move around the globe in preferred regions called “storm tracks,” forming over the ocean and generally traveling eastward and somewhat poleward along these paths. Thus, a storm that forms in the Atlantic off the East Coast of the US at a latitude of around 40N will reach Europe in the region of latitude 50N. Until recently, however, this inclination to move in the direction of the nearest pole was not really understood. Dr. Talia Tamarin-Brodsky in Kaspi’s group solved this fundamental question in her doctoral research.
Read more at Weizmann Institute of Science
Image: This is a Google earth storm track. (Credit: Google earth)
