Climate change could lead to colder winters: new study
Posted Jan 13, 2012 06:01:10 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
A new study published this week suggests global warming and climate change may be driving winter temperatures down over the long run.
Although Nova Scotians have enjoyed a mild winter with only the occasional snowfall, the study “Arctic warming, increasing snow cover and widespread boreal winter cooling,” suggests that pattern won’t last.
Lead researcher Judah Cohen, of the firm Atmospheric and Environmental Research, said Arctic sea ice is forming later and disappearing earlier because the northern atmosphere is gradually getting warmer. At the same time, Cohen said, Siberia is getting heavier and heavier snowfalls.
Cohen and his team theorized the two phenomenons are linked and that more ice-free water and warmer air in the Arctic leads to more moisture in the northern atmosphere.
News 95.7 meteorologist Richard Zurawski agrees there’s been some concern about how much precipitation comes off the waters in the Siberian Arctic.
“Because you look at colder water in the open ocean, the open ocean gives you more snow, more snow gives you more severe winters,” said Zurawski. “However, the rest of the globe warms up until you get to the point where you get rain, and you wind up with a big flip.”
The study goes on to note large-scale cooling trends that have existed across large stretches of eastern North America and northern Eurasia over the last two decades.
“We argue that this unforeseen trend is probably not due to internal variability alone,” write the authors. “Instead, evidence suggests that summer and autumn warming trends are concurrent with increases in high-latitude moisture and an increase in Eurasian snow cover, which dynamically induces large-scale wintertime cooling.”
Cohen said the pattern of warm springs, summers and falls followed by cold winters is likely to persist and said it will last until climate change advances to the point where November precipitation in Siberia falls as rain, not snow.
Zurawski says the theory has merit, but cautioned that it’s just one of the possibilities researchers are considering. He says the study shouldn’t be taken as gospel – just an interesting possibility.
“This is just one study and it tells us that there are some serious ramifications to climate change,” said Zurawski. “Once things change, we are not familiar with the degree of change nor the direction of change. It’s a learning curve. Now whether or not this in fact is going to happen and the degree that it is going to happen is really the question.”
