Trends in the atmospheric jet streams are emerging in observations and could be linked to tropical warming

• Published in: Communications Earth & Environment
• Main Authors: Woollings, Tim, Drouard, Marie, O’Reilly, Christopher H., Sexton, David M.H., McSweeney, Carol
• Other Authors: Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (España), orcid:
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Nature Publishing Group 2023
• Subjects: Arctic; Climate change
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10261/359755; https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-023-00792-8; https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/85153102982

Climate models predict a weak poleward shift of the jets in response to continuing climate change. Here we revisit observed jet trends using 40 years of satellite-era reanalysis products and find evidence that general poleward shifts are emerging. The significance of these trends is often low and varies between datasets, but the similarity across different seasons and hemispheres is notable. While much recent work has focused on the jet response to amplified Arctic warming, the observed trends are more consistent with the known sensitivity of the circulation to tropical warming. The circulation trends are within the range of historical model simulations but are relatively large compared to the models when the accompanying trends in upper tropospheric temperature gradients are considered. The balance between tropical warming and jet shifts should therefore be closely monitored in the near future. We hypothesise that the sensitivity of the circulation to tropical heating may be one factor affecting this balance. The authors acknowledge funding from NERC projects Real Projections (NE/N018Royal Society University Research Fellowship 15X/1) and EMERGENCE (NE/S004645/1) and from JeDiS project (RTI2018-096402-B-I00) from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. COR was supported by a (URF\R1\20123). CM and DS were supported by the Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme funded by BEIS and Defra. Some of the data were analysed using the Web-Based Reanalysis Intercomparison Tools (WRIT) of the NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory. Peer reviewed