Imagining Simpler Worlds to Understand the Complexity of Our Own
The atmospheric circulation response to global warming is important for accurate prediction of climate change on regional scales. For the midlatitudes, shifts in the extratropical jet streams have important consequences for precipitation, blocking, and extreme events. It has proven to be a challenge...
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ftpubmed:oai:pubmedcentral.nih.gov:6856847 2023-05-15T17:33:49+02:00 Imagining Simpler Worlds to Understand the Complexity of Our Own Gerber, Edwin P. DallaSanta, Kevin Gupta, Aman 2019-09-13 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6856847/ https://doi.org/10.1029/2019MS001753 en eng John Wiley and Sons Inc. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6856847/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2019MS001753 © 2019. The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. CC-BY Commentaries Text 2019 ftpubmed https://doi.org/10.1029/2019MS001753 2019-11-24T01:40:55Z The atmospheric circulation response to global warming is important for accurate prediction of climate change on regional scales. For the midlatitudes, shifts in the extratropical jet streams have important consequences for precipitation, blocking, and extreme events. It has proven to be a challenge, however, to predict. For example, the North Atlantic jet stream plays a vital role in the climate of eastern North America and Europe; in the last intercomparison of state‐of‐the‐art climate models, the models did not even agree on the sign of its wintertime response to global warming. Perhaps this should not come as a surprise, as we also lack a comprehensive theory for the impact of warming on the midlatitude circulation. In a recent study, Tan et al. (2019, https://doi.org/10.1029/2018MS001492) constructed models of simpler atmospheres to explore the response of the midlatitude jet to global warming. Their idealized atmospheres highlight the difficulty of developing a comprehensive theory for the midlatitude circulation but also provide pathways to improve models of Earth's atmosphere. Models of simpler atmospheres allow one to isolate the impact of specific atmospheric processes and connect theoretical understanding with comprehensive climate prediction systems. Such models can also be used to explore very different atmospheric regimes, from Earth's past to distant planets. Text North Atlantic PubMed Central (PMC) Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems 11 9 2862 2867 |
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Commentaries Gerber, Edwin P. DallaSanta, Kevin Gupta, Aman Imagining Simpler Worlds to Understand the Complexity of Our Own |
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The atmospheric circulation response to global warming is important for accurate prediction of climate change on regional scales. For the midlatitudes, shifts in the extratropical jet streams have important consequences for precipitation, blocking, and extreme events. It has proven to be a challenge, however, to predict. For example, the North Atlantic jet stream plays a vital role in the climate of eastern North America and Europe; in the last intercomparison of state‐of‐the‐art climate models, the models did not even agree on the sign of its wintertime response to global warming. Perhaps this should not come as a surprise, as we also lack a comprehensive theory for the impact of warming on the midlatitude circulation. In a recent study, Tan et al. (2019, https://doi.org/10.1029/2018MS001492) constructed models of simpler atmospheres to explore the response of the midlatitude jet to global warming. Their idealized atmospheres highlight the difficulty of developing a comprehensive theory for the midlatitude circulation but also provide pathways to improve models of Earth's atmosphere. Models of simpler atmospheres allow one to isolate the impact of specific atmospheric processes and connect theoretical understanding with comprehensive climate prediction systems. Such models can also be used to explore very different atmospheric regimes, from Earth's past to distant planets. |
format |
Text |
author |
Gerber, Edwin P. DallaSanta, Kevin Gupta, Aman |
author_facet |
Gerber, Edwin P. DallaSanta, Kevin Gupta, Aman |
author_sort |
Gerber, Edwin P. |
title |
Imagining Simpler Worlds to Understand the Complexity of Our Own |
title_short |
Imagining Simpler Worlds to Understand the Complexity of Our Own |
title_full |
Imagining Simpler Worlds to Understand the Complexity of Our Own |
title_fullStr |
Imagining Simpler Worlds to Understand the Complexity of Our Own |
title_full_unstemmed |
Imagining Simpler Worlds to Understand the Complexity of Our Own |
title_sort |
imagining simpler worlds to understand the complexity of our own |
publisher |
John Wiley and Sons Inc. |
publishDate |
2019 |
url |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6856847/ https://doi.org/10.1029/2019MS001753 |
genre |
North Atlantic |
genre_facet |
North Atlantic |
op_relation |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6856847/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2019MS001753 |
op_rights |
© 2019. The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
op_rightsnorm |
CC-BY |
op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.1029/2019MS001753 |
container_title |
Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems |
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11 |
container_issue |
9 |
container_start_page |
2862 |
op_container_end_page |
2867 |
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1766132454400196608 |