Increased wind risk from sting-jet windstorms with climate change
Extra-tropical cyclones dominate autumn and winter weather over western Europe. The strongest cyclones, often termed windstorms, have a large socio-economic impact on landfall due to strong surface winds and coastal storm surges. Climate model integrations have predicted a future increase in the fre...
| Published in: | Environmental Research Letters |
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | unknown |
| Published: |
IOP Publishing
2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aaae3a https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:bf5cc096-167b-4f7e-8a4b-2a3fd185e59a |
| Summary: | Extra-tropical cyclones dominate autumn and winter weather over western Europe. The strongest cyclones, often termed windstorms, have a large socio-economic impact on landfall due to strong surface winds and coastal storm surges. Climate model integrations have predicted a future increase in the frequency of, and potential damage from, European windstorms and yet these integrations cannot properly represent localised jets, such as sting jets, that may signicantly enhance damage. Here we present the rst prediction of how the climatology of sting-jet-containing cyclones will change in a future warmer climate, considering the North Atlantic and Europe. A proven sting-jet precursor diagnostic is applied to 13-year present-day and future (2100) climate integrations from the same model. The present-day climate results are consistent with previously-published results from a reanalysis dataset, supporting analysis of the future-climate integration. While the proportion of explosively-deepening storms increases only slightly in the future climate, the proportion of those storms with the sting-jet precursor increases by 50%. The European resolved-wind risk associated with explosively-deepening storms containing a sting-jet precursor increases substantially in the future climate; in reality this wind risk is likely to be further enhanced by the release of localised moist instability, unresolved by typical climate models. |
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