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Weakened evidence for mid-latitude impacts of Arctic warming

Nature Climate Change volume 10, pages 1065–1066 (2020)Cite this article

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To the Editor — The idea that rapid Arctic warming might be changing weather patterns at lower latitudes rose to prominence in 2012. At that time, amidst rising global temperatures and record low Arctic sea-ice cover, parts of the mid-latitudes had just experienced a run of extremely cold winters1. Some scientists speculated that these cold snaps were driven by Arctic-induced changes in the atmospheric circulation, pointing to an unexpected 25-year winter cooling trend over Eurasia, an ostensible shift in the Arctic Oscillation and increased meandering of the jet stream as evidence2,3. These tendencies would continue as the Arctic warmed further, they predicted. Such ideas were controversial from the outset. Very quickly, other scientists questioned the idea, arguing that the cooling and circulation trends were not robust and unlikely to continue in the longer term4,5. Jennifer Francis, whose seminal work proposed that Arctic warming was leading to a wavier jet stream, predicted in 2014 that “within a few years, as Arctic amplification continues, we will have enough data to know whether or not we’re right”6.

Also, over the past six or so years, there has been a surge of modelling studies suggesting only a weak influence of Arctic warming on mid-latitudes8,9,10,11,12,13. The magnitudes of the simulated responses are consistently weaker than observations might imply, for reasons that are uncertain and contentious14,15,16. A recent review concluded that observations provide strong evidence of Arctic influence on mid-latitudes16; this conclusion, however, was drawn from surveying influential studies that reported now-outdated trends. We argue that updated observational and reanalysis records (Fig. 1) tell much the same story as models: that the Arctic influence on mid-latitudes is small compared to other aspects of climate variability, and that observed periods of strong correlation (such as 1988/89 to 2011/12) are an artefact of internal variability11,17,18.

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Fig. 1: Indicators of Arctic change and its possible mid-latitude impacts.

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Acknowledgements

The authors were supported by a UK Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC) grant (NE/P006760/1). The sea-ice extent data are available from the National Snow and Ice Data Center21. The Arctic Oscillation index is provided by the NOAA Climate Prediction Center (ref. 22). ERA-5 reanalysis23 data are freely available at the Copernicus Climate Change Service Climate Data Store (https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/home).

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  1. College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Russell Blackport & James A. Screen

  2. Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

    Russell Blackport

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Correspondence to James A. Screen.

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Blackport, R., Screen, J.A. Weakened evidence for mid-latitude impacts of Arctic warming. Nat. Clim. Chang. 10, 1065–1066 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-020-00954-y

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