Atmospheric dynamics articles within Nature

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  • Letter |

    The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is an important source of climate variability in the Northern Hemisphere; here, a model-tested reconstruction of the NAO for the past millennium reveals that positive NAO phases were predominant during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but not during the whole medieval period.

    • Pablo Ortega
    • , Flavio Lehner
    •  & Pascal Yiou

  • Letter |

    This study identifies statistically significant trends in mid-atmospheric circulation patterns that partially explain observed changes in extreme temperature occurrence over Eurasia and North America; although the underlying cause of circulation pattern trends remains uncertain, most extreme temperature trends are shown to be consistent with thermodynamic warming.

    • Daniel E. Horton
    • , Nathaniel C. Johnson
    •  & Noah S. Diffenbaugh

  • Letter |

    Examination of amateur observations of Mars shows atmospheric plumes 200 to 250 kilometres high that are observed in the morning but not in the evening over a period of more than a week; our current understanding of Martian atmospheric dynamics and plume formation cannot account for the creation of such enormous plumes.

    • A. Sánchez-Lavega
    • , A. García Muñoz
    •  & D. Peach

  • Letter |

    The cloud that appeared above the south pole of Saturn’s satellite Titan in early 2012 is found to be composed of micrometre-sized particles of frozen hydrogen cyanide, indicating a dramatic cooling of Titan’s atmosphere to temperatures about 100 degrees less than predicted by atmospheric circulation models.

    • Remco J. de Kok
    • , Nicholas A. Teanby
    •  & Sandrine Vinatier

  • Review Article |

    The intertropical convergence zone, where global rainfall is greatest, is a narrow belt of clouds usually centred about six degrees north of the Equator; this Review links its migrations on various timescales to the atmospheric energy balance.

    • Tapio Schneider
    • , Tobias Bischoff
    •  & Gerald H. Haug

  • Letter |

    Human-induced climate change is usually assumed to be responsible for the dramatic thawing of glaciers since the mid 1990s in Greenland and northeastern Canada; approximately half of the observed warming in this region during this period is now found to be attributable to atmospheric circulation changes that may be of natural origin.

    • Qinghua Ding
    • , John M. Wallace
    •  & Lei Geng

  • Letter |

    Tropical and subtropical speleothems show that the latitudinal migration of the Intertropical Convergence Zone tends to produce increased precipitation in one hemisphere and drying in the other; now it is shown using speleothems from the Korean peninsula that this phenomenon extended to the mid-latitudes during the past 550,000 years.

    • Kyoung-nam Jo
    • , Kyung Sik Woo
    •  & R. Lawrence Edwards

  • Letter |

    Warming of the north and tropical Atlantic Ocean, which is associated in part with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (a leading mode of sea surface temperature variability), is shown to affect sea-level pressure in the Amundsen Sea, explaining the accelerated warming of and sea-ice redistribution around the Antarctic Peninsula.

    • Xichen Li
    • , David M. Holland
    •  & Changhyun Yoo

  • Article |

    The change in global mean temperature in response to a change in external forcing is highly uncertain; here differences in the simulated strength of convective mixing between the lower and middle tropical troposphere are shown to explain about half of the variance in climate sensitivity, constraining the predicted equilibrium climate sensitivity to an increase of 3 to 5 degrees Celsius.

    • Steven C. Sherwood
    • , Sandrine Bony
    •  & Jean-Louis Dufresne

  • Letter |

    In the quasibiennial oscillation, the prevailing wind direction in the tropical stratosphere switches between easterly and westerly and back with a period of about two years; now an analysis of a suite of radiosonde wind data reveals that the amplitude of this oscillation has weakened over the past six decades, most probably as a result of increased tropical upwelling in the lower stratosphere.

    • Yoshio Kawatani
    •  & Kevin Hamilton

  • Letter |

    On Uranus and Neptune, the measured fourth-order gravity harmonic, J4, constrains the atmospheric dynamics to the outermost 0.15 per cent and 0.2 per cent, respectively, of the planetary mass, indicating that these dynamics are confined to a thin weather layer no more than 1,000 kilometres deep on both planets.

    • Yohai Kaspi
    • , Adam P. Showman
    •  & Ravit Helled

  • News |

    Afforestation and climate change are blamed for stilling surface winds in the Northern Hemisphere.

    • Joseph Milton

  • Letter |

    Cloud simulation is one of the most challenging tasks in regional to global-scale modelling. In many cases, the physical mechanisms responsible for observed cloud dynamics are unknown, making it difficult to realistically simulate their structure and behaviour. These authors show that open cellular clouds — characterized by low albedo — can be created by precipitation-driven downdrafts and that the resulting cloud structure forms an oscillating, self-organizing cloud field.

    • Graham Feingold
    • , Ilan Koren
    •  & Wm. Alan Brewer

  • Letter |

    Palaeoclimate data show that 3–5 million years ago in the early Pliocene the equatorial Pacific experienced persistent warm, El Niño conditions. Here a hurricane model and a coupled climate model show a feedback between sea surface temperature and frequent hurricanes that could account for such conditions.

    • Alexey V. Fedorov
    • , Christopher M. Brierley
    •  & Kerry Emanuel

  • Letter |

    The elevation of the Tibetan plateau is thought to cause its surface to serve as a heat source that drives the South Asian summer monsoon, potentially coupling uplift of the plateau to climate changes on geologic timescales. Here, however, an atmospheric model is used to show that flattening of the Tibetan plateau has little effect on the monsoon, provided that the narrow orography of the Himalayas and adjacent mountain ranges is preserved.

    • William R. Boos
    •  & Zhiming Kuang

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