This blog is about a paper on heat waves written by my student Evan Oswald and myself. I don’t usually write about my own research, but this paper poses some interesting challenges to think about heat, heat waves, climate change and public health. Or I might say, how do I explain this to my epidemiologist friends?
RickyRood, • 6:27 AM GMT on November 28, 2013
Potential changes in the character of the Arctic Oscillation are an important issue for those thinking about how to respond to climate change. The loss of sea ice is a large change, which will undoubtedly have important impacts in the Arctic. It is reasonable to expect large impacts on weather at lower latitudes, in the U.S., Europe and Asia. The change in the Arctic sea ice has happened very rapidly. This challenges the assumption often made in planning that climate change is a slow, incremental process. The weather of the here and now and/or the next fifty years, a common length of time for planning, is likely to be quite different from the past fifty years. Since we rely on our past experience to plan for the future, this is a direct challenge to our innate planning strategies. If we are cognizant of the possibility of significant changes to weather patterns on decadal lengths of time, then we can develop new planning strategies that will improve our resilience and make our adaptation decisions more effective.
RickyRood, • 5:14 AM GMT on November 19, 2013
An interesting feature of this simulation is that the Arctic Oscillation does look like the observations before 1960, but not after 1960. Hmm. Perhaps something has changed? The simulation does suggest that in the nature that the model represents, the Arctic Oscillation does naturally occur.
RickyRood, • 5:00 AM GMT on November 19, 2013