Rising Temperatures Could Trigger Unpredictable Weather Patterns, Warn Experts

Weather in Earth's midlatitudes is expected to become more unpredictable as global temperatures rise, according to new research from Stanford University.

Changes in Weather Patterns

Climate change has resulted in widespread changes in weather patterns, as well as a rise in the frequency and intensity of severe weather events, according Phys.org.

Storms, droughts, heatwaves, and wildfires may become more frequent and intense than infrastructure can handle or people have grown to anticipate as a result of these deviations.

Despite this, numerical weather models are still capable of predicting the weather 3 to 10 days in advance more accurately than they could in the past because of faster computers, better simulations of physical atmospheric processes, and more exact observations.

According to a recent study, the window for accurate predictions in the midlatitudes shrinks by several hours with every degree Celsius of warming in the Earth's atmosphere. Winter storms may take longer to organize and deploy in mild winters compared to cold ones.

Every 3 degrees Celsius increase in temperature reduces precipitation predictability by around a day. For wind and temperature, the impact is less pronounced, with a loss of one day of forecastability for every 5 C rise in temperature.

When compared to late 1800s levels, worldwide average temperatures have risen by around 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit), although not everything has. Cities in the United States have seen average yearly temperatures climb by more than 2 degrees Celsius since 1970. It's possible for seasonal changes to be considerably more drastic than this.

Sheshadri stated that more research is required to determine if winter weather is fundamentally more predictable than summer weather, but the new findings clearly imply a narrower time horizon for valid weather forecasts in locations that are warming above their historical norms.

Discoveries Linked to the Butterfly Effect

The study comes as the American government braces to lose $80 million to supercomputing equipment for upgrading weather and climate models. The development is among the bipartisan infrastructure law approved in November.

With greater processing power or better models, the problem of forecasting precise weather beyond 10 or 15 days in the future with perfect precision can't be solved. It is impossible to predict the future because of the chaotic structure of the Earth's atmosphere.

The "butterfly effect" was discovered by meteorologist Edward Lorenz in the 1960s. Findings by Lorenz show that models of Earth's weather system may be greatly affected by small changes in starting circumstances, such as wind disturbances from a butterfly beating its wings.

Uncertainty is inherent in every numerical weather model that includes barometric pressure, temperature, wind speed, and other variables. As you go farther into the future, the discrepancies in forecasts derived from apparently comparable start circumstances widen.

Eddies in the Troposphere

At a certain point, the findings no longer resemble one another and are indistinguishable from forecasts based on realistic but random beginning circumstances. "Memory loss" occurs at this point in the computer model's life cycle.

Errors spread through weather models quicker when temperatures increase in Earth's mid-latitudes, where most Americans reside, according to new study.

There seem to be no temperature thresholds at which the tendency changes. As per the authors, this seems to be connected with the storms' growth referred to as eddies in the troposphere which is the closest layer of atmosphere to Earth.

When the planet's surface is hotter, changes in the vertical distribution of heat and cold in the atmosphere promote more rapid eddy growth, according to previous study.

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