Dr Jennifer Francis on weather whiplash, 2024 and beyond "Expect surprises, destruction, suffering..."

New research has investigated abrupt swings in extreme weather in the Northern Hemisphere. This is being driven by Arctic amplified warming and slowing of the Northern Hemisphere Jet stream.

Changes to the Jet Stream is one of the areas that Dr Jennifer Francis has been focussed on. Francis is Senior Climate Scientist with the Woods Hole Institute in the US. Her recent research has been in weather whiplash, abrupt changes in extreme weather as it applies to North America and Europe.

This interview below is with Nick Breeze and she says for 2024 expect surprises, more broken weather records, and extreme weather will get even worse.

Heatwave: hottest July day on record for Britain, Records broken in France, Red alert for Switzerland

Currently in Europe a blocking high, called an Omega Block, is situated over Western Europe due to a large bend in the jetstream causing heatwave conditions in England, Spain, Portugal, France, etc, with conditions likely to continue for at least several days.

What causes the increased waviness in the jetstream? The reduced temperature differential between the Arctic and mid latitudes. These conditions are similar to the 2003 heatwave that killed 70,000 people. People are more alert now, but there is still a high health risk, and of course an elevated fire risk. I reported on how climate change is affecting extreme weather including more intense heatwaves in Arctic amplification, the Jet stream and Extreme weather in Northern Hemisphere in March 2013.

A recent study published this year found that Seventy Five percent of heatwaves now attributed to climate change on a global level. Cities are also to get much hotter as heatwaves amplify the Urban Heat Island Effect.

Arctic amplification, the Jet stream and Extreme weather in Northern Hemisphere

A series of major extreme weather events in the Northern hemisphere including the heatwave in the United States in 2011, the Russian heatwave of 2010, the Pakistani floods of 2010 have now been attributed to a common physical cause. The scientists suggest in a new scientific study that man-made climate change repeatedly disturbs the patterns of atmospheric flow - the atmospheric Rossby waves of the jet stream - around the globe's Northern hemisphere through a subtle resonance mechanism.

"An important part of the global air motion in the mid-latitudes of the Earth normally takes the form of waves wandering around the planet, oscillating between the tropical and the Arctic regions. So when they swing up, these waves suck warm air from the tropics to Europe, Russia, or the US, and when they swing down, they do the same thing with cold air from the Arctic," explains lead author Vladimir Petoukhov.

"What we found is that during several recent extreme weather events these planetary waves almost freeze in their tracks for weeks. So instead of bringing in cool air after having brought warm air in before, the heat just stays. In fact, we observe a strong amplification of the usually weak, slowly moving component of these waves," says Petoukhov.