20th Century Northern hemisphere jet stream variability

Abstract:

The latitudinal position of the Northern hemisphere Jet stream (NHJ) modulates both long term climate trends and the occurrence and frequency of extreme weather events. Precipitation anomalies in particular are associated with NHJ variability and the resulting floods/droughts can have considerable societal and economic impacts. Therefore a better understanding of NHJs role in regional climate is essential in assessing the natural and socio-economic impacts of projected future change in NHJ features.

We developed a new climatology of the 300 hPa NHJ based on its seasonally explicit latitudinal position. We used the 20^th Century Reanalysis V2 (20CR) data at monthly resolution from 1930-2012 to define the latitudinal position of NHJ as the latitude with the greatest 300 hPa scalar wind speed (m s^-1). From these data, we identified four seasons with coherent NHJ patterns (January-February, April-May, July-August, and October-November) and detected longitudinal sectors (total of 15 sectors for all the seasons) where the seasonal jet shows strong spatial coherence. We examined the influence of seasonal NHJ position on the geographical distribution of precipitation and temperature patterns for all sectors.

Furthermore, we compared NHJ positions to atmospheric circulation indices at inter-annual and multi-decadal time scales. We found a significant relationship between the NHJ position and the North Atlantic and Arctic oscillations for all seasons and across the majority of longitudinal sectors. In addition to this, our NHJ data set supports a connection with ocean-atmosphere interactions over the northern Pacific Ocean on various time scales: we found significant correlations between the North Pacific Jet and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation for all seasons and with El Niño Southern Oscillation for the winter season.

Our results emphasize the importance of the seasonal and spatial characteristics of NHJ, as well as climate teleconnections, when considering regional temperature and precipitation variability.