From 2000 to 2010, about 1,900
cyclones churned across the top of the world each year, leaving warm water and
air in their wakes — and melting sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. That’s about 40
percent more of these Arctic storms than previously thought, according to a new
study of vast troves of weather data that previously were synthesized at the
Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC).
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A 40 percent difference in the
number of cyclones could be important to anyone who lives north of 55 degrees
latitude — the area of the study, which includes the northern reaches of
Canada, Scandinavia and Russia, along with the state of Alaska.
The finding is also important to
researchers who want to get a clear picture of current weather patterns, and a
better understanding of potential climate change in the future, explained David
Bromwich, Ph.D., professor of geography at The Ohio State University and senior
research scientist at the Byrd Polar Research Center.
The cyclone study was presented
at the American Geophysical Union meeting in December, in a poster co-authored
by his colleagues Natalia Tilinina and Sergey Gulev of the Russian Academy of
Sciences and Moscow State University.
“We now know there were more
cyclones than previously thought, simply because we’ve gotten better at
detecting them,” said Bromwich, who amassed the weather database and consulted
on the cyclone study.
Cyclones are zones of low
atmospheric pressure that have wind circulating around them. They can form over
land or water, and go by different names depending on their size and where they
are located. In Columbus, Ohio, for instance, a low-pressure system in December
would simply be called a winter storm. Extreme low-pressure systems formed in
the tropical waters can be called hurricanes or typhoons.
How could anyone miss a storm as
big as a cyclone? You might think they are easy to detect, but as it turns out,
many of the cyclones that were missed were small in size and short in duration,
or occurred in unpopulated areas. Yet researchers need to know about all the
storms that have occurred if they are to get a complete picture of storm trends
in the region.
“We can’t yet tell if the number
of cyclones is increasing or decreasing, because that would take a multi-decade
view. We do know that, since 2000, there have been a lot of rapid changes in
the Arctic — Greenland ice melting, tundra thawing — so we can say that
we’re capturing a good view of what’s happening in the Arctic during the
current time of rapid changes,” Bromwich said.
Read more at the Ohio
Supercomputer Center.
Top
of the world image and cyclone
images via Shutterstock; merged and morphed by Robin Blackstone.