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Weather chains during the 2013/2014 winter and their significance for seasonal prediction

Nature Geoscience volume 8, pages 833–837 (2015)Cite this article

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Abstract

Day-to-day weather forecasting has improved substantially over the past few decades1. In contrast, progress in seasonal prediction outside the tropics has been meagre and mixed2,3. On seasonal timescales, the constraining influence of the initial atmospheric state is weak, and the internal variability associated with transient weather systems tends to be large compared with the nuanced influence of anomalies in external forcing. Current research and operational activities focus on exploring and exploiting potential links between external anomalies and seasonal-mean climate patterns2,3,4. Here I examine reanalysed meteorological data sets for the unusual winter 2013/2014, with drought and freezing conditions juxtaposed over North America and severe wet and stormy weather over parts of Europe, to study the role of weather systems and their transient upper-tropospheric flow patterns. I find that the amplitude, recurrence and location of these transient patterns account directly for the corresponding anomalous seasonal-mean patterns. They occurred episodically and sequentially, were linked dynamically, and exhibited some circumpolar connectivity. I conclude that the upper-tropospheric components of transient weather systems are significant for understanding and predicting seasonal weather patterns, whereas the role of external factors is more subtle.

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Figure 1: Examples of instantaneous and seasonal-mean distributions of select meteorological variables during the 2013/2014 winter.
Figure 2: Two Hovmoller diagrams (time-longitude sections) for the daily averaged meridional wind component on the 250 hPa pressure surface.
Figure 3: Key Eulerian and Lagrangian aspects of the large-scale flow during the 2013/2014 winter.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to the ECMWF and to NOAA/ESRL Physical Sciences Division for access to their data repositories and use of their software, and to the University of Melbourne for the trajectory routine.

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  1. Institute for Atmospheric & Climate Science, ETH CHN (N15.2), Universitatstrasse 16, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland

    Huw C. Davies

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Correspondence to Huw C. Davies.

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Davies, H. Weather chains during the 2013/2014 winter and their significance for seasonal prediction. Nature Geosci 8, 833–837 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2561

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