Study Reveals Key Changes in the North Pacific Jet Stream Due to Climate Change

New research led by final-year PhD student Tom Keel in collaboration with Professor Chris Brierley, has uncovered major changes in the North Pacific jet stream that could have wide-ranging impacts on weather patterns and the climate.  

Their findings, recently featured in New Scientist, show a trend in how the jet stream is changing due to global warming. 

“We found two main things,” says Tom. “Firstly, we found that a poleward trend has begun emerging in the wintertime North Pacific jet stream in observations. Our paper uses six statistics to study jet position and four observational datasets to check this robustness.”  

This means that the data record is now long enough to reveal jet stream changes that climate models have been predicting for some time. 

The second key finding is that the North Pacific jet stream will continue to shift polewards, especially in the autumn, and this shift will be more extreme under high-emission global warming scenarios.  

“The North Pacific jet exerts a control over North American climate,” explains Tom, highlighting the potential impacts this could have on weather patterns in the region. 

This research is crucial for understanding the uneven way our planet is warming. Tom notes, “The jets respond to the imbalance of warming and are roughly following the expansion of the tropics. This tropical expansion pushes weather and biodiversity polewards and this can have huge implications on humans, crop yields, etc.” 

Looking to the future, Tom’s team aims to explore how the North Pacific jet’s poleward shift could affect extreme weather in North America. “Its position is a key control on (extreme) surface conditions, so we are looking to quantify the link,” he says.  

His advice to aspiring researchers? “Collaborate with others and find out about (and contribute to) open-source software tools related to your research field!”