Draw warm air on the eastern shore in the cold

After traveled South of Europe, as well as West, provided that they were in a climate of the warmer, more benign winter came early settlers in the new world. This question the simple geography was fatal miscalculation century, and researchers have since been attracted.

So why have London and Barcelona warmer winter as southern New York?

The current pointed researchers since Benjamin Franklin the tropical heat that flows from the tropics along the East coast of the United States and then angle of the North Atlantic Ocean to the shores of Europe of Baden first to the Gulf stream.

Later studies suggested that it really more Canadian continental cold air in New York and of ocean heat over Europe had to do transfer the flow of the prevailing Western winds.

Now comes in the current issue of the journal nature, a new idea based on big waves in the atmosphere of the planet. According to the modelling work at the California Institute of technology, strong contrasting winter climate are the result of waves of thermal energy air is rising from the warm Atlantic Ocean in a pattern that is colder further South on the eastern borders of continental North America. These stationary waves in the atmosphere, rather than the ocean itself, shape the pattern of the winter on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Geophysicist, Yohai Caspian and Tapio Schneider, showing the work done you also on the same large atmospheric wave pattern, over the Pacific Ocean as a continental responsible for cold winters along the eastern boundary of Asia. This atmospheric waves over both ocean basin explain also the warmer climates on the western borders of the continents, they add.

The Cal-Tech few write that their work offers modeling "a plausible answer to the question why the Eastern limits of the continental Asia and North America are so cold, and why the extent of the cold regions on both continents is similar."

"Caspian and Schneider's work offers fresh insights into processes that create a remarkable asymmetry in Earth's climate," wrote Yale University Geophysicist William boos in a separate review of the study in the same issue of nature published. It solves also "problems" in how such waves affect climate patterns on longer time scales, he said.

BLOG: Siberia at the Baikal feeling the heat

Figure 1: This image of the snow cover over North America and Europe was on the 23 March 2003 by the satellite Terra MODIS instrument using NASA. Approximate latitude 30 ° N, 45 ° N, 60 ° N and 75 ° N are marked. Note that in the North-East of North America snow almost completely covered N between 45 ° and N is 60 °, but there is little snow in the same broad in Western Europe. Sea ice surface temperature (represented by the MODIS instrument of NASA satellite Aqua) is also shown: Rosa, temperatures of 0 ° C to very ° C; purple, temperatures between very ° C and ?28 ° C; white (deep Arctic), temperatures colder than ?28 ° c. Caspian and Schneider call the influence of Rossby wave the plume as a partial explanation of the transatlantic asymmetry.?Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center scientific visualization Studio. George Riggs (NASA/SSAI), edited by Yohai Caspian.

Figure 2: sea surface temperatures off the eastern coast of North America from the advanced high resolution on radiometer (AVHRR) made the NOAA operational polar orbiting satellites. Credit: NOAA

Figure 3: sea surface temperatures off the East coast of North America, such as by the NASA shown Terra satellite with the help of instruments MODIS (moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer). The darkest reds are 32 degrees Celsius and the purple is-2 C (the freezing temperature of ocean water). The main feature in this image is the Gulf stream flows us northward along the East side of Florida to North Carolina and then depart from the coast in the Atlantic Ocean. This warm water in stark contrast to the cold continent in the West are in the winter. This specific image is 6 to 14 a 8-day moving average of Sep 2001. In the procedure described in the paper this warm waters off the Eastern limits of the continental drive atmospheric waves that result in cooling of the continents in the West. Credit: Ronald bird, SAIC for NASA GSFC.

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