Climate change and climate risk in the perspective of synoptic scale atmospheric dynamics - The case of 2013/2014 northern winter

Abstract

The winter of 2013/2014 has been one of the richest in decades in weather paroxysms, in the northern hemisphere, particularly in a wide area stretching from North America to Europe, including Atlantic basin. Intense and persistent cold waves in the United States, strong and recurrent storms of wind and sea on the Atlantic influencing the western facade of the Iberian Peninsula and the British Isles, while Scandinavia felt a prolonged cold dry wave, intense rainfall in Italy and exceptional quantity of accumulated snow in Southeastern Europe. In the media, immediately, the causes of this rough winter was so attributed to “global warming”. Its causes, however, have to be properly framed in the synoptic scale atmospheric dynamics, in a hypothetical context of “climate change”. The purpose of this article is to analyze these weather paroxysms according to their dynamic and synoptic direct causes, in the perspective of climate risk, in a possible causal remote scenario of climate change towards a warming, specially of the high northern latitudes.