Wet summer due to Arctic warming

Record wet summers and severe snowy weather in winter from recent years across Britain could be linked to Arctic warming, scientists have claimed.

The UK has been hit by a number of extreme weather events in the past decade. Those events have included heavy rain in the summers of 2007 and 2012, the record wet and stormy winter of 2013-14, and cold and snowy winters in 2009-10 and 2010-11.

Researchers compared data of recent UK extremes with the position of the North Atlantic polar atmospheric “jet stream” using a measure called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) index that indicates shifts to the north and south.

The exceptional wet summers, snowy cold snaps and mild stormy winters all corresponded with pronounced negative or positive spikes in index readings.

The researchers also linked the jet stream’s altered path – its increasing “waviness” – with a rise in summer months of areas of high pressure remaining largely stationary over Greenland, distorting the path of storms across the North Atlantic. Researchers from the University of Lincoln and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the US said global warming could be one of the causes.

The strength and path of the North Atlantic jet stream and the high pressure in Greenland appear to be influenced by increasing temperatures in the Arctic, which has been warming much faster than the global average in the past two decades.