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Robert Frost wrote 100 years ago that the world will end in fire. The poet described one popular take on the world's end before writing "some say in ice."
In terms of Earth's climate, the relationship between fire and ice isn't quite as depicted as Frost. The relationship is more give and take in the case of the study presented at the AGU Fall Meeting in New Orleans.
A recent study shows a link between decreasing sea ice and worsening wildfires in the western United States. The area surrounding the sea ice is getting iceless as sunlight warms it. The heat and fire-favorable conditions will be brought to distant states like California, Washington, and Oregon later in autumn and early winter.
The relationship is described as similar to the El Nio-Southern Oscillation in its underlying mechanism.
"It's not a perfect analogy, but teleconnections like this are a bit like the butterfly effect," said Hailong Wang, an Earth scientist at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and coauthor of the new study. Chaos theory states that a butterfly's flapping wings can influence the formation of a tornado.
Wang said that climate conditions in one part of the world can influence climate outcomes from thousands of kilometers away. The relationship between the western United States and the northern region is connected in our case. Warming caused by sea ice loss causes hotter and drier conditions in the West later in the year.
Wang presented his findings at a press conference about wildfire in a changing climate.
How could the loss of ice in the north contribute to the weather in the west? The shift in atmospheric circulation patterns can be traced back to surface warming in the ice-less northern part of the world. The mechanism at play is explained in this animation. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has a credit.
A tale of two different things.
Wang and his fellow authors found that as the land and sea warm, the atmosphere in the heated area strengthens. Differences in air pressure are what causes thiscounterclockwise vortex.
The polar jet stream is constantly pushed out of its normal pattern by the powerful vortex. The jet stream has become wavier and a second vortex forms under the ridge of the polar jet above the western United States. The second vortex is similar to the one that caused the extreme heat in the Pacific Northwest.
The contrast between the two systems can be made worse by the warming of the Arctic. There were more than three million acres burned in California during the wildfire season.
The study found that the connection warms and dries out the western United States region. We hope that those in charge of managing forests and preparing for wildfires will be better informed by uncovering the mechanism behind that teleconnection.
Less ice and more heat.
The authors of the study wanted to know if the influence of sea ice on climate conditions was related to the past four decades of recorded sea ice levels. The mechanism at play was isolated through modeling done at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, a DOE Office of Science user facility.
Scientists began measuring the loss of sea ice in the late 1970s. The end-of- summer sea ice cover has decreased by 13 percent each decade over the past 30 years.
After the 2050s, periods of iceless Arctic waters are projected. Older, thicker ice is thinner and more fragile today.
The authors from PNNL include Wang and Zou.
Increasing large wildfires over the western United States are linked to diminishing sea ice in the Arctic. There is a DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-26232-9.
Nature Communications is a journal.
There is a link between Western wildfires and the ice on the sea.
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