Climate change is making winters in northern China twice as likely to be extremely cold (Image: ChinaFotoPress via Getty)

As the Arctic warms, extremely cold winters are becoming more likely in Eurasia. Recent studies had suggested that a warmer North Pole would be linked to colder, more extreme winters in Eurasia. Now a study based on climate models of Eurasian weather suggest colder than normal winters will be twice as likely to happen. But there is a twist: the effect is unlikely to last.

The jet stream, is a fast-moving flow of air that sweeps from west to east and normally keeps Arctic weather systems swirling around the pole. Warmer than usual air over the Arctic is thought to weaken it, allowing these cold weather systems to creep south, and leading to blocking events where systems stay in one place for long periods of time rather than flowing east as normally happens. The latest study, published this week, suggests that climate change is making extreme winter systems twice as likely to settle over central Eurasia.

Masato Mori of the University of Tokyo and colleagues focused their climate modelling on central Eurasia – the region around southern Russia and northern China – and found that Arctic warming due to climate change was doubling the chances of extreme winters.


The weather systems of western Europe are linked to the jet stream too, and Adam Scaife of the UK Met Office says the effects are likely to be similar if slightly less pronounced in this region. He says Mori’s study adds some strength to the proposed link between Arctic melting and cold Eurasian winters, though more work is needed to confirm it.

Mori and colleagues then pushed the analysis one step further and used their models to explore whether the cold Eurasian winter trend was likely to last. Their models suggest it won’t. The Arctic could have no sea ice during the autumn by some time in the 2030s, says Scaife, at which point things will change. “The key thing here is that they argue that climate change wins in the long run,” he says. So while winters may be cold for now, it might not be all that long before they follow the global warming trend.

Journal reference: Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/ngeo2277