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D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 5 5.00
Q So let's talk about what actually happened here. Can you just describe the meteorological phenomenon that just gripped Europe?
A Europe was the victim of a conspiracy of atmospheric factors, and they're both, ah, pretty unusual. One is a stubborn area of high pressure, also referred to popularly as a heat dome, that was sitting Over, um, pretty much central to Western Europe. Now, what's that, what that's doing is it's causing air to sink, it's rerouting weather systems around it, and it is, uh, causing its own area of above average temperatures. And then you had this air mass straight out of the Sahara Desert, pretty much, that Moved north into Spain and Portugal and affected them for quite a significant period of time, and we saw temperatures go all the way up to almost, almost a 117 degrees in Portugal. But what happened next was you still had that heat dome with its clockwise area of rotation around it, and then you had an area of low pressure Sitting to the west of the, of Iberia. Now, that low pressure area then moved a little bit north. And the air currents between the, you know, the flow around the low and the flow around the high basically kind of formed, like, a funnel and rocketed that hot air all the way up to the UK, all the way up to the far northern reaches of the UK, and today it's actually traceable, uh, in Sweden and other parts of Scandinavia. So, Is this some sort of unprecedented atmospheric setup like Hurricane Sandy was? No. We've been seeing these stubborn, strong heat domes occur…
AI assessment note: “One is a stubborn area of high pressure, also referred to popularly as a heat dome”
Answered produced feed
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q of the reasons why Western Europe in particular is seeing heat waves that are already outpacing the increase in heat waves in other parts of the Northern Hemisphere. So you're showing that heat waves are increasing about three to four times faster than other parts of the Northern Hemisphere. Can you talk a little bit about that phenomenon? Why is it taking place? What are the fingerprints of climate change?
A The study that came out a couple weeks ago, which now looks ridiculously well-timed for a journal article, um, and, and it's purely random that it came out when it did, but the study that came out about a couple weeks ago showing that Western Europe is, is seeing a, a faster spike in heat waves than other parts of the globe, um, Really tied that to jet stream patterns. Most people, other than meteorologists, like, sometimes don't even know what a jet stream means. They just hear the term, um, and it's a common term used on forecasts, uh, you know, on TV or elsewhere. But it's really just a narrow corridor, uh, like a highway of fast-moving air that sets up, uh, contrast between air masses and steers storms. So what they've been seeing is certain ways that the jet stream is shaped downwind of Europe. So times when it splits in two, uh, and you have that jet stream split encourages the weather to get backed up, like traffic going into the Holland Tunnel over Western Europe. And that in turn encourages these Long-lasting heat domes. So, it's a little bit of a complex chain of events, but But it's kind of a, it was a creative study in that it teased out this pattern that other people hadn't seen before, or just hadn't noticed. And this dual jet stream structure does seem to have some sort of potential influence from climate change, specifically the change in the difference between …
AI assessment note: “Really tied that to jet stream patterns.”
