Climate variations influence North Atlantic winter storm intensity and resultant variations in wave energy levels. A 60 year hindcast allows investigation of the influence of decadal climate variability on long-term trends of North Atlantic wave power, PW, spanning the 1948–2008 epoch. PW variations over much of the eastern North Atlantic are strongly influenced by the fluctuating North Atlanti...

[1] The winters of 2009–2010 and 2010–2011 brought frigid temperatures to parts of Europe, Russia, and the U.S. We analyzed regional and Northern Hemispheric (NH) daily temperature extremes for these two consecutive winters in the historical context of the past 63 years. While some parts clear ly experienced very cold temperatures, the NH was not anomalously cold. Extreme warm events were much ...

The Pacific–North American (PNA) teleconnection is a major mode of Northern Hemisphere wintertime climate variability, with well-known impacts on North American temperature and precipitation. To assess whether the PNA teleconnection has extended predictability, comprehensive data analysis is conducted to elucidate PNA evolution, with an emphasis on patterns of PNA development and decay. These p...

This article investigates the synoptic characteristics of individual North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) events by examining the daily evolution of the potential temperature field on the nominal tropopause (the 2-PVU surface). This quantity is obtained from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction–National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP–NCAR) reanalysis dataset for the winter seaso...

Recent winter warming over Central Europe associated with a positive phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) strongly influenced the thermal and water column stability properties of deep Lake Constance (zmean 5 101 m). Volumetrically weighted average water temperatures have increased since the 1960s by an average of 0.0178C yr21, and its interannual variability was strongly related to the...

Recent winter warming over Central Europe associated with a positive phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) strongly influenced the thermal and water column stability properties of deep Lake Constance (zmean 5 101 m). Volumetrically weighted average water temperatures have increased since the 1960s by an average of 0.0178C yr21, and its interannual variability was strongly related to the...

A large single-year reversal in the phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) during 1996 led to a dramatic shift in the slope-water circulation patterns of the northwest (NW) Atlantic. Analyses of time-series data collected from the region over the past half century show that both physical and biological responses are commonly elicited by such phase reversals in the NAO. Here, we use a mod...

[1] This study contributes to the discussion on possible effects of El Niño on North Atlantic/European regional climates. We use NCEP/NCAR reanalysis data to show how the two different types of El Niños (the central Pacific, or CP, and the east Pacific, or EP) result in remarkably different European winter temperature anomalies, specifically weak warming during EP and significant cooling during...

The influence of Atlantic sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies on the atmospheric circulation over the North Atlantic sector during winter is investigated by performing experiments with an atmospheric general circulation model (GCM). These consist of a 30-year run with observed SST anomalies for the period 1961–90 confined geographically to the Atlantic Ocean, and of a control run with clima...

The dynamical mechanism for the late-winter teleconnection between El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is examined using the output from a 2000-yr integration of a coupled general circulation model (GCM). The coupled model captures many salient features of the observed behavior of both ENSO and NAO, as well as their impact on the surface climate in late ...