By Ashna Kadami
On the news, updates about changing weather patterns or warnings of extreme weather events have now become a norm in our society. From ever-climbing afternoon temperatures in Singapore to the bomb cyclone snow blizzard seen in New York, current predictions are forecasting worsening weather. The reason? Global Warming.
From 2016-2022, meteorologists have seen record breaking heat waves throughout the globe. Rampant fires in California and Australia, increased number of Tornadoes in the United States and the longest run category 5 of hurricanes in the world, hurricane John. But, to understand why this is happening let’s start at the very beginning.
How is the weather even predicted? How do we even know that worsening weather is because of global warming?
In order to forecast weather, meteorologists measure the atmosphere’s initial conditions. This involves measuring the current levels of precipitation, air pressure, humidity, wind speed and wind direction. You may not notice it, but twice everyday meteorologists from 800 weather stations globally release balloons in the atmosphere which carry small instruments known as “radiosondes”. Radiosondes measure the atmosphere’s initial conditions and transmit its findings to international weather centers. Then, the data is run through predictive physics models which generate the final weather forecast. However, the forecasts are not perfect predictions. This is due to how weather itself is a fundamentally sensitive and therefore, chaotic system. Any small disturbances to an atmosphere’s initial conditions can majorly impact weather patterns. Hence, weather cannot be predicted more than 2 weeks in advance.
Now let’s factor in global warming. A region’s climate prediction is based on the average of all its weather data and boundary conditions. Boundary conditions are factors such as solar radiation and the gas composition of our atmosphere, factors that are theoretically meant to stay consistent. However, with global warming, Earth’s climate is becoming warmer due to more heat-trapping gasses (CO2 & CH4) present in our atmosphere. This is causing our climate to change, or in other words the average of all weather data and boundary conditions to change. This correlates to a much larger change for our everyday weather patterns. With global warming, Earth’s surface temperature has warmed by almost 1℃ over the last 150 years. It may seem small, but remember that it is our climate that is being warmed. This extra 1℃ has added the energy equivalent of roughly 1 million nuclear warheads into our atmosphere. This massive surge of energy is what is causing the dramatic increase in extreme weather events.
To show you how science manifests into reality, let me walk you through a recent extreme weather event – the December 2022 bomb cyclone in the US and Canada. In the north (Arctic), temperatures plummeted 21℃, affecting areas such as the Great Lakes. In the South (Midwest), reports were made on unusually warm weather. The bomb cyclone, nicknamed “Elliot”, was caused by a collision of cold, dry air from the north and warm, moist air from the south. Such storms are referred to as ‘bomb’ cyclones due to their explosive power intensified by the rapid fall in air pressure.
Cyclones, Hurricanes and Typhoons will be more intense in 2023 as collisions of warm air from Asia and Europe will clash with the cold air from America and Canada across the Atlantic Ocean. 2023 will be a witness to many storms which have already begun brewing and there is nothing we can do about it… Or is there?