In a warming Pacific Northwest, summers are getting hotter and winters less cold, but the atmospheric patterns that influence the weather aren’t necessarily expected to become stronger or more frequent by the end of the century, according to a new Portland State University study.
That means that in an overall warmer climate, models suggest we'll have the same variety of atmospheric patterns as we have now but the weather we experience from them will be warmer and, in some cases, wetter.
Graham Taylor, a Ph.D. student in PSU’s Earth, Environment and Society program, and Paul Loikith, associate professor of geography at PSU, applied a novel machine-learning approach to assess to what degree the range of weather patterns over the Pacific Northwest will change under a high-end scenario of future warming using a suite of state-of-the-art climate models. Their findings were published in the Journal of Climate.
Read more at: Portland State University
A storm hits the west coast in March 2023 (Photo Credit: NOAA)