Future changes in wind climate in the European and North Atlantic area

What is it about?

According to climate model simulations, mean wind speeds in Europe and the extratropical North Atlantic area change fairly little in response to global warming. Even so, in many areas significant changes in the occurrence of high wind speeds are seen when the different wind directions are examined separately. For example, in northern Europe in autumn and in north-western Europe in winter, strong westerly and south-westerly winds are projected to become more frequent at the expense of easterly winds. These findings do not contradict the very substantial projected changes in temperature and precipitation noted in previous research.

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Why is it important?

As an extension to most of the previous studies, the present work examines changes in the bivariate distributions of the wind speed and direction. Even though changes in the mean wind speed are generally fairly modest, directional segregation reveals substantial changes in the frequency of strong winds blowing from certain directions. Moreover, the analysis has been performed separately for the four calendar seasons. This is essential since the modelled changes in the various seasons are often quite different. In this work, winds have been derived from modelled sea-level air pressure fields. This restricts the analysis to large-scale weather phenomena, such as extratropical cyclones. Winds related to small-scale phenomena, e.g., hurricanes, typhoons, tornadoes and thunderstorms, are not captured.

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