Violent polar storms help control the world's weather

POLAR storms are among the most vicious weather systems on the planet, but we may soon be wishing there were more of them.

These mini-hurricanes occur in the Arctic winter, when freezing air flows out of the region and over the warmer Atlantic Ocean. As the Arctic warms in the coming decades, there are expected to be fewer of them.

But without the storms, the rest of the world could face weather disruption. They are vital to the global thermohaline circulation in the ocean, which underpins ocean currents and weather systems, say Alan Condron at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Ian Renfrew at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK.

The thermohaline circulation starts in the far north of the Atlantic with the rapid sinking of dense, saline water. Condron and Renfrew's modelling shows that polar storms often initiate this by stirring up the water column (Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/ngeo1661).

Others are more sanguine. Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University in New Jersey says low-pressure systems that form along the path of the Gulf Stream are likely to push further north as the world warms. "My money would be on the jet-stream storms doing a larger fraction of the stirring job previously done by local polar storms," she says.

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