Dangerous Rossby Waves Are Threatening Lives Of Millions Of People On Three Continents

Don Wood – MessageToEagle.com – The danger of powerful Rossby waves should not be underestimated. A recent study shows these bizarre waves could have catastrophic consequences to life on three continents.

Little is still known about Rossby waves, but it’s clear they change winds in the jet stream and result in crop failures and severe droughts around the world.

Jet streams are fast flowing, narrow, meandering air currents in the atmospheres of some planets, including Earth. Atmospheric ‘wobbles’, called Rossby waves – can cause the wind to move north or south. The jet stream causes changes in the wind and pressure above our heads and also affects things nearer the surface, such as areas of high and low pressure

Rossby Waves And Food Shortage

Scientists from Oxford University have discovered jet stream patterns that could affect up to a quarter of global food production.

Their research finds that these simultaneous heatwaves significantly reduce crop production across those regions, creating the risk of multiple harvest failures and other far-reaching societal consequences, including social unrest.

This means that food supplies would be at risk across North America, Western Europe and Asia, causing starvation and threatening the lives of millions of people.

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“Co-occurring heatwaves will become more severe in the coming decades if greenhouse gases are not mitigated. In an interconnected world, this can lead to food price spikes and have impacts on food availability even in remote regions not directly affected by heatwaves,” Dr. Kai Kornhuber from the University of Oxford’s Department of Physics and Colombia University’s Earth Institute explained.

“We found a 20-fold increase in the risk of simultaneous heatwaves in major crop producing regions when these global scale wind patterns are in place. Until now this was an underexplored vulnerability in the food system. We have found that during these events there actually is a global structure in the otherwise quite chaotic circulation. The bell can ring in multiple regions at once and the impacts of those specific interconnections were not quantified previously”, he added.

Western North America, Western Europe and the Caspian Sea region are particularly susceptible to these atmospheric patterns that get heat and drought locked into one place simultaneously where they then affect crops production yields.

“Normally low harvests in one region are expected to be balanced out by good harvests elsewhere but these waves can cause reduced harvests in several important breadbaskets simultaneously, creating risks for global food production,” Dr. Dim Coumou from the Institute for Environmental Studies at VU Amsterdam said.

The jet stream is a core of strong winds around 5 to 7 miles above the Earth’s surface, blowing from west to east. Credit: Public Domain

Dr. Elisabeth Vogel from Melbourne University explained that “during years in which two or more summer weeks featured the amplified wave pattern, cereal crop production was reduced by more than 10% in individual regions, and by 4% when averaged across all crop regions affected by the pattern”.

“If climate models are unable to reproduce these wave patterns, risk managers such as reinsurers and food security experts may face a blind spot when assessing how simultaneous heatwaves and their impacts could change in a warming climate,” Dr. Radley Horton from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Colombia University explained.

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The scientists conclude that a thorough understanding of what drives this jet stream behavior could ultimately improve seasonal predictions of agricultural production at the global scale and inform risk assessments of harvest failures across multiple food-producing regions.

Written by Don Wood – MessageToEagle.com Staff

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