Climate Models Are Not Accounting For This Surprising Move In The North Pacific Storm Track
In November 2024, a powerful tropical cyclone and storm surge hit the Pacific Northwest, causing severe flooding in many states and Canada. Like most West Coast winter storms, the system traveled along the North Pacific storm track—the highway of mid-latitude storms that shape the region’s climate. New research suggests that the track is making an unexpected change.
The study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, found that climate change has been causing the North Pacific winter storm track to shift toward the Arctic since the late 1970s. By the end of the century, this will have major impacts on West Coast climate and water availability that current climate models do not fully account for, according to the researchers.
“We find climate models fail to capture recent changes in the storm’s track,” lead author Rei Chemke, a climate researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, told Gizmodo in an email. “This calls into question the models’ ability to provide accurate regional predictions.”
The storms are moving
Previous research has suggested that the North Pacific storm track is moving upward, with climate models showing a major shift under global warming. But the lack of a historical record of wind over the ocean has prevented researchers from determining whether the change has occurred in recent decades and how climate change is influencing it.
“To overcome this, we establish a mathematical connection between storm tracks and sea level pressure, which has been directly measured in recent decades,” explains Chemke. Analyzing these pressure measurements allowed researchers to examine the location of a storm’s track each winter and estimate how much its location has changed in recent decades.
The analysis confirmed that the storm’s track has been moving upward since 1979, with the center of storm activity shifting north about 0.067 degrees of latitude per year on average. It also showed that this change exceeds natural variability and is accompanied by externally forced change driven by human-caused warming.
Climate models fail to capture the magnitude of this recent change. “For now, the models are generating change [roughly] 2 degrees at the end of this century,” said Chemke.
The weather on the West Coast will be very bad
With this critical gap in climate simulations now identified, improving the way models represent storm track dynamics will be critical to accurately reflect and prepare for future changes in storm activity, including heat and moisture variability on the West Coast, Chemke said.
The change he and his colleagues estimate will allow heat and moisture transported along the West Coast to reach higher elevations and drive increased climate variability in those regions. This will lead to warmer conditions in the southwestern US, cooler and drier conditions in the Pacific Northwest, and warmer and wetter conditions in Alaska, Chemke explained.
The West Coast is already struggling to adapt to extreme weather as climate change fuels unprecedented heatwaves, prolonged droughts, and more intense storms. This study highlights the complex ways in which rising global temperatures are changing the planet’s climate. Understanding—and accurately modeling—these complexities will be critical to anticipating regional impacts and adapting to a warming world.
