A new peer-reviewed paper just came out within the last few weeks analyzing Derechos and other Straight Line Winds (SLWs) events.
Up to now, since the grid size of most climate models is too large (coarse) to capture SLWs like Derechos, we have not known much about how climate change affects these types of extreme weather events.
This new paper greatly advances our understanding of what is really happening. Using 40 years of observations, a newly developed model with a much tighter grid size of 4 km (2.5 miles), and a better understanding of the internal structure and dynamics of Mesoscale Convective System (MCS) thunderstorm systems, we now know the following:
– the geographic extent of SLWs including Derechos has increased by a factor of about 5x (specifically by 4.8 plus-minus 1.2) over the last 40 years
– the intensification of these SLWs like Derechos has been observed to increase by roughly 13% per degree C of global warming; the theory expected an intensification rate of about 7.5% per degree C of warming, so we clearly need to find out why
– we are observing a phenomena known as “global stilling”, whereby there are longer intervals of time where there is essentially no (or very low) wind speeds around the planet. At the same time, when there are winds, the maximum wind velocities are much higher than they used to be. In other words, there are longer periods of stillness (global stilling) bit when it is windy, it is very very windy
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by paulhenrybeckwith