Our Atmosphere is Unstable 8% – 32% More Often Now than it was 40 years ago Thanks to Global Warming.
Times when the atmosphere is stable are becoming much rarer.
Not only that, but the energy in the atmosphere is much greater now (higher Convective Available Potential Energy or CAPE, making the positive buoyancy of the air much greater) and higher Convective Inhibition (CIN) or cap means that when the storms are triggered they are much more intense.
Press article:
https://www.albany.edu/news-center/news/2023-study-climate-change-has-increased-atmospheric-instability-over-past-40-years
Peer-reviewed open source scientific paper:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2023GL106125
Title: “The Atmosphere Has Become Increasingly Unstable During 1979–2020 Over the Northern Hemisphere”
This paper looks at newly homogenized data (cleaned up to account for different upgrades to radiosondes, etc) from weather instruments (radiosondes) on weather balloons that are launched twice daily around the world at 00Z and 012Z (6 am and 6 pm in EST).
The radiosondes send real-time data on temperature, atmospheric pressure (hence altitude) and humidity to ground-based computers for the several hours that the balloon rises and drifts in the atmosphere, going as high as 30 km and as far as several hundred km.
The radiosondes weather balloon collection of atmospheric data has been ongoing twice daily from 1979 to present day; the new paper looks at the global data from 1979 to 2000.
Basically, periods of time when the atmosphere are unstable has increased by between 2% and 8% per decade, for each of the last four decades, for a total increase of between 8% and 32% depending on the location.
“For example, summer frequency of the unstable conditions increased from ∼54%, 56%, and 50% (of time) in 1979 to ∼72%, 71%, and 63% in 2020 over EA (East Asia), NA (North America), and EU (Europe), respectively. These changes represent a percentage increase of 26%–33%. Although we mainly show the results in JJA and DJF, the increasing (decreasing) trends for the unstable (stable) conditions are consistent among different seasons.”
Not only do we have slowing meandering jet streams becoming much wavier leading to much worse extreme weather events, the actual atmosphere itself is much more unstable and prone to much more intense, much higher frequency, and much longer duration storms.
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by paulhenrybeckwith