Last year’s record-breaking heatwave, recent droughts and the 2020 Labor Day megafires that swept across Oregon and Washington all share a contributing factor: atmospheric ridges, or elongated regions of high pressure relative to their surroundings that are typically associated with warm and dry conditions at the surface.
More still needs to be known about the key drivers of ridges and how they will be affected by a warming climate. That’s why researchers from Washington State University Vancouver (WSUV) and Portland State University (PSU) are teaming up to study atmospheric ridging in current and future climates, thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation.
While ridges are a normal part of the mid-latitude atmospheric circulation, their occurrence and impacts over western North America is influenced by multiple unique factors including proximity to the Pacific Ocean, interactions between the Pacific Ocean and the atmosphere and the complex topography of western North America, said Deepti Singh, an assistant professor at WSUV and director of WSUV’s Climate Extremes and Societal Impacts Lab, and her PSU collaborator.
The project aims to advance the basic understanding of the components of the Earth system that influence atmospheric ridges over western North America and investigate how and why ridges will respond to continued global warming. The project will seek to answer three key questions using a combination of observations and climate model simulations.
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