Response of Northern Hemisphere Rossby wave breaking to changes in sea surface temperature and sea ice cover

Tahvonen, Sara; Köhler, Daniel; Räisänen, Petri; Sinclair, Victoria A.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/wcd-6-1299-2025

Articles | Volume 6, issue 4

https://doi.org/10.5194/wcd-6-1299-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/wcd-6-1299-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 6, issue 4

Research article

|

04 Nov 2025

Research article |

| 04 Nov 2025

Response of Northern Hemisphere Rossby wave breaking to changes in sea surface temperature and sea ice cover

Sara Tahvonen, Daniel Köhler, Petri Räisänen, and Victoria A. Sinclair

Data sets

Global fields of meteorological and aerosol data from seven experiments with the NorESM2 model under different warming scenarios, Dataset version 1 Tuomas Naakka et al. https://doi.org/10.17043/naakka-2025-noresm2-1

CESM2 Seaice and SST experiment for crices project K. Nordling https://doi.org/10.11582/2024.00018

Model code and software

Rossby wave breaking detection algorithm Sara Tahvonen https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15357272

The Community Earth System Model G. Danabasoglu et al. https://github.com/ESCOMP/CESM

Norwegian Earth System Model (NorESM) Ø. Seland et al. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3905091

Short summary

Rossby wave breaking (RWB) influences weather at a large scale and can contribute to extreme weather events, but it is not known if climate change will have an effect on where and how often RWB occurs. We investigate how extreme sea ice loss and warming of the sea surface effect RWB. Our results show that sea surface temperatures significantly change local RWB frequencies and the closely related upper atmospheric jet streams, but that sea ice changes have no noticeable effect in our experiments.