Pukyong National University

"The ’winter extreme’ in North America is due to the change in the location of the North Pacific Oscillation."
Ewha Womans University · Pukyong National University(Prof. Kim Baek-min) · Hanyang University’s joint research team

Recently, the study results that the North American ’winter extreme’ phenomenon is due to a change in the position of the North Pacific Oscillation has attracted attention from academia. The joint research team of Ewha Womans University, Pukyong National University, and Hanyang University said that the reason why the temperature of winter in North America is erratic is that the east-west position of the North Pacific Oscillation changes every several decades. The joint research team conducted research by combining climate observation data and 500-year climate model experimental data, and discovered for the first time the fact that the North Pacific Oscillation controls the winter climate in North America.
In particular, in the last 20 years, as the center of oscillation in the North Pacific moved to the east of the North Pacific, the dependence with the winter temperature in North America increased, which caused the occurrence of abnormal climate more frequently. The co-research team explains that this series of changes in the location of the North Pacific Oscillation originates in the tropical Pacific thousands of kilometers away. In the last In the last 20 years, a series of long-distance effects leading to changes in surface sea temperature (SST) in the tropical Pacific, convective changes in the Mid-Pacific Ocean, and east-west temperature differences in the North Pacific Atmosphere have increased volatility by increasing the available potential energy in the atmosphere near North America. The joint research team conducts research with the support of the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) and the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA), and the thesis containing the results of the study, ’Tropical influence on the North Pacific Oscillation drives winter extremes in North America’ (lead author, Dr. Sung Mi-kyung of Ewha Womans University, Co-author, Prof. Kim Baek-min of Pukyong National University and Prof. Yoo Chang-hyun of Ewha Womans University) has been published in the April 2019 issue of Nature’s stablemates International Journal <Nature Climate Change>. (기사보러가기 클릭!)

24 April 2019

연구진
  김백민 baekmin@pknu.ac.kr
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