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News Release 11-063
Extra-Cold Winters in Northeastern North America and Northeastern Asia?
Warm water off continents' eastern coasts to blame
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Snow cover over North America and Europe in March, 2003, as imaged by a satellite instrument.
Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio; George Riggs (NASA/SSAI)
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The Gulf Stream flows northward along the Eastern United States then diverges out into the Atlantic Ocean.
Credit: NOAA
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Sea-surface temperatures off Eastern North America; purple = freezing temperature of ocean water.
Credit: NASA
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Surface temperature deviation averaged over northern hemisphere winter months and across 40 years.
Credit: Tapio Schneider/Yohai Kaspi
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Blue colors in the southern hemisphere (summer there) show ocean heating; red colors, ocean heat loss. Strong heating of the atmosphere from the ocean off the east coasts of America and Asia is visible.
Credit: Tapio Schneider/Yohai Kaspi
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Scientists have developed a new theory of how warm regions in the ocean lead to atmospheric cooling to their west. In these simulations, the northern hemisphere is perturbed with a constant localized heating at the ocean surface (seen as the redder triangular patch in the atmosphere). As a reference case the southern hemisphere is perturbed with the same amount of heating spread out in all longitudes. In these idealized simulations there is no seasonal cycle.
Credit: Yohai Kaspi
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