The Big Chill

With global warming the atmospheric pressure distribution will change and thus may lead to drier and colder winters in Europe - in 250-years time. Joachim Müller-Jung reports in FAZ (7.3.2006) that a German-Scandinavian team of climate scientists have modelled energy fluxes in the atmosphere and unravelled the dependence of the so-called North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) on global warming. The NAO describes the pressure system associated with the Iceland low and the Azores high. With a new combined ice-ocean-atmosphere model the researchers think to have a clue for future climate prediction.