Future increases in wind strength along the California coast may have far-reaching effects, including more intense upwelling of cold water along the coast early in the season and increased fire danger in Southern California, according to researchers at the Climate Change and Impacts Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Earth scientist Mark Snyder will present the findings in a poster titled ‘Future Changes in Surface Winds in the Western U.S. due to Climate Change’ at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco on Friday, December 19. Snyder’s group used a regional climate model to study how the climate along the U.S. West Coast might change in the future as a result of global warming driven by increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. The results suggest that a general increase in wind speeds along the coast is likely to accompany regional changes in climate. ‘What we think is going on is that land temperatures are increasing at a faster rate than the ocean temperatures, and this thermal gradient between the land and the ocean is driving increased winds,’ Snyder said. The researchers conducted multiple runs of their regional model to […]