"Climate change is messing with the jet stream, and it means more extreme weather events in the future."
"The climate crisis has changed weather patterns, and this could increase crop failure in multiple agricultural regions around the world, a new study says. In a report published in Nature Communications this week, researchers in the U.S. and Germany outline how food-producing regions of the world will see significantly lower crop yields in the near future.
The researchers analyzed climate models and observational data from 1960 and 2014 and then looked at future projections between 2045 and 2099. By analyzing the data, they found that a changing jet stream has contributed to crop failure in the past. Jet streams are air currents that change weather patterns around the world. But many scientists have observed that climate change is changing how jet streams move, which could challenge crop-growing regions around the world. Climate models are equipped to show those changes in the atmosphere, but these models cannot always show how it affects conditions on the ground.
The study explains that under a high emissions scenario, a “strongly meandering jet stream” or a wavy jet stream could actually trigger some of these lower crop yield events worldwide. Data showed the researchers that years with “more than one wave event” often lead regional crop yields to drop up to 7%. They also found that agricultural regions in Eastern Europe, East Asia, and North America were likely to be impacted by these events. The study referenced a heat wave that significantly hurt agriculture in Russia back in 2010. The high temperatures that year were connected to a shift in the jet stream, according to the researchers."
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