What is it about?
Northern winds in the Gulf of Mexico are generated by cold surges entering the Gulf from North America. These winds generate high waves that disrupt maritime transport, oil and gas operations, and other maritime and coastal activities. Here we first classify northern events based on their resulting wave intensity and then we assess the effect of global warming. We show that by the end of the century there will be more frequent mild northern events and barely any of the extreme events.
Featured Image
Photo by Torsten Dederichs on Unsplash
Why is it important?
If global warming results in more extreme northern wind events, it may have important economic consequences to maritime and coastal activities. In this work, we show that there will be less intense events, which is good news for the offshore energy industry. Nevertheless, these results are the first approximation and we need to provide more robust conclusions by adding more models to the analysis.
Perspectives
The effect of global warming on northern events appear beneficial to the energy and maritime industries as less downtime can be expected due to extreme waves in the Gulf of Mexico. Nevertheless, there can be other negative implications, such as less mixing un the upper ocean. Also, northern events usually bring crucial rain to mainland Mexico and if we have less rainy days by the end of the century, there could be an important water crisis. We are planning to expand our study to establish the precipitation patterns following the same methodology.
Christian Appendini
Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Effect of climate change on wind waves generated by anticyclonic cold front intrusions in the Gulf of Mexico, Climate Dynamics, January 2018, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/s00382-018-4108-4.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
