Citation

Knippertz P, Pantillon F, Fink AH. Environ. Res. Lett. 2018; 13(5): e051001.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Institute of Physics (IOP) Publishing)

DOI

10.1088/1748-9326/aabd3e

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Wintertime windstorms associated with low-pressure systems from the North Atlantic Ocean are the costliest natural hazard for Europe (Ulbrich et al 2013). These storms are associated with large pressure gradients and high background winds, but the most destructive gusts are often confined to relatively small areas within the low-pressure systems. Examples include showers and thunderstorms in the area of the cold front (e.g. Ludwig et al 2015) and the so-called 'sting jet' as analysed in the recent paper by Martínez-Alvarado et al (2018). Sting jets are relatively small and short-lived high-wind zones in the area of the bent-back warm front during the mature stage of a particular type of low-pressure system (see figure 1 for a recent example). The name goes back to a seminal paper by Browning (2004) calling the high winds 'the sting at the end of the tail'. Sting jets typically occur in explosively intensifying storms and are mostly confined to the North Atlantic Ocean and the adjacent British Isles (Hart et al 2017). There is an ongoing debate about the details of the physical mechanisms involved in creating sting jets, including aspects such as conditional symmetric instability, frontolysis and cooling through evaporation, melting and sublimation.

Language: en