MANCHESTER, England, Aug. 25 (UPI) -- The jet stream dictates much of the weather on both sides of the Atlantic. Western Europe's summer has been especially wet thanks to a jet stream that dipped to the south for much of the first half of the summer, supplying the British Isles with a constant stream of low-pressure systems.
Recently, scientists at University of Sheffield set out to understand what causes the jet stream to shift. What drives the river of air's variability?
They developed a model to analyze and anticipate the movement of the jet stream. Their results -- detailed in the journal Climate Dynamics -- suggest the jet stream's movements are at least 35 percent predictable, driven by factors like sea surface temperatures, solar variability and Arctic sea ice coverage.
"We've made big inroads into long-range forecasts for winter, but we are still limited to shorter-range weather forecasts in summer," Adam Scaife, a professor at Manchester and head of long range forecasting at the Met Office, said in a news release. "Studies like this help to identify ways to break into the long-range summer forecast problem."
"Our study will help forecasters to predict further into the future giving a clearer picture of the weather to come," concluded study leader Richard Hall.
