University of Utah Research Could Mean Millions of Dollars to Weather Sensitive Investments

By Javan Rivera

Ryan Oates

When people associate weather patterns with money, they almost always think of crops first.

Farmers and agriculture investors are always hedging their agrarian investments to insure against droughts, floods and more. Weather, fickle as it often is, could mean the difference between a bountiful harvest and healthy economic income, and a dead field with little more than pennies to show for a season’s worth of work.

And while these are all fine examples of the importance weather plays in economic investments, few seem to realize that there is an entire season of economic betting that takes place during the winter months.

Ryan Oates, graduate researcher at the University of Utah, is currently studying atmospheric influences on weather that can have an economic influence during the winter months.

For example, the energy that people use to heat their homes every winter isn’t free. It’s part of a multi-billion dollar industry that, much like the agricultural industry, is greatly subject to global weather patterns. The real question on all these investor’s minds isn’t why the weather changes, but rather, how far out can that weather be forecast, and what else can be done to extend that lead time?

This is one of the most important questions that could be addressed by Oates’ work.

“There’s currently a two to three week lead time between forecasting mid-latitude weather and stratospheric events,” Oates said.

What would happen if that lead time could be extended, with greater understanding of stratospheric patterns during the winter?

Oates, along with his research advisor, Thomas Reichler, are running a series of computer models in the University’s atmospheric sciences department in an attempt to understand the changes of global weather patterns as climate change begins to take affect. More specifically, Oates is studying the effects of CO2 increase on the polar vortex.

The polar vortex is a well-documented massive circulation of the atmosphere in the Northern Hemisphere. The circulation, which takes place in the stratosphere, directly influences winter weather in the mid-latitudes according to Oates, meaning the importance of what happens in the vortex can’t be understated for energy investors.

Oates said that due to the direct correlation between the polar vortex and global weather patterns, the vortex can not only affect tropospheric weather, but tropospheric weather can affect it as well. Any time large-scale tropospheric weather destabilizes the vortex, it can stop spinning, or even reverse as part of an event known as “Stratospheric Sudden Warming” (SSW). These SSW events can significantly change weather patterns in the mid-latitudes.

“The troposphere affects the polar vortex, but it also works the other way,” Oates said. “So when you have these sudden warming events, that impacts storm tracks. When you have a sudden warming event, that tends to push those storms farther south towards the mid-latitudes.”

Oates uses a global climate model in order to simulate advanced states of global climates containing large-scale CO2 increase in order to observe what effects that has on the polar vortex.

“Since CO2 is expected to readily increase throughout this century, what would happen to our global climate model if we doubled CO2 in it?” Oates said.

The preliminary results, according to Oates, are that an increase in greenhouse gases means an increase in SSW events.

“This means that our winters will be more variable,” Oates said. “That’s obviously important, because you will potentially have more instances where you have periods of above and below average weather.”

What does this mean for investors in energy supplies? Oates said, this research could be a significant driving force behind the “opportunity and risk” these investors face going forward.

As global climate change marches on, the significance of SSW events is likely to only increase for these investors.

This correlation between his work and real world economic consequences is something that drives Oates.

“For me, science ties into everyday things,” Oates said. “You can’t isolate it to just one thing. It always has real life implications.”

With his graduate studies coming to an end, Oates expects to graduate with a master’s degree this fall, and hopes to apply his research to the real life consequences he finds so fascinating.

“Ideally, I’d like to work with a company that deals with weather sensitive commodities,” Oates said.

In the end, regardless of where Oates ends up, his research represents a step forward in understanding and forecasting storm and weather patterns across the globe.