Wind Works: The Atmosphere’s Invisible Energetic Tug-of-War

Source: AGU Advances

Understanding how wind changes in response to global warming is necessary for accurately modeling climate and weather, identifying risks to infrastructure, and assessing global wind power capacity.

Sunlight delivers energy to Earth. A small part of that energy is converted into atmospheric kinetic energy (i.e., winds), which eventually dissipates into heat and radiates back out to space.

This heat exchange process is called the “atmospheric heat engine.” But traditional models of this engine depend on complex processes such as cloud microphysics that remain poorly constrained, limiting the models’ predictive power.

One of the main questions about wind and climate change is why models and observationally constrained reanalysis exhibit only relatively weak and inconsistent changes in the atmospheric heat engine in response to warming. Researchers also debate whether a wetter atmosphere is decreasing the efficiency of the heat engine, weakening global wind energy dissipation.

Jansen et al. present a new approach to estimating the work that drives the winds, using just two quantities. The first is the height-weighted radiative energy loss of the atmosphere. The second is a bulk Bowen ratio—the ratio of the column-integrated upward sensible heat flux to latent heat flux, which reflects how much energy travels upward as warm air versus latent heat in the form of water vapor.

The study authors worked from first principles to show how those two factors (the height-weighted radiative energy loss and the bulk Bowen ration) can explain changes in the heat engine and wind dissipation in various climate scenarios, including today’s.

They found that increases in radiative cooling in the upper troposphere and a decrease in bulk Bowen ratio with warming are in competition with each other. More radiative cooling increases the atmospheric heat engine’s work output, whereas a decrease in the bulk Bowen ratio reduces that output.

The balance between the two determines changes in the atmosphere’s kinetic energy dissipation and shapes how wind responds to a warming world.

Under current climate conditions, these opposing mechanisms largely cancel each other out, the study found. That could explain the relatively weak and inconsistent changes in global wind energy dissipation during the 21st century predicted in comprehensive climate models and atmospheric reanalysis.

However, the authors note that near-constant global wind energy dissipation does not imply that the winds don’t change at all. Climate change can still lead to significant shifts in atmospheric circulation and in regional wind behavior. The authors’ own simulations show the storm tracks shifting poleward, with substantial regional wind changes.

The authors also applied their theory across a much wider range of climates and found that this near cancellation breaks down at the extremes. In very cold climates, the energy driving the winds drops sharply—consistent with the far less energetic circulation seen in simulations of the Neoproterozoic snowball Earth. In addition, they suggest that given its simplicity, the model could be useful for estimating atmospheric kinetic energy and circulation on exoplanets. (AGU Advances, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026AV002593, 2026)

—Rebecca Dzombak, Science Writer

Citation: Dzombak, R. (2026), Wind works: The atmosphere’s invisible energetic tug-of-war, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260294. Published on 17 September 2026.

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Source: Wind Works: The Atmosphere’s Invisible Energetic Tug-of-War