Meridional Gulf Stream shifts can influence wintertime variability in the North Atlantic storm track and Greenland blocking.

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2019. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Geophysical Research Letters 46(3), (2019):1702-1708. doi:10.1029/2018GL081087.After leaving the U.S. East Coast, the northward flowing Gulf Stream (GS) becomes a zonal jet and carries along its frontal characteristics of strong flow and sea surface temperature gradients into the North Atlantic at midlatitudes. The separation location where it leaves the coast is also an anchor point for the wintertime synoptic storm track across North America to continue to develop and head across the ocean. We examine the meridional variability of the separated GS path on interannual to decadal time scales as an agent for similar changes in the storm track and blocking variability at midtroposphere from 1979 to 2012. We find that periods of northerly (southerly) GS path are associated with increased (suppressed) excursions of the synoptic storm track to the northeast over the Labrador Sea and reduced (enhanced) Greenland blocking. In both instances, GS shifts lead those in the midtroposphere by a few months.Our research has been conducted with the support of NSF (AGS‐1355339, OCE‐1419235, and OCE‐1242989), NASA (NNX13AM59G), and NOAA CPO Climate Variability and Predictability Program (NA13OAR4310139) grants to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. We also thank three reviewers for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. Quarterly estimates of our Gulf Stream Index are available as a data file in the supporting information.2019-07-2