To better understand the impacts of climate change on Europe, it is
important to understand changes in the wintertime large-scale
circulation. The framework of weather regimes provides a powerful tool
for studying the highly nonlinear Euro-Atlantic circulation, but exactly
how these regimes will be altered by anthropogenic climate change is
still imperfectly understood. Using the recently developed approach of
geopotential-jet regimes, applied to an ensemble of state-of-the-art
CMIP6 models, we show that the centres of action of anticyclonic regimes
are not projected to change substantially by the end of century, even
under an extreme warming scenario. Instead, the regimes are expected to
become less persistent, making long-lived blocking events less likely.
We show that these two key elements of the regime response can be
captured in a simple Lorenz-like model subjected to parameter
variations, emphasising the conceptual link between observed atmospheric
regimes and the regimes identified in basic mathematical systems.