ere was an article in Nature about this a year or two ago - ...thinkWaghorn posted the links if I
recall - Mr Waghorn?
Cheers
Richard
Mr Dixon,I presume you mean-
Baldwin, M.P., and T.J. Dunkerton, 2001: Stratospheric Harbingers of Anomalous Weather Regimes.
Science, 294, 581-584.
Electronic version of this paper availablethrough this link.
http://horizon.atmos.colostate.edu/a...erton_2001.pdf
other papers at-
http://horizon.atmos.colostate.edu/a...rs/StrTro.html
including-
Charlton, A. J., A. O'Neill, D. B. Stephenson, W. A. Lahoz, M. P. Baldwin, 2003: Can knowledge of
the state of the stratosphere be used to improve statistical forecasts of the troposphere? Q. J.
Roy. Met. Soc, in press.
http://horizon.atmos.colostate.edu/a..._QJRMS2003.pdf
which addresses the statistical nature of the relationship,I quote-
"... analysis appears contradictory to the findings of Baldwin (2001) and
Thompson et al. (2002) that composites of large AO events in the stratosphere
show a large change in the tropospheric AO some time after the event. We
show that while the relationship between the stratosphere and troposphere is
real in a statistical sense, the quantitative size of the relationship is small....)

BTW a copy of the SCIENCE 03 paper is at-
http://www.atm.damtp.cam.ac.uk/shuckburgh/baldwin.pdf
and a 'perspectives'at
http://www.atm.damtp.cam.ac.uk/people/efs20/baldwin.pdf

;-)
regards,
david