Huh. This is really cool. In Nathaniel's bio he mentions connects to the variability of the Polar vortex but I can't seem to find a paper where he talks about this. Could you point me in the right direction? I study atmospheric transport, cyclones, and other phenomena at the surface in the Arctic and connections to the Polar vortex are always important to me.
Follow up: that's a really neat paper! The wind results are super interesting. I just wish the paper explored the lag more readily, and more importantly talked about the physics at play there. The description "a wind filtering mechanism may be responsible for the strong correlation, but the exact nature of this mechanism is beyond the scope of this paper" is at the end and it just leaves so much more to be explored! Do the authors really believe it's the wind that's responsible? Would it not be more likely wind-associated properties such as moisture transport? It would make sense for there to be a hysteresis tied to water vapor concentration (LWP/PWV) tied to large scale shifts in circulation.
NVM. I finally found it:
https://doi.org/10.1002/2015JA022168