Wandering polar vortex may cause a wild, snowy winter
By Laura Geggel - Associate Editor a day ago
Snowier, colder weather may be heading to the Eastern U.S.
A model showing how warm (red) air may impact the cold (blue) polar vortex that swirls over the North Pole.
(Image: © Atmospheric and Environmental Research)
High above the North Pole, the polar vortex, a fast-spinning whirl of frigid air, is doing a weird shimmy that may soon bring cold and snowy weather to the Eastern U.S., Northern Europe and East Asia for weeks on end, meteorologists say.
While it's not unusual for the polar vortex to act up, this particular reconfiguration — wandering around and possibly splitting in two — may be tied to climate change in the rapidly warming Arctic, said Judah Cohen, director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research in Massachusetts, part of Verisk Analytics, a risk-assessment company.
"Expect a more wintery back-half of winter here in the Eastern U.S. than what we had in the first half," Cohen told Live Science.
The Arctic is heating up faster than any other region in the world. As a result, sea-ice cover there is shrinking — in September 2020 and December 2020, the Arctic sea-ice cover shrunk to its second-lowest and third-lowest minimum on record for those months, respectively, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
More:
https://www.livescience.com/polar-vortex-disruption-snowy-weather.html?utm_source=notification
= new reply since forum marked as read
