PowerSwitch

A storm of epic proportions has blanketed much of upstate New York, trapping people in their homes and vehicles as more than six feet of snow fell in 48 hours.

And it’s not over yet.

This week's intense cold blast is being triggered by an unusually extreme jet stream pattern, featuring a sharp ridge of high pressure along the U.S. West Coast and a deep trough of low pressure diving to the south over the Central United States. This configuration allows cold air to spill out of the Arctic behind the trough into the Central U.S., and be replaced by anomalously warm air flowing northwards along the West Coast of the U.S. deep into the Arctic. This extreme jet stream pattern is due, in part, to the influence of Super Typhoon Nuri, which caused a ripple effect on the jet stream after the typhoon became one of the most powerful extratropical storms ever recorded in the waters to the west of Alaska eleven days ago. However, we've seen an unusual number of extreme jet stream patterns like this in the past fifteen years, which happens to coincide with the period of time we've been observing record loss of summertime Arctic sea ice and record retreat of springtime snow cover in the Arctic. Could it be that these changes in the Arctic are causing the wacky jet stream behavior of recent years? That's the theory being advanced by a number of prominent climate scientists.

snow hope wrote:More global warming.

Blue Peter wrote:This website: http://cci-reanalyzer.org/DailySummary/index_ds.php

is good for visualizing deviations from average temperature. The cold purple splodge has been on the US for the past week or so (moving eastwards I believe),
Peter.

biffvernon wrote:

snow hope wrote:More global warming.

That's right, more global warming results in more regional climate chaos. You're getting it.

The waters off the coast of New England are warming more rapidly than almost any other ocean region on earth

Pershing and a colleague documented the gulf's rapid warming — including an uptick of roughly three degrees Celsius over the past decade. In 2012, a massive, unprecedented oceanic heat wave descended on the entire northwest Atlantic with the gulf at its epicenter, making it the warmest year on record. Last year proved to be the second warmest ever documented, but Pershing says 2014 may beat that — despite last winter's frigid "polar vortex."

The world is approaching the warmest year “in spite of the U.S. being pretty cold,” Arndt said. That’s because the United States is only 2 per cent of the world’s area and the part that’s unusually cold is about 1.5 per cent of the entire globe, he said.

emordnilap wrote:

That’s because the United States is only 2 per cent of the world’s area and the part that’s unusually cold is about 1.5 per cent of the entire globe, he said.