Cold Jumps Arctic ‘Fence,’ Stoking Winter’s Fury

[DainBramaged]

For two winters running, an Arctic chill has descended on Europe, burying that continent in snow and ice. Last year in the United States, historic blizzards afflicted the mid-Atlantic region. This winter the Deep South has endured unusual snowstorms and severe cold, and a frigid Northeast is bracing for what could shape into another major snowstorm this week.

Yet while people in Atlanta learn to shovel snow, the weather 2,000 miles to the north has been freakishly warm the past two winters. Throughout northeastern Canada and Greenland, temperatures in December ran as much as 15 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. Bays and lakes have been slow to freeze; ice fishing, hunting and trade routes have been disrupted.

Iqaluit, the capital of the remote Canadian territory of Nunavut, had to cancel its New Year’s snowmobile parade. David Ell, the deputy mayor, said that people in the region had been looking with envy at snowbound American and European cities. “People are saying, ‘That’s where all our snow is going!’ ” he said.

The immediate cause of the topsy-turvy weather is clear enough. A pattern of atmospheric circulation that tends to keep frigid air penned in the Arctic has weakened during the last two winters, allowing big tongues of cold air to descend far to the south, while masses of warmer air have moved north.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/science/earth/25cold.html?ref=todayspaper

[dipsydoodle]

1. Was caused mainly

by the shape of the jet stream. Question is - what changed the shape.

[Uben]

2. El Nina?

Isn't that what's also causing the flooding in Australia? I know when the El Nina pattern hits the U.S., we have a dry winter here in Texas, although we have had a few rains at strategic times to avoid a drought in my area. I think it tends to keep the jet stream more to the north of us, sending the rain to the midwest, southeast and east coast.

[dipsydoodle]

3. Its the shape which affected us here in the UK.

Its normally a stretched out sine wave of sorts. In simple terms the front slowed down and when it banked up behind that the frequency / peaks increased allowing cold air to sucked down across us meeting up with damp air from the Atlantic.

Was similar cause of the Pakistan floods when it sucked so much wet air up from the Indian Ocean and the Moscow heatwave when it sucked up air that should've been over Greece.

I always imagine Texas to be as it is in cowboy films. :)

[Uben]

4. Well, Texas is just as modern as the rest of the U.S......

...we just have a lot more space! You could take the entire population of the world and put them all in Texas, and the population density would be no more than that of New York City!

I live in the northern part of Texas, right on the Oklahoma border, so we usually get snow and ice in the winter, and average about 35-40 inches of rain annually. We have seen sub-zero (farenheit) temperatures occasionally, but it can be 20 degrees Farenheit one day and 70 the next in the dead of winter. The El Nino pattern brings us more rain, El Nina, less rain.

We still have a lot of open range in the western part of Texas where it's less densely populated. The Texas you see in films usually depicts the 1800s when Texas was in it's infancy, but believe me, there are still parts of the state where life is still a lot like that, except we can get the weather and trade stocks on our laptops!

[OnlinePoker]

5. Still won't be enough to save the ice in Hudson's Bay from a quick melt

The Bay only just froze over completely last week. It would take a couple of months of severe cold to get it to a normal thickness.

Here's the NOAA temperature anomaly map so you can see how the current cold spell formed over the last 30 days.

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/images/fnl/sfctmpmer_01a_30frames.fnl.anim.html