"Polar Vortex" And Climate Change: Are They Related? Well.....It's Complicated

Someone in Chicago lifted this pasta with a fork in this week's
subzero cold and it froze that way. 

The big cold wave that hit the Midwest this past week has faded fast, and there's a brief spell of spring-ish weather coming to much of the nation.

Practically everybody called the cold wave the "polar vortex," but of course as I explained the other day, it was just a piece of the polar vortex way up north breaking off and that helped to send frigid air to the States.

As noted, as cold waves go, this was a powerful, if brief one. There might have been an Illinois state record for lowet temperaeture set, and a few cities like Rockford and Moline, Illinois and Cedar Rapids, Iowa set all-time record low temperatures.

There are a few clowns out there telling the gullible that the cold wave means climate change is a hoax. Ever notice we're told that every time it gets chilly, but whenever there's record heat, they shut their mouths?

You have to keep repeating: A cold wave in one corner of the world does not disprove climate change, and a hot spell in another little corner of the world doesn't prove it exists.

We look at longer term trends and other factors instead. Here's one possible indication:

It's true that a lot of record low temperatures were set in the past week. But if you look at the past 365 days, almost twice as many daily record highs were set as daily record lows. That's a trend, folks.

You might also have heard some news reports that suggest the record cold this week in the Midwest might partly have been actually caused by global warming. An Associated Press article on January 28 was headlined: "Science Says: Get Used to Polar Vortex Outbreaks."

Well, maybe.

I've covered the issue of how cold snaps might be related to climate change, but now's a good time to review.  The polar vortex is a circle of very cold air that meanders around the Arctic. It's usually trapped somewhere up there by jet stream winds.

This cold outbreak was triggered in part by something called a Sudden Stratospheric Warming. The stratosphere is a layer of the atmosphere high above us, around six to 30 miles above ground.

A schematic from the Weather Channel. The Sudden Stratospheric Warming
over the North Pole splits the Polar Vortex into two or more pieces. 

When there is a Sudden Stratospheric Warming (SSW for short) over the Arctic, it can split up the polar vortex.  Then, pieces of the vortex break off and end up in Siberia, northern Asia,  Europe or southern Canada and the United States.  

There was an SSW earlier this month, which helps explain why this brutal piece of the the polar vortex made places like Minneapolis, Des Moines and Chicago so miserable.

I have to stop here and offer a caveat: The fact is scientists are sure global warming is occurring and it's causing all kinds of problems, notwithstanding what our President Trump says. He claims his own "high level of intelligence" to explain his view that climate scientists are all wrong. 

Whatevs.

However, there is not yet scientific consensus on what I'm about to describe. The pieces of the puzzle seem to be coming together, but what I will offer is NOT proof that this is global warming in action.

Some scientist think that climate change might be making SSW's more common. That means the polar vortex, usually locked up somewhere near the North Pole, will more frequently break apart, sending shards of itself over the places in the mid-latitudes and giving places like Madison, Wisconsin or Burlington, Vermont more frequent wicked bad winter cold spells.

On top of that, the Arctic is warming faster than the midlatitudes and tropics. This reduced temperature contrast could make the jet stream weaker. A weaker jet stream tends to have bigger northward bulges and southward plunges.

Those southward plunges here in the Northern Hemisphere are cold waves. Also, this slower jet stream, and these bigger bulges and plunges might make SSW's more likely, according climate scientist.

At the risk of getting into the technical weeds here, let's allow Robert Fanney, aka Robert Scribbler to explain this:

The slower jet stream "results in the collapse of the column of  upper level air held aloft by the (Polar) Vortex's winds. When the air collapses, it compresses, causing the stratosphere to warm. The falling column of warm air then can end up acting like an atmospheric wedge - driving the Polar Vortex apart and causing it to split."

The end result might be we could now be just entering a future in which it's generally hotter most of the time than it used to. But this general warmth would be punctuated by periods of intense winter cold, like the Midwest experienced in the past week.

This winter could be a glimpse of that scenario. There have been periods of record warmth in parts of the country interspersed with punishing cold snaps.  We always have periods of record warmth and chill, but the contrast between the two extremes might be getting, well, more extreme.

As noted above, not all climate scientists agree with what I've just described. The atmosphere is incredibly complex, and there's so many things going on up there that it's hard to tease out what might be affected by climate change, and to what extent.

Some scientists say climate change is making Sudden Stratospheric Warming events more frequent, while other equally credible scientists say this is hogwash.

That's the thing. The science of climate change is settled, but a lot of the picky details of what it will do are not. Which sows public confusion. Well, if the science is settled, why don't we know what's going to happen.

Think of the current state of climate science as a house under construction. The frame and roof and the walls and such are up, so we know what the shape of the house is going to be. Like climate science, the basics of the house are established.

The house isn't done, though. We don't know what color it's going to be, how they will furnish the interior rooms or what the landscaping will look like.  Like the work of climate scientists, the picky details of what the house will become are still uncertain.

It's possible the departing cold snap in the Midwest is just another normal aspect of what we fondly or not-so-fondly call "winter." Besides, as I said at the start of this post, one weather event on one spot of the globe does pretty much nothing to prove or disprove climate change. You have to look at long term trends all over the Earth.

I know damn well I will get blowback from the climate change deniers and skeptics for this piece, as I always do when I say something factual like "climate change exists."

I'm always stunned by the vehemence of some of these deniers. Maybe they doth protest too much?

Polar Vortex Is Back In The News. Don't Panic, But It Could Cause Something Called "Winter"

Schematic of how something called Sudden Stratospheric Warming
can split up the Polar Vortex and send those cold pieces closer
to Europe and the United States, increasing the risk
of harsh winter weather. 

Some of you might remember the media hype back in the winters of 2014 and 2015 about the "Polar Vortex."

At the time it was hyped as some new-fangled thing unleashing supposedly apocalyptic winter despair on the nation, or something like that.  

Well, the hype is back, at least sort of. The polar vortex, or at least a particular orientation of it threatens us again. It could cause us to experience something called "winter."

The short version of this things are changing in the atmosphere, as they often do in the winter, in a way that could bring some sharp cold spells and maybe some good sized snowstorms to parts of the middle and eastern parts of the United States.

Let's explain: As non-insane people explained in the winter of 2014, the polar vortex is something that's totally, absolutely normal.  It's pretty much always there, spinning high overhead in the Arctic.

It's basically a circle of strong winds spinning around  a blob of particularly cold air up north.

Sometimes the polar vortex moves a little south, sometimes toward Europe, sometimes down into central or eastern Canada. When that happens, the cold air on the ground moves south, too.

If the polar vortex approaches Europe, it gets really cold there. If the polar vortex gets south into Canada, chances are there will be some subzero cold in the United States. Plus, depending upon how the polar vortex orients itself, some areas get decent snowstorms.

Now, I'm going to introduce another so-called villain that is getting a lot of hype this particular winter. 

It's called Sudden Stratospheric Warming. Again, it sounds terribly frightening to most people, because they've never heard of it before and it sounds like something has gone off the rails.

Well, no. Sometimes, very high in the atmosphere over the Arctic, above where most weather systems live, the air quickly gets unusually warm. Again, scientists have long known about this, and it's not like the world is going to end in 15 minutes.

Weather geeks have been going bananas since at least early December over this winter's Sudden Stratosphere Warming when forecasts first indicated it might happen and then it unfolded. Until now, I've spared you this esoteric excitement because it had absolutely zero effect on your life.

But now it looks like we're approaching the time when you might, just might, feel the effects of this thing, which we'll call SSW for short. Trust me, you're not going die.

In the weeks after an SSW develops, its effects begin to trickle down to near the Earth's surface and begins to affect the weather we experience.

The SSW very often moves the polar vortex southward, or splits it up into two or three mini-polar vortexes. That's what is happening this winter. It looks like the Northern Hemisphere is temporarily home to three of these mini-polar, um, vortexes? vortices?  

These little baby vortices  also drift south, opening the door for Arctic outbreaks to hit the mid-latitudes. That's why central and parts of southern Europe have experienced so much snow and cold over the past couple of weeks.

Another "mini polar vortex" of sorts seems to be setting up in Canada. Though this is not definite, it looks likely that this might set the eastern and central United States up for some Arctic cold for the end of January and into February.

We might already be starting to see the effects of all this. We managed to get a typical cold wave on us this weekend, and another brief one will be upon us around Thursday. Things look like they will become more active and stormy within about a week or so, but nobody yet has any idea how stormy.

Long range forecasts after that indicate repeated influxes of Arctic air and a risk of some snowstorms through the beginning of February.  This somewhat more exciting weather pattern should be established within a week here in the Northeast.

There's no telling how extreme things will get. Yes, it'll be winter. So you have to expect these spells  of Arctic cold and snowy weather.  There's also a chance that other atmospheric conditions, like a strong west-to-east jet stream coming across the Pacific Ocean into North America, could thwart many of the invasions of Arctic air from the North Pole.

On some occasions, the weather following a SSW can get awfully extreme, worse than your standard winter conditions.

That was the case in 2015, when Boston had an unprecedented snow siege. The city had 94 inches of snow in just 30 days in late January and February that year. February, 2015 in Burlington, Vermont was the third coldest on record.  I've gotten wimpy in my old age, so I'm hoping we don't get a repeat of 2015.

Last year, harsh weather after an SSW blasted much of Europe, and contributed to frigid, snowy conditions in much of the United States through March. That snowy chill lingered well into April, especially in the northern and central Plains.

If the current aftermath of a SSW brings cold, snowy weather to New England or elsewhere in the United States, it's really not possible right now to tell how long it would last or how intense it will get.  It could be just a couple weeks of rough weather. Or, worse case scenario, a couple months.

Scientists are investigating whether SSW's would become more frequent because of climate change. Some preliminary evidence suggests this is the case. Which would bring many of us in Europe and the eastern half of the United States a strange irony:

Conditions would warm up as years and decades go by, but we'd still be at risk of occasionally getting some of the harshest possible long spells of Arctic winter weather.