Why You Don't Want To Be In Alaska This Month

Ice fog often forms around Fairbanks, Alaska, when it gets very
cold, like it is now up there. Photo by John Dougherty/KTVF

Frankly, I would never want to be in Alaska in January. No matter which year.

Heck, I'm such a wimp that I'm too cold this month in Vermont, and it's been a much warmer than normal January.

Not so in Alaska. That state came off its warmest year on record in 2019 but that northern state has had quite a flip to start 2020.  

It's damn cold up there, even by their standards.

Take Fairbanks, Alaska (Please!). The average temperature there so far this month is -21.2 degrees Which is 13.1 degrees below normal through January 27. (That their normal January temperature is alround 8 below is another chilly story).

It's been at least 30 below on 16 days this month in Fairbanks, with the lowest reading dropping to 43 below On ten days, the high failed to get above minus 20.

Unbelievably, the odd thing about the cold in Fairbanks is not how frigid it is. It's just that it's been consistently cold.  Fairbanks typically gets January "thaws" in which you get spells in temperatures rise all the way into the teens and 20s above zero. But not this year. The hottest day so far this January up there reached to 4 above zero.

The Fairbanks cold is nowhere near to breaking any records. While many nights have gotten into the 30s below zero this month, most record daily record lows in January are within a few degrees either side of minus 60.  Ugh!

Down in "tropical" southern Alaska, its the same cold story this month.   Anchorage has never had a January in which the temperature has failed to get to 24 degrees or above. This month, it has only gotten as high as 22 degrees this month.  There is a chance, just a chance it could get warmer than that in Anchorage Wednesday before the frigid air returns.

Not all of Alaska is in their version of the deep freeze. On the northern tip of Alaska, the community of  Utqiagvik, formerly Barrow has had an average temperature so far this month of minus 11.3 degrees. That sounds awful, but that's still 1.9 degrees warmer than average.

It's this cold in Alaska this winter because the overall weather pattern is vastly different than it has been in recent winters.  Winters lately have featured relatively weak jet stream and steering pattern winds over the Arctic.

That helped create big dips and bulges in the jet stream. That pattern has allowed big chunks of very cold air to plunge south into places like the United States. It also allowed plumes of mild air to stream north into places like Alaska.

This year, the jet stream winds in the northern hemisphere are pretty strong and generally west to east, keeping the cold air bottled up in the far north. It also keeps the Polar Vortex way up there.

The Polar Vortex, as you remember, is this very normal pool of frigid air up over the Arctic. Sometimes, pieces of it break off, causing those frigid outbreaks in places like the United States and western Europe.  Not this year. That's why it's been such a warm January across most of the continental U.S., including here in Vermont.

It's hard to say whether this pattern will maintain itself through the rest of the winter and early spring.

There are a few signs that the jet stream might buckle a little bit, allowing a few squirts of Arctic air into places like the United States, and a few shots of somewhat milder air to go up into Alaska. We'll see!

I guess it was time for Alaska to turn cold. As noted above the year 2019 was easily the warmest year on record in Alaska. Four of the last six years in Alaska have been the warmest on record, so this January has been an exception, for sure.

Snowy Vermont Spring Setback Looking More Likely; NW, Alaska Heat Partly To Blame

A first look at expected snowfall Thursday night through Saturday.
Yellow and orange areas would get more than six inches of snow.
This is a preliminary forecast and WILL change. 

As of early Wednesday morning, things still looked like they were coming together for a snowy slap in the face, especially Friday night and into Saturday for Vermont and surrounding areas.

Oh, joy!  

Astronomical spring starts today and it will be deceptively benign, with highs in the 40s under quite a bit of sunshine, so not bad!

It's still looking like that nor'easter will get going after all, and with it, we'll get a big slug of precipitation. At least some of it will be snow.

Weather will deteriorate somewhat tomorrow, with clouds and a rising chance of rain showers in the afternoon.  Everybody except the highest mountain peaks should stay rain.

Thursday night and Friday, the main body of precipitation comes. Had this been mid-winter, everybody in Vermont would have gotten solid six to 12 inches of new snow out of this, with some places getting more.

But it's getting toward the end of March, and it's warmer. At least in the valleys, at least some rain looks likely. But this is tricky. A degree or two will make all the difference. Right now, the National Weather Service in South Burlington is going for mostly rain in the valleys Thursday night and Friday.

If that's true, valley dwellers won't see an enormous snowstorm, but could get several inches toward the end. More on that in a bit. If it turns out to be a few degrees colder than forecast, we could have a winter wonderland on our hands.

Early forecasts, which are totally subject to change, snow a most likely storm total of perhaps three inches in the Champlain Valley. A worst case scenario (with just a one in ten chance of this happening) would dump 10 inches of new snow on the Champlain Valley with even more in the mountains.)

All together now, Oh, Joy!

In the mountains, there will be more snow. It's hard to say at what elevation the rain/snow line will be. The very highest elevations will get a lot of snow. I have no idea yet about those of you who are not really in the valleys, but not really up at the tippy top of mountains either, stay tuned.

Colder air works in Friday night as the storm begins to depart, but the set up right now looks great for upslope snows.

That's when a departing storm wraps moisture in from the north and west, and strong winds go up and over the mountains. The western slopes and mountain peaks will get blasted with this. There's a good chance storm totals in some of the northern Green Mountains will go over a foot.

This is great news for late season skiers, but bad news for people worried about spring flooding. This storm will add to an already substantial snowpack up in the mountains. And this storm will further delay the spring melt.

Valleys, including the Champlain Valley, will share in this upslope snow Friday night and Saturday, too. There's the potential for several inches of snow, especially north of Burlington and away from the immediate lake shore.

After a brief warmup Sunday when temperatures are forecast to get up into the 40s, another cold front will give us more light snow, and more winter chill for the first half of next week.

Let's say it again: Oh, Joy!

By the way, this storm will bring heavy rain and strong winds to southern New England. It will be a little warmer in northern Maine than here during the bulk of the storm, so there is some risk of flooding up there.

NORTHWEST HEAT

A ridiculously resilient ridge of high pressure aloft has kept Alaska oddly warm all winter, and that is continuing now.

This ridge has been causing all sorts of havoc in the Lower 48 and is continuing to do so. Or at least contribute to it.

This ridge has fudged with the weather pattern for weeks. It's caused the jet stream to dive south into the northern Rockies and Plains, causing one of the coldest and Februaries on record in the northern half of the Plains and western Great Lakes.

That helped set the stage for the immense storm last week that unleashed a brutal blizzard on the high Plains, and more importantly the heavy rains last week that caused that huge flood in the central United States.

The ridge in Alaska was also one ingredient that caused the general storminess over the winter, especially late in the season, over much of the continental U.S.

That hot ridge in Alaska has sort of rejiggered itself a bit in recent days. Earlier in the winter, it fed cold air down into coastal British Columbia and Washington State, causing a lot of snow and cold weather in February, which was unusual in a normally mild climate.

This week, the ridge extended into those very same areas causing record warmth.

All-time record highs for the month of March have been set this week from Alaska to Washington. Here we go again with these bizarre extreme warm spells that have become so much more common than decades ago. (I can't prove the record highs I'm about to list are direct caused by climate change, but they are certainly consistent with what you'd expect from global warming.)

Sitka, Alaska reached 67 degrees Tuesday for a new March record high and the warmest temperature for any date between October 7 and April 16.  Eagle, Alaska, set a record high for the month of March with 55 degrees and Northway also set a March record of 50. High temperatures in those two towns are normally in the mid-20s this time of year, says the National Weather Service in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Tofino, British Columbia set a March record high of 74 degrees. Amazingly, that would also be the hottest temperature on record for that town for the month of April.

Further south, Seattle reached 79 degrees on Tuesday, its hottest March day on record. More record highs are anticipated for Seattle and environs today.

This ridge in the west this week has created a corresponding dip in the jet stream over the eastern United States. This dip is one important reason why we in Vermont appear as if we're going to get another snowfall Friday and Saturday.

One more time: Oh, Joy!

Wicked Fast Jet Stream Meant Speedy Cross Country Flights

A schematic of the force of Tuesday's jet stream winds in the
United States from CBS News. The whitish shading over
the Northeast depicts record strong jet stream winds
of more than 200 mph.

Like everybody else, I don't like flight delays.

But I understand that weather, mechanical issues, staffing, coordination between airports and all kinds of other factors frequently conspire from letting you make your connecting flight on time.

Every once in awhile, you get lucky and your plane lands a little ahead of schedule. That happened a lot this week as what could be a record fast jet stream rocketed roughly west to east across the nation this week.

Eastbound flights got caught up in this jet stream and often made it to their destination in record time.

For instance, a Virgin Atlantic flight from Los Angeles to London landed at Heathrow 48 minutes early because of the boost given by the jet stream over the United States.

That plane was clocked at going 801 mph over Pennsylvania. Usually, cruising speed is around 560 mph. That 801 mph is faster than the speed of sound and airliners are generally not designed to go that fast. But nothing bad happened because the aircraft was being propelled by 200 mph jet stream winds and not by revved up plane engines.

That meant the air speed of the plane was 800 mph, but the ground speed - what the plane's engines could produce - was well below that.

In any event, most flights heading west to east across the nation in the past couple of day landed earlier than normal. Of course, planes heading in the opposite direction were a little late, because they either had to fight the jet stream head winds or detour around the jet stream.

Jet streams thrive on the contrast between the warm tropics and the cold Arctic. Because there's a bigger temperature contrast between the North Pole and the Equator in the winter, the jet stream is fastest in the winter.

The jet stream got an added boost this week because of a conspiracy of three different branches of the jet stream. A very fast stream coming across the Pacific zoomed into Mexico and the southwestern United States.

Meanwhile, the polar jet stream split, with one arm heading southeastward through the western states, then turning northeastward toward New England. The other branch of the polar jet stream made a beeline from Alaska to the Great Lakes.

All three of these jet stream branches merged over the northeastern United States. They combined their collective power and voila! A record fast jet stream was born over places like Pennsylvania.

The jet stream is 35,000 feet or so overhead. The incredibly fast winds of a jet stream don't usually translate to the surface and that's what happened this time.

Tuesday afternoon, the jet stream was screaming above our heads in Vermont at roughly 200 mph. Here on the ground, it was a delightfully sunny, calm winter day with wind speeds of less than 10 mph.

Jet streams do help steer weather systems. The southern jet stream is carrying moisture from the tropical Pacific, which helps explain why it has been snowing so hard in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, and raining so hard in the Ohio and Tennessee River valleys this week.

The northern stream that approaches from the west is helping shunt the deeper moisture to our south, which explains why the precipitation with these storms has generally not been that heavy here in Vermont.

The jet stream has slowed down a bit overhead since yesterday but it is still wicked fast. The overall speed and orientation of it is expected to remain roughly the same as it has been the past couple of days, so the current general weather pattern will last that long, too.

Wicked Fast Jet Stream Over Pacific Contributing To Our Changeable Weather

Jet stream forecaast for the Pacific Ocean between Asia and
North America for this coming Saturday The fast flow (in pink and orange)
denotes a fast west to east flow that is influencing the weather
across the United States, pushing repeated storms
into the West Coast, which turn into fast moving
disturbances racing generally west to east across the
United States. 

Lately, there's been a hugely fast west-to-east jet stream over the Pacific Ocean from Asia all the way to the North American west coast, and that's been influencing our weather here in Vermont.

This state of affairs began before Christmas and will continue at least into the middle of this month, if not beyond.

I'll get into how this affects Vermont in a bit. -

This jet stream has been sending a series of fast-moving storms into the West Coast from central California north into British Columbia, Canada.

These storms have been, and will continue to dump bursts of heavy rain and blinding mountain snow in these region

These have also brought damaging winds to California, Oregon, Washington and especially British Columbia over the past couple of weeks. Just over the weekend, Seattle had a gust to 60 mph, it's highest gust in 12 years. About 300,000 people were without power because of the storm.

The good news with this pattern is rain has been falling off and on through most of California, and a decent snowpack is building up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  That's great for the parched state's water supply.

Of course, a lot of those occasionally heavy rains are falling on massive areas scarred by last year's wildfires. Mudslides in one of these burn areas over the weekend closed the Pacific Coast Highway near Malibu. This is an area that was hit by a large wildfire late last year.

Several motorists, including rapper Soulja Boy, were trapped in the mud and debris on that highway. Everyone was rescued, nobody was hurt, but many of the cars were badly damaged or destroyed.

A couple video clips of the rough West Coast weather are at the bottom of this post.

THE OVERALL PATTERN

These storms have been zipping eastward across the United States, seemingly just on momentum alone. Most of the moisture from these storms get stripped off by the mountains in the West, so they become somewhat moisture-starved.

Some, but not all of the storms manage to pick up replacement moisture from the Gulf of Mexico, which helps explain why the Southeast has been so wet lately.

All this energy from had been those strong storms on the West Coast is still mixed up with all this. Pressure gradients between the storms and brief high pressure systems have caused frequent bouts of windy weather coast to coast, including here in New England and Vermont.

I noticed winds gusted to 40 mph in Burlington Sunday. The next system Tuesday morning will bring gusts of 45 mph to the Champlain Valley. More gusty winds are in the forecast for Thursday.

This seemingly endless parade of storms running east to west across the nation have been blocking any long-lasting cold waves from invading the country. Behind each storm, a bit of Arctic air does get stripped off and sucked southward from Canada, giving brief cold snaps to the northern tier of states, especially here in New England.

Notice that temperatures were in the single digits either side of zero here in Vermont this morning with subzero wind chills.

Then the next storm comes along, scooping a bit of mild air up from the south to give us a quick warm spell. Then the cycle repeats, over and over again. This is why the weather has been so changeable here in Vermont since Christmas: Warm to cold back to warm again.

The relatively flat east to west jet stream means most of the storms don't get a chance to become super strong. The last really substantial storm we had was on December 21 and 22, which caused flooding across Vermont. We've had six quickie storms since then, all of them pretty minor.

It's January, so it's not too hard for some pretty cold air to briefly bleed in between storms.

BOTTOM LINE FORECAST IN VERMONT

The first round of snow this week, late tonight and Tuesday
morning, will only amount to an inch or two for most
of us, with possibly even less than that in the Champlain Valley.

Here's how the next few days look The next one coming along tonight and Tuesday morning will bring some more relatively light snow, with patchy valley rain.

The strong winds, those 45 mph gusts in the Champlain Valley and 35 mph gusts elsewhere in Vermont, will peak late tonight and during the early and mid-morning hours on Tuesday.

Total snow accumulations with this initial burst will be one to three inches, with locally less than that in parts of the Champlain Valley.

There will be a lull in the action Tuesday afternoon and evening. No cold air will be able to sneak in during this time, so it will remain mild, with highs in the 30s to near 40 Tuesday and temperatures staying in the low 30s for most of us Tuesday night.

Another disturbance in this quick jet stream flow will come in late Tuesday and Wednesday. This one looks like it might be good enough to dump several inches of snow, perhaps two to six inches of powder, by Wednesday afternoon in much of Vermont.

The Champlain Valley might miss out again: It will be mild, so there, some of the precipitation, especially earlier on Wednesday might come down as a cold rain, which would minimize accumulations.

Overall, these frequent snows are great for winter sports prospects this month in the Green and White Mountains, and the Adirondacks.

After this relatively snowy period, the door will open for a piece of an Arctic high pressure system will break off and head south into New England, giving us the strongest, or nearly the strongest cold snap we've had all winter. This will hit next weekend, but don't worry too much about it.

Snow showers, mostly in the mountains, will continue amid the strong northwest wind gusts and falling temperatures Thursday, introducing a good three-day long cold snap.

It will be a run of the mill January cold snap, nothing we haven't seen before. We'll gethighs in the single numbers to near 10 and lows mostly in the 5 to 15 below range over the upcoming weekend. However, the west-to east race of storms will continue, though, so the cold snap won't last long.

It's possible, but not definite, that the next weather disturbance that originated in the Pacific Ocean could create a coastal storm that could dump some snow on us toward next Monday. That is highly uncertain but something to watch. One computer model gives us a substantial snowstorm, most of the others forecast not much of a storm and little or no snow for the region. We'll see.

Beyond that, the fast air flow across the nation will probably continue and our changeable, back and forth Vermont January weather will continue as it has since the start of the month.

Here are some of those weather video clips from the stormy West Coast.

First, a news clip about the mud slide along the Pacific Coast Highway:



Here's some footage of wind storm damage in Washington State from Saturday night and early Sunday morning:

Will This Autumn's Baked Alaska Gives Us Vermonters A Frigid Winter?

Will a weird autumn Alaska heat wave give us Vermonters a frigid
winter? It's possible. This photo shows a frigid January day in 2015,
in St. Albans, Vermont, the last time a warm northeastern
Pacific Ocean influenced the weather, It was really cold here.. 

There are all sorts of predictions for what this winter will be like, ranging from warm and dry to frigid and snowy and everything in between.

It's always hard to forecast a winter. It's even tougher this year, with a weak El Nino possibly influencing things, and weather patterns in the Arctic still making up their minds

One intriguing clue to this winter is the return of "The Blob."  

No, it's not a horror movie. But for those who don't like frigid winters, it could be somewhat horrible.

Here's what I'm trying to explain: There's been a huge and persistent and warm ridge of high pressure over and near Alaska throughout this autumn. This has caused record warmth across that region. An autumn Baked Alaska.

Fairbanks, Alaska has yet to see so much as a flake of snow so far this year. That's by far a record for the latest first snow. Nome, Alaska should have had about 20 freezes so far this autumn. This year, they've had one. So far this month, Anchorage is running ten degrees warmer than normal.

This warm high pressure system has heated up the northeastern Pacific Ocean. This area of toasty water has come to be known as The Blob. As the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang points out, this can really chill us in the eastern United States.

The Blob last made an appearance in the winters of 2013-14 and 2014-15. You remember the talk of "Polar Vortexes" those winters, and how cold it was over Vermont and the rest of the Northeast. The winter of 2015 was also when Boston had its epic snow siege. 

Those extreme winters were created in part by "The Blob."  The warm northeastern Pacific Ocean forced the jet stream over western North America northward. That caused a big dip in the jet stream downstream, over the eastern United States. That led to repeated Arctic outbreaks in the winters of 2014 and 2015.  It also led to the hottest year on record in the Pacific Northwest, under that warm ridge.

Snow siege in Boston, Massachusetts, 2015. Warm northeastern
Pacific Ocean water helped cause an intense winter in
the Northeast. Photo by Charles Krupa/AP

The Capital Weather Gang assures us The Blob might not hang on like it did in the winters of 2014 and 2015. In 2016, it looked like The Blob was reasserting itself, but it dissipated. This year, the huge warm high pressure ridge over Alaska is showing signs of breaking down.

If it does break down and stay broken down, that will open the door to big Pacific Ocean storms. The storms will mix up the water in The Blob zone, bringing cold water up from down below. The warm blob will disappear and no longer be a factor in our winter.

There's no way to tell for sure whether this will happen or not. It's just one piece of the puzzle for a complicated winter forecast.

For the next week here in Vermont, it will sure be wintry. Temperatures will stay 10 to 15 degrees below normal most days, and the threat of snow showers will be almost ever-present, especially in the high elevations.

Beyond that, who knows?

More Tornadoes In New NE "Tornado Alley" And Amplified Pattern Spells Trouble

A likely tornado in the dark clouds yesterday in western Pennsylvania
Photo came from Erie News via Twitter.

In this year in which the nation as a whole has had relatively few tornadoes, the new tornado alley - the Northeast - delivered again with some new twisters on Tuesday.

TUESDAY NORTHEAST TORNADOES

Tornadoes touched down in Pennsylvania and possibly southern New York and southwestern Connecticut yesterday, continuing a severe weather trend that's been going on since at least May in the Northeast.

The worst tornado was in western Pennsylvania, where a nursing home was struck. There were no injuries directly caused by the tornado, but two residents were taken to a local hospital for other medical issues and the other 160 residents were evacuated to a nearby, undamaged middle school.

In Connecticut, a possible tornadoes dropped large trees across a section of the Merritt Parkway. As you can imagine on that road, it caused some major traffic tieups.

So far there are three reports of tornadoes in Pennsylvania, according to NOAA's Storm Prediction Center, but I expect there will be more confirmed reports of twisters in the three states I mentioned as meteorologists conduct damage assessments.

There were certainly plenty of tornado warnings and videos of possible tornadoes and/or tornado damage popping up on social media from Pennsylvania, New York and Connecticut, so I'm sure those investigating meteorologists will have their work cut out for them today.

Through October 1, before Tuesday's tornado outbreak, the Storm Prediction Center had counted 877 tornadoes across the United States so far this year. Not counting whatever happened on Tuesday,

In the Northeast, there have been 33 tornadoes this year, which is a small percentage of the U.S. total but still impressive for this part of the country. Through Monday, again not counting Tuesday's weather, Pennsylvania has had 17 tornadoes, New York had seven, Connecticut, 6, then three each in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

There have been no tornadoes here in Vermont, just for the record. And just for the record, you would have needed to be in warm, humid air to get the severe weather yesterday. A west-to-east weather front was to the north of the tornado zone but south of Vermont. That confined the muggy air well to the south of us.

That's why we here in Vermont just got rain on Tuesday, with nothing extreme or dangerous.

"AMPLIFIED PATTERN" SPELLS TROUBLE

Anytime you hear meteorologist describe and "amplified weather pattern," take that to mean someone is going to get in trouble with rough weather.  

This is the kind of jet stream pattern we're entering the
next few days. A dip in the west, a northward bulge in
the east and storminess in the middle. This map is
NOT a current forecast. It's just meant as a
schematic to illustrate the situation

Enter the latest amplified pattern.

This "amplified" stuff means the jet stream is much more wiggly than usual. More specifically, an amplified pattern features unusually deep southward dips in the jet stream, paired with unusually far north bulges nearby.  

In this case, we're setting up for a deep dip in the jet stream, or trough, in the western United States and a deep northward bulge, otherwise known as a ridge in the East.

When you get that type of set up, there's usually a lot of stormy weather in the area between the trough and the ridge. (You might also see the potential for record chill in the trough and record heat in the ridge, and that could happen this time, too.)

But the main trouble is in the middle of the nation. It starts today. There is a risk of tornadoes in Wisconsin, and the chance of a strong one. So people need to keep their heads up there.

Worse, this ridge in the east, will get air flowing off the Gulf of Mexico and up through the middle ofthe nation.  There's a real risk of heavy rain and flooding from Texas to the western Great Lakes next week. Seven day forecasts call for three to eight inches of rain in this region, with higher amounts possible.

Much of this area has been drenched by heavy rain much of the summer and early autumn, to that's why flooding will be a real risk. There will be chances of severe weather and more tornadoes next week as well.

This  pattern also means there's the risk of heavy snow in the northern Rockies, possibly extending east into the western Dakotas.

Here in Vermont, we will be under that eastern ridge, so the weather here in our immediate future looks benign. Rainfall will be light over the next week, and temperatures will start to trend above normal. The only cool day in our forecast is Friday, when highs will be in the 50s. That's not unusual for early October.

By  next week, we Vermonters could be looking at Indian Summer weather with temperatures in the 70s. Stay tuned on that one.

Looks Like It's Going To Be A Cold December In Vermont, Eastern U.S.

NOAA's 8 to 14 day outlook says it all. Quite
cold in the East for mid-December,
warm out west. 

No guarantees, but it looks like December in much of the eastern half of the country is going to come in on the cold side.

The weather pattern in November was stuck in that zonal flow, a rapid west-to-east progression of small storms and patches of fair weather, which kept most of the nation either warm, or at least fairly close to normal, with few big storms.

(For the record, Vermont in November was a little on the chilly side of normal, and it was drier than average,)

That flat west-to-east jet stream will begin to buckle this weekend and settle into a pattern with a big northward bulge in western North America, and a big deep dip in the eastern half of the continent.

That means cold weather from the Plains east, and possible snow and storminess from the Great Lakes to the East Coast. (That storminess is much less certain than the forecast for cold, but there is some potential, anyway)

Just like the persistence of the November pattern, it looks like December's pattern will stay put, at least for a couple weeks - if not more - once it sets up during the upcoming week.

That means repeatedly pushes of Arctic air into the eastern half of the nation will be the rule for much of the month. So far, there's no evidence that this will be any kind of record, unprecedented cold. Just generally colder than normal for December. You do have to expect winter weather during the Christmas season anyway right?

In the western third of the nation, it will stay warm under the northward bulge in the jet stream. Alaska looks to stay warm, too, at least by their winter standards.

Here in Vermont, after a cloudy, calm weekend, the weather will temporarily turn windy, wet and warm mid-week as a strong storm intensies  while moving north through the Great Lakes into southern Canada. This storm is part of the process that will usher in this new weather pattern.

The storm's cold front will sweep through Wednesday or Wednesday night, bringing us into winter. It just looks seasonably cold - near normal - at the end of the upcoming week, but the cold will deepen the following week. Again, nothing that will break records, but you'll know it's winter.

It's too soon to know how much snow will accompany this colder weather. I know for sure it will snow, as early as next Saturday, but nobody knows how much. Stay tuned on that one

Zonal Flow And Shortwaves: Why We Haven't Had The Usual Stormy November

This is an example of zonal flow, a flat west-to east
orientation of the jet stream across the U.S. That tiny
little dip in the flow over the Great Lakes is called
a short wave. We feel it as weak, fast moving little
storms, as opposed to the much bigger storms we're
accustomed to this time of year.

After that terrible windstorm in late October, we sure weren't looking forward to November, which has a stormy reputation both here in Vermont and in the nation as a whole 

The month will draw to a close in less than a week, and so far, almost nothing in terms of storms.  And nothing big is in the forecast for the next week.

Oh sure, there's been some rain and snow locally. It's been windy at times. And other parts of the nation had spells of bad weather. But there's really been nothing dramatic, like we've seen in most past Novembers.

What's going on?

Blame something called a zonal flow.

The jet stream usually meanders quite a lot especially in the colder months. The jet stream is a river of high speed, upper atmospheric air that circles the globe. It runs generally west to east in the northern hemisphere, but takes frequent big dives southward in some spots, and lifts dramatically northward in others. Those big excursions north are called ridges.

Near where there's these big dips, you get a storm. In the United States for instance cold air might slide southward along with the jet stream, and warm air, and moisture from the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico ride northward where the jet stream curves to the north.

That clash is a recipe for the formation of storms. So you get lots of rain, snow, wind and sometimes severe weather.

This November, the portion of the jet stream that comes across the United States has been mostly just west to east, with no pronounced dips or curves to the north to speak of.  In meteorology circles, we call that a zonal flow.

The jet stream has been entering North America over the Pacific Northwest of the United States and British Columbia, Canada. That has brought repeated storms off the Pacific Ocean, which have caused flooding in that region.

The moisture from these storms gets wrung out over the mountains. The storms, now small, zip west to east across the northern United States. These are called short waves. They're basically just mini-dips in the jet stream, as opposed to the big dips that usually cause those big storms this time of year.

These shortwaves, being just part of a mini dip in the jet stream, are moisture starved, since there's no big dip in the jet stream to grab Gulf of Mexico moisture. They also move fast, so they don't last long in any one place.

Do remember that I said that the jet stream is a fast moving river of air. These shortwaves can grab some of that high speed air and bring it to the surface. That largely explains why it has been so windy this month, despite the lack of big storms.

Generally speaking, this month's zonal flow has not been perfectly west to east. The jet stream is a little further north in the western half of the nation, and that has allowed occasionally record heat to spread over the Southwest and southern Plains.

Here in the Northeast, the zonal flow jet stream has been coming our way at an angle that's more west-northwesterly. That orientation has allowed those short waves that zip on through to grab little pieces of cold Arctic air from Canada and spread it over the Northeast in brief bursts.  That's why November has been a wee bit cooler than normal this month in Vermont.

Zonal flows always end eventually. The jet stream will buckle, and we'll go back to big dips and ridges. My guess is that will happen by mid-December or even earlier. And, we'll go back to our normal stormy winter weather.

No Big Snowstorm Next Monday Because Jet Streams Don't Play Nice Together

Here's a schematic map for this coming Monday.
You see one small storm over southern Quebec, thanks
to one northern stream dip centered over New York.
The southern stream trough is further east off the coast
prompting another small storm off the North Carolina
coast. Had the two jet streams dips lined up perfectly
there could well have been a big nor'easter instead
of two wimpy little storms.
Thanks go to Dave Epstein for this illustration. 

Some of you might have heard rumors that there might be a nifty nor'easter snowstorm next Monday.

Bad news for snow lovers: Ain't happening. unless there's some kind of miracle.

This all involves two jet streams and whether they play nice together. On Monday, the jet streams won't be models of playground etiquette, so therefore, no big storm.

The jet stream is the river of fast moving upper level air that controls where storms go and how intense they might be.

Very often in the winter there are two jet streams, one going across the southern tier of the United States, another one zipping along or near the Canadian border.

Jet streams usually have bulges, called ridges, that curve to the north and dips, called troughs, that curve southward.

If you're looking at a map that shows the jet streams, you'll usually find some sort of storm system just to the right of where the dip reaches its southernmost point.

When there's the north and south jet stream, there's often fairly small storms accompanying little dips in both the north and south, each with a packet of mostly light precipitation.

Every once in awhile, the north and south jet streams cooperated. They set up troughs, those dips in exactly the same longitude or right above or below each other.

This creates one big dip. This is a bit oversimplified but when this happens, instead of getting two little storms you get one big one.  Often in the winter, when the southern and northern jet streams cooperate and form a big trough over the eastern United States, you get a nice big fat nor'easter.

Earlier this week, some of the computer models were hinting the two jet streams would play nice with each other and coordinate to form that one big trough by Monday.

But in the interim, there must have been some sort of playground spat. It looks like one small trough in the jet stream will cause a small storm to maybe drop a couple, few inches of snow on Vermont.

Meanwhile, another little trough in the southern jet stream won't quite line up with the northern one. That means  another weak storm that will zip off the coast of the Carolinas and not amount to much until it's over the open Atlantic, much too far away to affect us.

After that, there's some suggestion that there might be another opportunity for the north and south jet streams to interact and create a pretty good sized storm about a week from now. Early indications are that larger storm would go by to our west, which would encourage mixed precipitation.

But that's still really, really iffy, and we don't know what kind of storm, if any, will develop out of that.

Relax. Air Crossing The Equator Is Not The Sign Of Our Climate Doom

True, there was air flow across the equator over
the easterm Pacific Ocean recently, but despite
some claims to the contrary, this was really no big deal.  n

The jet stream crossed the equator!! We're all gonna die!!!!!!

Or not.

Some bloggers made some waves, and probably got a nice uptick on click views when they claimed last week  that the jet stream crossed the equator.

These folks said this  was unprecedented, that it was a sign that global warming mucked things up so much that we're now getting jet stream mayhem and who knows what terrible things that will cause?

Problem was, the air flow they detected crossing the equator was not the main jet stream, and it was something that happens all the time and is completely normal.

Oh well.

One of the bloggers alarmed by the jet stream was Robert Scribbler, who wrote that the jet stream has moved out of the middle latitutes where it belongs and now sometimes goes high into the Arctic and deep into the tropics in epic waves.

He said it's gotten to the point where upper level air flow between the northern and southern hemispheres is starting to happen.

Scribbler wrote: 

"If this is the case, then it's bad news for seasonality. Prevention and reduction of a mixing of air parcels between hemisphers by the thick, hot tropical air mass that has generated a strong division between summer and winter during the Holecene Climate Epoch.

However, erode that boundary and you get more summer heat spilling over into the winter zones and vice versa. You get this weather-destabilizing and extreme weather generating mixing of seasons that is all part of a very difficult to deal with "Death of Winter" type warming scenario."

Despite Scribbler's alarm, winter isn't going to go away any time soon. Winters are trending warmer, overall,  But winter will not be canceled.

It's true scientists are looking at how climate change is affecting the jet stream. It might be making it bulge much more to the north at times than it used to, and dip much more to the south in spots at times than it used to.

There's no firm conclusions on that line of study yet, but what is clear, and mainstream climate scientists jumped all over Scribbler for this, is that he was incorrect when he said the main jet stream crossed the equator recently.

There was lower and upper atmospheric flow across the equator recently over the Pacific Ocean, But that, according to the Washington Post, this cross-equatorial air flow has to do with atmospheric shifts brought on by the summer monsoon season. It's totally normal.

It doesn't happen every day, but it probably has nothing to do with global warming.

I don't mean to jump all over Scribbler, either.  His blog is often quite good.

And he did note that his "end of seasons' scenario is not happening now, but might in the future.

Sometimes, though, people who are rightly worried about climate change see something dangerous in everything that happens in the atmosphere now.

Climate change is real, that's obvious. And it's causing more extreme weather events. But not every oddball weather or atmospheric event is related to climate change. Sometimes - global warming or not - the weather just gets in a weird mood.

People who deny climate change decry climate "alarmists," who they say are creating panic over something that we need not worry about.

Well, we do need to worry about climate change. But let's not feed the denial crowd with false alarms.

There's plenty of real alarms out there to deal with.

Will The Death Of The Blob Spare Us From A Brutal Rest Of The Winter?

Map from the Watts Up With That
blog shows the warm "blob" in the Pacific
Ocean last year. 

A lot of blame or credit is going around for what has been a remarkably warm start to winter.

El Nino is certainly a prime suspect. Climate change probably plays a bit of a supporting role.

Something else might be at play as well: It's "The Blob." Or more precisely, the fact that the Blob is dying a quick death.

According to the Washington Post, citing weather blogger Cliff Mass, The Blob is, or was, an area of abnormally warm water in the North Pacific, off the coast of the United States and Canada and south of Alaska.

The Blob got going in the first place, said Mass, because persistent high pressure areas in the Northeast Pacific Ocean caused light winds. Usually it's stormy there, and those storms stir up waves that draw up cooler water from the depths of the ocean.

It's thought that this blob, which set up shop three years ago or so, altered weather patterns, creating a big bulge to the north in the jet stream near western North America. That steered storms away from the West Coast, contributing to a punishing drought, especially in California.

On the east side of the bulge in the jet stream, the air flow came down from the Northwest, from Canada, into the eastern third of the United States.

This northwest flow waxed and waned, of course, and sometimes disappeared entirely. But it kept coming back as long as The Blob was in the Pacific Ocean.

This winter, The Blob has cooled off to a ghost of its former self.  It's gotten stormier this winter in the northeastern Pacific Ocean, so cooler water is upwelling from the depths.

Since the water has gotten cooler, says the Washington Post, it makes that big west coast bump in the jet stream less likely.

That means, together with El Nino, storms can come off the Pacific Ocean and give California some welcome precipitation. That has been happening in California in recent days

Mild Pacific air is also able to head west to east across the nation, shunting some of those cold blasts from Canada away from the United States.

That's not to say it won't get cold. The death of The Blob just means that those traditional winter cold blasts might be less persistent than they were last winter, and the winter before that.

True, here in the Northeast, an Arctic blast started Sunday evening, but temperatures moderated quite a bit in the past day or so.  Back to somewhat above normal temperatures, anyway.

And true, there are signs another Arctic blast might come down from Canada at mid-month.

But there's still no definite sign - at least not yet - that a good chunk of the eastern United States is going to have weeks upon weeks of brutally cold, snowy weather from late January through February into March.

We had two years of that in 2014 and 2015, so that's enough.

I suppose we could end up getting another brutally rough late winter, but the death of the blob is one factor that could tip the scales against such an aggressive winter.

A wide variety of factors influence how winter weather goes. It's not all dependent on The Blob. But at least there's hope that we might not freeze quite as much as last winter.

First The Incredible Winds, Now A Snowstorm

A giant tree fell on this car in Spokane, Washington
during this week's wind storm. The woman inside
was miraculously not badly hurt. Photo by Ryan
Simm of KREM-TV. 

The northwestern United States, basically a broad stripe from Washington State to the Dakotas, is cleaning up from a massive wind storm earlier this week.

And now a snowstorm is developing across the middle of the country.

The wind storm was the main show.

At least four people were killed by falling trees and a million residents lost power, says the Weather Channel. (Note: Obnoxious auto play in link.)

Spokane, Washington had its  strongest non thunderstorm wind gust on record  at 71 mph. Things got so bad there amid the gusts and the blowing dust that the Greater Spokane Department of Emergency Management told everyone to stay inside during the storm, stay away from windows and don't call 911 unless there was a life-threatening emergency, according to television station KREM.

White Pass, Washington, in the Cascade Mountains, reported a gust of 119 mph. Gusts to 109 mph were reported near Boulder, Colorado.  Strong winds brought trees down onto houses in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

The strong winds, some of the worst the Northwest has seen in many years, were caused by screamingly extra strong jet stream winds over the region. The winds came from the west, hit the coast of Washington, then went east to southeast over the Rockies.

This kind of orientation can sometimes mix these strong upper level winds down to the surface, especially near mountains, notes Dr. Jeff Masters in his Weather Underground blog.

Next up, a snowstorm. A winter storm warning is up for southeastern South Dakota (hi, relatives in Yankton, South Dakota! Expect a good seven inches of snow or so today!)

The winter storm warning for 6 to 12 inches of snow extends across most of Iowa and through northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin. Winter storm watches are up for much of the lower penisula of Michigan.

The snowstorm is being generated by a storm heading east across the middle of the country. The moisture supply for the storm is only moderate, but it's a vigorous system, so it's able to take full advantage of whatever wetness is in the air to generate snow. And it's cold enough along the winter storm warning path to allow snow, and not rain.

In fact, after the snow passes by, some areas of the upper Midwest could find nighttime temperatures in the upper single numbers at night over the weekend.

After that, we expect the first major Arctic outbreak of the winter over the middle of the country. Temperatures across the Northern Plains will probably fall well below zero, but that's actually not unusual for late November and early December.

It's been so warm, it will just see odd.

Winter appears to be finally here.

Global Warming Causing Cold Winters? Goofy And Denialist Bait, But Maybe True

New research suggests that global warming might be contributing to such extreme cold winters that have cropped up in some spots in the Northern Hemisphere in recent years, including last winter in New England.

Warming wouldn't seem to cause cold spells at first glance. And I'm sure the climate change denialists would spout and steam about how ridiculous this seems.

But more and more research seems to be backing up this thesis.

New research indicates a warming Arctic contributes
to larger dips in the jet stream, meaning more intense cold
blasts in mid-latitudes  

A new study in Nature Geoscience, a peer-reviewed journal says rising temperatures in the Arctic are contributing to some nastier and nastier winters occasionally in parts of North America and Europe.

The Arctic is warming at a much faster rate than points further south. The warmer Arctic makes for bigger northward and southward bulges in the jet stream, that wavy river of upper level fast moving air that largely controls the speed, strength and direction of weather systems.

The Arctic is warmer than it was, but it's still pretty cold in the winter. The sharper, more persistent southward dips in the jet stream, ones that dip more south than they used to, bring repeated waves of bitter air into places like the United States and western Europe.

The latest research builds on previous work by other scientists, including Jennifer Francis, a climate scientist at Rutgers University, that generally reached the same conclusions.

Of course, other factors are at work, too, so there's no guarantee any one winter will be bitter. For instance, El Nino is going to be a big factor this winter. El Ninos sometimes help prevent some of these big dips in the jet stream.

That's just one example of how the warming Arctic doesn't always cause cold winters in parts of the Northern Hemisphere, but it can.

Of course, the concept of cold winters gets the warming denialists all riled up.

Last year, when it was cold, for instance, some guy named James Taylor wrote in Forbes how "ridiculous" it is for climate scientists to suggest climate change could have contributed cold waves and large snowstorms.

This research about the Arctic's influence on the jet stream is valuable, but it will give ammunition to the denialist echo chamber which seeks to discredit climate scientists through some odd leaps of logic.

Next time somebody tells global warming doesn't exist because it's cold outside your own window, just wave them off.

Scary South Pacific Storms To Help Spring Temporarily Vanish In Northeast U.S.

Satelllite view captures the swirl of four
cyclones near, north and east of Australia.  

The oceans near, north and east of Australia exploded with four simultaneous tropical cyclones this week, and at least two of them have spread death and destruction.

Hurricanes are called cyclones in this part of the world and they're fairly common in the region.

But you almost never get so many at once, and you don't get them as strong as the worst one, Cyclone Pam.

According to The Guardian, at least eight people, and possibly dozens, died as the powerful Category 5 strength Pam roared over the small island nation of Vanuatu.

It sounds like a very scary mess.  The Guardian reported that the capital city of Port Vila in Vanuatu was totally trashed:

"Save the Children's Tom Skirrow, speaking from Port Vila said: 'The scene here this morning is complete devastation, homes are destroyed, trees are down, roads are blocked and people are wandering the streets looking for help.'

Care International's Charlie Camon said 'Homes have been blown to pieces, and even evacuation shelters, where people had sought refuge, have been flooded and left exposed to Cyclone Pam.'"

The islands Pam struck are home to nearly 100,000 people. Peak winds with the storm were 155 mph, one of the strongest on record in the region.  

Damage from Cyclone Pam in Port Vila, Vanuatu  

Meanwhile, in northwestern Australia, Cyclone Olywyn slammed ashore, damaging quite a few houses, cutting power, setting of floods and storm surges and trashing agriculture in the region, said the Australian Broadcasting Corp. 

The other two cyclones in the region have not hit any major land areas.

CYCLONES AND U.S. COLD WAVE RELATED

All these storms were able to pop up due to something called the Madden-Julian Oscillation, or MJO.

According to the Weather Channel, the MJO is a wave of energy that moves eastward around the equator every 30 to 60 days or so.

When the MJO goes overhead, it tends to create upward motion in the atmosphere, which can form clouds and thunderstorms, some of which have the potential to create tropical cyclones.

This MJO was particularly strong and was able to contribute to these four cyclones.

If you live in the United States, you should care about the MJO for reasons beyone wanting to help the people in Vanuatu.

That's because this MJO is going to put a temporary stop to spring in the eastern United States.  At first, when the strong MJO was developing, it nudged the jet stream to finally end the persistent frigid weather than had plagued the Northeast for weeks.

Now, with the MJO heading east, for complicated reasons it will help throw the jet stream back into basically the same arrangement it had in February.

The MJO is, of course, is only one of many complicated atmospheric cycles and systems that affect the weather way up here in New England.

Still, the MJO's shenanigans, combined with the way weather circulations are oriented now,  mean spring weather is vanishing from the Northeast.

The opening salvo is a bit of freezing rain this morning in southern New England, and some pretty heavy snows in parts of northern New England and southern Quebec tonight and tomorrow.

Accumulations will probably amount to a slushy coating in central New England, one to three inches in much of central Vermont and central New Hampshire tonight as rain changes to snow, up to five inches in northeastern Vermont, and anywhere from five inches to as much as a foot in southern Quebec, including Montreal, northern New Hampshire and much of Maine.

Winter storm warnings are flying tonight and tomorrow for northern New Hampshire and most of Maine.

After that, we get repeated cold waves in the eastern United States through the end of the month. There might be some little thaws between cold blasts, and given that it's getting into late March, this won't be as bad as February, as I've noted previously.

Still, it sure as hell won't feel like spring for the next couple of weeks.

Explaining Why The Hell Winter Has Been So Arctic In New England

From Science 2.0. This general jet
stream pattern has kept the West Coast warm
and the eastern United States cold more
often than not for the past two years.  

You hear it all the time here in snowbound, subzero New England: Will it ever end?  

The answer of course is yes, but in the short term anyway, the cold and the snow is only grudgingly starting to relax. The long slog toward spring looks like it's going to be a slow one this year.  

You also hear people asking if this long stretch of storms and frigid air with practically no breaks is unusual and the answer is and emphatic, "Very."

Big snowstorms and temperatures way below zero are routine in a New England February, but such weather is usually interrupted by spells of relatively mild weather and sunshine.

The jet stream, that strong river of fast flowing air high above us that controls the path of storms, usually wiggles and shifts and changes frequently, so the weather changes.

A storm blows through, the jet stream changes and sends a big blast of cold air south from Canada. The jet stream changes again, and you get a thaw.

Rinse, repeat.

STUCK JET STREAM

Lately, as you might have heard, the jet stream has been "stuck." There's a big northward bulge in the jet stream that has people in western North America wondering whatever happened to winter. In Vancouver, British Columbia, cherry blossoms are now blooming, more than a month and a half early.

This same jet stream has sent one Arctic air mass from the North Pole after another into the northeastern United States. That big northward bulge in the West is counterbalanced by a big dip in the jet stream to the east, which opens the door for those cold waves to plunge southward.

The jet stream then turns north again just off the New England, allowing storms to form in part by picking up moisture from the warm Gulf Stream, letting it interact with the cold air from Canada, and you get snowstorms.

The stuck pattern lets storms form in rapid fire fashion, basically with each shot of cold air from Canada, or almost every other day.

"It's like reloading a gun. It just shoots one after another at us," Alan Dunham, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Taunton, Massachusetts told New Bedford, Massachusetts-based South Coast Today.   

Again, this configuration of the jet stream happens almost every winter. But it doesn't normally get stuck in one orientation for five weeks without a break.

In fact, this general jet stream pattern has more or less been intact since at least late 2013,  and occasionally before that. Sure, it has broken down occasionally, sometimes allowing wet and cool weather in the West and warm and dry in the East. But it seems like it quickly reverts back to this "stuck" pattern.

That's why California has had such a terrible drought for four years now. The northward bulge in the jet stream, dubbed the "Ridiculously Resilient Ridge" has steered rainstorms away from the West Coast and caused lots of heat. Last year was the warmest on record in California. Dry weather and high temperatures equals drought.

On the flip side, the big dip in the jet stream, named by some the Terribly Tenacious Trough, has more or less held in place for a year and a half now. (With those occasional, aforementioned breaks)

That's why the so-called Polar Vortex cold wave last winter was so intense. It's also why the Midwest had a rather cool summer last year. It's also why a stripe from about Illinois to Louisiana had one of its top 10 coolest years in 2014, when overall for the globe, 2014 was the warmest on record

This jet stream stickiness is why winter has been so extreme in the Northeast so far this year.

WHY IS THE JET STREAM SO STUCK?

The snows of New England had in some sense their origins way out in the Pacific Ocean

As always with weather and climate, the answer is complicated. Nobody is really 100 percent sure. It probably has to do with a mix of things, ranging from natural cycles in the Pacific, air pollution in Asia, and of course, the biggest villain of all,  human-induced climate change.

If there's a lot of storminess in the eastern and central Pacific, that tends to help build up the western ridge and eastern United States trough.

According to Mashable, something called the Madden-Julian Oscillation heated the atmosphere and changed upper altitude winds in the the northern Pacific Ocean, said Michael Ventrice of WSI Corporation in Andover, Massachusetts. 

A typhone named Higos also formed in early February in the eastern Pacific, and it might have been the strongest one on record for so early in the season.

That helped really bolster the jet stream pattern that has brought so much winter misery to New England, says Mashable:

"The ripple effects were like setting a Slinky on a march down a staircase - downstream waves formed troughs and ridges that contorted the jet stream that encouraged air to venture south from the Arctic."

OK, but why all the storminess in the Pacific to set this jet stream weirdness in motion?

POLLUTION PROBLEMS?

Let's blame China!

Actually, there's potentially some science to back up my wild accusation against China.

A recent article by James West in Mother Jones says heavy pollution coming from the factories of China, that soot that keeps causing dangerous air pollution in Beijing, might be contributing to the rough weather we've had this winter.

Says Mother Jones:

"Over the past few years, a team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology has found that aerosols - or airborne particles - emitted from the cities fueling Asia's booming economies are making storm activity stronger in the Northwest Pacific Ocean. These storms wreak havoc on the polar jet stream, a major driver of North America's weather. The result: U.S. winters with heavier snowfall and more intense cold periods.

Pollution billowing from Asia's big cities, they found, is essentially 'seeding' the clouds with sulfur, carbon grit and metals. This leads to thicker, taller and more energetic clouds, with heavier precipitation. These so called 'extratropical' cyclones in the Northwest Pacific have become 10 percent stronger over the past 30 years, the scientists say."

We know the pollution in China is killing people there. Maybe the fatalities in this winter's disasters in the United States could indirectly lead back to China, too.

OF COURSE, GLOBAL WARMING IS SUSPECTED, TOO

It turns out global warming might cause at temporary areas of cooling in some regions, too.

Writing in Science 2.0, Jennifer Francis, a Research Professor in the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University, said there is evidence that global warming is messing around with the jet stream, which in turn might help explain the kind of stuck weather patterns that victimized New England this winter.

She writes:

"Our own new work, published last month in Environmental Research Letters, uses a variety of metrics to show that the jet stream is becoming wavier and that rapid Arctic warming is playing a role. If these results are confirmed, then we'll see our weather patterns become more persistent."

In other words, stuck weather patterns might become the new normal.

Of course that's bad, because if the same weather keeps hitting the same area for weeks, you get disasters like the New England snows, the California drought, or other huge droughts, floods, heat waves or cold waves.

Despite the eastern United States cold, waters in the Atlantic Ocean a few hundred miles off the New England coast were unusually warm this winter. Storms gain energy, and tend to produce more precipitation when they feed off warmer waters.

Some of the nor'easters this winter did just that. When all that moisture lifted off the warm Atlantic Ocean was flung into the cold air over New England, that wetness fell as snow. Lots of it.

Writing in the Boston Herald, Weather Channel Meteorologist and Storm Chaser Jim Cantore said that warm water way off the coast should take at least some of the blame for the unprecedented New England snow blitz this winter.

This next bit will be cold comfort (ha!) to people in New England, but despite what happened this winter, the amount of cold air circulating around the North Pole has shrunk to record and near record lows in recent years.

According to the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang:

"In what may see like a paradox, the amount of wintertime cold air circulating around the Northern Hemisphere is shrinking to record low levels. This winter (2014-2015, is on track to see the most depleted cold air supply ever measured."

Yeah, and too bad it seems like most of that depleted cold air supply has been sitting right over my house in Vermont for the past month.

THE NEXT FEW DAYS, WEEKS

The stuck weather pattern continues, but it is finally shifting around a little bit. It's not going away just yet, but New England might not be quite so extreme in the next few weeks.

The whole Ridiculously Resilient Ridge and Terribly Tenacious Trough arrangement is all shifting a little to the west this week.

That means the core of the cold waves is now plunging into the middle of the country, going all the way to near the Gulf Coast. That's what's setting off a series of snowstorms across the South in the past ten days or so.

The slight westward shift in the pattern means the Northeast will stay cold and stormy, but not as cold. And the storms might include rain, not just snow.

On top of that, there are some uncertain signs that heading into mid-March, the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge and the Terribly Tenacious Trough might weaken somewhat, at least temporarily.

If that happens, temperatures across the country might not end up as extremely cold in the East or extremely hot in the West.

But to all those people in New England stuck with the winter weather, keep those snow shovels and warm winter coats handy for the next few weeks at least. You're going to need them.

Counterintutive, But, Is New England Extreme Winter Weather Linked To Climate Change?

Dwight Johnson of Worcester, Mass clears
his roof on Friday for the second time this winter in anticipation
of the next big snowstorm now arriving in the region.
Photo by Paul Kapteyn, Worcester Telegram and Gazette.  

New England remains on tap for continued extreme winter weather for at least this week and probably beyond.

As I hint at in the headline, there might be a weird connection to climate change. I'll get to that in a minute.

But first, I'll get into what's going on today and for the next week, since that's the immediate concern.

Forecasts haven't changed a whole lot since yesterday.

Once again, northeastern Massachusetts and the areas around Worcester, Mass are in the bullseye for the deepest snow with the winter storm that is starting in fits and starts but will gain momentum tonight and Monday.

With an Arctic front stalled to the south of New England, and relatively modest storm systems rippling along the front, the snow will just keep on going. The most substantial of the storms will come along tonight and Monday, hence the heaviest snows in southern New England.

With strong east winds coming off the ocean north of the storm and the front in Massachusetts, the snow will really come down near and just north of Boston, and on toward Worcester. Those areas are the ones that really seem to keep getting the most snow in this persistent, very weird weather pattern.

The National Weather Service in Taunton, Mass. near Boston is referring to that blast of wet, cold east wind as a "moist, cold conveyor belt.... which will serve as a fire hose transporting copious moisture into the cold airmass over southern New England."

That's why the expect to get so much snow.

 There's about two feet of snow on the ground, locally more in the area due to get the heaviest snow. (They've had five feet or more of accumulation since the third week of January, but snow tends to settle.)

The snow banks are huge, and I have no idea where they're going to put the snow.

In the Capitol District around Albany, N.Y and much of eastern New York for that matter, the winter storm warning calls for generally 9 to 18 inches of new snow by Monday night.

The southern halves of Vermont and New Hampshire will get into the act with the heavy snow, with ten to fourteen additional inches forecast through Tuesday morning.

When I say "heavy snow" I don't mean it will snow super hard. The storm is just lasting a long time, so light to moderate snow going on for more than 48 hours will really pile up.

Areas closer to the Canadian border in New York, Vermont and New Hampshire are still expecting maybe six to ten inches of additional snow.

Areas of Maine hardest hit by the recent snows will fare OK with this one. They're expected three to six inches of snow.

ANOTHER STORM?

We're still looking at another storm that would dive down from Canada midweek. Like many of the past storms, this one has the potential to blow up into something pretty big along the coast, which could dump a LOT more snow on eastern New England.

Oh, boy, I bet they're excited around Boston!

There's still a lot of questions as to whether that storm will get big and snowy, or whether New England will get a reprieve of sorts and only get light snow.

There's more certainty that behind that storm, perhaps the coldest air of the year, and perhaps the coldest air in decades could plunge into New England

Some runs of the American computer forecasting models are ridiculous, hinting at temperatures in the upper 20s to low 50s (not a typo) below zero in northern New England and teens and 20s below in southern New England

Before you start panicking the American model always overdoes cold waves this far in advance, so it won't be nearly as bad as they're suggesting.

But, there's a chance thing could be brutal over Valentines weekend, rivaling epic, historic cold waves in 1994 and 1979. Make plans now to cuddle up with your lover. Or get a lover --FAST!

If predictions pans out, it would mean lows in the 25 to 40 below range in much of northern New England, and single number and teens below zero in southern New England. High tempertures wouldn't get above zero in much of the region in this scenario.

Just for comparison's sake, the all time record low for any winter day is 18 below in Boston, Mass., 26 below in Hartford, Ct., 17 below in Providence, Rhode Island, 24 below in Worcester, Mass, and 30 below in Burlington, Vermont.

The coldest readings on record in New England are -50 at Big Black River Maine on Jan. 16, 2009, and another -50 at Bloomfield, Vermont on Dec. 30, 1933.

I don't think it will get that cold in any of these places this coming weekend, but it could get within a few degrees of those readings. Plus, sometimes all the computer models back down as we get closer to the event, and we just end up with frigid air, but not record breaking readings. We'll just have to wait and see.

This incredible weather pattern that has been in place since late January and will continue for most of February. I would rate it as unprecedented in southern New England, and extreme, but maybe not unprecedented in northern New England.

COUNTERINTUTIVE, BUT CLIMATE CHANGE CONTRIBUTING TO WINTER BLITZ? 

I know, Duh!. Extremes snows and record cold doesn't exactly make you think you're in the throes of global warming, but hear me out.

There have always been extreme weather events, of course. Records are made to be broken.  But the frequency of previously unheard of storms and temperature extremes does make us think about climate change

Is climate change making the jet stream contort into
big ridges and dips, like shown here? If so, extreme weather,
like the current New England winter blitz,
big storms and big heat waves might be increasing.  

I've mentioned this before, but climate scientists, digging into the gory details of climate change, have noted that the jet stream has tended more and more to develop bigger ridges poking way to the north, and bigger dips diving way to the south. And these patterns seem to be getting "stuck" in place more often.

Extreme jet stream bulges to the north cause record warmth, and extreme dips to the south cause record cold, even if the world overall is gradually warming.

And if the jet stream gets stuck in place, storms take the same path over and over again, hitting the same spots, causing record rainfall and snowfall.

New England has been the victim of recent weeks of an extreme southward dip in the jet stream that has become stuck, which is why the snowstorms keep targeting New England, areas near Boston in particular.

There's been an unusually flurry of stuck weather patterns, stuck jet streams in recent years. The California drought, which has dragged on for three years now (and is only getting partial relief from heavy rains this weekend) is the child of what has become known as the "ridiculously resilient ridge" that has more less stayed put over the West Coast for three years.

Super Storm Sandy came ashore in New Jersey with its devastation in 2012 due to an extremely odd and serpentine jet stream configuration that sent the storm smahing into the East Coast instead of roaring harmlessly northeastward into the open Atlantic, which is normally what happens.

Given how we're shivering, a lot of us might not remember the incredible heat wave of March, 2012, where dozens of cities in the Midwest, East Coast and southeastern Canada had all time high readings for March in the 80s over the course of a week due to an incredibly large northward bulge in the jet stream.

I want to caution that the "global warming is screwing with the jet stream" theory is intriguing, but not yet proven.  The science is settled on the fact global warming is occurring, but not totally settled yet on what effect the warming might be having on the jet stream and weather patterns.

Plus, there are always natural phenomenon at play which also periodically affect weather patterns. These natural cycles also influence extreme weather events and storms.

Of course, few winter weary New Englanders are worried about the jet stream at this particular moment. Who can blame them? The immediate crisis is just finding a place to put all this snow as they struggle to remove it from their driveways.