Your Fault: A Climate Crisis Weather Nightmare Before Christmas

You were warned not too buy all those presents and to go vegan

The weather nightmare before Christmas

Tens of millions of Americans will find themselves recalibrating – and in some cases canceling – holiday plans over the next week, as an exceptionally intense Arctic front plows across most of the eastern two-thirds of the United States during the run-up to Christmas Day.

Below-freezing air will push to the Gulf Coast by Christmas weekend, with readings likely to dip below zero Fahrenheit from Oklahoma to Ohio late this week. On top of this, a “bomb” cyclone (one that deepens by at least 24 millibars in 24 hours) will race from the Central Plains to the Great Lakes on Friday and Saturday, December 23-24. Fierce winds and heavy snow are expected to produce widespread blizzard conditions and shut down transportation over portions of the Great Lakes and Midwest on one of the year’s busiest travel weekends.

Heavy rains and high winds will buffet the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast before the front arrives, most likely bringing a burst of cold and a quick shot of snow around Saturday (Christmas Eve).

Sounds like a good time to travel, eh?

Every weather event now plays out in an atmosphere affected by the addition of greenhouse gases from human activity (mainly the burning of fossil fuels). This doesn’t necessarily mean that every type of weather event will become more extreme or more frequent as a result of human-caused climate change. Like weather itself, the effects of climate change can be variegated, affecting some regions and some types of dangerous weather more than others. (snip)

One intriguing line of research emerged from a series of surprisingly intense winter storms in the U.S. and Europe, as well as a surprising drop in average winter temperatures over Siberia. A scientific debate has now raged for more than a decade on whether the amplified atmospheric warming and increased sea ice loss found over the Arctic might be leading to more-extreme winter weather events in midlatitudes, even if winters as a whole are trending less fearsome over the long term.

As laid out in a series of papers, the core thesis is that the warming Arctic could be making the polar jet stream — and the stratospheric polar vortex it encircles — more unstable and variable. In turn, this could foster vortex displacement events where the polar vortex splits in two, or stretches, thus pushing frigid surface air unusually far south into the midlatitudes. The splitting and stretching could also be influenced by reverberations as the jet stream interacts with enhanced snowfall and high pressure over Siberia during the autumn months.

Sigh.

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