In Brimson, Minnesota, the temperature fell to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Fargo, North Dakota, recorded temperatures as low as 32 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. In Illinois, motorists are being urged to stay off the roads for a second day. Schools remain closed in Chicago and other cities. Here in New York, the temperature dropped nearly 50 degrees over a few hours on Monday. Central Park has just hit an all-time low for January 7th at 5 degrees Fahrenheit. The previous record was set back in 1896.
it’s called a polar vortex, a dense frigid air that’s descended as far south as Texas and Florida. According to the National Weather Service, temperatures are 20 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit below average in parts of Montana, North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan and Nebraska.
Jeff Masters talking:
Arctic vortex. It’s a situation you see every winter over the Arctic. I mean, you’ve got 24-hour darkness up there, and the cold air tends to build and build and build because of the lack of sunlight. And when you get all that cold air up there, it tends to drive stronger winds. And those winds blow counterclockwise around the pole in a vortex, and those winds tend to isolate that cold air from the rest of the world. And so, that cold air can stay cold, and when that happens to slosh over where we are, boy, we sure notice it.
that’s pretty rare to go a 50-degree change in one day. I mean, back on Sunday, you had airplanes sliding off runways, and then it was 55 on Monday, and now you’re down at 4 degrees, which, like you said, is a record low. That’s some serious weather whiplash. You don’t see the things oscillate that extremely very often.
you don’t go to Rush Limbaugh for science. I mean, the polar vortex has been around forever. It’s just the media happened to latch onto it this week. I don’t know why, but it sure did kind of snowball. It’s been around—you know, I’ve been talking about the polar vortex for years. It’s just funny that it got out in the media the way it did this week.
How can the Earth getting hotter relate to such cold weather?
this is a one-in-20-year type of cold weather event, which you expect to see grow less common as the planet heats up. I mean, the planet has heated up about a degree and a half Fahrenheit over the last 130 years, and you expect these one-in-20-year events to maybe occur one-in-30 years. But they’re still going to happen.
OK, now counterbalancing the fact that we would expect to see these events grow less common due to the fact the planet is warming up is, well, maybe, if we alter circulation patterns in such a way where the polar vortex now will slip southwards more often, then you could counterbalance that. And there is some evidence over the last few years that the jet stream has been doing something we haven’t seen before, at least not as often. Normally those winds blow straight west to east, with a little bit of waviness to it, but now we’re seeing more extreme excursions in the jet stream, where you get these big bulges, these high-pressure ridges on one side, and then low pressure dipping far to the south—very unusual to see these sort of contortions like we’ve had in recent years. And there is evidence that possibly Arctic sea ice loss could cause that sort of jet stream behavior.
drunk jet stream. normally the jet blows, like I said, straight west to east, but when the winds slow down in the jet stream, now they tend to wander around a little more. They’re not constrained to flow in this kind of tight, narrow ribbon so much. Now they can do kind of these big meandering loops. And when you reduce the temperature difference between the Equator and the poles, you tend to slow down the winds of the jet stream, and you tend to allow this sort of meandering behavior. And this difference in temperature between the Equators and the poles has been growing less and less in recent years because we’ve been losing so much Arctic sea ice. That allows the sun to shine more intensely up there, because now you’re exposing open water, which is dark, absorbs more sunlight, heats up the area, melts more ice, in kind of a vicious cycle, and increases the warmth even more. So, all this kind of makes sense that it could be the fact that warming in the Arctic is altering jet stream behavior.
Where I am, in Detroit here, 40 below zero wind chill, if you expose your skin to that kind of extreme low temperature, you’re asking for frostbite in just a minute or two. You really shouldn’t go out and expose your flesh to that kind of extreme condition.
2013, if you talk globally, we had $40 billion weather disasters, which ties a record for the most we’ve ever seen. Now, the actual dollar losses from those events was, oh, near average. We didn’t have a single like Hurricane Sandy or a single drought of 2012, which was a tens of billions of dollars type of loss event. But that kind of a $40 billion sort of year for these events does make me say, “Wow, you know, that was a pretty extreme year,” even though we didn’t have a major La Niña event or an El Niño event, which tends to drive sort of an increase in extreme weather events. So, it’s hard to quantify extreme weather. We don’t have very good ways to do it. We don’t have data that goes back in time long enough. But certainly, by that measure, by the number of billion-dollar disasters, it was a very extreme year.
– source democracynow.org
Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at the Weather Underground, joining us from Ann Arbor, Michigan.