A polar vortex, flooding and 50-degree heat: World is hit by extreme weather Monday 13 Jan 2014 6:00 am
Winter wonderland? Niagara Falls turned white in the recent cold weather (Picture: Reuters) Talking about the weather is as British as standing in a queue for too long or saying ‘sorry’ for something you haven’t done.
But even by British standards, there has been an awful lot of talk about the weather in the past few weeks. It’s difficult to find time to talk about anything else, given the recent storms and floods that have torn their way across the country.
Unfortunately, 2014 has brought tragedy and misery for many people who have lost loved ones or their homes. A number of people have been killed and thousands have had their homes flooded in the severe weather, as more than 100 flood warnings were put in place last week.
The devastation has led to calls for the government to do more to prevent the kind of flooding that is becoming a regular occurrence – it has pledged almost £400m a year to fight the problem, but some climate experts believe more needs to be spent on Britain’s flood defences.
But the conversation about weather has gone global in recent days, because it’s not only Britons who have suffered. In the US and Canada, more than 200m people were caught up in freezing conditions, believed to be caused by a polar vortex – a pattern of strong winds that has brought a mass of cold air. On just one day last week, the temperature in all 50 US states fell below freezing.
MORE: Polar vortex pictured from space
Another different weather extreme could be found in Australia, where temperatures rocketed to the 50C mark, just days after it was revealed that 2013 had been the hottest year in the nation’s history. In October, New South Wales was ravaged by a series of bushfires.
MORE: Cooked bat corpses falling from the sky in Australia
But are periods like the past week or so, filled with differing extreme weather patterns in different corners of the world, freak occurrences or the new norm?
‘The atmosphere globally is all connected, so we shouldn’t be entirely surprised if we get extreme weather in one place and another place at the same time,’ said Doug Parker, professor of meteorology from the
school of earth and environment at the University of Leeds.
‘There is some evidence of global connections. The Australian heatwave is perhaps linked to what is happening to us. It’s like throwing a stone in the pond – if you’re having an event somewhere in the Earth’s atmosphere, then it causes waves to move out and they can move across the globe. If you have a big disturbance somewhere, like a storm, then that will cause changes in the atmosphere away from it and those changes move outwards around the world.’
Prof Parker pointed out that there is already a well-established link – another special relationship, almost – between weather systems Britain and in the US. The recent storms here have been caused by a jet stream crossing the Atlantic.
‘Our weather comes from that direction,’ he said. ‘You can get a seesaw effect across the North Atlantic – it’s called the North Atlantic oscillation. Quite often, if we’re getting one kind of weather, North America might be getting the opposite. That’s kind of what we’re seeing at the moment. They’ve had severely cold temperatures and we’re quite mild. Those temperature changes go hand in hand with the winds. In these conditions, the jet stream is pointing at us and firing these storms across us. They’re riding along the jet stream, effectively.’
Scientists cannot be definite on whether or not we are going to see more instances of severe weather like this in the near future, said Prof Parker, but when it does come, it will be hard-hitting.
‘One of the expectations with a warming climate is the storms that we get will be more intense, deliver more rain and have stronger winds,’ he said.
GALLERY: Polar vortex grips US and Canada
MORE: First floods then the snow for Britain
‘The big open questions are to do with the frequency of those storms and where they occur. We might get fewer of them or we might get more of them. One way of looking at climate change is to think that our climate will become more like those of warmer countries that we know.’
He said the public are beginning to ask the same questions about weather patterns as the scientists, and that they are becoming more interested in what exactly is happening in the atmosphere, illustrated by the recent interest in the polar vortex.
‘It’s a scientific term that we use a lot and the media have picked up on it – for some reason, it sounds kind of exciting,’ said Prof Parker. ‘Polar vortices are just one of those phenomena that move around.’
Although future weather events cannot be accurately predicted, there is a fear that fairly stable periods in Britain could be a thing of the past.
‘We seem to have had season after season of intense events,’ said Prof Parker. ‘We had some really cold winters a few years ago and we came from a period of drought in the UK into a period of really intense flooding – and that rainy season was record breaking. We don’t seem to have had a season that has been unremarkable for quite a long time.’
But he said there is still uncertainty about what exactly is behind the recent extreme weather around the world.
‘Scientists are wondering if this is just a roll of the dice. If you roll the dice a lot of times, occasionally you get three sixes in a row… or is it something where the dice is weighted by climate change?’