By
Andrea Thompson
Follow @AndreaTWeather
The polar vortex got all the blame for the frigid winter that held much of the eastern U.S. in its icy grip this year, but the
wild kinks in the jet stream that sent that cold air southward may be due to thunderstorm activity half a world away, one scientist says.
The first four months of 2014 in the U.S. were the
coldest such period the country has seen since 1993, due to the large dips in the jet stream that pulled Arctic air down over the central and eastern portions of the country. The same extreme dips in the jet stream also sent
storm after storm over the UK, causing them to have their wettest winter on record.
Visualization of surface winds (lines and black arrows) and temperatures (shaded colors) in January, as an Arctic blast swept from the Midwest to the South and East.
Click image to enlarge. Credit:
earth.nullschool.net.
“Waves in the jet stream are what make the weather we feel here on the surface,” climate scientist Jennifer Francis, of
Rutgers University, said in an email. “And when the jet has big kinks — like this winter and in 2011-12 — those waves tend to get ‘stuck’ and so do the weather patterns they create.”
Francis and other scientists have been looking at the ways that global warming may be causing changes in the atmosphere and at Earth’s surface that could influence the likelihood of these “big kinks” occurring. While
Francis’ work has linked the jet stream’s wild wanderings to warming-induced changes in the Arctic’s sea ice cover, climate scientist Tim Palmer draws a tropical connection in an
article published in the May 24 issue of the journal Science.
Palmer, of the
University of Oxford, argues that heat released by unusually strong thunderstorm activity in the western tropical Pacific — helped along by heat absorbed from Earth’s warming atmosphere — set in motion the meanderings of the jet stream. The scenario is an example of how changes in atmospheric patterns aren’t caused just by natural variability or the forcing of man-made warming as greenhouse gases are increasingly added to the atmosphere, Palmer said.