Apparently, the Polar Vortex Is Evolving

If you live in the northern United States or Canada, you’ve probably come to dread the phrase “polar vortex” when it’s uttered by a meteorologist during the winter months. Think brutally cold air, often accompanied by strong winds. The National Weather Service’s website points out that polar vortices aren’t exactly new, though the term itself has only entered wide use relatively recently. But like so many things involving climate, changes are afoot when it comes to this type of weather.

As Stephanie Pappas reports at Live Science, a group of scientists have been studying why these extremely cold stretches seem to be getting more severe. Pappas writes that they’ve discovered evidence of “an increasingly common pattern in the polar vortex” — and the reason for that pattern becoming more frequent is that Arctic temperatures are rising.

In the paper, published earlier this month in the journal Science Advances, the authors address a seeming paradox. “[W]hile North America (NA) winter cold extremes have warmed faster than mean temperatures since 1980, extreme winter cold events in the central-eastern US (CEUS) have not similarly decreased in frequency or intensity,” they write.

The authors also note that things are changing when it comes to brutally cold weather in the United States. “The location of strongest winter cold anomalies has shifted from east of the Mississippi to west of the Mississippi in the U.S. during the past decade,” they note.

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Judah Cohen, one of the paper’s authors, told Live Science that the extent to which sea ice melts could have a significant impact on winter weather in the future. The discovery of shifts and patterns in how polar vortices operate could be helpful for more precise forecasting in the future — and a better understanding of these weather events in the present day.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…