January 15, 2025
4 min learn
How the Polar Vortex Can Carry Arctic Blasts to the U.S.
Huge climate patterns can carry blasts of frigid air removed from the polar areas—right here’s the way it works
A girl walks on a pedestrian bridge along with her face lined to guard from the chilly on January 31, 2019, in New York Metropolis.
Johannes Eisele/AFP through Getty Pictures
Winter is meant to be chilly—and certainly, within the absence of world warming, the season could be colder than it sometimes has been within the U.S. lately. Nonetheless, when freezing temperatures and nipping winds workforce up for days on finish, it may be troublesome to not marvel why circumstances have to be fairly so chilly. However should you can maintain your mind thawed sufficient to be curious, the reply presents intriguing glimpses into the climate methods that govern our planet.
“Thinking about how the central part of the country or even the Gulf Coast states get cold air isn’t just thinking about what’s happening locally,” says Andrea Lopez Lang, an atmospheric scientist on the College of Wisconsin–Madison. “You have to really zoom out and take a big-picture perspective.”
That big-picture perspective is centered on the Arctic and pushed by two atmospheric phenomena. The primary is the polar jet stream, an enormous present of air that circles the globe between 50 and 60 levels north latitude inside the low-altitude troposphere, the identical layer of environment the place most climate unfolds. North of the polar jet stream is colder air; south of it’s hotter air.
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When the polar jet stream zips kind of evenly across the Arctic, the continental U.S. and different midlatitude areas stay comparatively heat as a result of it retains chilly air trapped to the north. However when the jet stream meanders, drifting north and south because it circles Earth, teeth-chattering air can sneak farther south, inflicting native temperatures to drop sharply in what’s typically generally known as an “Arctic blast.”
The polar jet stream exists year-round and may trigger winter chilly snaps by itself. However in the course of the winter, it’s joined by a second atmospheric phenomenon dubbed the polar vortex. This swirl of frigid air, situated greater than 10 miles above Earth’s floor, strengthens annually in the course of the Northern Hemisphere’s coldest months. And though polar vortex antics aren’t concerned in all chilly air outbursts, the 2 atmospheric phenomena can work together in ways in which trigger notably frigid spells.
In regular circumstances, the polar vortex spins tightly over the Arctic, permitting the polar jet stream—which blows by beneath and south of the polar vortex—to stay pretty clean. “If the polar vortex is left alone, nothing’s bothering it, it’s a nice fast, quiet rotation—[and] the cold air is close to the center of that rotation,” says Judah Cohen, a local weather scientist on the firm Atmospheric and Environmental Analysis.
However typically the polar vortex will get messy—slowing or wandering and even breaking in two—and that destabilized air mass may cause the polar jet stream to develop notably giant meanders alongside its path, permitting brutally chilly climate to sneak farther south than typical. This was a consider February 2021, for instance, when freezing temperatures in Texas lasted greater than eight days, inflicting widespread energy outages and killing greater than 200 individuals.
No matter whether or not the polar vortex contributes to a particular chilly air outbreak or that occasion is the work of the polar jet stream alone, these frigid spells are solely typically joined by winter precipitation. “There’s a lot of ingredients that need to be in place to get a really big snowstorm,” Lopez Lang says. A kind of elements is chilly, after all, however one other is water vapor that’s accessible to freeze into snow.
Intriguingly, the Southern Hemisphere can also be house to a polar vortex, however that system doesn’t endure the disruptions that characterize the northern vortex. “These events never happen over the Antarctic,” says Aditi Sheshadri, an atmospheric scientist at Stanford College.
And the absence of those polar vortex disturbances within the Southern Hemisphere, which has its personal polar vortex and polar jet stream, can level towards an evidence of what’s inflicting the phenomenon within the Northern Hemisphere. The South Pole is situated within the continent of Antarctica, surrounded by the Southern Ocean. In distinction, within the north Arctic sea ice is surrounded by alternating land and ocean: North America, the Atlantic, Eurasia, the Pacific. Earth’s environment behaves in another way over land and ocean, creating large-scale atmospheric waves within the Northern Hemisphere that, when circumstances align, have the facility to upset the polar vortex, triggering extra excessive chilly air outbreaks.
Simply because it impacts every part else on Earth, local weather change is contributing to chilly air outbreaks in some clear methods and in some ways in which scientists are nonetheless working to grasp. What’s sure, researchers say, is that winters have gotten extra delicate and chilly extremes have gotten much less frequent than they had been in the midst of the twentieth century.
Fashions aren’t clear on whether or not local weather change is making polar vortex disruptions extra frequent. Cohen notes that chilly extremes have change into extra frequent since 2000, when the Arctic’s warming price picked up steam—and he believes they’re linked to the way in which melting ice is shaping the environment. “In this period of Arctic change, extreme winter weather and severe winter weather have been surprisingly resilient,” he says.
