Extreme polar cold is about to pummel the U.S. over the holidays

The US is getting a lot of cold weather this holiday season.

The National Weather Service expects a lot of the country to experience freezing or dangerous conditions over the next week. The cold air will move into the Central U.S. on Wednesday and into the Eastern U.S. on Friday. A major snowstorm will hit the Midwest between December 21 and 25.

Drop in temperature is expected. The high temperature in Denver on Wednesday is predicted by the NWS. The temperature will fall to minus 1 F on Thursday. The temperature in the New York City area will be in the 50s and 40s on Friday, but will plummet to around 20 degrees later that day. In Wyoming, the wind chill is so bad that it would feel like it was snowing.

Bob Oravec, a lead forecaster with the National Weather Service in College Park, Maryland, told Mashable that it's a lot of temperature changes in a single day. Mild air will be displaced by cold air.

You can check your local NWS office for more information. Even with incoherence and absurdity, national and local NWS updates are still useful sources of information.

It is likely that you will want to take a hard look at your travel plans. The weather service office in Chicago said that the cold will continue through the holiday weekend.

The weather is going to be very impacting over the next few days. There will be a lot of delays.

The NWS weather map shows the cold air moving to the south and east across the U.S. The colors show average temperature departures over the last three decades. Blue is a dominant shade on these maps, which means that temperatures can be as low as 40 degrees below normal.

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What's driving the extreme polar cold

The air from the north spills into the U.S. during winter.

The jet stream is a band of powerful winds that separates the northern and southern air. It goes from west to east. Large scale weather events can cause the air to move north or south. It opens the refrigerator door when it falls to the south.

A graphic showing how the meandering jet stream separates cold air from warmer air. Credit: NOAA

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Strong winds that circle around the pole in the winter can affect the jet stream. In the current case, as the jet stream bends downwards, parts of the polar vortex lower in the atmosphere are moving. He said that this allows a large chunk of cold to move over parts of the U.S.

It will still happen in a heating world. Climate Central, an organization that studies climate change, says that the winter is the fastest-warming season. Dynamic weather moving through our chaotic atmosphere will often allow for the release of air from the north into the Lower 48.

There will be extreme cold spells. There are many types of weather events that occur in a Warming world.

If climate change is making cold air in the north more likely, that's a hot area of research. The jet stream, a band of powerful winds that separates cold northern air from warm southern air, could become more prone to meandering north if the heating of theArctic makes it more likely. It could allow polar air to swoop down from the top of the world. Other research did not find a link.

What is certain is that the air in the north is going to affect a lot of the country. Nearly a quarter of US car crashes happen on snowy, wintery roads. It's time to be prepared.