The polar vortex is descending on the midsection of the U.S., bringing bitterly cold air and causing temperatures to plunge quickly in many areas. There will be a snowstorm that will cause travel chaos.
There is a large rotating expanse of cold air in the north that sometimes moves south from the pole. There are cold snaps in the US. When the cold air reached deep into Texas, it caused temperatures to be as low as 40 degrees below normal.
Damage to the state's power infrastructure was caused by that freeze.
As global emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide continue, the Arctic is warming four times faster than other parts of the planet, and the region's sea-ice coverage is Shrinking Two questions arise when the vortex moves southward. Climate change plays a role. Will extreme freezes increase as the temperature warms?
Scientists aren't sure at the moment. There are more to learn.
Steve Vavrus is a Climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Vavrus wrote a paper in 2012 in which he claimed that the polar vortex was being affected by climate change. He said that the state of things is not clear.
The term refers to a mass of high-altitude air that rotates over the North Pole. The northern one affects weather in the Northern Hemisphere while the southern one affects weather in the southern hemisphere.
With the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the Sun at that time of year, little or no sunlight reaches the northern part of the country to warm it up.
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The air at the North Pole looked like it was rotating in a clockwise direction. Scientists say it's like a spinning top. The polar jet stream is a band of winds that blow from west to east.
The vortex is confined to the top of the world. As a spinning top can start to drift if it bumps into something, the vortex can be disrupted as well. Changes to the jet stream can be seen as it circles the globe.
There are times when the vortex splits into several pieces. It becomes stretched like a rubber band sometimes. The disruption can have a lot of consequences.
Sometimes the temperature in the atmosphere over the northern part of the planet can go up a lot. The air is cold in the north and warm in the south.
If the movement is rapid enough, temperatures in the areas exposed to the mass of cold air can fall by tens of degrees within hours, and can stay that way for days or even weeks.
This is the most important part of the debate for climate scientists.
Changes in the polar jet stream are being blamed for disruptions in the vortex. According to others, modeling suggests that naturally variable factors are driving disruptions instead of the previous increase in disruptions.
Judah Cohen is a climate scientist at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, a weather risk assessment firm in Massachusetts. The same thing is happening now.
He said that the warmer conditions create larger and more energetic atmospheric waves that make the jet stream wavier. That affects the weather.
He said that the analogy was like if it started banging into things. In this case, it becomes more stretched out because it loses its circular shape. An outbreak of cold weather occurs in Canada and the US.
Dr. Cohen has been studying the subject since 2005, and he is more confident than ever about the link to changes in theArctic. He said that the evidence is growing.
Others are not as sure. The short-term trends in cold extremes, jet-stream waviness and other climate related measurements in the 1990s were written about in a paper in the journal Nature Climate Change.
According to some experts, other naturally variable elements of the earth's climate might be affecting the vortex. Ted Shepherd, a climate scientist at the University of Reading in England, said that sea- surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean can cause changes to air mass in the northern latitudes.
The kind of healthy climate- change debates that occur now are an example of the questions over what role climate change might play in extreme cold snaps. Climate change isn't about whether it's real or not, it's about how severe it is and whether it will get worse as warming continues.
The debate is still going on, and most scientists think it's important. According to Dr. Vavrus, some aspects are on solid ground. Reducing the temperature difference between the tropics and the polar regions is thought to have weakened the jet stream winds. The things that we've really been wrestling with and remain uncertain are whether or not warming is making the jet stream wavier.
There was a lot of black and white thinking when I was younger. More and more evidence shows that there are many shades of gray.
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