Forecasters are watching changes in the stratosphere that could trigger a shake-up in the mild weather pattern over the Eastern U.S. and Europe.
Lee likened the situation to a “boxing match” between “planetary waves,” or large-scale weather systems nestled within dips and crests of the jet stream and the vortex itself.“An earlier minor warming,” analogous to a smaller punch from a jet stream disturbance, Lee said, “seems to have left the vortex in a more vulnerable state.” That happened at the end of January.
“There is pretty high certainty that the polar vortex will get strongly disturbed by mid-February, but less certainty that it will be disturbed enough to influence the surface below,” Butler said.Under ordinary circumstances, the stratospheric polar vortex spins like an unperturbed top, minding its business and keeping cold air bottled up high in the Arctic. But if something interrupts the flow of the vortex, it sometimes allows bitterness to slosh down to the mid-latitudes.
,” or a weather pattern that favors insurgences of colder air at lower latitudes in Europe and sometimes the Eastern United States.Sudden stratospheric warmings also often help establish or reinforce “Greenland blocks,” or stagnant domes of high pressure over Greenland. That can result in an atmospheric logjam that maintains prolonged periods of unsettled weather over the U.S. Northeast and East Coast, like what occurred in March 2018.
It will probably be at least another week or so before any potential impacts at the mid-latitudes can be ironed out. “Usually we can make the first more reliable predictions only starting around the time when the sudden stratospheric warming happens,” Domeisen said. “For North America, these predictions are even more difficult than for Europe.”
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