Partial North Pole photo: Greg Rosenke
Climate researchers have previously connected polar heating and mid-latitude freezes. Now a new study is the first to link Arctic warming and February’s cold snap. Polar vortices—large areas of low pressure and cold air swirling around the North and South poles—usually keep icy air contained there. But polar heating and ice melt is allowing normally trapped Arctic air to flow far southward. Vanishing sea ice and greater snowfall in the Arctic over the past 40 years may be driving cold winter weather in North America and Eurasia via the stratospheric polar vortex. The Arctic’s rapid warming appears to be disrupting—that is, stretching—this vortex in a way that has a knock-on effect on atmospheric circulations above North America, generating unusually cold spells in winter. That appears to be likely to be what happened in Texas this February.
www.commondreams.org/news/2021/09/03/new-climate-study-arctic-heat-fueled-deadly-february-texas-freeze