The United States of America is now going through a rather strange period of record low temperatures - even those regions where there should be no trace of cold. Let's try to figure out what caused such climate change and what to expect next.
On January 1, 2019, Anchorage, Alaska, was warmer than Jacksonville, Florida. And then, on January 2, it snowed in Tallahassee, Florida, for the first time in 28 years.
All of this is due to the fact that the incredible Arctic weather has escaped from its atmospheric prison, in which most of the Earth's cold is concentrated. After that, she headed south - to the central and eastern states of America. The weather in the country has turned upside down.
Ultracold air is usually trapped in the Arctic in a polar vortex centered around the poles, in this case around the North Pole. When the vortex weakens, it is like the collapse of a dam, only instead of water - cold air.
Frozen Lake Michigan in Chicago, Illinois / The Guardian / Getty Images / Scott Olson.
For the States, this is an unusual phenomenon, but rather not in terms of low temperatures, but the duration of the cold snap. More than 1,600 temperature records were broken or reached in the last week of December 2018, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For Omaha, for example, minus nine degrees Celsius marked the coldest start of the year since 1871. Nevertheless, the record was set on January 5, 1885: then the temperature dropped to minus 35 degrees.
Chicago, for example, was completely renamed "Chiberia" (from English Siberia and Chicago). The temperature in the city dropped below minus 30 degrees.
Most of the polar vortex shift affects the United States. While the continental part of the country is covered with an ice crust, temperatures in the rest of the world are even slightly higher than usual. The same January 1, 2019, the average temperature in the world was 0.9 degrees higher than usual, and the temperature of the Arctic was as much as six degrees higher, according to the Climate Change Institute of the University of Maine.
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What to expect next? According to the meteorological service, the intense storm, which is part of the system, will intensify so quickly that it will become a "bomb cyclone" In the event of such a phenomenon, the pressure in the center of the storm drops very quickly.
Meteorologists are hoping the hurricane wind will remain at sea and suggest that the worst thing to expect is sub-zero temperatures on the US East Coast.
What caused the polar vortex to move? This question is now a topic of heated debate among scientists. Most likely, the reason for the movement of the polar vortex is a mixture of climate change, provoked by humans, and its natural variability. The change in climate did not make the polar vortex more extreme, but, judging by the studies, due to global warming, the Arctic air can "descend" through the United States for further and longer periods.
Of course, the question arises: how can it be so cold with global warming? To begin with, Arctic air is still quite cold, so atmospheric changes that allow air to move south will continue to provoke such sharp drops in temperature. In addition, you should not confuse the weather - a regional phenomenon that lasts for several days or weeks - with the climate, which, in fact, determines the habitability of a particular area for many years. The weather, with its frequent changes, is similar to the human mood, and the climate is more like a person's personality with its more or less well-established traits and habits.
