Essays by Eric Worrall
According to climatologist Judah Cohen, global warming is causing colder February and arctic cold outbreaks.
Thanks to climate change, February is now the cruelest month
Jeff McMahon
senior collaborator
Jan 29, 2023.12:14 a.m. ESTThe unusually frozen Februarys in Texas may not be so unusual anymore.
Early winter has warmed across North America, but late winter is a different story. Scientists have documented a cooling trend over February 40, marked by the dangerous and increasingly common penetration of arctic air deep into the United States.
“December has definitely warmed up if you look at the United States,” said Judah Cohen, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. speak in a recent video. But “February, going back to 1979—it’s been quite a few years now—we are really seeing in the heart of the United States a very special cooling trend.”
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“We tend to have more severe winter weather when the vortex is weak, and milder rainy weather when the vortex is strong, and we have also seen the strength of the polar vortex decrease and the weak state of the polar vortex. increase. polar vortex,” said Cohen in an interview with Peter Sinclair, a videographer for Yale Climate Connections who posts insightful interviews on his amazing Youtube channel, green bucket.
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Video interview;
Abstract of the article;
Linking Arctic variability and change to extreme US winter weather
JUDAH CENEN , LAURIE AGEL, MATHEW BARLOW, BOTTLE I. GARFINKELAND IAN WHITE
SCIENCE
Sep 1, 2021
Volume 373, No. 6559
page 1116-1121Cold weather interruption
Despite the rapid warming that is a key sign of global climate change, especially in the Arctic, where temperatures are rising much higher than elsewhere in the world, the United States and other regions Other Northern Hemispheres have experienced a significant and increasingly frequent amount of extremely cold winter weather over the past four decades. cohen et al. observations and models combine to demonstrate that arctic change can be an important cause of a chain of processes involving what they call stratospheric polar vortex disruption, which eventually leading to periods of extreme cold in the northern mid-latitudes (see Coumou’s Perspective). —HJS
abstract
The Arctic is warming at twice the global average rate, and severe winter weather is reported to be on the rise in many densely populated mid-latitude areas, but there is no agreement on whether to do so. whether there is a physical connection between the two phenomena. We use observational analysis to show that little-known stratospheric polar vortex (SPV) disruptions related to wave reflection and SPV stretching are associated with extreme cold in regions of the world. parts of Asia and North America, including the recent February 2021 Texas cold snap and increasingly in the satellite age. We then use forced numerical modeling experiments with fall snow cover and Arctic sea ice trends to establish a physical link between Arctic variability and SPV elongation and related surface effects.
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Read more: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.abi9167
Colder winters are clearly a sign of global warming. Let’s hope governments get global warming under control, before we all freeze to death.
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