Move Over Polar Vortex: A Tale of Two Extreme Storms

Nature has really been dishing out the misery to millions of people on opposite sides of the Atlantic in the past few days. It might be tempting to conclude that the cold and snow that has reached from Mississippi to Maine this week (as seen in the animation of satellite images above), and the extreme storms that have caused devastating flooding in the United Kingdom, each are separate examples of the kind of weather mayhem that just happens to occur from time to time. But this winter, these events have not been a time-to-time phenomenon. The cold and snow on one side, and intense wind and rain storms on the other, have come one after the other, starting in late December. So how unusual is that, and what's going on? If a new scientific analysis is correct, the repeated bouts of extreme weather on either side of the Atlantic are indeed unusual — and both are manifestations of a chain of climatic "teleconnections" that reach half way around the globe and all the way to the tropics. According to the new analysis, produced this week by the U.K.'s Met Office, they are tied together by a distorted and, in some places, unusually fast jet stream, abnormally warm sea surface temperatures in the West Pacific, and by a particularly intense polar vortex — not a weak one, as has been widely reported before. And the analysis does not stop there. It also raises the possibility that the extreme weather may have gotten a boost from us, through human-caused climate change. The report itself was cautious in its conclusions about climate change links, pointing out possible connections and saying that more research is necessary. But the head of the Met Office, Julia Slingo, went a little further. Here's what she told reporters at a press briefing on Feb. 10 about what's been happening (as quoted in the British newspaper the Independent):