Those warm temperatures are expected to track east along the jet stream over the weekend, Masters said. Meanwhile, the ridge hung over the west coast of the U.S., extending all the way to Alaska, bringing warm dry weather to those areas and making it possible for areas of Alaska to be hotter than Texas. When Nuri hit the jet stream, it created a trough that dipped far south over the eastern U.S., essentially lowering the border of where Arctic air can travel and allowing polar blasts to penetrate far south. Waves in the jet stream are described as having ridges, with high and low points. It gave it a big whip,” said Jennifer Frances, a research professor at Rutgers University and the author of “ Rapid Arctic Warming and Wacky Weather: Are They Linked?” “If you think of the jet stream as a rope and you take that rope and whip it, that’s what. The impact forced the normally fairly straight, eastward-moving jet stream - which acts as the barrier between frigid Arctic temperatures and warmer weather in the south - to bulge, creating large waves. The jet stream is the fast-moving river of air high in the atmosphere that affects most of the weather seen in North America. “Eleven days ago, we saw Super Typhoon Nuri, one of the most intense storms ever seen in the Pacific, go north to the waters west of Alaska,” Jeff Masters, the director of meteorology at Weather Underground, told Al Jazeera.Īs Nuri tracked north along the coast of Japan, it effectively ran headfirst into the jet stream - like an “800-pound gorilla,” Masters said. Scientists have said that warmer ocean temperatures contribute to more frequent and intense extreme weather, making it likely that climate change strengthened Nuri. Climate-change-induced ocean warming in the Pacific turned Typhoon Nuri into a supertyphoon that punched the jet stream off its course, bringing the North Pole's weather down over the eastern U.S., according to experts. Ironically, though, it was warmer-than-usual temperatures that likely sent the cold weather southward. Media have referred to the strange weather pattern as the polar vortex and the Arctic blast. And overnight Wednesday, more than 5 feet of snow descended on parts of western New York state. Residents in a swath of the country's east have been met with subfreezing temperatures over the past week. Arctic conditions in the eastern United States this week may have been the result of climate-change-induced effects on the jet stream that regulates weather over the Northern Hemisphere, according to meteorologists.
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