Archives for 2014

A nor’easter may dump 4 to 12 inches of snow in most of northern and central New Jersey Wednesday and trigger major East Coast travel woes, according to forecasters. “It’s just going to be nasty traveling Wednesday, Wednesday night,” said David A. Robinson, the New Jersey state climatologist. “Even if it’s rain, it’s going to be a wind-swept rain, and where it snows, it’s going to obviously make for even worse travel…” Robinson, a geography professor at Rutgers University, said “the forecast warrants some the real careful attention.” The storm “definitely has (the) potential of having the most impact on New Jersey of any storm thus far” this season, he said.

“Historic” snowfalls have the US northeast this week, with Buffalo, New York under an astonishing 2.4m (8ft) of snow – enough to cause some roofs to cave in under the pressure…Scientists now have evidence that these persistent extreme weather patterns are increasing in their frequency, due to the rapid heating up of the Arctic that is changing the behaviour of the jet stream, and in turn, the polar vortex. And Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University, one of the leading US scientists studying the relationship between Arctic warming and changes in the jet stream, believes that it’s thanks to ‘global warming’ that northern hemisphere weather is becoming more extreme – and it’s not about to get any better.

Arctic conditions in eastern United States this week may have been the result of climate change-induced stressors on the jet stream that regulates weather over the northern hemisphere, according to meteorologists…Ironically, though, it was warmer-than-usual temperatures that likely sent the cold weather southwards. 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…”If you think of the jet stream as a rope and you take that rope and whip it, that’s what (Nuri did), it gave it a big whip,” said Jennifer Frances, research professor at Rutgers University and author of “Rapid Arctic warming and wacky weather: Are they linked?”

It may be the timeliest — and most troubling — idea in climate science. Back in 2012, two researchers with a particular interest in the Arctic, Rutgers’ Jennifer Francis and the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Stephen Vavrus, published a paper called “Evidence linking Arctic amplification to extreme weather in mid-latitudes.” In it, they suggested that the fact that the Arctic is warming so rapidly is leading to an unexpected but profound effect on the weather where the vast majority of us live — a change that, if their theory is correct, may have something to do with the extreme winter weather the U.S. has seen lately.