A big link between climate change and severe weather may be lurking 30,000 feet above your head. More and more scientists are interested in the links among the increasingly weird behavior of the polar jet stream and the disappearance of ice and snow in the Arctic and other extreme weather trends…Rutgers University atmospheric scientist Jennifer Francis thinks there is a clear climate change factor in the jet stream’s wobbliness: the warming of the Arctic. Temperatures are rising in the Arctic regions faster than anywhere else in the world, an effect called “Arctic amplification” that may be due to the fact that as sea ice melts it exposes darker water that absorbs more heat then the reflective ice.
Newsroom Home / theweek.com