Skip to main content

Cyclones in the Pacific made it snow in Rome, and soon that weather will hit the U.S.

[ad_1]


A butterfly in the form of two tropical cyclones flapped its wings in the Pacific, and now Rome is covered in a dusting of snow.



First, some pictures of that (since that’s partly why you’re all here):


But wait! There’s more to this story than a few pretty pictures of snowy Roman roofs. There’s this sweet gif:


That’s the polar vortex splitting into two vortices earlier this month. Normally the vortex swirls around the North Pole, only occasionally dipping down into lower latitudes. But in mid-February, two tropical cyclones formed and started pumping heat into the atmosphere. That warming destabilized the polar vortex and forced it to split, which hasn’t happened in five years.



One of those sister vortices headed down toward eastern Europe and caused record-breaking cold snaps there, along with the snow in Rome. Normally, Europe gets most of its weather patterns off the Atlantic Ocean—winds generally travel around the world from west to east—and that makes most of the continent warmer than equivalent latitudes in North America. But when that vortex descended, it interrupted the normal weather pattern.



Similarly, most of the U.S. has had unusually high temperatures in the last week because we’re in a La Niña year, when we tend to have warmer winters. But the other half of that polar vortex is coming for us. Kind of.



If you live in the Western U.S., meteorologists predict you’ll see snow by mid-week. The Rockies will definitely get hit, and the Southern California mountains could see a foot of snow. Most lower-lying areas will only get a few inches.



Then the vortex is going to spread across the rest of the country. The northern Midwest looks like it’ll get some flakes, though if you’re south of Minnesota you’ll probably just get rain.



As for the Northeast, there will either be lots of snow or lots of rain. It’s too early to tell. Warmer air over the Atlantic could shift westward and make the temperature too high to produce any significant snowfall, but if the moving vortex is strong enough to push that out to sea there could be some flakes. The National Weather Service is cautioning that this could be a major storm (with lots of flooding) either way.


That won’t be until the end of this week, though, and the forecast will firm up in the meantime. Until then, remember that weather is an insanely complex system of moving parts, and it’s honestly amazing that meteorologists can forecast it at all. So don’t blame your local weatherperson if you get several inches of rain this week instead of a snow day. Blame the chaos of the universe, as always.




[ad_2]

Written By Sara Chodosh

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ice technicians are the secret stars of the Winter Olympics

[ad_1] The emphasis of this year's two-week-long Winter Olympic Games has been placed squarely on the Olympians themselves. After all, the stated purpose of the international competition is to bring together the world’s greatest athletes in a nail-biting competition across fifteen different winter sports. But before the curlers, skiers, and skaters even arrived in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the Olympians of the ice technician world were already a few weeks deep in a competition of their own. Mark Callan of the World Curling Federation and Markus Aschauer of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation both say they’re hoping to make the best ice the Winter Olympics have ever seen. To transform the barren concrete jungle of existing tracks and arenas into an ice- and snow-covered wonderland is an enormous undertaking. And it takes a keen understanding of the physics and chemistry that keeps frozen precipitation pristine. Curling Callan has been making and maintaining ic...
Post a Comment
Read more

With Operation Popeye, the U.S. government made weather an instrument of war

[ad_1] It was a seasonably chilly afternoon in 1974 when Senators Claiborne Pell, a Democrat from Rhode Island, and Clifford Case, a Republican from New Jersey, strode into the chambers of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations for a classified briefing. While the meeting was labeled “top secret,” the topic at hand was rather mundane: They were there to discuss the weather. More specifically, Pell, the chairman of the now-defunct subcommittee for Oceans and International Environment, and his colleague were about to learn the true extent of a secret five-year-old cloud seeding operation meant to lengthen the monsoon season in Vietnam, destabilize the enemy, and allow the United States to win the war. Though it cycled through several names in its history, "Operation Popeye" stuck. Its stated objectives—to ensure Americans won the Vietnam War—were never realized, the revelation that the U.S. government played God with weather-altering warfare changed history. The...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to avoid the mid-movie bathroom break

[ad_1] Long movies and the urge to pee have been linked since the early days of cinema. Sixty-three years before Avengers: Endgame and its three-hour runtime, moviegoers settled in for nearly four hours of The Ten Commandments . “There will be an intermission,” director Cecil B. DeMille announced during the movie’s introduction. And audiences’ bladders were relieved. On average, movies aren’t getting longer, but they also don’t come with a predetermined bathroom break. That means when nature calls, you’ve got to either sit in growing discomfort or gamble on the best time to run to the restroom. But it doesn’t have to be this way, and for most people, setting your body to “do not disturb” is fairly simple. Go before the show The first piece of advice is also the easiest: pee before the movie starts. Generally, healthy adults urinate every 3-4 hours, so the longer a movie runs, the more urgent it becomes to reset your internal p...
Post a Comment
Read more