This is out of Stanford.

What I am hoping to have readers understand about this entry is the fact polar vortexes splitting is less normal than a stable vortex system.

From 1989 to 1998, (click here) there were no split vortex events in midwinter. But in recent decades these events have been happening more frequently. This animation shows the polar vortex splitting in 2009.

The current membership of the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) is 195 (click here). They receive reports from thousands of other scientists and compile an international report from these sources. All in all, there are scientists in the tens of thousands attempting to cover the geophysics of Earth. They could use some attention to the specialty to attract more people into the specialty.

...AS: We don’t quite know why the polar vortex doesn’t affect the Pacific basin, but we have some initial hypotheses. We think it has something to do with the location of the jets in the two basins. In the Atlantic basin, the jet stream is located at higher latitudes. In the Pacific basin, it’s closer to the equator....