People and industry need to pay attention. There should also be hyper-vigilance with any travel industry, especially airlines. There is a lot of turbulence described in this article. NOAA and/or NASA needs to provide more details to the airline industry of episodes of erratic weather.
It is too early to declare Spring has arrived and all is well with the world. It ain't. People that have been struggling through horrible storms should not let their guard down. Not at all. The northern hemisphere is still in for trouble. Yes, this is trouble.
By Mark Torregrossa
The top of our atmosphere (click here) is about to warm dramatically. The warm-up usually sends a cold blob of air eventually into the eastern half of the U.S. and the Great Lakes region.
The stratosphere is the second layer in our atmosphere and lies about 50,000 feet above Earth. Years ago, researchers discovered what we now call a “Sudden Stratospheric Warming” or SSW for short.
When the stratosphere warms dramatically over the course of a few days, it ripples an influence down into the weather atmosphere, called the troposphere. Think of it as someone jumping on an old school waterbed - the older beds without the baffles. You jumped on the bed and waves traveled across the bed.
The same thing occurs when the stratosphere warms quickly and expands in thickness. The corresponding effect on the lower atmosphere is somewhat predictable.
Judah Cohen, director of Seasonal Forecasting at Verisk Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER), studies the effects of these Sudden Stratospheric Warmings. He says immediately after a SSW, a cold blob of air moves off the polar region and heads toward Siberia. While this shift of the cold blob is occurring on the other side of the globe, our part of the U.S. usually turns unusually warm. This scenario is indeed upon us with a mild to warm period coming over the next two weeks....
