5 Key Climate Change Terms to Know to Master Modern Weather Talk - Bloomberg

5 Key Climate Change Terms to Know to Master Modern Weather Talk - Bloomberg

Can We Talk About the Weather? Five Key Climate Terms to Know
Residents shovel snow from the street in front of a home in Austin, Texas, in 2021. Photographer: Thomas Ryan Allison/Bloomberg

People the world over talk about the weather. But it’s getting harder to follow the lingo as climate change messes with normal patterns, resulting in more frequent extremes of hot and cold, and wet and dry. Here are some terms to know for a modern discussion about the weather.

The polar vortexes are girdles of swirling cold air and low pressure surrounding the Earth’s poles. “Vortex” refers to the counter-clockwise wind pattern that helps lock the cold air near the poles. The polar vortexes are always there, but we often hear about the Arctic one as a cause of frigid weather in the US and portions of Europe and Asia. That’s because about once every other year, the low-pressure system weakens and a portion of it breaks off. This interferes with the jet stream’s separation of warm and cold air, and the jet stream gets distorted. Under these conditions, once a high-pressure system gets in the way, the Arctic air pushes south in the shape of a bubble. In February 2021 the northern polar vortex gave way and released a blast of icy air that reached all the way to Texas, crippling the electric grid and killing at least 210 people. Some models have predicted that further global warming will lead to a weakening of the polar vortexes and the jet streams that usually hold them in place.
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