What were the specific weather effect that occurred that led to the winter storm that battered Texas?
In: Earth Science
There is a mass of really frigging cold air above the north pole, called the polar vortex. Around it, there is a ring of really fast moving air, called jet stream. The jet stream acts like a barrier that keeps the polar vortex up north and warm air south of it. Since the jet stream is essentially just wind though, it won’t always stay neatly above Canada. Sometimes the stream is weaker, and begins to meander like a wet noodle. That is when some of the cold northern air is able to penetrate further south and surprise people. And as a bonus, climate change is affecting the atmospheric winds, so you can expect more of this to happen again in the coming decades.
The climate in the US is often split in two with a northern and southern climate. This is caused by general weather patterns of rising and sinking air meaning that northern air circulate on its own and southern air circulate on its own. Where they meet and both flow up there is also a jet stream formed that circulates air at high speed around the globe. The Northern weather patterns can become quite cold as they extend all the way to the North pole. The southern ones go all the way to the equator and is therefore quite hot. But occationally we do get dramatic shifts in these weather patterns. So in 1989, 2011 and now in 2021 we did see the boarder between these weather patterns and the jet stream go down far into the Mexican Gulf. This meant that weather you normally associate with New York and Michigan was now found in Texas. This is not uncommon in some states like Utah, Arizona and Nevada which are used to these types of events as they are further North. But these events are infrequent in Texas only happening about once a decade and their infrastructure were not designed to handle it.
Now although it is very hard to connect specific weather events to climate because the weather is so unpredictable we have noticed that the jet stream moves around a lot more the hotter it gets. And just the few degrees increased heat in the last decades in noticable and the jet stream is a lot more active now then it used to be. So this is the type of events we predict more of as the globe heats up. It is the reason why people stopped calling it global warming and started to call it climate change because a warmer globe does not always mean that your local climate will be warmer. The models predict more snow in Texas with a warmer global climate because of events like this.
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