# St Barts Forums > Storm Tracker >  >  oh boy...I can hear the whining now....

## MIke R

*America could get more and more super-freezing winters*

*Super-bitter winters might be something our grandchildren will frequently complain about.*



Robert Brigs shovels snow in Chicago. Credit: John Gress Newscom | Reuters





For  the eastern U.S., this winter and spring have been like a brutal  revival of the Ice Ages. One strong blast of polar weather after another  sent temperatures plummeting deep into the country, and as yesterday's  miserable weather attests, this frigid free-for-all has life in it  still.
As unusually cold as it's been, super-bitter winters might  be something our grandchildren will frequently complain about. That's  because the pattern in the jet stream that routed arctic air down to the  East could become more common as the climate changes. Conversely,  America's West might expect more of the kind of hot weather that's now  causing droughts, high food prices, and a jacked-up risk of wildfires.


This  unpleasant assessment comes from an international group of scientists  who just released a study examining the past and the future of the jet  stream. Working with lake-sediment cores and climate models, they  discovered that the stream's pattern shifted about 4,000 years ago into a  "positive" or curvy phase  the same dynamic responsible for the  ongoing hot/cold divide in America. And the fact that the planet's poles  are warming faster than the equator could "enhance the pattern so there  will be more frequent or more severe winter weather extremes or both,"  they predict.
Here are a few more specifics about what the future could bode, explained by University of Utah geochemist Gabe Bowen:
"In  [the positive phase], the jet stream is very sinuous. As it comes in  from Hawaii and the Pacific, it tends to rocket up past British Columbia  to the Yukon and Alaska, and then it plunges down over the Canadian  plains and into the eastern United States. The main effect in terms of  weather is that we tend to have cold winter weather throughout most of  the eastern U.S. You have a freight car of arctic air that pushes down  there."
Bowen says that when the jet stream is curvy, the West  tends to have mild, relatively warm winters, and Pacific storms tend to  occur farther north. So in Northern California, the Pacific Northwest  and parts of western interior, it tends to be relatively dry, but tends  to be quite wet and unusually warm in northwest Canada and Alaska."
To  help visualize these atmospheric fluctuations, the researchers  generated this pair of maps showing a typical year under a curvy jet  stream. The top map displays winter temperatures as regions of biting  cold (blue) to comfortable warmth or unusual heat (orange and red). The  bottom displays precipitation patterns as wetter (blue) and drier  (orange) zones. This past winter hewed close to these models, although  it was drier than average in California and abnormally frigid in the  upper Midwest:

Zhongfang Liu, Tianjin Normal University, China



The scientists' report is especially timely in that the nation just endured its coldest March  since 2002. The average temperature across the contiguous states was  40.5 degrees, about 1 degree below the 20th-century norm. For a few more  facts about the past month's weather  for instance, it was the coldest  March on record in Vermont  take a look at this graphic put out by the National Climatic Data Center:

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## Peter NJ

This Summer they are calling for brutal heat and humidity

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## MIke R

yeah I read that......that would be ok by me

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## NHDiane

So what else would we bitch about??   :Wink-slap:

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## Dennis

> So what else would we bitch about??



Maya's is impervious to climate change and the like.

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## NHDiane

Oh yeah, there's that!

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## NYCFred

This winter damn near did me in. I gotta litterbox train Jackson.

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## MIke R

> This winter damn near did me in. I gotta litterbox train Jackson.




get the grass boxes that people who have dogs on boats use.....Im told they work very well

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