Researchers have identified a weather event that caused an unusually extreme cold wave to hit Europe and Asia during the winter of 2018, which could help atmospheric scientists better predict similar events in the future, according to a new study.
A wave of extremely cold air hit Eurasia in late February 2018, lasting for a month while temperatures broke record lows across Europe. The extreme cold came from a splitting of a cluster of air high above the Arctic, called the polar vortex.
Weather forecast models didn’t anticipate the stratospheric warming in 2018 until the start of February – only 12 days before it happened – which prevented the models from anticipating the extreme cold that followed.
Now, a new study in AGU’s Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres finds a cyclone-induced chain of events warmed the stratosphere and caused the Arctic polar vortex to split in two, causing the extreme cold.
The information could help weather forecasts detect stratospheric warmings earlier and anticipate future cold waves, according to the study’s authors.
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