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An early disruption event is starting for the Polar Vortex
- an1sotropy 4y agoPossibly off-topic: the variety of color scales used here is wild, and interesting. It looks like of them may have pre-established meaning within the community of expertise (like the rainbow-ish one for the image after "Overall, no sign of any influence from below."), but many of them are versions of a double-ended scale (white in middle, at 0), but there's a wide variety of double-ended scales. I wonder if this less disorienting to the domain experts?
- anigbrowl 4y agoI'm kinda used to them, there's a 'library' of color scales used in scientific visualization that aims to balance contrast with complexity and also be accessible to color-blind people. Matplotlib docs have good reference material on this iirc.
- an1sotropy 4y agoRight, but with those goals in mind a lot people say "so viridis it is!" and leave it at that; but there's nothing like viridis on that page, which is intriguing.
- anigbrowl 4y agoI mean why would you ever want anything else XD I think the most interesting scale on that weather page is the red-blue one where the extremes of both then veer into other colors - often the same colors, but that's OK because they will only appear within 'moats' of red or blue covering the typical temperature distributions. So you have increasingly deep shades of blue or red to indicate very cold or hot weather, and then purple to white within those areas for record-setting-breaking extremes. I guess you could just do normal vs deviant scales, but given our sensitivity to the dichotomies of weather people have an inherent need to know what sort of extreme it is.
- an1sotropy 4y agoYes I noticed that too, and I agree with your guess about why it’s ok. Fundamentally the functions here are smoothly varying, which avoids ambiguities and some some contrast effects that affect chloropleth maps. Long path length in colorspace == more opportunities for nearby discrimination, even if with overlapping hues
- sudden_dystopia 4y agoEurope can’t catch a break. God speed.
- xwdv 4y ago
- synergyS 4y agoEnergy prices skyrocketed in 2022 :(
- croes 4y agoThe bigger problem is the food and energy prices for poorer countries. Europe won't have a real problem compared to them.
- xwdv 4y agoWas told it’s not a problem, still plenty of cheap food to eat and no one will really freeze to death anyway because they have alternative ways to stay warm.
- croes 4y agoNot all of them https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-07/pakistan-s-1-billion-gas-tender-flop-to-worsen-energy-crisis https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-07/pakistan-... That's also the reason many states do not participate in sanctions against Russia.
- swayvil 4y agoIf you aren't poor then you have nothing to worry about.
- btilly 4y agoA cold snap and limited supplies of gas would be miserable for Europe. However the backlash against mobilization will hopefully take Putin out of power, end the Ukraine war, and result in fresh supplies of gas for Europe.
- tomohawk 4y agoIt's a hoot that the weather has been made to be so dramatic with terms like "polar vortex" and named storms for what used to be thought of as fairly pedestrian occurrences.
- samatman 4y agoThe imputation of drama to "polar vortex" is entirely in how you see it. "Polar" refers to the poles, in this case the North geometric pole, and "vortex" is an exact description of what wind is doing in a polar vortex. Storms have been given names since the early 19th century, so your "used to be" here is well beyond the threshold of living memory.
- tomohawk 4y agoTropical cyclones have been given names for a long time, but that's not what I was referring to. Now-a-days snowstorms and other run-of-the mill phenomena are given names. That's pretty recent. And is it really "entirely" in how I see it? I'm referring to the breathless intonation of modern weather talking heads as they discuss normal weather phenomena as a "polar vortex" (in scare quotes). They used to just say it was going to snow more or be colder. The use of "polar vortex" in that context definitely amps up the drama.
- abracadaniel 4y agoBecause polar vortex storms aren’t a very common phenomenon. Aside from the past couple of years, the previous occurrences seem to be 2014-2015, 2013-2014, and then 1985 prior to that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_vortex https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_vortex So, we have a very rare, very extreme weather phenomenon that’s hit multiple in the last 10 years after decades of static behavior. The wiki on the Polar Vortex even attributes the 2013 storm with popularizing the term due to the heavy reporting.
- tjr225 4y agoAnd yet if you talk to any older person they’ll tell you winter used to be worse/more snow/etc, so perhaps the heavy reporting is the real culprit.
- baxtr 4y ago
- jason-phillips 4y agoSmooth surfing with Brave browser here.
- pvwj 4y agoI agree, this was ultimately unreadable for me on IOS.
- layer8 4y agoNo ads here, using AdGuard Pro.
- ASalazarMX 4y agoAlso no ads using Lockdown (localhost VPN) on iOS. Seems like quite a decent site without ads.
- haunter 4y agoNo ads on iOS w/ Firefox Focus as content blocker
- mongrelion 4y agoI saw zero ads on my phone thanks to running pihole at home
- focusedone 4y agoThere were ads on that page? (Firefox with uBO)
- midoridensha 4y agoWhy would anyone who frequents HN not know how to use an ad-blocker? Really a strange comment.
- BoGoToTo 4y ago
- bilsbie 4y ago
- TomSwirly 4y ago
- chess_buster 4y agoThank you.
- version_five 4y agoBoth the comment you replied to and its parent are throwaway and basically parallel imo. Rah rah climate change vs dismissing the link to climate change are both super boring at this point, but somehow one is presently the top comment and the othe dead.
- andrewxdiamond 4y agoOne of them is right.
- FollowingTheDao 4y agoExactly, and it's the climate change. https://www.ucdavis.edu/climate/definitions/what-is-the-polar-vortex https://www.ucdavis.edu/climate/definitions/what-is-the-pola...
- FollowingTheDao 4y ago
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- TT-392 4y agoSo.... it is gonna get colder than usual? Article is a bit vague if you don't feel like reading the whole thing start to end.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bertil 4y agoIt will get both unseasonably warm at times and have several days of biting cold at others. The original name for what we now call “Global warming“ or “climate change” was “climate unsettling”: balancing mechanisms that allowed seasons to have predictable temperature and precipitation (like El Niño) are being disrupted. The relatively small rise of average temperature (one degree) is enough to move airmass. Those block otherwise stable currents. Things aren’t where they are supposed to be.
- space_fountain 4y agoIsn’t it more that they aren’t where we expect them (plus higher energy systems tend to be more chaotic). There isn’t really any supposed to be when it comes to nature, just expected/precedented.
- abathur 4y agoWhile there is certainly no place an airmass is supposed to be, this framing makes it sound like the problem would go away if we just updated our expectations. Do you think the problem would go away if we updated our expectations?
- lmm 4y agoIf "the problem" is that we're expecting an unnatural level of consistency, yes, it would. (If you consider "the problem" to be that weather is chaotic, then of course the answer is no)
- space_fountain 4y ago
- yosito 4y agoI'd love to see an ELI5 summary of what this is predicting globally for the upcoming season. It's interesting, but hard for me not being trained in this domain to really understand how to interpret such detailed information.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Helmut10001 4y agoDue to a weakening of the polar weather system, there's a higher than usual chance of colder 'outbreaks' towards the US and Europe this winter.
- leke 4y agoWhat causes the polar weather system to weaken?
- schainks 4y agoOne thing that can cause it to weaken is extra snow over Siberia in the fall.
- Helmut10001 4y agoI think there are many different reasons, the bigger picture of course is climate change. More concretely, air is getting warmer at the North Pole (due to glacier/ice melt, open water reflecting less sun etc.), which reduces temperature gradients (those that fueled the Yet Stream that was responsible for the stable Polar Vortex). Grant scale of ocean water temperature change is another reason, and (more specifically) more chance for more snow in Siberia. The north pole weather system is connected to all other weather systems, so it is not easy to define a clear causal chain.
- kstenerud 4y agoWhen the polar vortex is strong, it maintains its cylindrical shape and keeps the cold air trapped within that cylinder at the pole (like those blowing air barriers on the doors to shops in the summer that blow air down and stop the cold air from escaping the store). When warmer air masses push into the polar region in the fall (which happens more often now due to global warming), it disrupts and weakens the polar vortex and leaves open channels for the cold air to escape during the winter. This cold air then cools parts of the Northern hemisphere, causing pockets of cold (generally to the South), while the warmer air also bunches up and causes pockets of warm (generally to the North). The end result is wild temperature and weather swings during Winter (colder in the Eastern USA and Europe - see the last two images in the article), and we're in for a doozy this year.
- singularity2001 4y agoIsn't it mostly all a give and take? Siberia gets more snow, Greenland less, then the pressure fronts swap again, etc. All in all the annual snow curves look rather narrowly distributed and severe weather seems to be over-dramatized? Even in the event of a (precedented) vortex collapse the predictions are not that dramatic, or am I misreading it?
- dls2016 4y ago> Isn't it mostly all a give and take? Water. A slight increase in global temperature means more water sloshing around in the atmosphere. Of course "the weather" is partially a result of how that water is distributed around the world... but in conjunction with a more "dynamic" atmosphere, this can lead to things like: weather events occurring in places they usually don't or more severe weather events or stranger timing than usual.
- enviclash 4y agoThis site is very unusual for climate or weather communication, and albeit interesting, it does not manage to bring a clear message to their audience.
- leke 4y agoYep, it would definitely benefit from a summary or simple English paragraph before the main text. It could actually prepare the reader for the more difficult comprehension.
- aaa_aaa 4y agoMan that temperature color scale is very annoying. Red hot is 7 degrees and -23 is pinkish? -23 and 14 has almost the same colors.
- lakomen 4y agoSo many ads and repeated pictures and ads and pictures. It's hard to read