Arctic Warming and Cold Weather

Austin Tang — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 14:29:19 +0000

What’s Up With This Big Freeze? Some Scientists See Climate Change Link

Arctic spring in south Spitsbergen. Around the fjord Hornsund.

A warming Arctic can stretch the polar vortex, a high-altitude air ribbon, one says. The “wobble” can disrupt the jet stream, causing extreme cold in the East.

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Pedestrians walked the snow-covered streets of Jersey City, N.J., during last month’s winter storm. Some scientists say there is a link between a warming planet and the recent frigid temperatures. Credit…Aristide Economopoulos for The New York Times

By Eric Niiler

Feb. 7, 2026, 5:03 a.m. ET

If the planet is getting warmer, why is it so cold this winter?

The seeming contradiction comes up often when talking to Judah Cohen, a research scientist at M.I.T. who has been studying how global warming might also be causing colder winters in the eastern United States.

The idea, explained Dr. Cohen, is that a warming Arctic can cause a high-altitude ribbon of air called the polar vortex to stretch and wobble. That wobble can affect the flow of the jet stream that controls much of the atmospheric conditions over the United States, causing waves of high and low pressure that affect our daily weather.

For weeks, a mass of frigid air over the North Pole has dipped into eastern North America, bringing record cold temperatures for a prolonged period. In the West, a ridge of warm, dry air has stalled for weeks, panicking ski resort operators and prompting concerns for communities that rely on a healthy snowpack for drinking water in the summer months.

The polar vortex stretched and wobbled in February 2021, causing a prolonged deep freeze that killed 248 people in Texas and knocked out power for millions. The same wobble reappeared in the winter of 2024-2025 and again last month, causing blizzard conditions across the East and an icy blast.

Dr. Cohen expects the grip of cold temperatures to continue throughout February.

“It’s weird what’s going on now in the stratosphere,” Dr. Cohen said. “These stretching events happen every winter, but just how the pattern is stuck is really remarkable.”

Climate warming in the Arctic is causing this disruption of the polar vortex, Dr. Cohen said. With more snowfall in Siberia and melting sea ice in the Barents and Kara seas, just north of Norway and Russia, the ocean is feeding more heat into the atmosphere, setting up a weather pattern that leads to a burst of extreme cold in North America.

Dr. Cohen cowrote a study in the journal Science last year that linked the stretching of the polar vortex to more frequent severe winter weather in the United States in the past decade. A new analysis by Dr. Cohen and colleagues finds that a warming Arctic is also making the wobble in the polar vortex last longer.

“This is very consistent with this winter,” he said.

Not all scientists agree.

“These are interesting ideas,” said Russell Blackport, a research scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada. “But I’m very skeptical. When I look at these papers, they’re often not that convincing.”

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Snow

Austin Tang — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 17:57:17 +0000

Snow consists of individual ice crystals that grow while suspended in the atmosphere—usually within clouds—and then fall, accumulating on the ground where they undergo further changes.^[2] It consists of frozen crystalline water throughout its life cycle, starting when, under suitable conditions, the ice crystals form in the atmosphere, increase to millimeter size, precipitate and accumulate on surfaces, then metamorphose in place, and ultimately melt, slide or sublimate away.

Snowstorms organize and develop by feeding on sources of atmospheric moisture and cold air. Snowflakes nucleate around particles in the atmosphere by attracting supercooled water droplets, which freeze in hexagonal-shaped crystals. Snowflakes take on a variety of shapes, basic among these are platelets, needles, columns and rime. As snow accumulates into a snowpack, it may blow into drifts. Over time, accumulated snow metamorphoses, by sintering, sublimation and freeze-thaw. Where the climate is cold enough for year-to-year accumulation, a glacier may form. Otherwise, snow typically melts seasonally, causing runoff into streams and rivers and recharging groundwater.

Major snow-prone areas include the polar regions, the northernmost half of the Northern Hemisphere and mountainous regions worldwide with sufficient moisture and cold temperatures. In the Southern Hemisphere, snow is confined primarily to mountainous areas, apart from Antarctica.^[3]

Snow affects such human activities as transportation: creating the need for keeping roadways, wings, and windows clear; agriculture: providing water to crops and safeguarding livestock; sports such as skiing, snowboarding, and snowmachine travel; and warfare. Snow affects ecosystems, as well, by providing an insulating layer during winter under which plants and animals are able to survive the cold.^[1]

Precipitation

Snow develops in clouds that themselves are part of a larger weather system. The physics of snow crystal development in clouds results from a complex set of variables that include moisture content and temperatures. The resulting shapes of the falling and fallen crystals can be classified into a number of basic shapes and combinations thereof. Occasionally, some plate-like, dendritic and stellar-shaped snowflakes can form under clear sky with a very cold temperature inversion present.^[4]

Cloud formation

Snow clouds usually occur in the context of larger weather systems, the most important of which is the low-pressure area, which typically incorporate warm and cold fronts as part of their circulation. Two additional and locally productive sources of snow are lake-effect (also sea-effect) storms and elevation effects, especially in mountains.

Low-pressure areas

Mid-latitude cyclones are low-pressure areas which are capable of producing anything from cloudiness and mild snow storms to heavy blizzards.^[5] During a hemisphere’s fall, winter, and spring, the atmosphere over continents can be cold enough through the depth of the troposphere to cause snowfall. In the Northern Hemisphere, the northern side of the low-pressure area produces the most snow.^[6] For the southern mid-latitudes, the side of a cyclone that produces the most snow is the southern side.

Fronts

A cold front, the leading edge of a cooler mass of air, can produce frontal snowsqualls—an intense frontal convective line (similar to a rainband), when temperature is near freezing at the surface. The strong convection that develops has enough moisture to produce whiteout conditions at places which the line passes over as the wind causes intense blowing snow.^[7] This type of snowsquall generally lasts less than 30 minutes at any point along its path, but the motion of the line can cover large distances. Frontal squalls may form a short distance ahead of the surface cold front or behind the cold front where there may be a deepening low-pressure system or a series of trough lines which act similar to a traditional cold frontal passage. In situations where squalls develop post-frontally, it is not unusual to have two or three linear squall bands pass in rapid succession separated only by 25 miles (40 kilometers), with each passing the same point roughly 30 minutes apart. In cases where there is a large amount of vertical growth and mixing, the squall may develop embedded cumulonimbus clouds resulting in lightning and thunder which is dubbed thundersnow.

A warm front can produce snow for a period as warm, moist air overrides below-freezing air and creates precipitation at the boundary. Often, snow transitions to rain in the warm sector behind the front.^[7]

Lake and ocean effects

Main article: Lake-effect snow

Lake-effect snow is produced during cooler atmospheric conditions when a cold air mass moves across long expanses of warmer lake water, warming the lower layer of air which picks up water vapor from the lake, rises up through the colder air above, freezes, and is deposited on the leeward (downwind) shores.^[8]^[9]

The same effect occurring over bodies of salt water is termed ocean-effect or bay-effect snow. The effect is enhanced when the moving air mass is uplifted by the orographic influence of higher elevations on the downwind shores. This uplifting can produce narrow but very intense bands of precipitation which may deposit at a rate of many inches of snow each hour, often resulting in a large amount of total snowfall.^[10]

The areas affected by lake-effect snow are called snowbelts. These include areas east of the Great Lakes, the west coasts of northern Japan, the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, and areas near the Great Salt Lake, Black Sea, Caspian Sea, Baltic Sea, and parts of the northern Atlantic Ocean.^[11]

Mountain effects

Orographic or relief snowfall is created when moist air is forced up the windward side of mountain ranges by a large-scale wind flow. The lifting of moist air up the side of a mountain range results in adiabatic cooling, and ultimately condensation and precipitation. Moisture is gradually removed from the air by this process, leaving drier and warmer air on the descending, or leeward, side.^[12] The resulting enhanced snowfall,^[13] along with the decrease in temperature with elevation,^[14] combine to increase snow depth and seasonal persistence of snowpack in snow-prone areas.^[1]^[15]

Mountain waves have also been found to help enhance precipitation amounts downwind of mountain ranges by enhancing the lift needed for condensation and precipitation.^[16]

for more info, go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow

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