Scientists say January's bonkers weather is thanks to a mix of natural weather weirdness with some help from human-caused climate change
Much of what’s causing problems worldwide is coming out of a roiling Pacific Ocean, transported by a wavy jet stream, experts said.
Maue said the big driver is a three-year La Nina—natural temporary cooling of the equatorial Pacific Ocean that alters world weather patterns—that just won’t quit. It is creating literal waves in the weather systems that ripple across the globe. And on certain parts of the waves are storms where the atmospheric pressure drops low and quickly, called bomb cyclones, that are quite wet, and they travel on atmospheric waves that transport the weather called the jet stream.
In addition to La Nina, a different natural temporary weather event called the Madden-Julian Oscillation enhances storms in the western Pacific, Maue said. “You can think of it like a jump rope. When you start to flick it at one end, that ripple goes through the whole jump rope eventually,” Francis said Wednesday. “And so it could be that the waving as such, being perhaps driven in the Pacific, could be accentuating it also over Europe.”
This extreme weather has “a silver lining,” especially with the record heat in Europe in January easing winter heating fuel crunches caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, said Colorado meteorologist Bob Henson of Yale Climate Connections. And California, where there’s been a more than 20-year megadrought that worsens wildfires, is getting much-needed rain and snow — too much of it, actually.
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