Winter is coming early to much of the United States, as a super storm over the Aleutian Islands in Alaska is warping the jet stream, bringing frigid northern air down south.
Nuri, once a super-typhoon that recently passed close to Japan before dying down, is once again gaining strength over the Bering Sea, between Alaska and Russia. Meteorologists estimate the storm may now be the most powerful one on record to strike the region. The lowest pressure ever recorded for a storm over the Bering Sea was 824 millibars (mb), seen in October 1977. The remnants of Nuri have barely edged that out at 924 mb, if estimates are correct. By comparison, Hurricane Sandy that destroyed much of New Jersey and New York in 2012, had a pressure of 920 mb when it made landfall. Direct measurements of the pressure of the Bering Strait storm are challenging, due to the remote location of the storm, and few records of previous storms in the region are available.
Bombogenesis, a drop of pressure of 24 mb or more in a single 24-hour period, took place in the weather system. An unusually strong jet stream combined with the remains of the storm to create the powerful system currently sitting off the Alaskan coast.
"Over the Great Plains and Upper Midwest, a stronger cold front moving southward from Canada will begin to deliver much colder weather and winter-like conditions. The coldest weather of the season is expected to arrive by early next week for the northern Plains and Montana as a massive arctic surface high begins moving southward," the National Weather Service wrote on its Web site.
Warm air is expected to soon fill the skies of Alaska and Canada, pushing multiple large blasts of frigid air south, toward the eastern United States. A chain reaction between the weather system and the jet stream will likely result in wave after wave of cold Canadian air dropping down south. Frigid conditions throughout much of the eastern United States are expected to continue through the rest of November. A high pressure system over western states will keep that largely warm and dry, which could aggravate drought conditions in California and other states.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) researchers predicted earlier this year that El Niño, an atmospheric and oceanic phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean, would bring warm temperatures to the Atlantic coast of the United States. The odds of the formation developing are now reduced, potentially making early winter harsher than once believed.
The polar vortex, a weather phenomenon that brought record-cold temperatures to much of the nation in 2013, is not involved in this latest movement of chilly air.
