Texas Climate Change and Severe Winter Weather
According to Metrologist estimates, the state of Texas experienced a devastating deep freeze last winter, resulting in up to $155 billion in damages and economic loss, and a new study published in the journal Science reveals links between the weather disaster that occurred in Texas last year and climate change in the Arctic.
The study, published in early September, discovered a link between Arctic temperatures and the Valentine’s Week Freeze that engulfed Texas this past February. According to the Texas Department of State Health Services, the extreme winter weather caused at least 210 deaths.
“Clearly, an intense occurrence like this is quite unusual in a state like Texas, so many people and policymakers are finding it difficult to react and take the threat seriously,” Meteorologist said. “One of the most serious risks people faced was a loss of heat in houses with no backup electricity or heat sources.”
Many Texas homes are inadequately insulated to withstand the intense cold that swept the state that week in February. Homes were flooded when pipes burst owing to the high cold, and some homeowners even had icicles form in their homes and apartment buildings, including one from Dallas, Texas, who posted a photo of icicles hanging from a ceiling fan on social media on Feb. 15.
The temperature at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport dropped to 2 degrees below zero in the early morning hours of Feb. 16 when Arctic air from the polar vortex poured into the region.
The polar vortex is a belt of strong westerly winds that sits between 10 and 30 miles above the North Pole and traps extremely cold air. Rising Arctic temperatures can cause a region of severe high pressure to form in the atmosphere surrounding the North Pole, “pushing” the polar vortex further south, into places like North America, Europe, and Asia, according to metrologists.
“Think of the strengthening high-pressure system over the arctic region as an expanding balloon, and the polar vortex as a pocket of air outside the balloon,”metrologists explained. “As the balloon fills with air, the pocket of air outside the balloon – the polar vortex – moves farther away, and in this case, it moves south into the mid-latitudes.”
According to Metrologist , the study’s principal author, in an interview with Weather, the research found that the severe weather in Texas was caused by what the scientists defined as a stretched polar vortex event.
Metrologist noted that extended polar vortex occurrences can occasionally cause the polar vortex to resemble a dumbbell, with one area of energy centered in North America and another in Asia.
While the February cold snap in Texas was remarkable, Cohen said there are many modern-day examples of stretched polar vortex occurrences in recent memory, and that at least one incident occurs almost every year, but not every event matches the magnitude of the one in Texas.
“The winter of 2013-14 is the poster child for these sorts of occurrences,” Cohen added. “It occurred several times that winter. It significantly contributed to the severe cold, particularly around the Great Lakes.”
The study published in Science also gave some further insight into these polar vortex occurrences, which may cause some concern because they are growing more often. The research, according to Cohen, reveals that the frequency of these occurrences has roughly doubled since the 1980s.
“Climate change has the potential to cause more heatwaves, floods disasters, drought, and wildfires in the West” . “There have been a lot of dramatic weather events this summer.”
“The premise was that climate change can lead to milder winters, less snowfall — that intuitively makes sense,” Cohen said, pointing out what may be a climate change fallacy. “As a result of our research, we have reached this surprising conclusion”. “This Arctic change has the potential to lead to more extreme winter weather occurrences, such as the Texas cold wave.”
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