Icicles hang from the handlebars of a bicycle outside a coffee shop in Harmony, Pa.WASHINGTON – Cold and snow keep battering the Midwest and East, and even Atlanta was temporarily paralyzed. California has been bone dry. Alaska set heat records.
The wild winter somehow became even more wicked Thursday morning when the national average temperature plunged to a brutal 11 degrees — the lowest temperature of a season of extremes
A weather weary nation asks a simple question: Why?
The answer is the jet stream, the river of air that dictates our weather. Normally the jet stream stays in Canada or the northern U.S., going west to east in a somewhat straight line. But this winter it has plunged south, creating high pressure ridges and low pressure troughs and taking cold polar air south and east and leaving warm, dry weather to the west.
“We are having an unusual jet stream that’s giving us crazy cold weather in the East and the ridiculously resilient ridge as it’s called in California,” said Weather Underground meteorology director Jeff Masters.