'Ready or Not' the Polar Vortex returns.HT: The weather network. After a brief warm up, people across the country are being told to prepare for the oh so beloved return of the polar vortex this week.
Temperatures will significantly plummet in areas east of the Rockies throughout the week.
"Areas spanning from Calgary to Toronto will be 10 to 15°C below normal this week," says Weather Network meteorologist Brian Dillon. "Regions east of Toronto will be colder starting on Monday. However, with the lack of moisture through the Prairies and Ontario, there will be no big snow storms for the next five days."
This past weekend has already been a cold one for the Prairies and that trend is expected to continue through a large part of the week.
"Cold air is expected to infiltrate Ontario on Monday, while getting progressively cooler throughout the week," says Monica Vaswani, another meteorologist at The Weather Network.
WHAT EXACTLY IS A POLAR VORTEX?
The polar vortex is by no means something new or something rare. It is a permanent atmospheric feature all year round existing at the North and South Poles. They are a circulation (on a planetary scale, not a mesoscale like a tornado, so it’s big) and are located from the middle troposphere to the stratosphere so it is an upper level phenomenon. The polar vortices are strongly reliant on large scale temperature gradients so in the winter, they are at their strongest due to the temperature gradient between the equatorial regions and the poles. The term “polar vortex” has been used in scientific papers since the 1940’s.
Here's a brilliant explanation by Weather Network meteorologist Doug Gillham about what the polar vortex is.
No comments:
Post a Comment