7/26/2023 0 Comments Cold weather polar vortex![]() ![]() ![]() Like her circumnavigation of the globe, Francis’ research pushes boundaries. It wasn’t until Francis moved on to graduate school at the University of Washington, however, that she connected this research with climate change. When Francis returned to dry land, she switched majors and joined the meteorology department at San José State University, which had a treasure trove of data from the Arctic. In school she wanted to study dentistry, but changed her mind after her round-the-world sailing journey. “Other things can disrupt the polar vortex too, but it’s a very hot area of research,” she says, adding that the Texas storm is “consistent with the kinds of things we expect to see happen more often.”įrancis didn’t set out to become a climate scientist, although growing up in a small sailing town on the coast of Massachusetts did give her an early love of weather-watching. While Francis says it’s too soon to know if climate change played a direct role in last February’s freeze, she suspects global warming will increasingly disrupt the polar vortex and send bursts of intense cold southward. About 10 years ago, she began studying how rapid warming in the Arctic might have a ripple effect on lower latitudes. Temperatures there plunged 40 degrees Fahrenheit below normal and news reports asked the increasingly common question: Was this climate change ?įrancis appeared again and again in news stories about the deep freeze, in large part because she was one of the first scientists to link more frequent polar vortex disruptions to climate change. At that time, one offshoot descended over North America as far as Texas. saw firsthand the weather chaos that can follow. This phenomenon is at least vaguely familiar to any American who witnessed last year’s Winter Storm Uri, which killed hundreds of people in Texas and caused more than 4 million homes to lose electricity during a brutal storm.įrancis describes the polar vortex as a “spinning top” of cold air that normally hangs over the Arctic, but sometimes breaks into multiple mini-tops of freezing air that descend over North America, Europe and Asia.Īlmost exactly a year ago in February 2021, the polar vortex broke apart for nearly the whole winter and the U.S. Today, as a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts, she’s one of the world’s most prominent experts on the polar vortex. And accurate information about weather in the Arctic was sorely lacking.įrancis resolved to fill that gap. ![]() “Weather really controls your life when you’re living on a sailboat,” Francis explains. The couple’s biggest challenge - more than lacking modern amenities like GPS or cellphones - was that the further north they went, the less reliable weather forecasts became. “At the time, we were told that we’ve gone farther north than any other American sailboat,” Francis says. In 1985, during an extended break from college, she and her husband-to-be completed a five-year sailing adventure that took them to places like Cape Horn, around the bottom of New Zealand and, eventually, above the Arctic Circle. Jennifer Francis’ long relationship with the extremes and vagaries of Arctic weather began in a sailboat. Unlikely creatures reveal the story of early Arctic seas Lexi Krupp ![]()
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