Our one-and-one-half week of winter

This is a follow-up to my previous two posts in which I showed that even as very cold Arctic air was pushing deep into parts of the continental United States, abnormal warmth was occurring around much of the globe, including in the Arctic itself.

That cold Arctic air pushing southward sometimes happens when the polar vortex that encircles the Arctic and traps cold air at high latitudes gets disrupted and allows cold air to escape and push far south of where it would normally be. That can happen because the jet stream that controls the vortex gets "wavy" and bulges in spots or gets otherwise disrupted. And that in turn can be caused by an abnormally warm climate that affects the jet stream. So paradoxically, the kind of transient deep freeze we saw in the U.S. might itself be more likely thanks to global warming. Whenever conditions are unusually cold in one region, it's always a good idea to look around and see that's happening in other regions. That's what my previous two posts did.

Whatever the reason for that burst of cold Arctic air, it's now over. That didn't last long. The graphic below (click on it for a larger view) shows that pretty much the entire U.S. is now experiencing abnormal warmth, as is most of Canada and some of the Arctic. Same for the northern half of Africa and most of Asia.

Temperature anomaly 2026-02-12

 

As I previously explained, the graphic shows not absolute temperature but rather temperature anomaly, which means deviation from normal. In this case "normal" is defined as a 1979-2000 baseline. Colors map to the scale on the right, which is in degrees Celsius. As is standard for measuring surface temperature, this refers to temperature 2 meters (about 6 feet) above the ground.

See my previous two posts for more information about this and where the data comes from. The images are updated daily, so you can always get a current view of what's happening around the globe.

I would just finally note that the short-lived influx of Arctic air occurred in the context of a very mild winter, and that's an increasingly recurring phenomenon. The serious cold of winter I remember from my childhood now seems to last just two or three weeks. Late December was quite warm, with a high in the upper 70s in southeast Kansas on Christmas day. That's bonkers. Now that the Arctic air has departed, we're having a long run of temperatures in the 60s. In February, for gawdsake. This hardly even counts as winter.

Copyright (C) 2026 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved 

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