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Now let's get to some polar vortex myth-busting: - Not a storm: The polar vortex is not a storm, like a winter storm or blizzard; instead, it's a standard feature of the Earth's atmosphere. - It's ...
The term polar vortex can be used to describe two distinct phenomena; the stratospheric polar vortex, and the tropospheric polar vortex. The stratospheric and tropospheric polar vortices both rotate in the direction of the Earth's spin, but they are distinct phenomena that have different sizes, structures, seasonal cycles, and impacts on weather.
Vortices in the Earth's atmosphere are important phenomena for meteorology. They include mesocyclones on the scale of a few miles, tornadoes, waterspouts, and hurricanes. These vortices are often driven by temperature and humidity variations with altitude. The sense of rotation of hurricanes is influenced by the Earth's rotation.
" The polar vortex is a basic fixture of the Earth's atmosphere," AccuWeather Meteorologist La Troy Thornton said. As the name implies, the polar vortex phenomenon occurs at the Earth's poles.
The polar vortex is circled by the polar night jet. The warmer air can only move along the edge of the polar vortex, but not enter it. Within the vortex, the cold polar air becomes increasingly cold, due to a lack of warmer air from lower latitudes as well as a lack of energy from the Sun entering during the polar night. [112]
The Earth's weather is a consequence of its illumination by the Sun and the laws of thermodynamics. The atmospheric circulation can be viewed as a heat engine driven by the Sun's energy and whose energy sink, ultimately, is the blackness of space. The work produced by that engine causes the motion of the masses of air, and in that process it ...
Rossby waves in the Earth's atmosphere are easy to observe as (usually 4–6) large-scale meanders of the jet stream. When these deviations become very pronounced, masses of cold or warm air detach, and become low-strength cyclones and anticyclones , respectively, and are responsible for day-to-day weather patterns at mid-latitudes.
The discovery that GJ 1132b has an atmosphere is a key step in the search for life outside our solar system. Scientists confirm 'Earth-like' planet with atmosphere discovered 39 light-years from Earth