The Art of Polar Vortex Explanation · 11:03pm Mar 29th, 2019
New story out now. Check it out here:
I started writing this two months ago, when, as residents of some parts of the Northern Hemisphere may recall, it was rather chilly. This saw a return of headlines about the Polar Vortex and a resulting spectrum of science stories, and a twitterstorm of science communicators trying to both correct misconceptions and cash in on the interest in a science topic.
When reporting the weather, journalists face a problem. If they write a straightforward accurate article headlined IT’S COLD OUTSIDE, then their readers might very well ask why they are bothering to read about something that they already know. In fact they won’t even get the chance, as such an article pitch wouldn’t make it past the editor. There has to be a story. It has to tell the reader something new. So you need find an underlying cause, add some characters and a bit of conflict, link it to hot topics like Climate Change and you have a winning pitch. Then your editor will change the title of the final piece to something like POLAR VORTEX STRIKES AGAIN.
When, back in 2014, newspapers first hit on the catch phrase Polar Vortex, it irritated many weather scientists as they incorrectly implied this was a new phenomenon and did little to improve public understanding. But the phrase has stuck and has since been used by more and more reporters, science writers, and scientists. I am not a meteorologist, but as a particle physicist who loves sticking my nose into other research fields, I decided to do some reading to try to properly understand what the term really means. It turned out to be more confusing than I thought.
A Polar Vortex is not an extreme weather event, but refers to a band of cold air that flows around the north and south poles. It’s gets confusing as past scientific papers have used the term to describe different things. This review: What is the Polar Vortex and how does it Influence Weather? clarifies the use of the term by explaining that there are two different circumpolar vortices, a tropospheric vortex – a variable jet stream that meanders around the pole at about ten kilometres altitude, and a stratospheric one which forms fifty kilometres up during winter months. More recent scientific literature tend to specify which one they are referring to. However it appears not every atmospheric physicist sees it this way, as there are also articles which talk about a single polar vortex and seem to treat the troposphere and stratosphere bits are two parts of the same thing.
While weather scientists complain about reporters, there are a lot of very good journalists out there who make a considerable effort to research their articles and aim describe the science accurately. There are some interesting science stories here, seeking answers to questions like: How can warming in the arctic stratosphere lead to colder weather at lower latitudes? Is there a link between global warming and extreme cold weather in some locations? Can we expect these events to be more frequent in the future?
The answer to the last two seems to be ‘quite possibly’. Many newspaper articles report proposed mechanisms by which this could happen with such confidence that the reader is left with little doubt this is true. However when you read articles written by researchers working in the field, they are rather less conclusive and tend to stress the uncertainties. This reports gives a detailed overview of the debate: Q&A: How is Arctic warming linked to the ‘polar vortex’ and other extreme weather?
Created from image by NASA, AndoAnimalia, DashieSparkle
The background to all this is a political environment where the president of the United States tweets comments suggesting that the cold weather means global warming isn’t real. Sigh.
As polar vortex memes have spread across the internet, science communicators like myself come along and see an opportunity to engage with people about physics, maybe correct some misconceptions, and hopefully not create any more. So I present my contribution to the niche world of scicom pony fan fiction. Please read and enjoy.
Finally, as I am aiming to do a more robust analysis of the impact of my stories than reading the comments, this time I have created a short readers survey. Please complete this if you can. If Fan Fiction is, as I believe, a greatly underexploited medium to engage with people about science research, it would be great to collect the data to show that. If it isn’t, I want to know that too. This itself is an experiment. I want to see if reader questionnaires are a good way to get information. I will report the results here if I get enough responses to draw meaningful conclusions.
It is a good story about an often misunderstood phenomenon. I did the survey,