Remember back at the start of 2013, I along with many other forecasters talked and showed you the onset of a major stratospheric warming event which would split apart the polar vortex and drive the entire arctic reservoir down into the mid-latitudes,

Well, these incredible images below are off weather.com, taken by Andreas Dörnbrack of that major event back in early January.

Just beautiful.

Caption from weather.com

This might look like sci-fi, and the atmospheric parameter it plots is “Lait potential vorticity at the 550K theta level”; it shows the polar vortex splitting in two after a sudden stratospheric warming event.  Okay, enough technical jargon — what did it mean for those of us down on Earth?  Cold weather in parts of North America and Eurasia.

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