A new disruption of the polar vortex will spread Arctic air across the top of the globe and make Donald Trump’s second inauguration the coldest in the last 40 years in the United States, according to meteorologists.
After starting in the Rocky Mountains on Thursday night, the cold will move east and into the northern tip of the Florida peninsula for several days. Up to 280 million Americans will experience a day or two when it is colder than Anchorage, Alaska, said private meteorologist Ryan Maue.
“This will certainly be one of the most intense cold snaps in the last 10 to 15 years,” said Judah Cohen, a winter weather expert at Atmospheric Environmental Research. “It’s pulling air from Siberia. And, you know, that’s consistent with these episodes because when the polar vortex stretches, the flow starts in Siberia and ends in the United States.”
The cold wave will reach Washington before Trump’s inauguration scheduled for Monday in front of the federal Capitol.
The National Weather Service predicts temperatures will be about 6 degrees Celsius below zero (about 22 degrees Fahrenheit) at noon during the takeoverwhich will make it the coldest since Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration recorded temperatures as low as minus 14 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit). At Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009, the temperature was minus 2 degrees Celsius (28 degrees Fahrenheit).
But that’s not all, as the wind is forecast to reach speeds of 48 to 56 kilometers per hour (30 to 35 miles per hour).
“The wind chills will definitely be around freezing,” said Zack Taylor, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center. “It’s going to be biting cold basically along the National Mall. And it can be pretty windy there with the west-northwest wind right in your face.”
Washington could see below-freezing temperatures later and could approach minus 17 degrees Celsius (0 degrees Fahrenheit) on Wednesday morning, according to Maue. Additionally, a record low temperature could be broken in Baltimore, Taylor added. He noted that most of the records that will be broken in this cold snap will probably not be overnight lows, but still cold daytime highs.
About 80 million people will likely experience freezing temperatures at some point, Maue said.
“The coldest day will be Tuesday morning for the lower 48 states overall,” Maue said. The average minimum temperature forecast for that morning for the 48 states will be about 14 degrees Celsius below zero (7 degrees Fahrenheit), he noted.
Maue said a swath from Chicago to Indianapolis and from Columbus, Ohio, to Pittsburgh will experience the most brutal cold compared to its normal temperatures.
“That’s like a corridor of extreme cold, light winds at night over a layer of snow. Temperatures could really plummet there,” Maue said.
Frost could reach states along the Gulf Coast and northern Florida, according to forecasters.
Earlier this month, long-range forecasts were hinting at the worst kind of cold in 30 years for the first week of the year, but those predictions softened as the cold snap approached. Low temperatures were recorded, but not near record levels. This time, it’s the opposite. Computer models for each day show it is colder than the day before, Maue said.
There’s some chance for flurries of snow here and there, but mostly it’s going to be cold, Taylor said, what Maue described as a dry cold.
As occurred earlier this month, this cold snap comes from a disturbance in the polar vortex, the ring of cold air usually trapped around the North Pole. That ring is stretching southward across North America like a rubber band, Cohen said.
These stretching events are happening more often in the last decade, Cohen explained. He and other experts have linked these polar vortex outbreaks to human-caused climate change and decreasing pressure and temperature differences between the Arctic and the rest of the world.
This also triggers changes in the jet stream, the river of air that typically carries weather from west to east, causing cold air and weather systems to plunge from north to south like a roller coaster.
On the east side of that dip is cold air and potentially record high pressure, according to Taylor and others.
On the west side, in Southern California, there is not only warmer air but also extreme pressure differences that could intensify the already strong winds that are fanning fires around Los Angeles, according to meteorologists.
Get used to it. There is some debate among meteorologists about how long this outbreak of extreme cold will last, but below-normal temperatures could persist through the end of the month for much of the country, said Jason Furtado, a meteorology professor at the University of Oklahoma who organized winter meteorology workshops at the American Meteorological Society annual conference in New Orleans.
And Cohen added that long-range forecasts suggest the same polar vortex conditions could return in early February.
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