Instead of reading about record heat, we read on December 9 that a Polar vortex is sending a ‘wrecking ball’ of cold air to the US. The planet’s most extreme cold air flooded into the central and eastern United States last weekend. “Some of the coldest, if not the coldest, temperatures across the entire globe will cover the central and eastern U.S. into this week,” said climatologist Judah Cohen, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In Chicago, for instance, wind chills could “make a run at 20 below at some point this coming weekend,” the National Weather Service said. Even colder wind chills approaching 45 below are possible in the Dakotas. It is even going to get chilly in Florida. The northern hemisphere is facing exceptional early-winter conditions.
Europe (and in particular Russia) will be on for truly brutal freezes over the Christmas period, with predictions around 30F below late-December norms — and potentially colder.