Wild weather driven by roiling Pacific, nature and warming

In a world getting used to extreme weather, 2023 is starting out more bonkers than ever and meteorologists are saying it’s natural weather weirdness with a bit of help from human-caused climate change.

Much of what’s causing problems worldwide is coming out of a roiling Pacific Ocean, transported by a wavy jet stream, experts said.

At least one highway in drought-mired California looked more like a river because of torrential rain from what is technically called an atmospheric river of moisture. New Year’s brought shirtsleeve weather to the U.S. East and record high temperatures to Europe as the Northern Hemisphere on Wednesday was more than 2.6 degrees (1.4 degrees Celsius) hotter than the late 20th century average. And this is after frigid air escaped the Arctic to create a Christmas mess for much of the United States.

“All the ingredients are in place for two weeks of wild weather especially in the Western U.S.,” private meteorologist Ryan Maue said in an email.

Maue said the big driver is a three-year La Nina -- natural temporary cooling of the equatorial Pacific Ocean that alters world weather patterns -- that just won’t quit. It is creating literal waves in the weather systems that ripple across the globe. And on certain parts of the waves are storms where the atmospheric pressure drops low and quickly, called bomb cyclones, that are quite wet, and they travel on atmospheric waves that transport the weather called the jet stream.

The jet stream now is unusually wavy, said Maue and Woodwell Climate Research Center climate scientist Jennifer Francis. The storms dip over the warm subtropics “and create a conveyor belt of of moisture to strafe the West Coast of the U.S," Maue said.

“I’d describe the jet stream and bomb cyclones as a runaway Pacific freight train...