User:VanBuren
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{{Huggle/warn-test-1}}
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Read this somewhere, found it illuminating:
Speech as protected under the First Amendment is subject to time, place and manner restrictions.
- REMEMBER
The polar vortex exists all the time, regardless of the time of year. What happens is that, during some periods of some winters, at some specific locations in the Northern Hemisphere, the vortex loses its regular shape, spinning off huge chunks of cold air into lower latitudes. The news media has latched on to these outbursts as "polar vortex", which is wrong, the vortex still always exists even when it isn't unusually cold in the eastern third of North America. These outbursts are properly called Rossby waves, which are undulations of the path of the jet stream. Rossby waves also always exist, but tend to become more pronounced in the winter over eastern North America because of the local geography. The relatively unbroken, flat land along the Canadian Shield, Great Plains, and Midwestern U.S. allow these outbursts. They tend not to happen in the west because the Rocky Mountains and the mediating effects of oceanic climate prevent it. A related concept is the Alberta clipper, which is what happens when these outbursts of cold air interact with a simultaneously timed influx of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico. All of these interactions are highly dependent on where you are located on the landmass, and do not just occur randomly, but occur because of the specific interactions of land, oceans, and air. --Jayron32 20:36, 1 March 2015 (UTC)