Is climate change to blame for a chaotic spring?

This article discusses how weather is changing because of global warming. When the trend toward earlier springs overlaps with intensifying winter storms, the result is wild weather.

Elizabeth Weatherhead, a research scientist with the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences in Boulder, Colorado, says that while weather near the poles has become more variable in the spring, the trend in the mid-latitudes – where mainland U.S. residents live – is the opposite: Weather is getting “stuck.”

This means that, in general, weather – be it high temperatures, extreme storms, or a lack of rain – stays the same for longer than it used to. Researchers and meteorologists have a term for this phenomenon of stuck weather: persistence.

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