If we have a low pressure system move over us with accompaning storms, can that low pressure system continue to travel around the world and affect us again in a few days?
I ask because the recent storms perhaps associated with the Polar Vortex event eventually lifted but more storms and cold weather is upon us. I was wondering if this second round of bad weather was the original storm system coming back to haunt us.
Meterologists talk about A low pressure system coming into our area, not THE low pressure system coming back in. I just wonder if sometimes the system has been here before.
additionally, are there websites that track storms over time as they pass through N.America, out to the Atlantic, then over Europe, Asia and back towards N.America again? I think it would be kind of cool to see the larger picture of systems globally instead of in my region only.
But I don’t think it allows me to follow a particular storm from N.A to europe, asia and back to N.A again. So I don’t think it shows me what I was asking about.
I don’t think a single system would survive to circle the globe, but certain patterns can cause similar systems to form and repeat. For example, when the jet stream dips lower, cold air will go further south. So, in some locations, you can have cold weather for a few days, then warmer, then colder again just because of the jet stream.
I’m not sure where you’re at or what you’re talking about right now, but this weekend is supposed to be cold, and it isn’t caused by the same thing as last week. Last week, we had a “polar vortex”, which is cold air that circulates around the Arctic. The Vortex often spins off some cold air that goes south and makes a nice cold snap for people living there, but the one we had last week was larger than normal.
This weekend, we’re getting an Alberta Clipper or Canadian Clipper, which is a cold mass of air that forms in Canada, often near Alberta. I don’t know much aboyut them so I’ll take it from wiki:
General weather patterns, highs, lows, and their associated fronts, will persist for a while if nothing disturbs them but when they move from sea to land or vice versa, the pattern gets significantly disrupted. An extreme example of this can be seen with hurricanes (which are just intense low pressure systems). Hurricanes form in tropical waters and will “live” for as long as they have enough energy input in the form of heat and moisture. Once they make landfall or move to cooler latitudes they dissipate quite quickly. More mundane low and high pressure systems do the same thing but they persist a lot longer seeing as they don’t require a narrow set of conditions to exist.
In a way weather patterns are similar to eddies in a stream, they will move away from where they are formed but once clear of the conditions that formed them in the first place they morph into something different.
The low pressure systems south of the landmasses in the southern hemisphere would be a good place to see persistent weather patterns that may survive significant trips around the globe.
What you are seeing there is the cold fronts (long bands of cloud associated with low pressure systems) coming up to the western ranges of Chile, being forced upward by the terrain, which causes the moisture to condense further and rain. As the system moves to the other side of the ranges the low pressure system still exists but the front attached to it has lost all its moisture and so the cloud that you see in the video has gone.
In other words, the basic weather pattern, the low pressure system, is still there, but it’s lost the cloud that makes it visible.