storm track

“The flow is cut off from the main storm track, which is why we’re seeing this kind of unsettled weather reach deeper into California than usual for May,” Handel told the San Francisco Chronicle, adding that a ridge will build in the eastern and central U.S.

“We’re definitely still in the storm track,” Wofford said.

In January, the weather pattern worsened — with the storm track blocked from “not just Southern California, but all of the West — from Seattle southward,” Tardy said.

“The Southern Hemisphere would roast, the Pacific storm track would go kind of nuts, and there would be these extreme shifts in weather patterns that are very different from what you would expect from a more incremental or linear warming path.”

“But a collapse of the global overturning circulation really would be different, because it would result in rearrangements of the jet stream, of the storm track, of which places on Earth are really cold relative to other places,” he said.