, a current of eastward-blowing strong winds, causing storms like the one that recently dumped record amounts of rain on Vermont to stall out. The temperature difference between the Arctic and the tropics powers the jet stream, but the Arctic is warming faster than other regions, disrupting the flow of the jet stream.
“Human-caused warming from fossil fuel burning is impacting these events in several ways,” Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania,in an email. “A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, so when it rains there’s potential for much more of it. And the pattern of warming is impacting the jet stream in such a way that we get more of these very stagnant or ‘stuck,’ wavy patterns which are associated with persistent weather extremes .