ByMarshall Shepherd,
Senior Contributor.
It’s winter. We are actually having a proper one this year. Irrespective of what is going on with our climate, it is supposed to be cold here in the Northern Hemisphere right now because the Earth is tilting away from the Sun in its orbit. As the nation recovers from a massive winter storm, frigid Arctic air is entrenched across much of the United States. Over the next week or so, two winter weather buzzwords, “Bomb Cyclone” and “Polar Vortex,” will be all over your newsfeeds. Here’s why.
WFLA Meteorologist Jeff Berardelli posted on his Florida-based Facebook site, “Not hype. A true bomb cyclone along the Eastern Seaboard will propel Arctic Air south Sunday.” He went on to warn his Florida viewers that wind chill potential could be in the single digits in northern Florida, teens near Tampa and Orlando, and the twenties in southern Florida.
Let’s deal with the bomb cyclone first. The American Meteorological Society’s Glossary defined it as, “A rapidly deepening extratropical surface cyclone with a central pressure that falls on the average of at least 1 hPa h−1 for 24 h…. It requires a larger pressure drop to qualify as a bomb cyclone at higher latitudes compared to lower latitudes.” The process of a low pressure cyclone forming is called cyclogenesis. The formation of a bomb cyclone is often referred to as “explosive cyclogenesis” or "bombogenesis."
