Baby, it’s cold outside, or at least it’s significantly colder for Alabama standards. In light of the recent drops in temperature, media outlets, scientists and celebrities across the country have taken the opportunity to utilize certain weather buzzwords like “big cold” and “Polar Vortex.” The comments suggest the cold weather is part of global warming.

“Cold enough for ya’?” Bill Nye, (@TheScienceGuy) asked his followers on Twitter. “-40 is cold F or C. What if this dipping polar whirlwind is the future? What if these big temp swings become normal?”

Kelsey Varner, a sophomore, said she does not think she would mind more of the colder weather, though she does not believe many students agree with the concept of global warming.

“I really wouldn’t mind if the low temperatures were the norm,” Varner said. “I personally like cold weather.”

Regardless, the questions on climate change may seem alarming to those of us with limited knowledge on weather patterns like the Polar Vortex.

What is the Polar Vortex?

“National media certainly took the opportunity to latch onto another buzzword to try to explain what was occurring, but in doing so, they really hyped up the polar vortex into a lot more than it really is,” said Fred Gossage, chief forecaster at local meteorology service Shoals Weather. “The Polar Vortex is a permanent low pressure area in the upper-levels of the atmosphere, found near the North Pole. It is always there, and it has always been there, every day of the year.”

According to the American Meteorological Society’s Meteorology Glossary, the vortex “is strongest in winter when the pole-to-equator temperature gradient is strongest.”

How does the Polar Vortex reach us?

Sometimes a piece of the weather event will break off from the main Polar Vortex and will be pushed by air currents to lower parts of the Northern Hemisphere. The “big cold” we have recently experienced is an arctic air pattern that has been pushed south, Gossage said.

The occurrence is not new, though it doesn’t always happen in America, Gossage said.

“It’s nothing new or unprecedented in a larger sense,” Gossage said. “It just does not happen to one particular area on a frequent basis, and the kind of cold it often brings is even more infrequent for our area because of our more southern latitude, compared to other locations in the United States.”

How has the recent cold from the vortex affected us?

“There were no daily record lows broken at the official reporting station for the Shoals, the Northwest Alabama Regional Airport in Muscle Shoals, during the big cold wave,” Gossage said. “That means that on an individual daily basis at some point in history, it had been colder than the cold wave we recently dealt with.”

However, weather observers should not discount the intensity and potential danger caused from cold waves like the recent ones, Gossage said.

What connection does this have to global warming?

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Space Flight Center indicates that the patterns the Vortex follows have altered, sometimes drastically, as the world heats. The primary effects are shown in the Polar Vortex that appears in the Southern Hemisphere, according to the GSFC’s article “What is the Polar Vortex?” found on their website.

“Of special interest is the Southern Hemisphere vortex in 2002,” the article reads. “That year had the first major warming observed in the Southern Hemisphere stratosphere. It was a wave-2 warming and the vortex split into two parts.”

It is important to remember that weather patterns like the vortex have appeared before, but the confusion comes from the fact that they do not happen in the same area consistently, Gossage said.

“Regardless of what your personal stand is on the idea of man-made global warming, it is undeniable that such patterns have happened over and over and over again,” Gossage said. “To be frank, some of our largest cold outbreaks in United States weather history happened before our “carbon footprint” became of significant importance to the mainstream media. And some of the coldest periods in the past few hundred years of weather history around the globe happened before the main period of industrialization. “