The West to East Jet Stream Continues

 The fanatical relationship between humans and weather has been  part of almost all cultures as far back as archaeologists have evidence.

About 5000 years ago the saying we know as, "Red sky at night, sailors delight ..." was inscribed on Babylonian stone tablets. Years later Aristotle repeated  the saying in his treatise Meteorologica.

The saying also appears in the Bible, Matthew 16, 1-3, and William Shakespeare penned a version in his 1592 poem, Venus and Adonis.

The folkloric rhyme it seems has been with us since the beginning and that makes sense, because long before all of the above recalled the weather forecasting rhyme, nomadic tribes had to  know weather patterns and seasonal changes to survive.  The sacred oral traditions were passed from one generation to generation the next.

Fast forward to today and modern humans cyber-digital relationship with weather is as fanatical as our earliest ancestors.

All this is a long way to get to an outlook for the next 10 days and whether there will be a big snow.

When the 20th Century dawned we had no knowledge of fronts, highs and lows and the weather they cause. In the years before and after WWI in Bergen, Norway a group of meteorologists developed the next-to-last big block in the structure of modern meteorology.

They developed the concept of fronts as the battle ground between contrasting air masses.  The horrid trench warfare of "The War to End All Wars" had left its mark on meteorology.

The only problem is that when tested with equations the Bergen School's approach could not account for how strong cyclones, those low pressure storms you see on weather maps, would become.

They were not wrong, they just did not have enough information. After WWII at the University of Chicago the role of the jet stream and those mysterious entities TV meteorologists call upper level disturbances was unraveled and the final building block was in place.

And the video below tells you why I am not encouraged about the possibity of a "big one", a snowstorm that is, before it is too late this season.  It is not impossible just not likely.