Occasionally on this site we have discussed the idea of "meridional flow" — a north-sound jetstream pattern, which tends to make for colder winters on the East Coast and in Eurasia.
This appears to be the focus of a lot of new research, originating seemingly in James Overland's Warm Arctic-Cold Continents idea (described here by Jeff Masters, who saw the same talk from Overland at the AGU that I did). Yesterday the Earth Observatory/NASA put up a great post that demonstrated what that looks like this winter. Which, as Judah Cohen predicted, has turned to be a cold one.
Here's what it looked like this winter, as compared to the past six years or so:
Earth Observatory: While a high-pressure weather system brought warmer than normal temperatures to Greenland and northern Canada in March 2013, much of North America, Europe, and Asia shivered through weeks of unseasonably cool temperatures. The contrasting temperatures are no coincidence: the same unusual pressure pattern in the upper atmosphere caused both events.
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The temperature anomaly map [above], based on data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite, shows how this affected temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere. The map displays land surface temperature anomalies between March 14–20, 2013, compared to the same dates from 2005 to 2012. Areas with above-average temperatures appear in red and orange, and areas with below-average temperatures appear in shades of blue. Much of Europe, Russia, and the eastern United States saw unusually cool temperatures, while Greenland and Nunavut Territory were surprisingly warm for the time of year.
Note that the effect is much stronger on the East Coast, even Florida, than the West Coast. That's because (Overland said) we are influenced more by the Pacific than the Arctic. Here's another way of looking at it, through the lens of the Arctic Oscillation.
Either way, it just looks cold, cold, cold.
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Kit Stolz 