Science

Polar Vortex Drives a Cold Snap in Asia


Mohe, China’s northernmost city, recorded a temperature of minus 63.4 degrees Fahrenheit this week. That was the coldest in its recorded history, and cold enough to cause hypothermia within minutes in anyone who wasn’t dressed properly.

“It has never been this cold,” Zhang Hong, 53, who runs a pancake shop in Mohe and has lived in the city for 30 years, said by phone on Friday.

“It was so frosty outside,” she added. “The wind was so brisk that it felt as though it was shaving your nose and face.”

As arctic winds and snow whipped across Siberia and into China, Japan and the Korean Peninsula this week, Ms. Zhang was one of hundreds of millions of people across East Asia who suffered. Noses and fingers turned red. Plane and train journeys were delayed or canceled. And the extreme cold put a damper on the Lunar New Year, the most important holiday of the year for many people in the region.

This month, the polar vortex brought arctic air to Central Asia before slowly moving eastward, said Woo Jin-kyu, a meteorologist at the Korea Meteorological Administration. Its southward bulge is accompanied by a shift in the jet stream, a ring of strong wind that blows from west to east along the vortex’s edges, he said.

“It looks like the rails of a roller coaster,” Mr. Woo said. “And the larger the amplitude of the rails, the larger the area of the polar vortex and the farther south the arctic air extends.”

China’s national weather agency issued daily warnings of extremely cold temperatures earlier this week for almost the entire country, although the weather started to warm a little as the week wore on.

Some tourists, eager to travel again following the lifting of the country’s stringent “zero Covid” measures last month, were not deterred by the worst of the cold. Earlier this week, crowds gathered for an ice festival in Harbin, a city that was partly founded by Russian railroad engineers and is known for its magnificent Russian architecture. Gawkers mobbed ice sculptures the size of houses, and there was an hourslong line for a Ferris wheel.



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