Early Super Bowl Forecast: Extreme Cold

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There does seem to be some level of consensus forming in the meteorological community. Most suggest a deep trough will cut into the eastern half of the country a little less than a week before the Feb. 2 game at MetLife Stadium, a signal colder than usual temperatures could be expected.

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How cold will it get? Opinions vary, but Matt Rogers, a longtime energy industry consultant and founder of Commodity Weather Group, said the setup looks strikingly similar to last week, when New Jersey saw some of its coldest weather in two decades.

“The pattern does look like it’s going to go into a cold dominated story,” Rogers said. “It will depend on the timing, but it could conceivably rival the cold we saw last week.”

Rogers pointed to an ongoing phenomena that is expected to continue known as stratospheric warming, which can have an effect on the polar vortex, as the potential reason for this.

The polar vortex is a large, permanent area of low pressure that generally sits atop Arctic and contains the coldest air in the northern hemisphere. When sudden warming occurs in the stratosphere near the North Pole, some 60,000 to 80,000 feet above the Earth’s surface, it can split the vortex in two, sending cold air equator-ward and into the United States, much like last week.

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