This weekend, tens of thousands across the U.S. and around the world took part in a people’s march for climate action.

In the Nation’s Capital alone, it’s estimated that more than 200,000 took to the streets — doubling a projected attendance of 100,000. In a bit of dark irony, DC marchers faced scorching record heat in the low 90s. A late April day that felt more like a hotter than usual mid-July as the streets thundered with loud concern over a warming climate.

Time-lapse, bird's-eye video shows thousands of protesters marching toward White House during climate change march https://t.co/yhOcdt6iHR pic.twitter.com/YqhsCxvvaA — CNN (@CNN) April 30, 2017

In storm-tossed Chicago, thousands braved wind and rain to make their own concerns heard. And in Oklahoma, the Capital of Tulsa echoed with the shouts of a doggedly determined group of climate marchers as the governor declared a state of emergency due to flooding.

Fully 370 sister marches in places as far-flung as West Palm Beach near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago and Dutch Harbor in Alaska occurred across a country wracked by extreme weather all-too-likely related to climate change.

Massive Jet Stream Wave Produces Severe Heat, Storms

Still vastly under-reported in mainstream broadcast weather media is the fact that polar warming in the Northern Hemisphere appears to be having a harmful influence on middle latitude atmospheric circulation. The south-to-north energy transfers contributing to a more rapid warming of the northern polar region as the world heats up overall is combining with larger warming producing more powerful heatwaves and droughts over highly populated areas.

In contrast, as more warm air centers at the poles, more cold air tends to spill southward into large troughs as the Jet Stream slows down. These troughs encounter an atmosphere that is generally more heavily loaded with moisture and charged with convective lift that tends to produce higher cloud tops. An atmosphere that is therefore predisposed to generating far more intense precipitation episodes in these regions.

(A massive jet stream trough in the western and central U.S. produced cooler conditions, blizzards, severe rains and storms during this weekend’s climate march. A facing ridge in the east produced record-shattering heatwaves in DC. North and west, into Alaska, temperatures were 5-10 F above normal. Image source: Earth Nullschool.)

The result is an overall increasing prevalence of extreme weather events. Scientific model studies indicate a heightened tendency for extreme middle latitude storms and heatwaves as the Earth warms and the pole heats up. And this weekend, a persistent trough and storm track that, this year, has consistently produced extreme weather and heavy rainfall across the U.S. in 2017 (large sections of the U.S. experienced far wetter than normal conditions this winter with a substantial number of locations experiencing their wettest January through March on record) again deepened — with significant results.

80 Million Under Severe Weather Threat

Saturday and Sunday, this storm system generated record river crests and related extreme flooding as 5-10 inches of rainfall inundated a region including Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana. Vicious tornado strikes ripped through East Texas. A late-season blizzard dumped as much as 20 inches of snow on the high plains. And, as mentioned above, record heat stifled the Eastern U.S. ahead of the storm.

(80 million people under threat from severe weather today as a spring storm heads eastward. From the satellite, it looks like a classic spring weather pattern. But record heat in the east, blizzards in the high plains, and record floods in the Central U.S. tell a tale of continued abnormal conditions. Image source: NOAA.)

Unfortunately, though the climate march has ended, the severe weather threat has remained. According to CNN, the same storms that resulted in the tragic loss of 15 souls as floods, savage winds, snow, and tornadoes raged over the Central U.S. this weekend are moving east. Today, reports now indicate that 80 million people from Georgia through New England are again under the threat of severe weather as a result.

Links:

Sprawling U.S. Storm Takes at Least 15 Lives

People’s Climate March

Floods Inundate Plains

Weekend Storms that Ravaged Central U.S. Move East

NOAA

National Center for Environmental Information

Hat tip to Suzanne

Hat tip to Colorado Bob

Hat tip to Cate

Hat tip to Jean