The Jet Stream

what it is and why you should care

The weather report often mentions a thing called a jet stream, but it usually fails to explain what it's talking about.  Usually it's just a line along the contour of the United States that has some moving arrows, and since it's called a "jet stream" one probably figures that it's just really windy there.  It turns out that there's really a lot more to it, and furthermore this simple description isn't right.  The real story is much more subtle, and also, it isn't really all that windy under the jet stream.  The following image is from a weather map found at an NBC website showing the jet stream on the morning of November 20, 2007:

Those are 130 mph winds over North Dakota.  That's almost twice as strong as the lowest level of hurricane-force winds!  Of course, it fails the most important test: common sense.  If it were that windy in North Dakota every day, nobody would live there.  Nobody does live in North Dakota, you might say.  But people definitely do live in Minnesota (they have big malls there), with similar winds.  There are big cities with skyscrapers in Minnesota.  So something's clearly not right here.  (Something else is also not right here: if you look at the first figure on this page, you will see jet streams around the North Pole.  Though you'd expect to see it in the picture, at least a bit, the same thing happens around the South Pole.)

On this webpage you will find out what this jet stream thing is all about, and you will do it with NO MATH!  Without further ado, THE JET STREAM.

what it is
why I should care
why you should care
why it's there
the relationship between the Coriolis force and toilets

At least now, when you look at the Jet Stream (which now gets capital letters because it's Awesome) you can understand what people are talking about.  At least it will make "talking about the weather" much more interesting.

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