The phrase “historic polar vortex” evokes a country locked in ice from the Great Lakes to the Gulf, but the most reliable records show a patchwork of extreme outbreaks rather than a single, weeks-long ...

A band of fast-spinning stratospheric winds normally keeps Arctic air bottled above the North Pole all winter. But when that circulation, known as the polar vortex, weakens and breaks apart, the cold ...

It has been a brutal stretch of cold weather this past week or so, and of course, the topic or weather phenomenon that often gets thrown around is "polar vortex." You may have heard of it before in ...