It's Getting Wild in the US, Weather-Wise

Nearly every part of the United States is getting walloped by wild weather, or just about to be. Days of downpours have begun in Hawaii, per the AP. The Southwest will soon bake with day after day of record 100-degree-plus heat. Two storms will dump snow by the foot over northern Great Lakes states. And the dreaded polar vortex will again invade the Midwest and East with soul-crushing Arctic chill. This forecast of extremes comes as weather whiplash has already hit much of the East. On Wednesday, Washington, DC, residents walked around in shorts in record-breaking 86 degrees Fahrenheit; on Thursday, it snowed. Former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief scientist Ryan Maue says he expects extreme weather in all 50 states. More:

• A heat dome will form early next week and park over the Southwest, baking temperatures to triple digits that haven't been seen this early in the year, Maue and Chenard say. In Phoenix, for example, some forecasts are predicting 98 degrees Fahrenheit on Tuesday, followed by 103, 105, and two days of 107 degrees. In 137 years of recordkeeping, Phoenix has never hit 100 before March 26.
• Around the same time as the heat starts blasting Phoenix, the polar vortex—a system that usually keeps frigid air penned up near the North Pole—is forecast to send its chill deep into the Midwest and East, even bordering some of the Southeast, Maue says. Minneapolis will hover around zero degrees for a low, while Chicago will be in the single digits on Tuesday. Even Atlanta could drop to the 20s.
• Two storm systems in a row—one that started on Friday, then another Sunday into Monday—will chug along the country's northern tier and Great Lakes and between them could dump 3 to 4 feet of snow in places, Maue says. That bigger second storm system will see its barometric pressure drop so quickly and sharply that it will qualify as a bomb cyclone, which is quite unusual to develop over land.
• An area stretching from Kansas south through Oklahoma and cutting through to Texas to the Gulf of Mexico is forecast to get high winds in the 60mph range, with gusts a bit higher Sunday night, per meteorologist Jeff Masters of Yale Climate Connections.

• Even Alaska and Hawaii aren't quite right, Maue says Hawaii is getting an atmospheric river with such persistent heavy rain that flooding will be a major issue. And Alaska is normally frigid now, but it will be about 30 degrees colder than usual, he says. It's "the time of year where we can see stuff like this," Chenard says. "But this does seem even anomalous from what you would typically see."

Underlying this all is a jet stream gone wild, Maue and Chenard say—but they add that there is hope. "The first day of spring is 20th [of March], and then after that we get recovery," Maue notes. More here.