Ask A Met: Is The Weather Repeating Itself?

This week's question comes from Robinette, a Morning Brief reader in Fredericksburg, Virginia, who noticed a pattern in the local weather, "A few years back or maybe even longer, I started noticing that if it snows or even rains, say this Friday, the next Friday over the next couple of weeks, it snows or rains again. I've always found that very interesting and I just wanted to know if it's actually a thing or is it just coincidental? And if it is a thing, what causes it?"

Meteorologist Rob Shackelford: Well, yes, there are actually patterns in our weather.

So, there's this thing called the jet stream. It's in the upper atmosphere and it dictates a lot of our weather. If the jet stream is consistent, you can have storm after storm coming through almost like one wave after another.

Sometimes they just time out so that it rains every Friday. It's clear all week and then the next system comes in. It's almost like the weather is trolling all of us. Especially if you want to get outside.

These repetitive hits continue until something kicks the pattern into a new groove.

The jet stream is going all across the globe from west to east. If you're looking at upper-level winds, the highest and the biggest ones are your jet stream.

It's essential for weather to distribute across the globe or else we'd kind of be in trouble. These winds are the river of life, moving moisture all across the globe.

During a season, shifts in the jet stream are smaller, but from season to season, the jet stream moves.

It moves depending on seasons, and that's sunlight-driven. There are a lot of factors, of course, but sunlight is the major one.

In Fredericksburg, Virginia, there are reasons you might notice the jet stream pattern more than in other places. There on the East Coast, you can get the jet stream pretty consistently.

And you can also have snow coming in with round after round of clipper systems coming in from Canada over and over again.

With Fredericksburg, you can see both ends of the jet stream coming through at certain points directly.

A little fun fact for you: With hurricanes and with storms that form near the equator, they always track north because those storms are redistributing heat from the equator. They're grabbing a lot of excess heat that's near the equator and they're redistributing it.

That same redistribution of heat is part of what drives the jet stream.

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