Polar Vortex & Gaza Weather: Explained | Sciences

Various regions of the Arab world, including the Gaza Strip, are exposed to a wave of extremely severe weather, due to a depression passing through the region these days.

A depression is an area where atmospheric pressure decreases, so moist winds are attracted to it and rise upward, leading to the formation of clouds, precipitation, and wind activity.

Sudden warming above

But there is another reason that may be related to the increase in coldness during this depression, which is the polar vortex, and to understand it we must begin by learning about “sudden stratospheric warming.”

The stratosphere layer of the atmosphere contains within it the “ozone layer.” This layer begins at a height of 10 kilometers above the Earth’s surface and extends up to 50 kilometers. It is above the troposphere, which contains most of the weather effects that we feel.

Sudden stratospheric warming is a phenomenon in which the temperatures of the stratosphere above the North Pole of the Earth rise from a point of up to -70 Celsius below zero to about 50 Celsius.

Special vortexes

Consequently, this causes turbulence in the weather below it, specifically in what is called the “polar vortex”, which are continuous low pressure areas that rotate in a hurricane-like manner above each pole, and extend deep into the atmosphere to the top, and these vortexes cause a large mass of cold, dense air underneath and surrounding each pole.

In the normal state, these vortices are in the form of a single cohesive cell or dome, and thus the cold air below them is completely confined to the polar circles only.

But sometimes, when sudden stratospheric warming intensifies, these eddies may weaken, and here they can split into two or more cells and begin to travel away from the poles.

When the polar vortex is very weak, it can break up significantly and thus travel south to deeper regions, reaching deep into countries such as the United States, or even North Africa and the Arab world.

Possible effect

Data coming from the General Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration indicate that the polar vortex has swayed strongly recently, and the “wall of cold air” that was trapping the cold has shaken to the north and begun to allow cold masses to leak towards the middle latitudes.

A study published in 2025 in the journal Communications Earth and Environment reported that some sudden stratospheric warming events weaken the polar vortex in the upper layers of the atmosphere, and then the effect of this disturbance gradually moves to lower layers within days to weeks.

This transition may change the shape of the jet stream and large-scale pressure patterns over Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, making the atmosphere more susceptible to the passage of cold surges that create a more suitable environment for deeper depressions or more severe storms, but not necessarily every time.

The study also indicates that the number of high-impact storms tends to increase over the eastern Mediterranean, compared to some parts of Central Europe.

Fragile systems

But it is worth clarifying here that this result does not say that every sudden stratospheric warming event will produce a strong storm over the eastern Mediterranean, but rather it says that the “statistical scale” is tilted in this direction within a large set of cases and data.

This means that there is a possibility that what is happening now in various regions of the Arab world may be related to an event in the planet’s North Pole.

The biggest problem remains primarily related to the fragility of the environment and infrastructure in areas such as Gaza and the refugee camps in northern Syria. Cold weather is common in these areas, but exceeding it without tools creates a major disaster.

In this context, United Nations reports indicate that despite many efforts, at least 1.1 million people in Gaza remain in dire need of assistance as weather conditions continue to deteriorate.

In northern Syria, the same equation is repeated, as depressions hit the camps for the displaced, which do not have enough infrastructure to withstand all of this.