High above Earth’s tropics, a pattern of winds changed recently in a way that scientists had never seen in more than 60 years of consistent measurements. This disruption to the wind pattern – called the “quasi-biennial oscillation” – did not have any immediate impact on weather or climate as we experience it on Earth’s surface. But it does raise interesting questions for the NASA scientists who observed it: If a pattern holds for six decades and then suddenly changes, what caused that to happen? Will it happen again? What effects might it have?
http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/a-strange-thing-happened-in-the-stratosphere
