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Have you ever wondered how the rapid warm-up in the Arctic and climate change could disrupt winds at high altitudes across the United States, Europe, and Asia?

Well, if you're like most people, you probably haven't given it a thought.

But as a meteorologist, I'm paying close attention to what's going on because it often leads to weather like this.

There's no place on Earth where the climate is changing as fast as it is here.

You've probably seen pictures like this of Alaskan glaciers. This is 1902; here's the same location now.

In this part of Alaska, we're losing ice at a rate of nearly two cubic miles per decade.

Not all glaciers are shrinking this fast, but most of them in the mid- and higher-mid latitudes are melting pretty quickly.

Here's another one: It's the Muir Glacier in 1941. Here it is now.

These are maps of the earth's surface temperature anomalies that are variance from normal over the last few decades.

Everywhere you see yellow, orange, and red is where the temperature is now averaging above normal.

Look at where most of the global warmth is occurring.

As a meteorologist, I am finding this pretty amazing, because the warmth that I'm seeing in the Arctic isn't just at the earth's surface; it's extending thousands of feet up in altitude.

So why, though, should the warmth at high altitudes over the Arctic matter to us thousands of miles away farther south across the United States, Europe, and Asia? Well, it's all connected, and I'll show you how.

First, we all know that the sun heats the equator more than at the poles, but what you may not know is because of that difference in heating, the atmosphere is deeper at the equator than it is at the poles, and this is important.

That difference in atmosphere depth is what drives winds in the upper atmosphere which travel around the world.

Those are the winds that create our weather. They move storms, warm, and cold air masses around.

When the Arctic is anomalously warm, those winds have to shift south.

In effect, the refrigerator door, so to speak, is opened, and the Arctic's warmth spills south, becoming a mid-latitude chill.

Not theory, it's measurably happening. We saw some extreme examples of this in the winters of 2010 and 2011: the record cold and snow in Europe; the record cold in Florida.

A rapid succession of snowstorms over the eastern part of the United States and historic snows over the Great Lakes are all part of a pattern of record warmth in the Arctic, especially over Greenland and Alaska. This displaces the Arctic weather farther to the South.

What's meteorologically interesting about this is that the effect is most prominent during the winter.

That's when the temperature differences are at their greatest between the equator and the poles.

So when the Arctic is anomalously warm, the mid-latitudes across North America, Europe, and Asia often end up like this.

And, looking into the future, global climate models continue to show change with a steady decrease in Arctic sea ice, a likely result of both warmer temperatures and disruptions in Arctic wind patterns.

In the coming decades, climate models also show significant increase in global temperature, especially in the Arctic.

But this is an average. As the Arctic warms, there will be disruptions in atmospheric circulation.

Some, as we've seen, won't be so warm.

In this video, we've only touched on just one of the many potential impacts a warmer Arctic can have on us as it feeds back into the climate system. The notion that climate change is a good thing and that we're all gonna be basking in warmer weather in the coming decades is most certainly a misunderstanding.

As the world continues to warm so unevenly, it seems very likely there's going to be additional disruptions and storm tracks and precipitation across the Northern Hemisphere.

Put simply, it probably means that most of us are going to end up with what used to be somebody else's weather.

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