Method to the meteorological madness

(CNN) -- It's official: The weather has been a bit weird this winter. The nation's climate agency says so -- and, in part, explains why.

There is method to the meteorological madness.

The drought parching California; those two snowpocalypses in the South; the unrelenting New England snow; the sopping soaking of the UK; short sleeves on Sochi's snow-hungry slopes.

"They are associated with that long-wave pattern, so they are connected in that sense," he said.

That "long-wave pattern" is like a whip that got swung in California and has cracked in all the other places.

A big, sturdy ridge of high pressure air has blustered rain clouds away from California, and at the same time, it has pushed the jet-stream way up into Canada.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/15/us/weather-weird-pattern/