January–March 2014 North American cold wave
extreme weather event affecting parts of Canada and the United States
The January–March 2014 North American cold wave was an extreme weather event that extended through the late winter months of the 2013–2014 winter season, and was also part of an unusually cold winter affecting parts of Canada and parts of the north-central and northeastern United States. The event occurred in early 2014 and was caused by a southward shift of the North Polar Vortex. Record-low temperatures also extended well into March.
On January 2, an Arctic cold front initially associated with a nor'easter tracked across Canada and the United States, resulting in heavy snowfall in some areas. Temperatures fell to unprecedented levels, and low temperature records were broken across the some areas of the United States. Business, school, and road closures were common, as well as mass flight cancellations across some airports in the Midwest. Altogether, more than 200 million people were affected, in an area ranging from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean and extending south to include roughly 187 million residents of the Continental United States.
Origins
Beginning on January 2, 2014, sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) led to the breakdown of the semi-permanent feature across the Arctic known as the polar vortex. Without an active upper-level vortex to keep frigid air bottled up across the Arctic, the cold air mass was forced southward as upper-level warming displaced the jet stream. With extensive snow-cover across Canada and Siberia, Arctic air had no trouble remaining extremely cold as it was forced southward into the United States.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “January–March 2014 North American cold wave” is extreme weather event affecting parts of Canada and the United States. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through January, March and North, not as a finished interpretation.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15581374. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2014 and 2013.
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This entry incorporates text from “January–March 2014 North American cold wave” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.