Jet streams are key to understanding climate change because they both create weather and steer weather around the globe. Unlike global warming, jet streams undeniably cause both extreme heat waves and extreme cold snaps as well as directly causing droughts and floods.
Jet streams cause extreme weather when their waviness increases and causes weather patterns to linger over a region longer than normal. Examinations of the jet stream's cycle of waviness were first published by MIT’s Carl-Gustav Rossby in the 1940s.
