NO REST FOR SNOW

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.

And it has served to spread the weirdness around the world, from the American West all the way to Russia, a climate expert from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said.

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.

One single weather event has a hand in all of them, said NOAA environmentalist Bill Lapenta.

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"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.

What goes up...

In reaction to that, the jet-stream has swung back deeper into the South than usual, carrying Canadian cold with it.

Voila. Snow and ice from Louisiana to the Carolinas.

Then it has whipped back up, helping big storms dump snow over the Northeast.

From there, the same jet-stream has crossed the Atlantic and brought weather that flooded Great Britain in the wettest January there in two and a half centuries.

Down the road a bit, at the Winter Olympics, it's practically springtime in Sochi, and it's that same jet-stream dragging in warmth that's boosting temperatures well above freezing.

But it gets even worse.

The jet-stream is moving slower than in past years, which means that all that ugly weather is hovering over places for longer periods, plaguing them with more of its nastiness than usual.

It has weather-beaten people in many parts of the world groaning the same moan: "I've never seen weather like this before."

Are they exaggerating? Maybe not.

Let's have a look at the season's weather, starting with the whip's handle -- in California -- and follow the jet-stream's lash from there.