http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/making-sense-of-the-wacky-weather/?hp

How will this effect our hang gliding planning?

http://e360.yale.edu/feature/linking_weird_weather_to_rapid_warming_of_the_arctic/2501/

Linking Weird Weather to Rapid Warming of the Arctic

The loss of Arctic summer sea ice and the rapid warming of the Far North are
altering the jet stream over North America, Europe, and Russia. Scientists are
now just beginning to understand how these profound shifts may be increasing the
likelihood of more persistent and extreme weather.

Does it seem as though your weather has become increasingly “stuck” lately? Day
after day of cold, rain, heat, or blue skies may not be a figment of your
imagination. While various oceanic and atmospheric patterns such as El Niño, La
Niña, and the North Atlantic Oscillation have been blamed for the spate of
unusual weather recently, there’s now a new culprit in the wind: Arctic
amplification. Directly related to sea-ice loss and earlier snowmelt in the Far
North, it is affecting the jet stream around the Northern Hemisphere, with
potentially far-reaching effects on the weather.

Arctic amplification describes the tendency for high Northern latitudes to
experience enhanced warming or cooling relative to the rest of the Northern
Hemisphere. This heightened sensitivity is linked to the presence of snow and
sea ice, and the feedback loops that they trigger. For example, as sea ice
retreats, sunshine that would have been reflected back to space by the bright
ice is instead absorbed by the ocean, which heats up, melting even more ice. As
the world has warmed since the fossil-fuel revolution after World War II, Arctic
temperatures have increased at more than twice the global rate. A dramatic
indicator of this warming is the loss of Arctic sea ice in summer, which has
declined by 40 percent in just the past three decades. The area of lost ice is
about 1.3 million square miles, or roughly 42 percent of the area of the Lower
48 United States.