(Winds flowing north from just west of Hawaii, through the Bering Strait, over the North Pole and on into the North Atlantic as seen by NOAA’s GFS model and imaged by Earth Nullschool.)

This is a very odd pattern for global surface winds.

In the central Pacific, along a band above 20 North Latitude and about 500 miles west of Hawaii, a broad stream of easterly winds yesterday took a turn toward the north. The wind field was then pulled into a long frontal boundary spinning out from a large low pressure system off Irkutsk, Russian and driven on toward the Western Aleutian Island Chain.

The winds continued their sprint northward through the Bering Strait before being again captured by a low, this time over the East Siberian Sea. Sped on by this second nudge, the winds, running at 15-25 mph, spilled over the North Pole and into a…