Do Storms Travel Around Globe?

I received this question from a blog reader a couple of weeks ago and it got lost in the fray:

I would still like to answer it. The answer to the question is... yes and no. In general, a particular piece (or "parcel" as we like to call them in meteorology) of air will continually travel around the globe, from west to east, in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. In general however, a particular low pressure system will not make it around the globe intact.

Looking at the 4-week satellite animation from Penn State University (you're looking down from the North Pole on the Northern Hemisphere) you can see that while the time frame you mentioned is about right for a parcel of air to travel the globe, the low pressure systems get "caught in the cogs" and routinely fade and regenerate as they circulate 'round the globe.

Or, take the 2-week surface pressure forecast animation from AccuWeather.com Professional (see below). Watch it and you can see various high and low pressure systems get squeezed out of (and into) existence.

More important to long-range forecasters such as Joe Bastardi is what we call "teleconnections," meaning relationships between what is happening in one place of the globe versus another. Think of the atmosphere as a huge ocean... as you raise the pressure in one area, it must drop in another. Large relationships such as El Nino and La Nina are important, but there are many more potential teleconnections, for example, does a typhoon in Japan today mean a high pressure on the west coast of the United States next week?

Meteorologists don't fully understand the implications of teleconnections, but more research is leading to more understanding as we move forward in time.