90 Degrees in Winter: This Is What Climate Change Looks Like

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http://www.thenation.com/article/166917/90-degrees-winter-what-climate-change-looks


A view of the Runge reservoir in the town of Runge, some thirty-seven miles north of Santiago on February 3, 2012. Reuters/Ivan Alvarado

The National Weather Service is kind of the anti–Mike Daisey, a just-the-facts operation that grinds on hour after hour, day after day. It’s collected billions of records (I’ve seen the vast vaults where early handwritten weather reports from observers across the country are stored in endless rows of ledgers and files) on countless rainstorms, blizzards and pleasant summer days. So the odds that you could shock the NWS are pretty slim.

Beginning in mid-March, however, its various offices began issuing bulletins that sounded slightly shaken. “There’s extremes in weather, but seeing something like this is impressive and unprecedented,” Chicago NWS meteorologist Richard Castro told the Daily Herald. “It’s extraordinarily rare for climate locations with 100+ year long periods of records to break records day after day after day,” the office added in an official statement.

It wasn’t just Chicago, of course. A huge swath of the nation simmered under bizarre heat. International Falls, Minnesota, the “icebox of the nation,” broke its old temperature records—by twenty-two degrees, which according to weather historians may be the largest margin ever for any station with a century’s worth of records. Winner, South Dakota, reached 94 degrees on the second-to-last day of winter. That’s in the Dakotas, two days before the close of winter. Jeff Masters, founder of WeatherUnderground, the web’s go-to site for meteorological information, watched an eerie early morning outside his Michigan home and wrote, “This is not the atmosphere I grew up with,” a fact confirmed later that day when the state recorded the earliest F-3 strength tornado in its history. Other weathermen were more… weathermanish. Veteran Minneapolis broadcaster Paul Douglas, after noting that Sunday’s low temperature in Rochester broke the previous record high, blogged “this is OFF THE SCALE WEIRD even for Minnesota.”

It’s hard to overstate how impossible this weather is—when you have nearly a century and a half of records, they should be hard to break, much less smash. But this is like Barry Bonds on steroids if his steroids were on steroids, an early season outbreak of heat completely without precedent in its scale and spread. I live in Vermont, where we should be starting to slowly thaw out—but as the heat moved steadily east, ski areas shut down and golf courses opened.

[FirstLight]

1. crazy stuff, maynard

here at 6200' we had a dry and lovely winter, no real snow, and 50-60 degree days! the first real storm of the season didn't hit till last week, and even then it was only a couple feet at lake level, more on top...... and now it is going to be 50 again and raining this weekend... weird. I am a jerk, because I really hate snow and I am glad that i haven't had to shovel all winter, but i know it isn't good for the streams and lakes...not to mention the folks who rely on our runoff for their water. this summer we are going to see a lot of fires in CA i am afraid.

[HereSince1628]

2. It's a remarkable excursion.

These sorts of things are especially interesting to computer modellers who are always trying to 'truth' their models.

I can imagine the 'short term' climate modellers scratching their heads and looking at the amplitudes and frequencies of these 'real world' excursions, and wondering how to tweek their models to get them to represent this 'reality.'

I've got the feeling that the nice bell-shaped distributions are needing justified mechanisms that generate rather more kurtosis.

[TrogL]

3. I first moved here in the 70's

Year after year you could count on literally tons of snowfall in the winter with blizzards, school closures, power failures considered the norm. You had a pretty good chance of seeing bare, brown ground on the 24th of May weekend and all the snow gone by June.

This is March. I'm seeing green grass, some of the trees are budding, the geese are here a month early and while there's a bit of snow on the ground in places with little sun (like my back yard) it'll probably be gone by the weekend.

The last "proper" winter we had was two years ago, the previous one was five years before that.

[emmadoggy]

4. I live in NE Iowa.

Last edited Wed Mar 21, 2012, 08:23 PM - Edit history (1)

The central states, in general, can have some wild swings in weather and we occasionally get those weird outlier days. But in all my 44 years I have never seen a March quite like this one. Sure, I've seen winters where our snow is gone early and we have bare ground in March. We've had warm, balmy days in March before. Usually a day or two in the 60's is a pretty big deal in March.

This year?? Well, this year we've had our windows open (not just during the day, but at night, too) and have not used our furnace in SEVERAL days. The first 10 days or so of March we used minimal heating. The St. Patrick's day parade, which has had to be cancelled due to snowstorms before, and is usually rather brisk and usually still has snow on the ground, felt like a 4th of July parade. Our overnight lows have been 10-15 degrees ABOVE the normal HIGHS. We've had several days with highs in the 70's and some spots have hit 80 or more.

Like I said, we do often get a couple of balmy, nice days in March, but to have what is now nearly 2 WEEKS STRAIGHT of MUCH above normal temps is just freakish. Freakishly freakish.



Edited to add link to this interesting info from our local NWS office: http://www.crh.noaa.gov/arx/?n=2012marchwarmth

[pscot]

5. George Soros probably paid a bundle

for this thread.

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6. ?nt

[pscot]

7. Sometimes I'm so obscure

that I have to explain things to myself. Just put me on ignore.

[OKIsItJustMe]

8. I often say

“The best humor needs to be explained…”

[OKIsItJustMe]

9. How rare is this Summer in March heat event?

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2057

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[font size=5]How rare is this Summer in March heat event?[/font]

[font size=3]One measure of how record-breaking this "Summer in March" heat wave has been is the impact it had on NOAA's National Climatic Data Center web site. The extremes section of the their web site has been down since last Friday, since their software has been unable to handle both the huge number of records being set and the huge demand from people wanting to see these records. The web site came back on-line this morning with software re-engineered to handle the load, but only with data through Sunday.

We can also quantify how rare a meteorological event is by looking at statistics of past years. By averaging together at least 30 years of data to take a representative snapshot of the climate, we can generate a mean and a standard deviation of the data. The standard deviation gives a measure of how much the data fluctuates around the mean.

In comparing deviations from normal across wide regions, it helps to normalize the deviations. A temperature deviation of 3 degrees C may be not that unusual in one region, but may be very significant in another. The solution is to use climatological anomalies (which we often refer to by the Greek letter, sigma.) Calculating the climatological anomaly is a two step process. First, we calculate the difference between a quantity (i.e., temperature) and it's 30-year average value. Then we normalize the difference by dividing it with the 30-year standard deviation. From statistical theory, we know how unusual climatological anomalies are by value:

Odds of a deviation > 1 climatological anomaly=31.7%
Odds of a deviation > 2 climatological anomalies=4.5%
Odds of a deviation > 3 climatological anomalies=0.27%
Odds of a deviation > 4 climatological anomalies=6.34/1000%
Odds of a deviation > 5 climatological anomalies=5.7/100000%
Odds of a deviation > 6 climatological anomalies=1.9/1000000%

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Figure 3. Climatological anomalies for March 20, 2012. Michigan experienced temperatures that were 4 - 5 climatological anomalies warmer than average (4-sigma to 5-sigma), the type of extreme that occurs between once every 43 years and once every 4779 years. Wunderground plans to make these plots available in real time on our web site later this year.

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