There continues to be a number of reports of colder than normal weather and seasons from around the globe. Here are a few.
Loveland Pass Colorado, today
Australia:
http://www.weatherzone.com.au/news/cold-weather-here-to-stay/9718
Cold weather here to stay
Tom Saunders, Saturday August 16, 2008 – 20:23 EST
August 2008 continues to be one of the coldest on record for most of Australia with temperatures averaging as much as six degrees below normal.
The cold weather has even spread to northern Queensland with Burketown dropping to five degrees on Saturday morning for the first time in 24 years. On the Queensland coast Coolangatta has now dropped to five or less on 10 consecutive mornings, easily beating the old record of six.
Daytime has brought little relief with Orange shivering through 10 consecutive days below eight degrees for the first time in 17 years.
The prolonged cold spell is due to a strong high pressure system anchored south of WA. The high is directing southerly winds over the country, carrying cold air from the Southern Ocean well north into the tropics.
The high will finally move east early next week but a second high will maintain chilly weather until at least Sunday.
– Weatherzone
Canada endures ‘briefest summer’ in decades
A bummer summer
Our sunny hopes for a long, hot season have been dampened by too many wet weekendsAugust 16, 2008(Aug 16, 2008)
Summer, we hardly knew ye. Even the sunniest optimist can’t deny the signs. It’s all but over. Area fall fairs start today. The CNE is under way. (Both, no doubt, doomed to storms that are both unforecast and torrentialWhat, you say summer doesn’t officially end until 11:44 a.m. on Sept. 22? Only if you’re an astronomer.
Back-to-school ads are out, retailers licking their chops in anticipation that Christmas is virtually around the corner. Soon sweaty Olympians will be replaced on TV by sweatier Jerry Lewis, the Ticats thump the Argos on Labour Day weekend, and the wet, brief, Summer of Woe-Eight is history. Has any summer felt shorter? And why does it matter? What is it about summer that so often breaks our hearts?
If you measure the season by blue sky and sunshine, this has been the briefest summer since perhaps the oppressive gloom and cold of the summer of 1992.
It’s not so much the total rainfall this season — although Hamilton has indeed had at least 10 centimetres more rain than average, and three times more than last summer. No, it’s more about timing. Summer is about the weekend. Last year, to this point in the summer, Hamilton had measurable rainfall on a total of four Saturdays or Sundays.
This summer? Sixteen — rain on 16 Saturdays or Sundays. Put another way, last summer there were seven totally dry weekends, this summer, just one (July 4-5).
Worst of all, the weather has been maddeningly schizophrenic, storm clouds on the periphery seemingly every day, and forecasts as scientific as a Ouija board.
“If it’s bright all day, or rains all day, it’s easy to plan, but we’ve seen the weather changing on a dime, by the hour,” said Dave Phillips, senior climatologist with Environment Canada, who is quick to assert that forecasters “never promise anything.”
As if to compound frustration over the summer that wasn’t, there is nothing convenient on which to blame the weather, not global warming, El Nino or El Nina. The cave-like summer of 1992 — perhaps the worst ever for cloud and cold — was attributed to atmospheric fallout of dust from the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines the year prior.
And this summer? There’s no identifiable cause for our season of discontent, other than we have for some reason been trapped beneath what is called an “upper low,” an oxymoronic disturbance parked over the James Bay-Central Quebec area that moves around a bit but never really exits, refusing to spin north or east, which would allow for the arrival of dry warm air from the southern United States.
Complete article here
In Colorado, an early mountain snow, the forecast…http://www.9news.com/news/article.aspx?storyid=97578&catid=339
In addition to the fall-like temperatures, the storm will bring a very good chance for rain to the metro area and snow to the high country.
Scattered showers and a few isolated thunderstorms will first develop along the urban corridor starting late Thursday afternoon. The rain will become more widespread as the main storm system moves into the state Thursday night.
And the results…
DENVER (Map, News) – Heavy rains prompted flood watches and warnings in Colorado‘s foothills, along the Front Range and on the eastern plains Saturday, while snow temporarily closed Loveland Pass in the mountains west of Denver.
http://www.examiner.com/a-1540471~Colorado_sees_flood_warnings__snow.html
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Call your broker, tell ’em to look for companies that are everything winter.
If “AGW” is causing a heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, “NGC” (Natural Global Cooling) is causing a cold wave just over the Rockies.
“RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE DENVER CO
700 PM MDT FRI AUG 15 2008
…RECORD LOW MAXIMUM TEMPERATURE SET IN DENVER FOR AUGUST 15TH…
THE HIGH TEMPERATURE AT DENVER INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TODAY WAS 59 DEGREES.
THIS WILL REPLACE THE OLD LOW MAXIMUM TEMPERATURE RECORD FOR AUGUST 15TH WHICH WAS 68 DEGREES SET 128 YEARS AGO 1880.”
While Eastern Australia has been cold . Here in the West we have had 2 weeks of warm dry weather. A pleasant 23C today. Overall this August looks like being the coldest in Australia for many years. Almost everywhere (except the west coast) has been colder than normal for the last 2 weeks by substantial amounts.
Australia temperature maps (note monthly values are calendar months)
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/silo/temp_maps.cgi?variable=minanom&area=nat&period=week&time=latest
New Zealand is experiencing record snowfall in some areas.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10527369
From the sunny South. The average temperature for July and now August for the midlands of South Carolina is at the recorded average for the period of all temperature records. In other words, that steep increase in temperature since about 1980 is gone. Antedoctal, but fun.
Also cold & wet here in Portugal, where it’s typically hot & sunny!
Ecotretas
I’ve lived in Charlotte, NC for 2 years. When I first came down here in 2006, the job I had then was partly indoors and partly outdoors. I remember that summer with Heat Warnings due to humidity and temperature at or in excess of 105 degrees. I had to take 2 showers a day because at the end of the day I just felt gross. This summer I think we have had maybe 3 days that even reached 100 degrees. Last summer was noticably mild too. I had one person come up to me one night this month (August) and say that it was “cold outside.” It’s in the mid 80’s to around 90 degrees for high temps for this week, significantly cooler than the mid to upper 90s typical for this time of year. These are temperatures normal to September and early October. To top it all off, with the poor condition of the stations Anthony has been finding, who really knows the real story on the temperature difference. It could be a little, and then again it could be a lot. But whatever it is, I would venture to say that this summer has been slightly below what is average for this area.
A quick and dirty way to check local temps vs local averages is go to the WeatherUnderground page and put in your city or zip code to get the local weather. Scroll down, and there’s a “Calendar View” for that area. You’ll see a calendar that has the average for each day, and what the temperature was this year. You can scroll back to previous months.
Where I am in South Florida it has been a less brutal summer than usual, and eyeballing the calendar view confirms that they’ve consistently reported 1-2 degree F cooler this year than their average.
I have no idea where they get those temps or how accurate they are, but its still interesting to eyeball their averages against this year’s reported temps.
Central heating back on in Oxfordshire, England, it was off for the whole of two weeks. For most of the last two decades (at least until last summer) the central heating has been off from May to September.
Been cold this year for some and warm for others here in the U.S.
http://www.hprcc.unl.edu/products/maps/acis/YearTDeptUS.png
HI,
I live in New Zealand and last July we had a storm and this July 2 storms equivalent to a Cat 2-3 Hurricane. All three hit land, our local coastguard weather station had winds regularly at 90+ Knots – around 160Km/h+
My theory is that record amounts of ice in Antarctica has increased the size of the Polar Maritime air mass and moved the border between Polar and Temperate air masses north. This has caused a steeper temperature gradient so when a block of tropical maritime air moves south and collides with a polar maritime air mass moving north we increasingly get these high energy storms. Can’t be global warming, this is mid-winter for !@ur momisugly!@ur momisugly#$!@ur momisugly!
This winter also feels colder, certainly our wood pile has shrunk faster than last year and I cut more wood as well.
Does this theory hold water?
Let’s not forget that these exteme weather events {a cold summer seems rather extreme} are proof of global warming; ask any well-funded scientist. And this winter, as I’m shoveling record anecdotal events, I’ll keep reminding myself that it’s all because of AGW. And also, remember over the course of the next decade, that all these anecdotal events will keep on masking the warming that should be happening; ask any well-funded computer programmer building models meant to simulate atmospheric events.
DC has had a string of mid-80s throughout the month of August, unseasonably cool for this time of year (average high in August is around 90).
Weather .com projects hitting 90 on Tuesday, then dropping back to the mid-low 80s for the erst of the month. It’s like late September out there.
Reality check. The corn crop in the northern USA is late and needs a warm sunny fall to mature properly. Looks like this is not goning to happen. Fortunately corn is grown in many parts of the USA. Golbal cooling can be bad. Global warming would have alowed a late plated crop to mature how ironic.
Dan,
Thanks for the WeatherUnderground tip.
Quote from the Canadian source :
“If it’s bright all day, or rains all day, it’s easy to plan, but we’ve seen the weather changing on a dime, by the hour,” said Dave Phillips, senior climatologist with Environment Canada, who is quick to assert that forecasters “never promise anything.”
Except those forecasters prophesying doom and gloom for the rest of this century.
You NH people maybe having an early winter on the way, however as reported above, the winter season in Australia is not going away. Ongoing snow is forecast for the highlands for the next week and beyond.
Massive amounts of snow abounds in our ski fields this year. Our government adviser, head climate doom sayer and hero of the year made the rash statement that Australia would be snow free by 2015.
Kagiso (15:55:39) :
‘For most of the last two decades (at least until last summer) the central heating has been off from May to September.’
And how much are you paying in CO2 drives the climate tax?
Kagiso,
You have your heating on in Oxfordshire? Blimey! I’m sitting here in Worcestershire, maybe fifty miles from you, in my shirtsleeves at 1.30 a.m. I agree that it’s been horribly wet, but you should try getting outside when the rain stops – it’s pleasantly warm! Maybe you should consult a doctor? 😉
Very little air conditioning time in New York since June. Usually it’s a blast furnace.
Last winter was unusually warm but this summer has been unusually mild.
Summer is about the weekend.
this is the main problem with anectodal evidence.
a summer with warm nights, rainy weekends and afternoons/evenings will feel cold, even though temperature measurement will show temps much above “average”.
so you need to look at temperature averages. farmers and ski ressort owners will be able to tell you the (local) trend as well.
Just a thought. Its been hot for the past 10 years or so (may no warming, but not a whole lot of cooling either). If we lose all that heat will we find it cold?
I think this may be what we are seeing. I remember the seventies. It was a lot like what we are now seeing. The eighties didn’t seem overly warm (except in summer), but the nineties did. Now we are just going back to what we once had.
I won’t be too worried about a Dalton Minimum unless it continues to cool like this for a few more years (with little or no sun spots too).
I would however like to see the AGW clergy squirm. They have built a pretty big house of cards on a very flimsy table.
We are having a preternaturally cool August here in Indiana. Usually the state fair is a trial of heat and humidity. Last night it was incredibly pleasant (mid-70s). Of course, we are supposed to be suffering through August.
It appears we are running 4-7 degrees low, it’s 71 degrees at about 10:22 pm, headed for a low of 57 degrees (58 this morning), with the average low being 64 degrees.
With Bill McClure, I am concerned about the corn crop (which has recovered nicely from the cold wet spring) having enough heat to finish out. I am very concerned about what things are going to look like this winter. If February runs 4-7 degrees low, it will be miserable.
[…] number of reports of colder than normal weather and seasons from around the globe. Here are a few. Watts Up With That? 16 August, 2008 But will it suit those ringing the leper’s bell? Positive progress […]
Reality check. The corn crop in the northern USA is late and needs a warm sunny fall to mature properly. Looks like this is not goning to happen. Fortunately corn is grown in many parts of the USA. Golbal cooling can be bad. Global warming would have alowed a late plated crop to mature how ironic.
Bill, you are correct, we need some heat units pretty badly.
I drove up from Denver this afternoon and was noticing how the corn is about half it’s normal height. With the very cold temperatures we are having here, it seems unlikely to recover..
Steven Talbot,
I drove through Worcester last week and it was pouring rain and quite cool. You seem to have a chip on your shoulder which makes it difficult for you to be objective.
I’m in South MS and it has been unusually cool all summer. Our shrimp season was delayed due to the Gulf waters being to cool. There have been some blast furnace with 99% humidity days, but overall, much cooler. I’ve been keeping up with the “Departure from Normal Highs” on weather.com. For a few weeks now. On average there have been below normal temps for the U.S. This snow event in Colorado is barely making a peep in the MSM. I guess it doesn’t fit the script.