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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Antartica ice extent is increasing phenomenonally and now about 1.5 million km2 above same last year. Does this suggest abnormal cooling? it may because ot this rate SH ice could reach 2-3 million km2 above anomaly.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.south.jpg
current artic still 1.5 below but melt seems to be petering out .
Even here in the Phoenix, AZ area, I have noticed that the corn crops are just now getting harvested. Normally, they’re on the second crop of corn by now. Whenever I hear a midwesterner say “knee-high by the fourth of July” I laugh, because it’s usually just about harvest time for the first crop here. Many farmers normally get 2 crops out of the season here.
How this year looks so far in the US, compared to previous years. Average is 1901-2000. Jan-Jul rank is 63 of 114. 114 be the warmest.
http://climvis.ncdc.noaa.gov/tmp/graph-Aug1701:21:264490356445.gif
In the 1970s when I left home in MA in mid August for vacations around the country it was still hot enough for me to be sweating all night; the summer heat usually ended by the time I got back the second week of Sept. This year what little there was to the summer heat ended by July 31st, that is I had to use a blanket. The next night I shut my windows.
Another way of looking at it: I work in an outside plant shop mostly as a cashier but I also water the flowers and trees. I used to need a hat; this year I did not. Also, it used to get so hot in August that we had to physically lift up the smaller perennials and annuals and immerse their pots in water because the surface of the soil turned to hardpan. We have not had to do that this year.
On a more personal level I am really having trouble growing peppers this year. Tomatoes are OK, but the peppers are stunted.
Steven Talbot (17:32:53) :
I live in The sub-trobics of Australia but emigrated here from the UK (I thank my lucky stars for so doing every day). I remember that when the temperature in Blighty reached 60 fahrenheit, all the guys would place knotted handkerchiefs onto their heads, roll up their trousers to just above (only slightly above!) the knees and don black socks drawn up to cover the gap whilst also wearing open toed sandals. I can picture it now even as I pick myself up off the floor after laughing!
Looking at the Central England stats (www.climate-uk.com) seems to suggest a fairly average summer. However the maxima (which are more important in summer since we spend longer at or near them than the minima) have been severely suppressed, with mild nights only keeping the average temperature slightly below average.
Rainfall has once again been way above average, with Northern Ireland in particular flooding badly yesterday (have not seen global warming blamed, yet), this all two years after a hot and dry summer led to calls for us to start using drought-resistant crops. Parts of Ireland have not registered a single completely sunny day all summer – the previous minimum was five days.
I was just looking at http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/. It seems that since the end of July, the blue ice melt curve has a little uptick now and then, but suddenly ‘remembers’ that it is supposed to be going down!
I live in the south of France, where the usual overnight minimum is 17 to 18 °C.
The last four nights fell to 12°C. The summer has been cool so far and it was mid June before I began to wear shorts regularly. This is about a month later than normal!
I have lived in Salvador Brazil for 10 years. This winter is by far the coldest I have experienced. Usually, temperatures don’t drop below 20 C but we have had many nights with temperatures of 16C and 17C.
Northern Ireland yesterday
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7566002.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/7565593.stm has a good video of the Northern Ireland floods, a good example of some typical Britishness in there as well!
This could well be the second successive year that nowhere in Britain manages to register the magic 30c. (well, OK, the London Weather Centre alone made it last year, but their thermometer is stuck on their roof, with a small patch of surrounding grass for climate reporting purposes).
Like Kagiso, I switched the heating on for a short period and put the gas fire on a couple of times here in Southampton England. My outside temperature display has been showing 15 C some evenings early on , when mid August we might expect 20 c early evening. The peak daytime temperature has only been 18 to 19c many days , when we would normally expect 19c to 23c, but some days could easily be 27 or 28c. As I’m a keen gardener I do love sitting outside in my garden with a nice cold beer, watching the fish in the pond, looking at the lovely flowers I have grown. My cats love to sit outside with me. This year its been far to chilly to do this. I might even buy a patio heater! ( ecocrime) I notice Ecotretas from Portugal says its cold & wet. Portugal is normally warm/hot and dry and a very beautiful country, highly recomended for a holiday. Sit outside a restaurant on a warm summer evening with an IceCold Super Bock and tuck into Chicken Piri Piri— heaven.
Steven Talbot: “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.”
Well, I’m sitting in Bristol, wearing a jumper because I can’t afford the gas bill – and it’s 13:00. It may be pleasantly warm when the sun’s out, but we’ve hardly seen the sun this summer.
Gulf of Mexico water temp yesterday morning at the beach was 83, about 5 degrees cooler than it should be. Almost too cold to go in.
I live near Hoosier Pass, Colo., nine miles South of Breckenridge on the Continental Divide at 10,900′. It’s snowing right now. It looks like December, not the 17th of August. We haven’t had much of a summer, with frequent thunderstorms, copious rainfall, and cooler-than-average temperatures (even for the Rockies). Last Winter’s snow still remains on many peaks. And now it’s snowing on top of the old snow.
Gordon Walker
What kind of grape harvest are we going to see in France?
Now there’s a long term proxy for the climate, the quality of the wines in France.
If it keeps getting colder, we may get short on heating fuel in the winters to come. The solution may lie with an obscure energy company called Oynklent Green Corp[OTC:OYNK]. Their clever approach is to utilise fast thermolysis/pyrolysis to create fuel oil from animal flesh–as in the Carthage, Missouri plant that uses poultry offal as feedstock. The difference is that OYNK uses as feedstock all “wholly warmer” orthodox activists, journalists, politicians, and academics who have achieved fame and fortune by misleading the public. As the ice age descends upon an unprepared world, OYNK may be the only path to redemption for the grifters who cashed in on a cruel hoax.
REPLY: Oynklent Green is made of Sheeple!
From the western slope of Colorado. In the first week of June we were wondering if it was spring yet, still had snow and frost. Now, fall comes a month early, with snow sticking above 10K ft. Ususally the first snows that stick are in mid to late September. In the past week, it is 10 degF cooler at night,
40s instead of 50s. One more cold front like this weekend’s will probably end the growing season.
Jack Simmons
I can’t really say. I live in the middle of a major wine growing area and the vendange is three to four weeks away. It has been unusually cool but as dry or even dryer than normal in this mediterranian climate. I have a friend who is a vigneron but he was out when I rang him just now. If he is prepared to risk an opinion I will let you know.
Teleskeez (07:06:01) :
“And now it’s snowing on top of the old snow.”
Isn’t that the basic recipe for growing glaciers?
And then there is this report:
This report
So which is it… warmer or cooler?
Just ask’n
DaveK
I think Deadwood is right its same Summers as we used to have in the early 70s. 1976 was however a very hot dry summer. The 60s were wet and cold, 70s it started to change. The late 70s and early eighties were cold, we used to go night beach fishing and the pebbles would be frozen together on the beach. Then it started to get milder and dryer late eighties and through the nineties although mid 90s and year 2000 were cold winters. The climate moves up and down all the time
Interesting. I just got back from raking hay on a rented farm, and noticed that the Maples in the yard are starting to turn. Now, the Maples are normally the first to turn, but this is August, prime time to see the changing of the trees isn’t normally till sometime in October. Interesting times indeed.
“I won’t be too worried about a Dalton Minimum unless it continues to cool like this for a few more years”
Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?
BUCKS FIZZ!
This from the UK Sunday Telegraph “The cold summer weather has caused confused stags to begin their mating rituals weeks ahead of schedule.
Staff at a farm park say that the seasonal rutting patterns have been upset and male red deer have begun shedding the velvet a month early.” How cool is that?