In New England, we could be chanting “We’re almost #1” except we’re exhausted from February.
Except for a heavy and wet snowstorm on Thanksgiving, winter got off to a late start in New England. At my home near Concord NH, the “White Turkey” snow was gone by Christmas. The lack of a January thaw and some small snowfalls made most of January unremarkable. That all changed in the last week of January – a series of snowstorms quickly left me feeling as though I was either dealing with snow or catching up on everything I had set aside to deal with snow. The storm track was south of Boston, so they got pretty much all snow, and more than me. They are just a few inches from setting a new record for the season and there’s a very good chance they’ll break it. The snow has been a big story, and continues to be so. However, regionally, the big story of the winter has been the cold temperatures.
A year and a half a ago, I wrote one of my historical posts looking back a the New England Hurricane of 1938 and the other extreme weather around then. One of my examples was February 1934 which set many records that still exist today. It was a truly awesome month, Mark Twain would have run out of superlatives to describe it, and I’ll try to refrain from using many more adjectives.
I didn’t know all that much about 1934 before then, and still don’t know as much as I should. It was in the middle of the Dust Bowl years, not a good time for much of the country. It was significant in my post because it was the coldest February in New England’s records and I expected I wouldn’t see a month like that in the rest of my life. That was then. Now I have – February 2015 was essentially a twin of 1934. While the old month remains the coldest on record for New England, the margin is minuscule. For example, Boston missed a tie by 0.1F°
It was a twin for much of the rest of the country. While Portland Maine did break their coldest February record, Portland Oregon broke their warmest February record. For both cities the old record holder was 1934! The driver for 2015 is a warm pool of water in the northwest Pacific, and that’s created the “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge” which has kept storms from California, brought warm weather to Alaska, and probably a lot of other things I’d know about if I hadn’t been moving snow for the last six weeks.
That ridge was a sign – we’ve seen it before. Last October a press release from the American Geophysical Union about the California drought observed:
“We noticed that 1934 really stuck out as not only the worst drought but far outside the normal range of what we see in the record,” said Benjamin Cook, an environmental scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City and lead author of a new paper that has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
The new study also finds that the same atmospheric pattern of a high pressure ridge over the West Coast deflecting away storms laden with rain last winter was also present over the area during the winter of 1933-34.
The maps above are from NCDC’s Climate at a glance application, it’s an interesting site to visit.
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The one event we have not witnessed since we started viewing things via satellites is the shift of the AMO being in a “Warm” phase to a “Cold” phase. (Some suggest this happens in a 60 year cycle.)
Guess what. It has just happened.
Perhaps it is just a “spike”, prior to the expected shift, which was expected to occur about five years from now.
Even if it is just a “spike”, it is a big one.
Because we only have pre-satellite data from the last time this occurred, we are not sure what to expect. It seems probable we should not expect things to be the same, and should expect the unexpected.
(I myself think sea-ice will increase on the Atlantic side of the Pole. Old Danish records seem to show this occurred, in pre-satellite times, when the AMO shifted to “Cold”. However exactly how Mother Nature engineers this change is a mystery. It is a time to observe, and take notes, and to be humble about our level of knowledge. It is also a time when know-it-alls will likely be embarrassed.)
[What? Be humble in the face of the Universe! Oh the hubris. /sarcasm .mod]
I have absolutely no sympathy for Ric Werme. While he has been shoveling snow and freezing in New Hampshire, I have been watching the flowers bloom in Oregon, and the ski area languishes in 17% of normal snow pack. All my liberal Oregon friends smile with a snide “I told you so, global warming will roast us all, you denier!”
My wife has been muttering about going south to get away from this winter, but that would mean missing our historic weather. Perhaps we should have gone to Oregon and get the flip side of the historic weather!
I haven’t totally nixed the idea yet. Don’t have to as far in March.
I just discovered that the actual measurements of the atmosphere are irrelevant!
Quoted with approval on a pro-warmist blog: “Experimentalists will be surprised to learn that we will not accept any evidence that is not confirmed by theory.” (Sir Arthur Eddington betraying a derangement of the kind that proceeds from falling in love — in this case with a beautiful theory.) See: http://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2015/03/top-lessons-to-be-learned-from-warming-hiatus/
Then again, one may ask, why did Eddington fall in love with a beautiful theory, rather than the facts of reality? The answer is to be found in philosophy, not science. Eddington also said, “The stuff of the world is mind-stuff.” You will have to get up to speed on Idealism vs. Physical Realism to appreciate this angle, but suffice it to say that post-Kantian philosophy insists that we can not be in touch with reality as such, or the noumena, but rather only with the phenomena — the thing as it appears. That could look like harmless metaphysical speculation — until we get to the current, postmodern, era.
Which brings me back to a point I have made in this venue a number of times: contemporary climate “science” is postmodern science. That means if you wish to expose its fallacies you must reach beneath the evidence and expose the irrationality at its root: catastrophic man-made (and undoubtedly, Mann-made) global warming, in the deepest recesses of its cult followers’ souls, is a result not of physical law, but of our catastrophic societal belief in capitalism. I know it’s hard to believe, but yes, they do believe that not only is public opinion socially constructed, reality itself is socially constructed. Reality is not physical, it is mind-stuff. There is no conspiracy. Each victim believes this without question and without hope.
So in case you were wondering, that is why climate “science” dissenters must be totally obliterated. Since reality is socially constructed, even one reputable dissenter threatens the very foundations of reality, as surely as Prometheus threatened the hegemony of the gods by granting fire to mankind.
You can’t forget Kant’s contribution to this belief system. 🙂
What determines the pattern of the stratospheric polar vortex? The same as in the previous winter.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat_a_f/gif_files/gfs_z30_nh_f00.gif
Let us see solar cycle 16 and 24.
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/Zurich_Color_Small.jpg
It is a comparison of two specific winters in 1934 and 2015.
So here is needed a specific temperature data for each day of winter.
The graphs do not show the truth.
It is over the eastern Siberia begins several years lock polar vortex.
http://oi60.tinypic.com/3339uet.jpg
http://oi58.tinypic.com/111nm2v.jpg
Stratospheric waves that occur in the winter arctic air pushing south.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat-trop/gif_files/time_pres_WAVE1_MEAN_ALL_NH_2013.gif
Waves appear, with waves of decline in solar activity.
Reblogged this on austparagus and commented:
I like that chant!
I think I know that one.
The current temperature in the Northeast.
http://oi61.tinypic.com/fo0vab.jpg
I looked at the NCDC data about 5- 6 years ago. If you go through it you will find various ways that the ‘patterns’ come through:
1. An East-West divide as in 2015 and in 1934.
2. A SW-NE divide can also be found.
3. A SE-NW divide can be found.
4. Maine is often divorced from the rest of the NE.
5. Florida can be divorced from the rest of the SE.
You can do that analysis based on temperature or precipitation.
You will find runs of similar patterns for several years in particular geographies and you will find that recurring cycles of differing lengths may be found in different geographies.
if you wanted to teach children science properly, those diagrams are a goldmine, just as sunspot data since 1800 are. You can teach them how to look for overall trends from diagrams, without getting too het up on formulae at that stage.
You can get them to document average data and position over a Hale cycle and move that data forward over four of them. They may or may not find something interesting. You can get them to do them same for individual years of positive and/or negative sunspot cycles and see if they find anything or not. You can get them to see if there is any ‘delayed reaction’ between an event in, say, Washington State and subsequent years in the Northern Midwest or wherever.
Then they wouldn’t be getting told what to believe, they’d be analysing some data and drawing some conclusions, if any.
Then they might start asking Mum and Dad: ‘Why does the news carry such bullshit night after night about climate change?’
At which point you the teacher will be sacked for having taught them the word: ‘bullshit’………..
Forecast polar vortex shows that Arctic air will return northeast US for about 10 days.
Stronger solar wind causes a decrease in temperature in the stratosphere in the winter and polar vortex acceleration.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat-trop/gif_files/time_pres_TEMP_MEAN_JFM_NH_2015.gif
http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/webform/query.cgi?startday=08&startmonth=02&startyear=2015&starttime=00%3A00&endday=08&endmonth=03&endyear=2015&endtime=00%3A00&resolution=Automatic+choice&picture=on
Feb 2015 was the fourth coldest since 1899 at the fairly nearby Hagerstown, MD observer:
COLDEST FEBRUARYS
21.7 1905
22.0 1934
22.5 1979
23.2 2015
23.3 1936
23.5 1978
23.9 1899 1904
24.5 1907
25.4 2007
26.0 1901 1963
26.4 1908
Avg Feb temp there is 33.5 F, so Feb 2015 was 10.3 F below avg.
March 6 & 7 also set record cold days — March 7th only the 7th March day since 1899 that went below 0 F.
Like Eastern US, February 2015 was unusually severe and record cold . Various coldest temperatures ever recorded for February were set in Eastern Canada including Toronto,Hamilton ,Kitchener, Peterborough, London, Ottawa,and Quebec and Montreal, . With an average temperature of -14.7C, February 2015 was the coldest ever seen in Montreal.. Some records beat temperature records going back to the 1800’s . These cold winter temperatures should not be a surprise to any one. Winter temperatures have been declining , globally, in Northern Hemisphere, and in North America since 1998. Winters in Northern Hemisphere have actually been declining since 1995 or 20 years. This has even been noted in some peer reviewed papers .
Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”
Mark Twain Samuel Clemens
The Northern Hemisphere pattern during this winter is in part driven by a weak El Nino Modoki, which causes a weather pattern over North America that is conducive for cold, wet winters for the eastern half of the CONUS, and dry, warm winters for the western half. I think JoeB predicted this last summer.
mid maine here, over 100 inches in 3 weeks or so. total for Feb was about 118 inches here +/- a little.
We are repeating the 30s in more ways than one. A big difference is, whereas, circa 1934, nuclear weapons were only concepts, now they are rife. And chem and bio weapons are making a comeback and are more likely to be used than than were 75 years ago. Well, the way things are going, we may get to see if the peace activists back in the 1980s were exaggerating or not with their nuclear winter theory.
Much as they may impress regional inhabitants, single-month or seasonal record-breaking temperatures in a time-series spanning only a century or two scarcely provide any trustworthy indication of climate change. The interesting thing about the contiguous USA, however, is that the ANNUAL average temperature variations are NEGATIVELY correlated between Southern California and many regions east of the Mississippi. This is but another example of regional temperature “see-saws,” of which the Greenland-Scandinavia winter is the oldest known example. As in the present case, they result from various long-term shifts in the multiple-lobe polar front and accompanying pressure distributions at mid-latitudes.
BTW, WUWT should wake up to the fact that its now daylight savings time.
@Owen in GA
That may be true but the areas that have ‘plumes’ of carbon dioxide do not correspond to higher temperature, some are over record cold regions.
There is also a base even coverage upon which concentration ‘plumes’ are built. Like a lumpy blanket it still keeps you warm, although CO2 is the thermal equivalent of a plastic sheet on a freezing winter night, the overriding natural factors trump the makeshift blanket.