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The Washington Post reports that the "lower 48" states of the USA are enjoying spring-like weather. It quotes a meteorologist as saying 1495 record high temperatures have been reached during the month of February (as against 10 record lows); among them:
- Magnum, Okla., hit 99 degrees [Fahrenheit, 37.2° Celsius] on Feb. 11 — tying the state record for hottest winter temperature ever recorded. Yet it occurred two weeks earlier than the record it matched from Feb. 24, 1918, set in the town of Arapaho.
- Denver hit 80 degrees [Fahrenheit, 26.7° Celsius] Feb. 10 — its warmest February temperature on record dating back to 1872.
- Norfolk hit 82 degrees [Fahrenheit, 27.8° Celsius] Feb. 12, tying its warmest February temperature on record dating back to 1874.
[Ed Note: it is actually Mangum, OK, not Magnum. The original WaPo article is incorrect.]
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Springtime for America in February
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(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Monday February 20 2017, @04:26PM
Are there any sane discussions of this
No. Sorry but No, not as far as I know.
I like reading the area forecast discussion from my local NWS office as trivially reachable from weather.gov. Thats probably what you're asking for but on a much larger scale.
The closest to what we're looking for is many people don't realize that just like Jupiter has a red spot, the earth has not one but two semi-permanent polar vortex eternal storms and winter weather depends pretty strongly on how well formed the vortex is and where it drifts off to. So if the entire north pole vortex kinda mushes over to Siberia for a week or two then it sux to be Siberia, but it'll be 100F in Oklahoma, until things mush back into their normal places. Or if its not well formed and spins off little polar vortex babies then you get cold snaps and stuff. So that's whats going on but this isn't much of a sane discussion, and not updated daily like a NWS station AFD.
When the poles inevitably completely melt, I bet the polar vortex gets really weird. Most of us are young enough we're gonna see that. Gonna be interesting.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday February 20 2017, @08:45PM
I sum it by "chaotic system is reacting to continuous drift in inputs"
One year we'll get wild stuff like recently (as forecasted by climatologists for over a decade), while next year might look totally normal again.
Overall, as there is more energy in the system, we can expect more wild stuff going on, but still randomly/chaotically.
No politics required, until we discuss the reasons for the extra energy and the cost of its effects.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 20 2017, @09:22PM
I'm not even sure the calculus style total amount of wildness is increasing.
That's another curious problem where just 20-30 years ago who knows what was happening behind the iron curtain, or 200 years ago nobody knew pretty much anything about the weather other than their locale and some sailor lore at least some of which was bunk. Only had satellites half a century, earth's been around a couple billion and now we think we're experts. The history of engineering is full of arrogant engineers doing stuff that in retrospect was pretty dumb.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday February 20 2017, @10:16PM
Well, the Chinese, Japanese and Indians have been keeping track of the weather for millenia. For other regions of the world, there are tree rings and ice cores giving us trends.
In the western world, people do need to check how precise the chemists did get with temperature measurements in the middle of the 19th century... This is not "20-30 years ago" stuff.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday February 20 2017, @10:32PM
people do need to check how precise the chemists did get with temperature measurements in the middle of the 19th century
I agree with the rest of your post at least more or less, but the chemists you list were not operating on an hourly basis in the middle of the Atlantic.
The HMS Challenger Expedition was kind of an anomaly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Challenger_(1858) [wikipedia.org]
It made the news recently, well, a decade ago, when the 50 volume book series of the expedition was available on line
http://www.19thcenturyscience.org/HMSC/HMSC-INDEX/index-linked.htm [19thcenturyscience.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 20 2017, @10:36PM
Not what is seen on Venus (which is known for its "boring", ie consistent, weather)