STRANGE SPRING: EXPLAINING THIS YEAR'S WILD WEATHER
We've seen snow in the Midwest, wildfires in Texas and a surge of tornadoes across the country. What's going on with the weather?
- By Emily Sohn
Thu Apr 21, 2011 09:50 AM ET
(9) Comments | Leave a Comment
THE GIST
- Spring has not been very spring-like throughout the United States this year, and more wild weather is likely to come.
- This season’s weird weather patterns are a result of multiple forces, including La Niña and climate warming.
- Predictions are for one of the worst tornado seasons on record.
State troopers are on the scene as a wildfire rips through Graford, Texas. Click to enlarge this image.
Getty Images
Getty Images
Even though May is right around the corner, recent weather reports have been far from spring-like.
Snow fell this week on Minneapolis and Green Bay. Record-setting cold has settled on Seattle. And historic wildfires are burning in Oklahoma and Texas, where temperatures in the 90s are threatening to topple heat records. Meanwhile, 272 tornadoes swept the nation in the first half of this month – already breaking the all-time twister-count for April.
So, what's up with the weather?
According to experts, this season's higher-than-normal highs, lower-than-normal lows and extreme storms are, to some degree, symptoms of what tends to be a volatile time of year. But there are also some more insidious factors behind the latest round of weather grief, including an unusually strong La Niña, a strange pocket of warm air in Arctic, and overall climate warming.
"The weather is inherently wacky," said Paul Douglas, meteorologist and founder of Weather Nation, a weather outsourcing company in the Twin Cities, Minn. "Personally, I'm seeing an increase over time in the wackiness."
Spring is traditionally a fickle and unstable season as winter makes its slow and often ugly retreat, said Deke Arndt, chief of the Climate Monitoring Branch at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center. Violent storms are common. And it's not unusual for temperatures and precipitation levels to be higher or lower than normal. After all, that's how we end up with the artificial line called normal.
But several trends set apart the spring of 2011 from pervious years, Arndt said. For one thing, there has been an unusual stalling of weather patterns that has divided the country in two. Draw a line from Washington D.C. to Denver and down to Phoenix. North and west of that line, it has been cold and wet. To the south and east, it has been hot and dry.
"You see red blobs and blue blobs in any season, but it has been pretty entrenched for weeks to months," Arndt said. "A high-pressure ridge that has set up over the Southern Plains has been really persistent there. It has pushed a lot of active or violent weather to the east."
"It is no coincidence that there are heat and drought in Texas and Oklahoma at the same time as there's violent weather east of the Mississippi," he added. "They are not unrelated."
The current weather map fits pretty well with a typical La Niña year, in which cooler than normal waters gather beneath the surface of the eastern equatorial Pacific off the west coast of South America. The phenomenon influences the positioning of the jet stream. And that, in turn, affects weather patterns around the globe.
This year's La Niña started building late last summer and was mature by January, Arndt said. While the effect is beginning to weaken now, it remains generally strong, which helps explain why the Northwest, Northeast and Northern Plains of the United States, along with parts of Europe and Asia, had particularly harsh winters this year. It's also why many of those places are still waiting for spring to arrive.
But La Niña, which is natural and cyclical, is not the only driver behind weird weather reports lately. For the last two years, for reasons climatologists do not yet understand, a strange pocket of warm air has lingered over the Arctic, Douglas said, making the dead of winter a full 10 to 20 degrees warmer than normal in Greenland and northern Canada. The bubble has displaced cold air southward.
"If you leave the refrigerator door open, you warm up the refrigerator, and all that cool air kind of spills on to the floor," Douglas said. "That's what's happened."
On top of all that, a general rise in global temperatures has boosted levels of water vapor in the atmosphere by four percent, Douglas said. That basically loads the dice for more storms to form. Meanwhile, Twitter and Facebook can accentuate and accelerate the sense that severe weather is worse than it is.
As for what's to come, current weather patterns are poised to linger for a while longer. The atmosphere is energized, Douglas said, and jet stream winds are stronger than any other April he can remember. That means that volatility is guaranteed for the next 60 days. One meteorologist has predicted that another 300 more tornadoes will strike in the next two weeks. Whether that many pan out or not, Douglas expects this to be one of the top three tornado seasons on record.
Since we can't change the weather, the most important thing Americans do is plan for what to do when dangerous weather strikes, Douglas said. He also recommended buying a $30 NOAA weather radio, which according to the NOAA National Weather Service website, "broadcasts warnings, watches, forecasts and other hazard information 24 hours a day, 7 days a week."
An emergency radio may be one of the best forms of life insurance available, according to Douglas, who insisted that he does not make a commission for radio sales.
"Everyone needs to sit down and talk about tornado preparedness and flood preparedness," Douglas said. "It's going to be a busy spring."
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When the BP blowout occurred, it was drilling the second largest methane reserve on our planet. At 22,000 lbs. per square inch being released for MONTHS, there were also 5 gases being released into earths atmosphere. Toxic gases at that.
Gee, I wonder whats going on with our weather
Typical gibberish for the sheep. Aside from the mention of LaNina, there isn't a single fact or attempt at rational thinking in the article.
Its down to simply pulling so e random number out of the air to feed to what ever brain-dead scribe happens to be "writing" that day.
Just how would anyone arrive at any kind of verifiable number the "amount of water vapor in the atmosphere"?
Where did they measure?
What was their method?
Over what time period did the quantification occur, and over what time period prior, is it being compared.
Simple baseless propaganda, for simple minded people, but hey, at least Emily got paid.
The guy is a professional meteorologist, so I presume he may indeed have a good idea what the water vapor concentration in the atmosphere is. In case you haven't noticed, this isn't a professional journal where everything has a citation to a specific study. If you want that kind of documentation, stick to reading peer reviewed journals, not science blogs intended for the general public.
Amen to that.
I hope you know of the instrament called a hydrometer which measures moisture in the air....it's also called a wet-dry bulb. It's one of many instraments used in meterology to determind current weather.
It's cold. :-(
Uh huh, you can start with various government's manipulation of the weather worldwide. Planting seeds in clouds to cause undue rain and all kinds of manipulation including barium in the chemtrails.
windmill farms redicting the wind and reinforcing their trength
People really don't remember weather year over year. We can only rely on historical data that is kept by governments agencies and others to really know, but then, people will still argue about it. Where I live, we had virtually NO snow last winter. We had some, less than average, this year but people complained that it was so much and also remember that we had some last year (NOT!). Two years ago there were mega dumps of snow. But ask people if they remember it. People like to complain when the weather is not cooperating for the activity they had in mind. Wouldn't it be nice if precip only fell where people didn't live and that rivers brought the water cheaply to where they did live and it was sunny all the time? It doesn't work that way.