Figure 1. Perhaps the most iconic image of the U.S. winter of 2013 - 2014: Traffic gridlock in Atlanta on Tuesday afternoon, January 28, 2014 after Winter Storm Leon brought 2.6" of snow, shutting down the city. Image credit: @beercontrol/twitter.
The winter of 2013 - 2014 will go down in the history books in the Midwest U.S. as a top-ten coldest winter on record, but ranked as the warmest winter on record in California. Temperatures averaged over December 2013 - February 2014 in the contiguous U.S. made it our 34th coolest winter since
records began in 1895, said NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in their latest State of the Climate report. The last winter that was colder was 2009 - 2010, which ranked 15th coolest. For comparison, the winter of 2012 - 2013 was the 20th warmest, and the "non-winter" of 2011 - 2012 was the 4th warmest. Seven states had a top-ten coldest winter on record in 2013 - 2014: Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan.
Three states had a top-ten warmest winter on record: California, Arizona, and Alaska. The Southwest had an unusually dry winter, with California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas all recording top-ten dryness. For the nation as a whole, it was the 9th driest winter on record. The winter average snow cover extent for the contiguous U.S. was the 10th largest since record keeping began in 1966.
The U.S. winter of 2013 - 2014 had the 25th highest level of extremes observed since 1910, thanks primarily to the spatial extent of cold maximum and minimum temperatures and days with precipitation, according to NOAA's U.S. Climate Extremes Index (CEI). The index tracks the percentage area of the contiguous U.S. experiencing top-10% and bottom-10% extremes in temperature, precipitation, and drought. For the Western U.S. (California and Nevada), it was the
most extreme winter on record, primarily because 84% of the region experienced top-10% dryness.
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/archive.html?year=2014&month=03
No comments:
Post a Comment