Wet Pattern For U,S. With Some Climate Change Signatures
Thursday February 14th… Dear Diary. The main purpose of this ongoing post will be to track United States extreme or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials). 😉
While not exceptionally warm by mid February standards it appears that weather systems traversing the United States over the next week will have a few climate change signatures, which we will briefly discuss today. Most of these signatures involve heavy precipitation, which as we know is one sign that the climate is changing since a warming atmosphere tends to hold then release more moisture.
First, the West has been hit exceptionally hard from several systems in the past week as might be expected with an El Nino pattern during the winter. Just ask the people of Seattle. Well look what we have here today. An El Nino, albeit very weak, was declared to exist today:
Now, there is nothing whatsoever strange or something we can peg on climate change in association with the advent of an El Nino, but when you combine associated weather patterns with a warming atmosphere you may see findings such as this:
The system Dr. Daniel Swain referred to has been dubbed Winter Storm Nadia by The Weather Channel:
Snow levels in association with Nadia started out very low at 500 feet in northern and central California, and more than six more feet should fall on the highest elevations of the Sierra. California is definitely swinging back from drought to deluge this year.
This radar loop looked pretty wet and nasty:
This is good news, though. California won’t have to worry about a drought this year and probably not into 2020, as well. I’ll add some record precipitation totals from Nadia to this post should I see them.
Looking at Tropical Tidbits graphics we see that Nadia starts out in the West:
Then next week some of Nadia’s energy interacts with a front in the South to produce some locally heavy rain:
To me this looks like a typical late winter/early spring setup for heavy rain that will probably lead to flooding. Just how bad depends on how fast this system will move through the South. I’ll be brining reports to this site of how serious the situation gets, such as this:
If you are wondering here is what we see aloft next week across North America when heavy rain is forecast:
This coming week we will see a persistent “dirty ridge” across the South and deep trough in the West. I use the met slang “dirty ridge” indicating that the heat dome will be relatively week and flat allowing precipitation to occur. Here I don’t see anything too convoluted in association with the jet stream that we can peg to climate change.
So, we will see how many precipitation records are set the next few days, which I will relate here. Again, the good news is that climate change has not hurt the United States too much during the winter of 2018/19 across the United States.
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Here is some more weather and climate news for Wednesday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity.)
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The Climate Guy