Sunday February 16th… 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)😉
Main Topic: A Weird, Windy, Warm Winter For Europe
Dear Diary. Sometimes climate change, during the lifetime of one human, creeps very slowly into the collective consciousness of a nation. For example, despite the United States having the warmest winter so far in recorded history looking at temperature averages, most unusual events this season we have witnessed are being chalked up by those denying climate change to variations with normal weather. There is a perception of warming trends occurring very slowly. As discussed on Friday we still are seeing enough Arctic chill and snow across the Midwest to fool a few people. Not so much in Australia. Record heat and conflagrations have slapped the populace in the face, waking most up in that country to the reality of the climate crisis from 2019 into 2020.
Europe also is having its warmest winter on record:
Dynamics in the Northern Hemisphere have led to ferocious storms in the North Atlantic producing damaging winds across the British Isles and Iceland over the course of this winter. Here is a note from last week:
Europe would appear to be somewhere in between the reality of the United States and Australia. All three areas were affected by and were part of a global warmest January on record.
It stands to reason that a warming atmosphere is producing stronger storms, and indeed that is what we have seen in the North Atlantic this season:
We also are witnessing a record strong jet stream between North America and Europe.
To the south of the jet across most of central and southern Europe a stubborn, warm ridge has been in place most of this winter season. I note that the ridge will get only stronger going into next weekend. By that time mid spring or even early summer like warmth will be occurring due to the ridge. These 500 millibar and 850 millibar conditions will resemble those of June more than February by next Sunday:
Record temperatures have been falling by the dozens over Europe this winter, but by next weekend it will be astoundingly warm.
Here is one note from Saturday:
I thought to look at Span and France, which have lately been under the heart of the 500 millibar ridge. Just today we saw these records:
And, of course, the weather pattern was eyepoppingly warm this Sunday south of winter storm Dennis:
(As usual, click on these tweets for translations.)
I’m sure that residents over Europe the last couple of years have seen enough warm, wacky weather to know that the climate crisis is here, now. I’ll be adding more notes to this post in association with Europe’s warmth and stormy weather later this week, such as these:
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Here is some more weather and climate news from Sunday:
(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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Guy Walton- “The Climate Guy”