Tuesday April 7th… Dear Diary. The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track United States extreme or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ET’s will be listed at the very end of my article, below the news section for each day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ET’s (not extraterrestrials)😉
Main Topic: Colder Times Ahead For The United States
Dear Diary. As often stated, the main purpose of this blog is to track extreme temperatures, or record temperatures across the planet. Due to global warming, we have mainly highlighted record heat over the last few years. Occasionally though, the weather stars can still align such that record cold appears but with much less frequency than several decades ago. One such record cold regime is now slated for April 2020.
It’s been a few months since we have logged a month of more record cold reports than warm. We have had a relatively mild winter and a warm March here in the U.S. November 2019 was the last chilly month relative to climatological averages. We will see a big change this month, though.
The meteorological tea leaves (models) I have been looking at the last few days have been pointing to winter making a return for most of the U.S. by the middle of this month. Here is the latest GFS model output indicating that a very cold surge of air will plummet southward into the Midwest by the 13th:
Looking at low thickness values we should see many reports of record low temperatures from the Rockies into the Plains. This cold air will probably surge southward into Texas and the Southeast after the 13th. It’s uncertain whether or not the Midwest will see a significant winter storm, but this remains a distinct possibility. Here is the chilly temperature regime forecast for Monday morning, the 13th:
Across the Northern Hemisphere we see a very cold by mid April standards 500 millibar trough developing in the CONUS:
This cold weather pattern will mostly be due to warm ridging developing in Alaska and a negative Arctic oscillation, which is exactly opposite of what we’ve seen for most of this winter through March.
I’m sure that early spring flora has made an appearance as far north as the Great Lakes due to exceptionally warm conditions in March lasting through early April. Here are early afternoon temperatures occurring during this Tuesday the 7th:
In this case we can blame climate change for creating a “false spring,” or one occurring so early that it confuses nature, causing flowers and leaves to appear too soon, such that they are susceptible to damage from a freeze. I’ll be reporting how much damage, if any, we see to flora from this forecast mid April cold snap.
Now, here are some of todays articles on the horrendous coronavirus pandemic:
Here is more climate and weather news from Tuesday:
(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. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article.)
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Guy Walton “The Climate Guy”