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 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: Fire And Ice Are Plaguing America
Dear Diary. Record cold has finally returned to the United States, but this much needed break from global warming is burning California.
Truth be told, we have an extreme fall weather pattern that could be set up by climate change. A cold lobe at 500 millibars responsible for funneling record cold air into the northern Rockies area is being pinched from both the northwest and southeast by warm ridges:
The strengthening jet on the west side of our cold lobe is responsible for strong easterly winds across California that will be exacerbating fire danger for days to come, unfortunately:
At the surface by tomorrow morning Arctic high pressure will continue to be setting record chill in the Rockies and setting up a pressure gradient producing some of the fiercest winds of the week across California:
To start off this week let’s take note of the great disparity between record warmth and chill during October 2020 and prior months back into the summer using my Record Scoreboards. Here we see stats updated through 10/22/25 before any record cold reports from the Rockies wintry blast get recorded in the National Environmental Information Center’s record count system:
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datatools/records
It’s no wonder that we were well overdue for a cold blast. Ever since August the ratio of hot to cold daily records has been approximately 3-1 across the United States, and historically over the last couple of decades the ratio is just a little over 2-1, so we were due for a statistical correction via Mother Nature.
DHMX= Daily High Max Reports. DLMN= Daily Low Min Reports. DHMN= Daily High Min Reports. DLMX=Daily Low Max Reports.
For these data sets all monthly ratios of > 10 to 1 DHMX to DLMN or > 10 to 1 DLMN to DHMX are in bold type. The rankings are for the lower 48 states with the warmest ranking since 1895 of average temperatures being 125 and 1 being the coldest as of 2020. Blue colors represent cold months and red warm. Those months and years with counts close to a 1 to 1 ratio of highs to lows are colored black. Boldly colored months, such as January 2020, have ratios of more than 10 to 1 daily record highs to lows or lows to highs, and are either historically hot or cold, most of which have made news.
And oh yes, Zeta will be lurking in the northern Caribbean getting ready to interact with the Rockies winter storm as it moves northward into the Gulf of Mexico, as seen on the above panel. I’ll write more on this soggy eastern weather pattern later this week.
Just like on yesterday’s rendition of the Extreme Temperature Diary, today I’ll be adding more western notes on both fires and record cold/snowy weather in the space below:
For a change here are some very cold “ET’s.” Brrrr!
Here is more climate and weather 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. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)
Now here are some of today’s articles and notes on the horrid COVID-19 pandemic:
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Guy Walton “The Climate Guy”