The main purpose of this ongoing blog will be to track planetary 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: Perhaps Seeing the Warmest End to Any Year for the U.S. On Record
Dear Diary. Merry Christmas Everyone. Across the United States this December has been historically warm. We have already seen three bouts or spurts of warmth that have seen better than 5,000 daily high maxes tumble and are in the midst of round four. Borrowing a graphic from the Washington Post, here is what we see:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/12/20/springlike-warmth-christmas/
On Christmas Eve I noted that we probably will have the warmest week, temperature average wise, across the lower 48 states, if not the U.S. as a whole, through New Years Day:
Christmas Eve was the first day of a streak of substantial record warmth across the nation that will last into the new year:
And early on Christmas Day I noted the following:
Now admittedly, the United States is centered under the reddest positive anomaly, so at least the planet isn’t burning up due to climate change this Christmas, but this warm holiday season should be a warning that we should get our carbon polluting ways under control very soon…as in before 2030.
For comparison, here are the last forty U.S. Christmas Day maximum temperature charts.
For comparison to the above chart, here is what we see as of midafternoon on Christmas Day:
Just eyeballing the last forty years I can tell that Christmas 2021 is the warmest since 1980, and since global warming began in earnest that year, all prior years were probably cooler.
It’s no wonder that we are seeing such warmth looking at how far north thickness values in excess of 564 decameters on Saturday’s 18Z surface chart:
Will there be any change by New Years Day? Not much:
New Year’s Day will probably feature a warm, wet soaker from the Plains into the middle Mississippi Valley.
As usual, I’ll be posting reports of records should they cross my radar through New Year’s Day and beyond.
Here are some of Saturday’s “ET’s”:
Here is some more November 2021 climatology:
Here is more climate and weather news from Saturday:
(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”