Time For Heat Waves To Begin: How Many Record Highs This Summer?

Amazing what a week of warmth can do. This is May 14 in my St.
Albans yard, just as weather was turning warm after a cold snap....

It's Memorial Day weekend, as we all know, so it's the unofficial start to summer, goes the cliche anyway.

It's also the unofficial start to the season of punishing heat waves, at least in the Northern Hemisphere.

Things are off to a roasting start with record highs possible on the West Coast, big time in Siberia, and maybe even some challenged records coming soon to Vermont and the rest of northern New England.

I mentioned the Siberian heat the other day, but it really  has gone off the charts in the past couple of days.  There's a town way up in northern Siberia that has a normal high temperature this time of year of 32 degrees. The record high for the date had been 54 degrees, but the temperature soared all the way up to 78 degrees.

That's basically as if temperatures here in Vermont were in the mid-70s in February.
t
The heat isn't, and won't be as extreme elsewhere, but it will be felt.

Excessive heat watches are in effect for California and the Desert Southwest this upcoming week.

-----and this is May 21, same view after just a week of warm sunshine. 

I know, I know, it's always hot in the summer in the Desert Southwest.

But by mid to late week, temperatures will be right around record highs in places like Las Vegas, where it would get to between 105 and 110 degrees. Hotspots like Lake Havasu City and Bullhead, Arizona could get as high as 115 degrees, and Death Valley could flirt with 120 degrees.

Ouch!

In central California, in places like Sacramento, temperatures are likely to get into the low 100s. Even the normally chilly San Francisco Bay area will share in the heat.

So will Vermont, but of course it won't reach 100 degrees.

It's already been quite warm, a nice reversal from our snowy Mother's Day weekend. It got up to 87 degrees in Burlington yesterday, though very low humidity made it feel anything but oppressive. Normal high temperatures are around 70 this time of year.

A weak cold front passed through northern Vermont and will do the same in southern Vermont today, cooling temperatures slightly and temporarily today and Sunday. Highs should "only" be in the mid to upper 70s both days, still pretty toasty for this time of year.

A lot more heat, this time accompanied by our first real humid spell of the year, comes in Tuesday into Thursday. Tuesday and Wednesday will be the hottest, with everybody well up into the 80s with maybe a few places touching 90 degrees. That could endanger a few record highs.

There will probably be some afternoon showers and thunderstorms around Wednesday and Thursday amid the humid conditions.  It's too soon to tell whether any of them will be strong. But, as noted yesterday, the rainfall is unlikely to be extensive enough to solve the growing dryness around here.

Hot Arctic, Bad Hurricanes, Carbon And Coronavirus: All Bad Climate Change News

A few reports, studies and breaking news this week have all been bad news in the climate change department. Let's get into them:   

Recent temperature depiction of the Arctic.  The more orange, the
further temperatures are above normal.  Notice Siberia and the
area around the North Pole have the deepest orange.

ARCTIC HEAT

The (sort of) breaking news is a weird Arctic heat wave that has spread from Siberia and is reaching the North Pole and parts of Greenland. 

As noted in Gizmodo, temperatures at the North Pole will probably get a bit above freezing in the next few days.  For most of us, temperatures in the low to mid 30s most certainly does not constitute a heat wave. 

But such temperatures are odd for the North Pole, especially this early in the season.  Plus, it gets the Arctic off to an early start to the melt season. 

Same is true in Greenland.  The warmth has gotten the melt season going two weeks earlier than normal.  True, not a huge amount of ice has melted in this heat wave, compared to some mid-summer epic melts in recent years, especially last summer, which saw record melts in Greenland. 

As Gizmodo points out, though, this year's early melt exposes older dirtier snow sooner in the year than nornal. This old snow and ice can then absorb more warm sunshine during the rest of the summer than newer, whiter, fresher snow and ice would. This would bring up the risk of major melt events later in the summer. 

We should care more about Greenland's melt than Arctic Ocean melt.  If ice floating on the sea melts, it won't raise global sea levels. But ice melting off the above sea level glaciers in Greeland flow into oceans, raising their levels globally. 

Meanwhile, Siberia is once again on fire after its warmest winter and spring on record. Fires have already crept north of the Arctic Circle. Gizmodo reports there are even some "zombie fires" which smoldered in buried peat all winter and then sparked back up again amid the current record warmth in high latitude Siberia.  

TURBOCHARGED HURRICANES

Climate change appears to be making hurricanes and typhoons and such more intense, according to new research from NOAA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies. 

As The Weather Channel reports:

"The researchers discovered that the probability of a tropical cycle having Category 3 or higher wind speeds (at least 111 mph) increased by aboug 15 percent between the first and last halves of the analyzed satellite data. This corresponds to about an 8 percent increase per decade over the period of the study. The proportion of all tropical cyclones exceeding major hurricane intensity showed a similar increase of about 6 percent per decade."

The largest increase in bad hurricanes was in the Atlantic Ocean, but other influences might have helped increase the odds of such storms, too. 

CARBON/CORONAVIRUS

Daily global emissions of carbon dioxide fell by 17 percent from the same period in 2018 as nations locked down their economies to battle the coronavirus pandemic. Most of that decrease was due to less travel and less industrial output. 

I suppose that's good news for people who are not fans of climate change, but obviously we would have all been better off without the pandemic.

Also, this cut in carbon emissions won't really dent the pace of climate change. Economies are already opening back up, and emissions will rise correspondingly.  Even a sustained 17 percent reduction in carbon emissions lasting years wouldn't really solve the problem. 

Said Richard Betts, head of Climate Impacts Research at the Met Office Hadley Centre in England said, "It's like we're filling a bath and have turned down the tap slightly, but not turned it off - the water is still rising, just not as fast. To stop the bath overflowing, we need to turn the tap off."

So yes, the world is rightly consumed with battling the pandemic, but we still need to deal pretty intensely with climate change at the same time. 

Would You Live In This Frozen Apartment Block?

I hate cold rooms in the winter.

You sit around, you want to read a book, watch TV, whatever, and it's cold. By cold, I mean 64 degrees or so. I'm wimpy.

So I wrap myself in fleece or a blanket and go about my day.

Imagine, though, if you lived in a building that was filling up with ice.

That's the fate of some people who live in a Siberian apartment block, in which the heat system, which is supposed to be powered by hot water, basically fell apart.

The large apartment block in Irkutsk, Siberia, has been filling up with ice from those broken water pipes.

The weather in Irkutsk is currently mild by their standards. (Highs mostly in the teens, lows between 5 above and 10 below most days, which is a good five to 10 degrees above normal for them).

There are still a few corners of the building that have heat, and the few remaining residents are huddling in those parts of the structure.  But so far, municipal officials have not moved these families out of this obviously dangerous building.

On top of that, spring will eventually come to Irkutsk.  What will happen when that huge volume of ice within that building will melt?

Here's a news video about the situation, with some breathtaking images from inside the building:

Siberian Fires Are Another Climate Change Worry

Forests in Siberia are burning at unprecedented rates this summer,
causing all kinds of ecological havoc. Photo from Tass via Getty Images

Yesterday, I talked about the big meltdown going on across Greenland's ice sheet, which is of course bad news.

Today, more bad news. As you might have heard in some news reports, there are huge, HUGE wildfires going on in Siberia.

Why should we care, you might ask. Hardly anybody lives there, and it's so far away. It's not impacting our lives, is it?

Well, short term it's affecting our lives a little, and long term, is contributing to bigger problems associated with climate change.

So far, according to Vox, 15,000 square miles of Siberia have gone up in flames this year. That's about the size of Maryland.

Smoke from the fires is choking nearby cities, causing health problems for many. The smoke is circling much of the Northern Hemisphere. Here in Vermont, we can all agree that Friday was a gorgeous day: Clear skies, warm sun, low humidity, a perfect beach day. But did you notice the sort of hazy quality to the sky? It wasn't exactly a robin egg blue. More of an ashy color.

Most of that haze was caused by smoke from Siberia.

That haze contains little particles of soot that are raining down everywhere. Right here in Vermont, it's not a big deal, because there's too little of it to be much of a threat to anything.

But some of the soot is coming down on what's left of the Arctic ice this year, on the Greenland ice caps and glaciers throughout places like Canada, the Arctic and Europe.  The soot darkens the ice. Pure white ice deflects sunlight. Darker ice draws in the sun's warmth, leading to faster melting.

The soot will always be there. So, if pure white snow falls on top during the winter, that's a good thing. Unless all that snow melts next summer and the sooty snow is exposed to the sun again. That means faster melting next year, and years to come, too.

The fires are contributing to likely further increases in global temperatures, too. Smithsonianmag.com reports that wildfires across the Arctic belched 50 megatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in June alone. That's about the same as Sweden's total annual carbon emissions.

Some of the fires are burning in Arctic peat bogs. Normally, they are wet and help contain the spread of fires. But early snow melt and hotter summer temperatures have led the peat to start burning as well. Peat contains carbon that's been stored there for decades or centuries. The peat fires are releasing that stored carbon into the atmosphere, as Smithsonian notes. 

It's a viscious loop.  Warming contributes to more Arctic fires. Those Arctic fires warm the atmosphere more, leading to even drier, hotter conditions up there, leading to more fires, more warmth, etc. etc.

As Vox notes, there are wildfires in Siberia every year.  But the fires this year, and in recent years, have been bigger and badder than in the past.

OK, have a cheered you up yet?

Heat Worldwide: Weather Off The Rails - Continued

People flee into the sea in Greece
as wildfires bear down on them
this week. 

It's been a busy month across the Northern Hemisphere as records keep falling in so many disparate locations.

Plus, throw in deadly wildfires, devastating flash floods, incredible hail accumulations, and a few tornadoes to make the whole mess complete, and you've got quite a July to report.

I've already described some of the very, very weird weather over the past month - the deadly Quebec heat wave that killed dozens of people, the Siberian heat wave, the extreme floods in Japan, the Midwest tornadoes, it goes on and on.

There's so many new extremes being reported over the past several days that I can't keep up. And I'll get to the weather weirdness here in Vermont later in this post.

You probably have already heard of the tragic wildfire in Greece, the one that roared through a coastal resort town and killed at least 74 people.

People had to flee on foot to the ocean ahead of the fast-advancing flames and many people didn't make it. Or, they got trapped on a cliff overlooking the sea and the blaze overtook them.

It's too horrible to even think about.

JAPAN ROASTS

Meanwhile, heat waves are still breaking records all over the world. Japan, devastated by that flood earlier this month that I mentioned, is having its worst heat wave on record.

As Dr. Jeff Masters noted in his indispensable Category 6 blog, the city of Kumagaya, Japan, about 40 miles northwest of Tokyo, reached 106 degrees on Monday, establishing the record for the hottest temperature on record anywhere in Japan.

Records there go back to at least the late 1800s.

People trying to beat the heat this week near Tokyo, Japan.
Photo by Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP/Getty Images

Until this month, the all time record high temperature for Kyoto, Japan was 101, set in 2014. Starting on July 14, six out of seven days beat that previous 101 degree reord high, peaking at 103.6 on July 19, tying Kyoto's all time record high for any month, Masters tells us. 

Needless to say, the heat wave is killing scores of people in Japan and South Korea. Several cities in both North and South Korea set all-time record high temperatures.

In Japan, the good news is the heat wave will ease within the next few days. The bads news is that's because a typhoon is headed their way. Japan can't catch a break.

FIERY SCANDINAVIA

Meanwhile, Scandanavia, including areas north of the Arctic Circle of all places, have also been contending with record heat lately.

All time record highs have been set at 14 locations in Norway, ten places in Finland and 3 towns in Sweden.

Large forest fires in Sweden this week. Photo by Maja Muslin/AFP/
Getty Images

Rare 90 degree heat has been seen north of the Arctic Circle. A village in northern Sweden just north of the Arcrtic Circle of 90.5 degrees, said climatologist Maximiliano Hererra, as reported by the Weather Channel.

It was also 90 degrees in Lapland, which we associate with winter reindeer. At least I do.

The result of all this heat is the northern fir tree forests in Scandanavia are on fire, big time.  Dozens of dangerous wildfires are burning across the region.

The bad news is it looks like intense heat will rebuild across most of western Europe, including Scandanavia, over the next few days. Those wildfires will only get worse.

NORTH AMERICA HEAT

Here in the United States, the parts of the Southwest from Texas westward  continue to bake in a relentless heat wave.

On July 23, Waco, Texas broke its all time record high temperature when it reached 114 degrees, breaking the old record of 112 set on August 12, 1969. Record high temperatures were reported across much of Texas earlier this week.

Thermal, California lived up to its name this week when it reached a record high of 122 degrees two days in a row. That's the first time on record Thermal had two consecutive days so hot.

Normally cool Seattle had three day in a row this week with 90 degree heat. This will also be onlu the fifth July in Seattle with five days that hit 90 degrees. It was 94 degrees or hotter for four days in a row in Portland, Oregon.

Way up in northern Canada - here we go with Arctic heat again, it was near 90 degrees this week in the Northwest Territories and the Yukon. Normally frigid Dawson, Yukon was 88 degrees.

Atlantic Canada shared in northern New England's oppressive humidity this week. Heat advisories were up as overnight temperatures in the region were at record highs.

Here in Vermont, Burlington is on track to possibly have its hottest month on record. It depends on what the closing days of the month do. (The next few days are going to be somewhat cooler than they recently have been. It has been 90 degrees ten times this month, tying the record for the second highest number of such days. (There were 11 days in the 90s in July, 1949.)

This post is statistics heavy. Here, I just wanted to prove that this heat is everywhere this summer.

I purposely didn't get into why all these heat records are being broken, and what this means for you and me. That deserves a separate poset, which I will get to in the coming days.  Lots of interesting science and economics associated with this.

Hot As The Fourth Of July, For Sure! Worldwide Heat Rages On

It's hot all over, as this map from the Washington Post shows. Greenland
looks nice and nippy, though. 

I hope you brought along a lot of water and sunscreen for the rest of your Fourth of July fun in Vermont today.  

It will be the fifth day in a row for many of us with 90 degree heat.

We did get a small break last night. Slightly lower humidity allowed early morning temperatures to drop to more comfortable levels -- in the upper 50s to mid 60s for most of us. Here in St. Albans, we left all the windows open and the fans going. The house cooled off nicely.

But as of mid-morning, it was getting stuffy again as temperatures rapidly rose. By 11 a.m., it was already 88 degrees in Burlington, Vermont.

For us, it will just be today and tomorrow, and then the heat will vanish for awhile. We'll have more warm days coming up, but I don't see any return to long stretches of terrible heat in the foreseeable future after this one is done.

The good news is that the cold front that will end this heat seems destined to speed up and race through here by Friday morning. By Friday afternoon, it looks like it will be back to typical, comfortable Vermont summer weather.

As I've noted, we keep breaking temperature records, locally and around the world this summer. I've already mentioned Monday's low temperature in Burlington, Vermont, which was 80 degrees. That's the warmest daily minimum temperature on record for any date.

The period Saturday through Monday in Burlington was the hottest three consecutive days on record. Individual days have been hotter, but this was the hottest continuous three day stretch, with an average temperature of 84.7 degrees.

The Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang has catalogued some recent all time record heat around the globe. The following have happened in just the past week or two. Some normally chilly areas roasted, while some normally torrid areas got off the charts hot.

-  Montreal, Canada, sharing in Vermont's heat wave, reached its all-time highest temperature for any date with a reading of 97.9 degrees. The heat wave has so far killed 11 people in and around Montreal, so this is turning into a real disaster. So far, three people have been confirmed dead from the heat in the northeastern United States, but that figure could easily rise.

Remember, heat waves are the most deadly of weather extremes. Down in the United States, more people die from heat waves than any other kind of weather in most years. This includes hurricanes, floods and tornadoes.

Some heat waves can turn especially deadly, like this one has in Montreal.  A 1995 Chicago heat wave killed about 600 people. 

Other recent hot weather records from the Capital Weather Gang:

--- Ottawa, Canada recorded its highest heat index on record. The combination of temperatures in the 90s and incredible humidity by Canadian standards gave Ottawa a heat index of just under 117 degrees (!)

It wasn't hot everyhere this week. Snow fell on this Montana ski
resort yesterday.

--- As I mentioned the other day, Glasgow, Scotland and Belfast, Northern Ireland hit their all time record high temperatures of 89 and 85, respectively.

The entire nation of Scotland appears to have also had its all-time record high with a reading of 92 degrees

--- Yerevan, Armenia tied its all time record high temperture of 107.6 degrees.

Today through Friday, most forecasts call for a region in northern Siberia, along the shore of the Arctic Ocean to see temperatures in the low 90s. That is unprecedented in that region of the world. Normal temperatures there in July are usually at least 40 degrees cooler than that -- around 50 degrees at best.

It's not hot everywhere, of course. A couple inches of snow fell yesterday at the Showdown Mountain Ski Resort in high-elevation Montana. But that's about to end. A heat wave is set to settle into Montana by the end of the week, and heat advisories are already up for northeastern Montana. 

The heat ridge that caused our heat wave here in New England is about to head west, setting up a heat wave in much of the western United States, not just Montana. Excessive heat warnings are already up in the Southwest.

Yes, it's always hot in the summer in places like Arizona, but it will be even hotter than normal in that part of the nation.

The westward march of the heat wave is opening the door for that Friday cold front we've been talking about.

Since the air flow will be out of the northwest while the heat ridge is out west, every time the heat tries to squirt into the Northeast from that heat ridge, a Canadian cold front will cut the heat off at the pass. That's why we're not looking at any extreme heat through the middle of this month.

Thousands Of Weird Snowballs Appear On Siberian Beach

Thousands of snow and ice balls formed along a coastline
in northwestern Siberia in a rare phenomenon caused by
wind, ice in coastal waters and snow. 

Residents of a shoreline community in northern Siberia were treated to an onslaught of snowballs that appeared on the beach recently.

According to the BBC, the snowballs appeared along an 11-mile stretch of coast in the Gulf of Ob, in northwestern Siberia.

The snow and ice balls, most of them perfectly round, ranged in size from tennis balls to almost three feet across, the BBC said.

The snowballs formed from a rare process in which small pieces of ice form, and are rolled by wind and water, collecting more snow and ice along the way, to form the snowballs. Winds and temperatures must be just right to form the snow balls.

Unrelated to these, there's another phenomenon that I've seen here in Vermont called snow rollers. These are rare, too, and form when fluffy snow gets sticky when temperatures are just barely above freezing, and strong winds roll them into cylinders.

The BBC says the Siberian snow and ice balls were something people who live in Nyda, just above the Arctic Circle, said they've never seen anything like it.

Weird Thunderstorms In Norway and Siberia

A large isolated thunderstorm in Siberia recently
looked like a very bad nuclear bomb going off. 

Last week, there must have been quite a lightning bolt in Norway.

Hunters discovered 323 dead reindeer in the Hardangervidda region of Norway, home to thousands of reindeer. 

Apparently, a lightning bolt did them in.

Turns out, this isn't a once in a lifetime event for groups of animals dying in lightning strikes. Writing in Forbes, Marshall Shepherd documented several cases of lightning killing herds of animals.

About 600 sheep in Utah once died in a lightning storm. Just this past May, 21 cows were killed in McCook County, South Dakota when lightning struck as they were feeding out of a metal container. About a decade ago, a giraffe died from a lightning strike at Walt Disney World in Florida.

So yes, lightning is dangerous for us humans. It's also a risk for animals caught out in thunderstorms.

Lightning is something to be afraid of, and people in Siberia recently found something else to fear.

As you can see in the photo in this post, a distant thunderstorm photographed recently near the Siberian city of  Kemerovo really, really looked like a nuclear explosion, and of course such explosions are something to fear.

Local emergency services were inundated with calls from people who were afraid a nuclear war had started and everybody was about to die.

Happily, this was just a thunderstorm.  Nobody died.

Usually, the anvil top of a thunderstorm, that big outstretched flare of clouds you see at the top of the storm, heads mostly in one direction or another, as winds blowing near the top of the storm push the clouds along.

Another view of the scary, but basically harmless
mushroom shaped cloud in Siberia that was NOT a nuclear
explosion, but just a thunderstorm. 

Upper level winds must have been near calm above this thunderstorm, so the anvil top of the storm pushed out equally in all directions.

The storm was also isolated, with no sign of other storms developing around it, which is also unusual.

The atmosphere must have been "capped," meaning a warm layer of air was preventing the updrafts that usually lead to thunderstorms. 

However, something made the air start rising forcefully where that thunderstorm developed, so the rising air broke through the "cap" and continued upward, creating this big thunderstorm.

I'm guessing the thunderstorm was probably severe, or at least borderline so, with strong, gusty winds, maybe hail, torrential downpours and dangerous lightning.

But, on the bright side, it wasn't nuclear. It was just beautiful instead. Phew!