Another Weather Off The Rails Weekend (Not In Vermont, Though)

From 9 News:  A severe thunderstorm associated with a derecho
knocked this billboard down on a Denver building Saturday. 

As we forecasted yesterday morning, weather is definitely going off the rails in different parts of the nation this weekend, and that trend will continue for the next few days.

We here in Vermont will pretty much be an island of tranquility in the weather department, but that won't be the case elsewhere.

The most remarkable weather event Saturday was a long lasting derecho that got going near the Arizona/Utah border and raced north and northeastward during the day through the central and eastern Rocky Mountains and on into the western Dakotas.

Derechos are relatively rare events and almost unheard of in the Intermountain West. Yes, I know we just had a derecho in Pennsylvania and New Jersey last week, but they still don't happen all that often.

On average derechos happen once every year or every other year in much of the Midwest and South. On the East Coast, you average one every four years or so.  In the Intermountain West, there have maybe been a handful over the past several decades.

The one that swept through yesterday was a doozy, too, judging by wind reports. Just a sampling:

110 mph near Copper Mountain, Colorado
94 mph Butte County, South Dakota
92 mph near Cactus Plateau, South Dakota
85 mph, Four Corners, Wyoming

There were numerous reports of gusts above 75 mph, including in metro areas like Denver.

Meanwhile, Florida got in on the action, thanks to Tropical Storm Cristobal.  Most of the heavy weather with this system was east of its center.  This mass of storms spun off at several tornadoes in Florida, including one that passed through Orlando.

The Orlando Sentinel reported that at least 50 residents of apartment blocks and houses were displaced near the city's downtown because of tornado damage.

MORE ROUGH WEATHER COMING

Tropical Storm Cristobal will splash ashore around Louisiana later today. Storm surges and flooding is already happening in Louisiana and Mississippi, and that will continue the rest of the day.

However, the bigger drama from Cristobal will come over the next few days, as its remnants head north through the Arkansas, Missouri and into Wisconsin by Wednesday.

It won't really be a tropical storm by the time it hits the Great Lakes, but it will manage to intensify. It'll form into a mean storm for this time of year over or near Lake Superior.  Expect reports of wind damage, battering waves and erosion on the lakes and maybe some flash flooding.

VERMONT CALM

All this weather action will pretty much miss Vermont. The fact that Cristobol will be going by to our west will give us a squirt of warm to hot, and windy weather midweek, but nothing extreme.  Not a lot of rain is in the forecast either.  A cold front associated with the remnants of Cristobol might bring a few showers and thunderstorms late Wednesday night and Thursday.

Very Strange Wintry Blast Still On Its Way

That purple bullseye over the Northeast is that chunk of
the polar vortex that broke off. .It will bring an exceedingly
cold Mother's Day weekend to us. 

The long anticipated, strange wintry blast still hasn't officially hit the Northeast and Great Lakes yet, but we here in Vermont and the rest of the North Country have already gotten a foretaste of it.

A dusting of snow on the ground greeted some people in the Northeast Kingdom when they awoke Tuesday morning.

It stayed chilly all day, too, especially up in the Kingdom. I noticed Lyndonville was only 39 degrees at 3 p.m. Tuesday.  It was down to 19 degrees (brrr!) in Saranac Lake, New York this morning.  

It will warm up, kinda, sorta, today and Thursday, but temperatures will still be below normal. Daytime highs both days will be in the 50s, with maybe a spot 60 degree reading here and there. That's still a few degrees on the chilly side for this time of year.

But that weird, big cold snap is lurking on our doorstep. By Saturday, it will seem like early March, not early May out there.

In the winter, the now infamous polar vortex spins up in the Arctic. Pieces of it occasionally break off, plunge southward and cause intense, subzero cold waves.  That didn't really happen in our neck of the woods this past winter.

By May, the polar vortex up there in the Arctic is very much weakened by the strong spring sun.  If a piece of it manages to break off, that cold chunk usually gets swiftly shunted eastward across Canada and out into the Atlantic.

Here in northern New England, when that happens, we get a bit of a cool snap and maybe a little frost in some spots.

This time, this will be a classic winter polar vortex thing.  A sizeable chunk of it has broken off and is plunging southward through eastern Canada and will crash into the Great Lakes and New England, just like the worst ones do in, say, January.

I'm not sure anyone has ever seen anything like this in May.  It could have happened in the past, but it's incredibly rare.

The upshot is a real return to winter on Mother's Day weekend.  Of course, temperatures won't go below zero like in a winter during a brush with a chunk of the polar vortex.  But it will be incredibly, weirdly cold for May.  With some snow to add to the misery.

You'll really start to notice in Friday as temperatures stay in the 40s and a few rain and snow showers filter down.

Saturday is when it really hits.  That chunk of frigid air will spin up a storm off the East Coast.  Luckily, it will be far enough offshore, as it looks now, to mostly avoid giving us a lot of precipitation. That's a good thing in this case, because the air would be cold enough to support a big late season snowstorm.  Kind of like a frigid January nor'easter.

Some forecast models bring the storm closer, but for now, we'll say it's a miss.

So, we will probably avoid a full-fledged snowstorm, but we'll still get snow. The storm will blow up into a powerful one as it heads toward the Canadian Maritimes.  That means a lot of wind for us in the form of cold, northwest gusts exceeding 30 mph at times. Moisture will wrap around that storm and come down over New England.

That moisture will spit out frequent snow and rain showers here in Vermont later Friday night, Saturday and into Saturday night.  Really, it will be mostly snow showers, believe it or not, except maybe in the warmest valleys.

Warm is a relative term for this weekend, that's for sure.  On Saturday, when normal high temperatures this time of year are in the low 60s, it will barely get above freezing up in the Northeast Kingdom.  In the Champlain Valley banana belt, it would actually get above 40 degrees for a brief time Saturday afternoon.

That's pretty incredible and rare for this time of year.  Since precipitation will be light, snowfall accumulations also won't amount to much. Still, I can't believe I just wrote that sentence with a straight face in May.

Higher and middle elevations could get an inch or two out of this, and there might even be a little coating in the valleys.

Wind and clouds will keep temperatures from really crashing Friday and Saturday nights.  It will get down to between 30 and 35 degrees both nights, which is not really cold enough to kill all the ew leaves on the trees.

We will have to watch for the risk of plant killing cold nights early next week.  Temperatures will "warm" into the 40s Sunday afternoon, which is still 20 degrees colder than normal. Highs will only be in the upper 40s Monday and Tuesday. If skies clear and winds die down on any nights Sunday through Wednesday we could get leaf-shriveling lows in the upper teens and 20s,

That remains to be seen.  We'll have to wait for updated forecasts.

The cold spell isn't just affecting us, obviously. Damaging frosts are a risk with this thing as far south as Tennessee and the Carolinas.

If you want a glimmer of hope through this cold spell, it does look like temperatures will start to climb to near normal levels toward the end of next week.

"Ice Shove" Wrecks Minnesota Home; This Is A Weird Thing That Has Happened Before

Strong winds earlier this week pushed a ton of lake ice
into this Minnesota house. 

A perfect combination of wind and spring thawing shoved a bulldozer like wall of ice into at least one lakeshore home in Minnesota this past week.

The 10-foot high wall of ice crunched into the home on Lake Mille Lacs in Isle, Minnesota. Isle is little under 100 miles north of Minneapolis.  

Lake Mille Lacs covers about 207 square miles, and the town of Isle is on the southeast corner of the lake. The ice on the lake was weak from the ongoing spring thaw.

As Minnesota Public Radio reports, a warm, mostly sunny day with northwest winds gusting as high as 50 mph on Monday pushed the wall of ice onto the shore in dramatic fashion.

This one smushed a deck and pushed in a wall of the Minnesota house.

Some people call these things ice tsunamis, because they do rise quite a way out of the water and go inland a fair amount like a slow motion, frozen tsunami.

Of course, ice shoves don't occur on every lake and they don't occur most years. You need the right combination of thawing ice that's ready to break up, a warm day, a strong wind and a shoreline to help steer the ice into big piles.

Other ice shoves have caused far more damage than this.

Lakes in Vermont aren't immune to ice shoves. There was a good one on Maquam Bay in St. Albans, Vermont on Lake Champlain in 2013.

Here's a news video from WCCO of the mishap:



An even worse ice shove hit the shoreline of Lake Mille Lacs in 2013:



Ice shoves can be pretty unpredictable, so you should stay away from them, as footage from this February, 2019 Lake Erie ice shove proves:



These things can move pretty fast, all things considered:

That Tornado Outbreak Killed 30 People; Major, Sometimes Weird Destruction

Just a slab is left of this house in Mississippi after this weekend's tornadoes,
and nobody is sure where it or its debris ended up. Photo by
Steven Macleroy, @SMacleroy on Twitter.

The weather system that caused all those tornadoes across the South has largely moved on, but people will still be picking up the pieces of this for a long time.

At last count, at least 30 people died in these tornadoes in the past couple of days.

There are at least 70 preliminary reports of tornadoes from this outbreak, and some of them were exceptionally strong. That accounts for the high death toll.

As in all major tornadoes, the damage can be extreme and very weird.  Three people were killed in a Mississippi cafe, where the only thing left was a concrete slab and debris piled up against fallen trees a few dozen feet away.

Another Mississippi house was also gone, with just a foundation and some floor boards. Drone footage taken at the scene appeared to show almost no debris around the house. I asked photographer Steven Macleroy, @SMacleroy on Twitter what he saw:

"We are not sure where any of that house ended up. There was very little that the homeowner's brother could find. The homeowner actually lives in Louisiana. Thankfully he and his family were not there."

Thankfully, indeed.  My guess is the house just got bodily sucked up into the tornado, pulverized in the air and rained down as small pieces of debris miles away.  Radar did show debris from this tornado nearly 30,000 feet in the air.

And Alabama meteorologist James Spann said a photograph that landed near Tuscaloosa, Alabama came from a tornado-destroyed house 120 miles away in Mississippi.  Another house in Mississippi had its house and most of its walls torn down, but a freshly baked cake in a glass container sat untouched on an island counter in the middle of what was left of the kitchen.

Some severe thunderstorms will linger in northern Florida today and perhaps tomorrow, but there are no new big tornado outbreaks in the immediate forecast.

Still, there has already been more than 60 tornado deaths in the United States, just a smidge under average for an entire year.  This is shaping up to be the worst yeaer for tornadoes since the epic year of 2011, which saw more than 500 tornado deaths.

We are still in the early parts of tornado season, with May usually being the worst month. Which means more outbreaks are likely.  We just don't know when, where and how bad.  You want tornadoes to hit open areas with little population, but as we saw in the South over the past couple days, that's more often than not impossible.

Videos:

Many of the areas hit by the strong tornadoes on Easter have a lot of mobile homes, which are especially dangerous in twisters. This aerial view includes some shots of just brown rectangles in the landscape. That's where mobile homes were. In some cases, where they are now is anybody's guess:



This video by Gage Shaw demonstrates one of many reasons why tornadoes in the Deep South are often more dangerous than a lot of twisters in the Great Plains.

In this video, the mile-wide EF-4, powerful tornado is in there. You have to know what you're looking for. Look carefully and you can see the back edge of the massive tornado in the video.

Around 2:00 into the video, the tornado is relatively apparent, but is barely visible, but just as strong, a minute later:





Here, a house in Georgia was bodily moved from its perch atop a small hill, perhaps 100 feet to a spot in the middle of the road:

Sunny Day Hail Storm Confirms Everything Is Upside Down

Bright sunshine amid falling hail near Portand, Oregon last week
You can see it better within the video in this post. 

You can hear the woman's voice in this brief video at the bottom of this post.

Yes, everything's normal. We're all under quarantine. It's a beautiful blue sky, sunny day. And it's hailing. Pretty hard.

That's the view in the video, so yeah, things are strange.

Actually, in terms of weather, it was strange, but very, very explainable.

Yes, there were blue skies overhead, but the air was unstable over Portland, Oregon on March 31, when the video was taken. That produced a lot of popcorn type showers in the Portland area.  The showers had gaps of blue sky between them. It was a very changeable day.

There was cold air just above the Earth's surface, so it was easy for hail to form. In the video, one of these shower clouds with hail must have just passed nearby, flinging handfuls of hail at this hapless homeowner.

The hailstones weren't big at all, as you can see, and caused little if any damage.

Still fun to watch in these topsy-turvy times. Here it is:

"Wrong Way" Ocean Storm To Give Vermont Usual April Yuck

One forecast map of the storm which is expected to be
off the New England coast late tonight. Normally, you'd
expect a storm like this to move northeastward toward
Atlantic Canada. Instead, it will move in the opposite
direction, then south, then southeast to the middle
of the Atlantic Ocean. 

On the bright side, a very strong, enormous storm in the Atlantic Ocean is far enough away from the East Coast that it won't cause a weather disaster.

On the not so bright side, yuck is the word for New England weather today and to a lesser extent tomorrow.

The cold rain, mixed with snow expected in Vermont is nothing out of the ordinary for the Green Mountain State in early April.

It does dampen spring spirits, however.  But - spoiler alert - we should be back in relatively springlike conditions starting Saturday, when temperatures will rebound into the 50s. That kind of mild-ish weather will last well into next week.

The storm has already caused some problems. When it was developing over the Southeastern United States a couple days ago, it unleashed some tornadoes that damaged or destroyed several homes in Alabama and Georgia.

Surf and gusty winds emanating from the offshore storm will cause beach erosion, and minor coastal flooding in spots from Florida to Maine.

ODD STORM

The massive ocean storm is expected to remain weird. I told you the other day how weather is coming in from the east and heading west over us, which is opposite of what normally happens.

The storm is also expected to do an odd loop. It was headed northeastward in the open Atlantic, like a normal storm would. Then it's going to turn west and then southwestward past New England.  So it will - for a time at least - essentially be a southwestward moving nor'easter.  Exactly opposite of normal.

Figure that one out. I guess we'll call this the Great Wrong Way Storm Of 2020, right?

Eventually, over the weekend, the storm will move south, than southeastward well out into the Atlantic and over warm ocean waters that are even warmer than normal for this time of year.  There's talk that the storm could become subtropical, which is really weird for April.

A subtropical storm is one that develops a warm core, like a tropical storm, but still retains some characteristics of a regular storm.

In any event, any kind of tropical or subtropical storm out in the Atlantic is definitely unusual.

Atlantic hurricane season goes from June 1 to November 30, but tropical storms have been seen out there every month of the year, at least occasionally. But April is the least likely month for such a thing.

There was Tropical Storm Arlene with top winds of 50 mph back on April 19-21, 2017 way out in the Central Atlantic Ocean. and Tropical Storm Ana on April 20-24, 2003.  There was also a subtropical storm way out in the Atlantic in 1992, but that's about it for this time of year in data going back to the 1920s.

There is speculation that with climate change ongoing, ocean temperatures will continue to rise, making these off-season tropical systems more likely.

WHAT'S IN IT FOR VERMONT?

Way before the storm has even a chance of becoming a subtropical storm, it will be just the usual Atlantic storm heading in that backward direction I spoke of.  As it makes its most northern approach then turns southwestward, a band of moisture is crossing New England, again backward, from east to west today and tonight while weakening.

Coastal New England will get gusty winds and more than an inch of rain out of this. Here in Vermont, many places are starting as snow this morning, but valley locations should switch over to rain or  mostly rain as the day wears on.

More snow will mix in tonight. Some valleys in Vermont will get a coating of snow this morning and again tonight. The mountains might pick up a few inches of snow. The total amount of rain and melted snow in Vermont will be mostly a quarter to a half inch. A decent wetdown, but nothing extreme.

As the storm starts to sink southward, Friday's weather will gradually start to improve, starting north and heading south.  Northern Vermont will actually be warmer than the south Friday as clouds closer to the Canadian border begin to thin out

Winds will gust to 30 mph today, tonight and Friday, adding some chill to the air.

Saturday looks nice. The storm will be out of our hair, at least in Vermont. Winds will be lighter, there will be at least some sun and temperatures will pop up into the low 50s, which is a bit milder than normal for this time of year.

Spring Sprouts, Tornado Joggers and Googly Eyes. A Few Notes

Look very closely  and you can see daffodil shoots trying to
emerge from the soil next to the retreating ice on Thursday
in my St. Albans, Vermont gardens. 

It's been a relatively warm week for early March in Vermont. The snow is retreating the sap is running and it feels like spring might get here. Eventually.

True, it's going to be on the cold side tonight and Saturday and we surely have more cold spells and snowfalls to come. But we've made a little progress.

It's hard to see in the accompanying pboto, but I spotted such progress in my yard amid the Thursday afternoon sunshine.

Next to the retreating ice in one of my garden beds, the first hint of daffodil shoots appeared.  It's not much, but a guy looking forward to spring will take anything he can get.

I don't anticipate anything blooming until April.  Still, it was nice to see something green, however tiny, instead of the shades of white, gray, black and brown we've been limited to since November.

Daffodil shoots are tough, so I'm not too worried about what will happen in cold weather. Today, a  huge nor'easter that's developing well off the New England coast today but it will miss us. The storm will throw a brief shot of gusty winds and chilly air at us, but nothing odd for early March.  It'll warm up again Sunday afternoon.

Given that the weather is relatively quiet, here's a couple other odd, unrelated things I've noticed recently, including an odd jogger and a googly-eyed TV reporter in a snowstorm:

THE TORNADO JOGGER

As soon as those awful tornados in Tennessee passed early Tuesday, first responders, as always, swooped in and did their best to help.

This brief video is a little strange. It shows firefighters arriving in a tornado-battered Nashville neighborhood. The power was out, and you could see little in the darkness.  But in firetruck headlights and firefighters' head lamps, you could see downed power lines, glimpses of debris and hints of chaos.

As the firefighters started heading into the neighborhood, presumably to pull people from the wreckage, a female jogger zips on by.

No, she's not running from the wreckage. Nothing, not even a tornado, complete darkness, debris and possibly live downed wires is going to interrupt her odd 1:30 a.m. running routine.  I love the look on the face of the firefighter at the end of this brief video:



SNOWSTORM REPORTER'S MANY FACES

In late February, a snowfall hit Asheville, North Carolina,  Justin Hinton, a reporter for television station WLOS was out in the snow, giving a live update for viewers via Facebook Live.

He said he somehow activated some sort of Facebook filter and this is what viewers saw as Hinton gave his report.

Mystery White House Tweet: Snow During January Heat Wave

The White House released this since-deleted Tweet Sunday night
announcing the first snowfall of the year. At the time it was 53
degrees in Washington DC after a day that brought a high of 70 degrees.

Record setting high temperatures were reported up and down the East Coast of the United Sunday (though not here in northern Vermont, that's for sure!)

Boston reported 74, degrees, which is the hottest tempeature on record for any January day there. Records keeping on this score started in Boston back in 1872.

Down in Washington DC it got up to 70 degrees on Sunday. After dark, temperatures slipped back to a stil-balmy 53 degrees.

At that point, when it was 53 degrees, the White House decided to release a tweet. It had a photo of what appeared to be snow falling around the White House, with a message, "First snow of the year!"

Obviously being Twitter, everybody piled on to that White House tweet.  They abandoned the beach, the outdoor barbecues or whatever to respond very unkindly. After all, it was the dumbest tweet anyone had seen in this young year of 2020.

"It's 52 degrees. It's snowing in DC to the same extent that Trump is innocent. These folks aren't even competent at lying," groused Neal Katyal, (@Neal_Katyal)  a Supreme Court attorney.

"It was 70 degrees in DC. WTF is wrong with these people. They literally lie about the dumbest things," Tweeted Josh Kail (@THATJoshKail).

To be fair, the response to the strange White House tweet was maybe, well, unfair.

 It did snow in Washington DC last Tuesday, so it's possible the White House meant to post its snow message then, but more important things, like the Iran crisis got in the way.  It was probably a draft Tweet that was accidently published.  The photo in the tweet was indeed taken this past January 7, when it was for sure snowing in Washington.  That January 7 snow was the first of the season in Washington.

However, the Trump administration has certainly had a, um, problematic, relationship with meteorology and the truth. He lied about the rain at his inauguration.  And then, we have the famous hurricane Sharpie incident.

You remember that. Last year, Trump mistakenly said that Alabama was one of the state's being threatened by Hurricane Dorian.  Rather than just correcting a simple mistake he made about Alabama and Dorian, Trump doubled down.

As Alabama meteorologists tried to calm the state's residents by assuring them Hurricane Dorian would miss that state, he insisted he was right. He even added some embellishments to a hurricane forecast map with a Sharpie in a sad attempt to make it look like Alabama was indeed threatened.

I think more people would have ignored the White House's "snow" on Sunday had the Trump administration, especially Trump himself, been a more honest person in general.

But that ain't ever going to happen, is it?

Meet Hector, The Latest Weather Celebrity That's Actually Been Around Forever

Hector, the world's most reliable daily thunderstorm, pops up around
3 p.m. daily off the northern tip of Australia. 

Like clockwork, every day around 3 p.m or so between September and December, a big thunderstorm develops explosively over some two islands off the north shore of Australia.

The thunderstorm or thunderstorms are so reliable, like a good friend who pops in to see you everyday for an afternoon tea, the storm has a name. Meet Hector.

Weather is usually random and prone to surprising people. Which is why I like Hector so much.  It's the Old Faithful of weather.

Hector has alway been there, as far back as people can remember, but for some reason it's gotten a lot of publicity this year. Just randomly, I guess. Unlike reliable Hector itself, which keeps popping up as scheduled.

I like the fact that Hector gets so much attention.  At any given moment, there are something like 2,000 thunderstorms in progress on Earth. But most of those pop up and die in varying places, depending on whether there are storms are converging winds nearby.

Converging winds are why Hector gets going every day.  He forms over two islands named Bathurst and Melville.  The islands are somewhat pyramid shaped, so the converging winds hit the islands, and the air has to rise up the slopes of these "pyramids" and voila! You have Hector.

Hector was apparently named by World War II pilots flying between Darwin, in northern Australia and Papua, New Guinea because he is such a landmark. The thunderstorm towers high into the atmosphere, so pilots and others can see Hector from a great distance.

Much like you might use a big water tower or tall building to orient yourself in an unfamiliar city, pilots used Hector to orient themselves as they flew north of Australia.

Photographers love Hector, because who doesn't love photos of thunderstorms? Meteorologists who study storms love Hector, too. He's so reliable, there's almost no guess work with it.

I love thunderstorms, too, but living here in Vermont, I'm not exactly in the lightning and thunder capital of the world.  Maybe someday I'll go visit Hector.

Here's an rather engaging video from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology that explains Hector:

Winter Update And a Strange Norwegian Guy Embraces Winter, With The Help Of Vodka

As this projected weather map shows, two very strong
storms on Wednesday will disrupt Thanksgiving
travel across much of the United States.

Yesterday's storm in Vermont, as expected, pulled a few surprises.  Central Vermont, as expected, got two to four inches of wet snow, sleet and slush.

However, the light snow and rain that forecasters thought would develop in the Champlain Valley never materialized.

From Burlington north, it was a dark, gloomy Sunday with a heavy, thick overcast, but no precipitation fell. (It gave me a chance to do a little work outdoors, which was nice.)

That storm's gone, but it looks like Thanksgiving week travel is going to be a challenge for much of the United States.

The first storm will travel from the central Rockies, through the middle of the Plains and into the Great Lakes Wednesday.  This will lay down a stripe of heavy snow from Denver to Minneapolis to the northwestern Great Lakes Tuesday through Wednesday. That will cause a lot of problems and flight delays for sure.

Here in Vermont, that storm will give us a slug of of rain Wednesday and Wednesday night, followed by mostly light snow, gusty winds and cold weather on Thanksgiving.

Meanwhile a beast of a storm is due to crash ashore in Oregon Tuesday night with its own package of strong winds, snow and rain on the West Coast.  The storm will reorganize over the southern Rockies and then emerge over the Plains late in the week, so the trip home from wherever your going will be a challenge, too.   It looks like that one will be a big, disruptive coast-to-coast storm.

No rest of the weary.

So, with that in mind, I found this odd little video from a guy in Norway who is a bit enthusiastic about the onset of winter. Certainly more than me.

Clad only in black underwear, he cleans off his car, drives to a frozen bath tub, cuts up the ice with a chain saw and relaxes in that icy tub.  It's apparent that copious amounts of vodka are helping with this. And for some reason he's got a little doll to help him out with this adventure.

In other words, DON'T try this at home.  But the video is oddly entertaining nevertheless. Watch:

Brutal Vermont Cold Update; Australian Wildfires

Record early season cold has engulfed Vermont and most of the
eastern United States. Burlington, Vermont this morning also set a
record for the coldest for so early in the season.

Like we expected, it's brutally cold for this time of year here in Vermont, and across much of the eastern United States.  Record lows are falling like crazy in the Green Montain State and elsewhere.

As of 7 a.m., it was 9 degrees in Burlington, Vermont.This is a record low for the date, beating the previous low of 15 degrees. It is also the coldest for so early in the season.

Before midnight Tuesday in Burlington, it got to 14 degrees, which managed to break the record for the date of 15 degrees, set in 1933.

It looks like there's a good chance we'll have three consecutive days of record low temperatures, as Thursday morning might set another record.

Also, the high temperature in Burlington Tuesday was just 26 degrees, which was a record for the lowest high temperature on that date.  Today, if you consider the low temperature and the expected high temperature, would be colder than normal for January

Burlington's string of record lows this week is especially remarkable because the city has such a long period of record.  They started keeping track of Burlington's daily weather in the 1880s.  The longer period of record you have, the less chance you'll see record highs or lows. That's because it's likely most days have seen something close to their highest or lowest possible temperatures.

This is also the second November in a row with a remarkable cold record in Burlington. Last November, the city experienced its earliest subzero reading on record.

Most of Vermont and northern New York before dawn were in the single numbers. Rutland was pretty remarkable at just 6 above zero.  Wind chills were mostly in the single digits below zero this morning.

Several other cities, like Burlington, broke records just before and just after midnight. They include Dayton, Ohio, South Bend, Indiana and Memphis, Tennessee, so you know the cold is widespread.

I expect all in all, a few hundred record lows will be broken by the time this cold wave ends towards Sunday or so.

AUSTRALIAN WILDFIRES

It's quite the opposite problem in Australia, and a much worse one at that.

Peter Parks AFP/Getty

We can survive shivering in the cold, and all most of us suffer from is increased heating bills. (Although I have to acknowledge this early season cold is very dangerous and potentially deadly for vulnerable populations, like some elderly people and of course the homeless.)

In any event, the Australian wildfires are extreme, even by their standards. Worse, this is hitting just at the beginning of their wildfire season, so it will be a long few months Down Under.

In the province of New South Wales, at least 200 homes have burned and three people have died, reports the BBC. 

The weather will continue to be dangerous and make Australia prone to more wildfires through the rest of the week.

Record Eastern Heat Contributes To Strange, Strong Vermont Thunderstorms

Huge hail fell near Massena, New York yesterday.
Note the quarter in the middle for scale. Photo
credit Terry S. 

As previously mentioned, the eastern United States is in the throes of a record, unprecedented September/October heat wave.

I'll get to a rundown of some of those incredible temperatures in a minute, but I first want to get to our odd Vermont weather on Tuesday.

Vermont has missed out on the heat wave, but we were close to a sharp boundary between the relatively cool air here and the record heat elsewhere.

The result was a strange afternoon and evening of out-of-season thunderstorms.   Sharp temperature contrasts can cause some pretty damn stormy weather, so we should be too surprised yesterday happened.

The forecast before yesterday hit mentioned showers and thunderstorms, a few of which could be strong

That's exactly what happened.  Even more big-time than expected. It's just the set up was odd for October.

The heat lurked just to our west on Tuesday. It was 83 in Watertown, New York, and 88 in Syracuse. A warm front was draped across northern New York and down through extreme eastern New York.

Lift in the atmosphere created by this front, and the strong temperature contrasts fired up some pretty impressive batches of thunderstorms.

The warm front was further to the west in the morning, so the first batch of strong thunderstorms rolled southward through central New York before noon Tuesday.

The next batches came in the afternoon. The initial storm was probably the worst as it crossed the international border into the Massena, New York area. There, hailstones were a little bigger than golf balls, so I'm sure some cars were majorly dented there.

That storm and more, kept coming in waves into northern New York and Vermont well into the evening.  What was odd for October is the amount of cloud to ground lightning  these storms produced.

One storm in and around St. Albans, Vermont had lightning that cut power to more than 1,200 homes and businesses, including my house.

Also odd for October, the storms produced torrential downpours. Repeated downpours and thunderstorms hit the far northern Green Mountains and the Northeast Kingdom. Rainfall totals reported to the National Weather Service in South Burlington include 3.25 inches in Westfield, 3.16 inches in Wheelock, and 2.78 inches in Island Pond.

This caused washouts and flooding.

Flood warnings were still in effect early this morning for the northern reaches of the Missisquoi and Passumpsic Rivers.

The heat ridge producing the record high temperatures is shrinking southward, and so is a cold front.

The warmth won't come back to us, but it will make a couple runs at us. There will be some rain Thursday night and Friday, but nothing too heavy.

Another storm that could tap the warm, humid air in the South looks like it will come through Monday. It's possible it could rain hard again, but that's highly uncertain.

RECORD HEAT

As strange as the weather was in northern and central Vermont on Tuesday the weather was totally off the rails in much of the rest of the nation's eastern half.

Here's a very partial list of cities that had their hottest October day on record. One of the many odd things about this list is how widespread the unprecedented heat was - from Louisiana to New York State:

Montgomery, Alabama: 101 degrees (I've never heard of 100 degree temperatures outside of the desert southwest in October.)
New Orleans: 95 degrees
Nashville: 98 degrees
Indianapolis: 92 degrees
Huntington, West Virginia: 95 degrees
Pensacola, Florida and Mobile, Alabama, 96 degrees
Syracuse, New York, 88 degrees
Erie, Pennsylvania, 89 degrees

A town in the mountains of western Virginia reported hit 94 degrees, which is the hottest temperature on record there for any month, not just October.

Unrelated to the eastern United States heat, Utquiagvik, Alaska, (formerly Barrow) on the northern tip of Alaska had a record high of 43 degrees Tuesday.

There were also a slew of record lows this week in Montana, where deep snow cover from that epic snowstorm last weekend, helped temperatures fall as low as 1 degree above zero in Cut Bank, Montana.

The unprecedented heat will go on for the next couple of days in the Southeast and South, and more all-time record October highs will be threatened today.





Utqiaġvik (Barrow) has set a new record high temperature for October 1 at 43F (+6.1C), previous record 39F (+3.9C) in 1989. The October record high temp of 44F (6.7C) set Oct 10, 2016

More Storminess In Vermont; It's Summer

A chaotic looking evening sky over Colchester, Vermont on
Saturday as thunderstorms blossomed in the region. 

Many of us in Vermont were treated once again Saturday to some fun, stormy skies, thunder and lightning.

There were reports of some damage as a few of the storms became severe. Interestingly at my place in St. Albans, Vermont, I was under a severe thunderstorm warning for the third time in a week, which is impressive. The storms around here, including those last evening, did not turn out to be damaging at all.

Still, strong thunderstorm winds knocked down trees Saturday in a variety of places around the region, including several spots in the Northeast Kingdom around Bradford and Orange and in Waterbury, where a number of trees blew over.

An initial round of severe storms hit southern New England the mid-Atlantic states Saturday afternoon, but missed Vermont.  Several places down there had high winds and hail up to the size of golf balls, so we should be glad we avoided that.

That strong upper level low in Quebec we've been talking about was slowly sinking southward Saturday evening. Even though there's not a major storm at the Earth's surface. this upper level pool of cold air is dynamic and creating plenty of instability.

Warm, humid weather usually feeds thunderstorms, but it wasn't super warm or super humid last evening. But the energy of this cool pool from Quebec was able to make lots of thunderstorms blossom Saturday evening. Some of them were strong to severe. But even if not, they were widespread.

And pretty, as you can see by the photos in this post.

Orange post-sunset light pokes through dark storm clouds
Saturday evening in St. Albans, Vermont.

You wouldn't expect anything in the way of thunderstorms today, again, at least on paper. It's overcast and cool this morning. Nothing that would inspire thunderstorms. A dull rain, maybe, but nothing dramatic.

But like I said, this upper level storm is pretty feisty and will be able to kick off at least some thunderstorms. I think very few, if any will make it to severe levels.

Maybe in southern New England, there will probably be a few storms with damaging winds and large hail, mostly because it's a little warmer and a little sunnier there to add energy.

Even so, in the rest of Vermont, there will be frequent showers around. Many of us will hear thunder and see lightning today. A few thunderstorms will be able to generate gusty winds. Again nothing destructive, but the strongest storms could produce gusts as high as 30 to 35 mph.

There is even a good chance some of us will get hail. Nothing big, just pea sized. It's so cold aloft that  if you get to just 8,500 feet in elevation, it'll get below freezing. Since there's not much space between subfreezing air and down where we are, there's little time or any hail stones that do form to melt. So some will make it down here.

Despite relatively dry-ish air over us, some of the showers and storms today could produce locally heavy downpours. The heaviest rains if they get going won't last long, so there's no real threat of flooding.

A band of heavy showers, with a few lightning strikes was over the Montreal area and heading south toward the Vermont border as of 8:45 a.m. this Sunday morning. Another zone of pretty good showers was over New York and appeared to be heading toward the southern half of Vermont.

The Quebec band of showers and thunderstorms appeared to be strengthening somewhat or at least holding its own as it moves south this morning, so these forecasts of potentially gusty and hail-ish storms seems pretty realistic.

This cold upper level low will get out of our hair quickly and it will be back go summer warmth by tomorrow.

As the week goes on, it'll keep getting warmer and especially more humid, so by the second half of the week, we'll be back to having chances of mostly afternoon and evening thunderstorms.

Here's a brief video I took of a stormy sunset and lightning strike as seen from St. Albans Saturday evening (Click on the square like thingy on the bottom right of the video to make it bigger and easier to see:

That "Rain Shower" In California Was Actually A Bunch Of Ladybugs

The green blob on radar in southern California looks
like a rain shower, but it was a swarm of ladybugs

The other day, weather radar appeared to show a large, isolated rain shower moving southward from California's San Bernadino Mountains toward San Diego.

It was an odd looking shower, and not one that was forecast. As some of you might have heard, this wasn't a rain shower at all. It was ladybugs. Lots of them.

The ladybug swarm was about 80 miles in diameter, flying at elevations of between 5,000 and 9,000 feet above sea level. The most concentrated part of the swarm was about ten miles in diameter.

According to scientists, this weird "shower" of ladybugs is perfectly normal. As the Los Angeles Times wrote:

"In early spring, after temperatures reach 65 degrees, adult convergent lady beetles mate and migrate from the Sierra Nevada to valley areas where they eat aphids and lay eggs.

In the early summer, once the aphid numbers decline, beetles become hungry and migrate to higher elevations."

Weather spotters in the San Bernadino mountains said from the ground, the swarm didn't look remarkable. People did see "specks" flying by, which were individual ladybugs in the lower levels of the swarm heading south.

This isn't the only time bugs or other living things show up on radar. Expanding rings often show up on weather radar in and around Austin, Texas in the evenings. That's bats coming out of their roosts under bridges and such for evening meals.

Big mayfly hatches sometimes show up in the Midwest, too. As recently as May, swarms of midges appeared on radar near Cleveland.

What Is It About Ottawa, Canada And Tornadoes Lately?

Tornado around Orleans, Ontario on Sunday. 

Last September, a huge tornado struck the Ottawa, Canada area injuring 25 people, destroying dozens of homes and damaging hundreds of other houses, businesses and apartment buildings

That seemed like a rare event in Ottawa and for the Ontario/Quebec border in general.

Then, yesterday, yet another damaging tornado hit the Ottawa area. This one struck in and around the community of Orleans, a little east of Ottawa. It also came pretty close to the path the one last year took, when it caused extensive damage in Gatineau.  

According to the Ottawa Citizen:

"Environment Canada said late Sunday that preliminary information indicates the tornado was a Category EF-1 and may have been on the ground for more than 30 minutes."

There were no reported injuries, but there was plenty of damage. Videos of the storm and its aftermath are below.

In some neighborhoods, roofs were damaged, windows blew out and scores of trees came down.

Lots of video showed a bright white funnel cloud along the dark tail end of a severe thunderstorm, illuminated by a low angle sun.

Ottawa is just a three and a half hour drive from Burlington, Vermont, but just like the September outbreak, Vermont suffered little if any damage.  There were downpours and thunderstorms in the Green Mountain State, but I've heard no reports of severe thunderstorm.

The severe thunderstorms that produced Sunday's Ottawa area tornadoes moved east toward Montreal but weakened dramatically as they crossed southern Quebec.

Here's a view of the tornado approaching a motorist on a bridge near Orleans. At the last second, the motorist zooms out of the way:



Another view of the tornado pulling water from a lake or river:



And here's the narrow, sun-lit tornado pulling apart part of an apartment house roof:

Stormy Here, But At Least It's Not Snowing (Yet)

At my place in St. Albans, Vermont, we awoke to a stormy morning at dawn, with lots of wind and rain, occasionally heavy, whipping the greening trees.

It's expected to be on the wet and cloudy side all day today, and after an OK weekend, the gloom will return next week.  But it could be worse. Ask anyone in Duluth, Minneota.

In this photo by Derek Montgomery for Minnesota Public Radio,
we have an aerial view of cars making patterns in the snow
at a University of Minnesota/Duluth parking lot Thursday. 

It's supposed to be well into spring, including in the nation's icebox of northern Minnesota. But a storm Wednesday night and Thursday morning in Duluth dumped more than 10 inches of snow.

According to the Duluth News Tribune:

"All told, 10.6 inches of snow accumulated at Duluth International Airport, a record for May that also included a single day record of 8.3 inches on Wednesday alone. It was the snowiest May day on record since 5.5 inches fell in 1902."  

Many other areas of northern Minnesota and northern Wisconsin picked up two to nine inches of snow.

That area wasn't the nation's only wintry spot. Much of Colorado, including the Denver metro aera had a snowy Thursday. Some mountainous areas picked up more than a foot of new snow.

It does snow in and around Denver occasionally in May. Still, it was a spring setback. Probably nobody felt the snowy chill more than college graduates at the University of Colorado at Boulder, which held its commencement ceremony outdoors despite the snowstorm. 

The weather in both Duluth and Colorado are improving today, mostly because conditions couldn't really get worse this time of year. High temperatures around Duluth for the next few days should be in the 50s to low 60s with no sign of additional snow.

In Denver, readings should climb into the 50s today after a frosty start, and reach the upper 70s by Monday.

We here in Vermont might get in on the snowy times, at least in the mountains. A chilly storm will meander through Monday, Tuesday and into Wednesday. It might get cold enough Tuesday and Tuesday night for snow to accumulate in the Green Mountains and Adirondacks.

So far at least, it looks like the valleys will be spared the snow, but it will be unseasonably cold during the storm, with highs on Tuesday only in the 40s.

Montana Blizzard, Chicago Winter Storm. NOW?!?!?!?

Red sky in the morning means to take warning. This was the ABC News 7
webcam in Chicago at dawn today. By this afternoon,  this same spot
will likely be seeing a late season snowstorm.

Boy, has the northern tier of the nation taken a giant step backward into winter!!

A compact but pretty wound-up storm is setting off a winter storm of all things in a narrow stripe in southern Minnesota and Wisconsin, northern Iowa and northern Illinois, including Chicagoland.

The northern half of the Chicago metro area in particular looks like it's really under the gun. There, three to eight inches of heavy, wet snow is expected to come down later today.

This storm is, of course, weird for Chicago in the heart of spring. The average date for the last one-inch snowfall in Chicago is March 17. This one, if an inch accumulates, will be close to a record. The latest one-inch snow in Chicago on record came on May 3-4, 1907.

Some trees in Chicago are starting to leaf out. That means the heavy, wet snow accumulating on those nascent leaves, and expected gusty winds, will damage a few of those trees.

So yeah, this is pretty unwelcome in the Second City and other areas under the winter storm warning. Some areas could see snowfall rates of one to two inches per hour.

Meanwhile, a separate storm has triggered a blizzard warning of all things in north-central Montana. Two to five inches of late season snow propelled by gusts of 55 mph expected Sunday won't make for   a terrific day there, that's for sure.

Here in Vermont, we're not getting off scot-free, but at least there's no blizzard coming. Rain showers will change to snow showers in the mountains today, leaving behind a dusting to a couple inches way up near the summits by Sunday morning.

That storm from Chicago will weaken as it heads east, but will still drop a cold, light rain Sunday in southern Vermont, with a little snow possible up high.  A hard freeze is likely statewide Sunday night, so if you got ahead of yourself in the garden, protect those plants!

We've also launched ourselves into a long period of colder than normal weather in Vermont that will last more than a week.  Spring is on hiatus for the foreseeable future, I'm afraid.

Flood Update And Those Weird Temperatures In Vermont On Saturday

Water from Lake Champlain began to creep over this walkway
at Perkins Pier in Burlington, Vermont Saturday as the
lake approached its 100-foot flood stage.

Water is receding this Sunday morning in most of Vermont, with the notable exception of Lake Champlain and the Connecticut River as the weather has taken a dramatic turn for the better, especially in northwestern parts of the state.

As expected, most of the flooding was minor, except in parts of the Northeast Kingdom where the heavy rains Friday and Saturday fell on melting snow.

High water around St. Johnsbury and Lyndonville rivaled the damaging floods of April, 2014, May, 2011 and July, 1973.  Homes and businesses in some parts of Lyndonville and St. Johnsbury likely suffered flood damage.

USGA data indicated Lake Champlain reached its 100 flood stage at around mid-morning today. and it will continue rising for at least a day or two as the rest of the runoff from that weekend rain and snowmelt makes its way to the lake.

The risk of damage from the lake flooding will come if we get any high winds over the next couple of weeks that could cause battering waves and erosion. Spring can be a windy time of year, so that's something to be watched.

It could get a breezy on Wednesday, but there are no big wind storms in the forecast for at least the next week. So that's good.

The other flood problem is along the Connecticut River from about Fairlee north.  Waterways were particularly high in northeastern Vermont and northern New Hampshire because there was more snow to melt there than elsewhere. That and the rain sent a LOT of water headed toward the Connecticut River.

At Wells River, Vermont, the Connecticut River could be close to two feet above flood stage, with possible further rises after that.  Low water crossings will be underwater for days, as will many hundreds of acres of farmland.

As the crest goes downstream, people should monitor the Connecticut River from along the central Vermont/New Hampshire border to Long Island Sound in Connecticut. Flooding is a possibility all the way down to the mouth of the river.

Other than the Connecticut River and Lake Champlain, I don't see much in the way of new flooding threats for the rest of the week at least. We'll certainly get our share of off and on April showers during the week and into next weekend, but there are no drenching storms in the forecast

ODD TEMPERATURES

A temperature inversion kept Burlington, Vermont chilly and
foggy last evening, while elsewhere in Vermont, it
was a very mild evening with temperatures in the 60s.

Can we talk about how weird the weather was on Saturday? Yes, it was a typically rainy April day, but those temperatures were all over the place.

One of the reasons why there was so much flooding is in many cases, the mountains were warmer than valleys, at least the valleys in western Vermont.

An inversion kept a layer of warm air overhead, with chily air in the deeper valleys of northwestern Vermont.

The top of Mount Mansfield had temperatures in the 50s all day Saturday, with rapid snowmelt contributing to the flooding. The snow depth there went from 107 to 90 inches in two days.

Meanwhile, in Burlington, temperatures were in the low 40s all day, as low level cold air drained down the valley from the north.

To the east, on the other side of a stalled cold front, in places like St. Johnsbury and White River Junction, temperatures Saturday were well up into the 60s.

South winds were blowing just one to two thousand feet overhead, so it was warmer up above. The cold waters of Lake Champlain also helped to form a lid of cold air over the Champlain Valley, which did not allow those warm winds above us to mix down to the surface. Thick fog formed beneath this lid keeping the warm air above out.

This lid began to break up overnight, leading to strange temperature changes. Rutland was just north of the stalled front during the day Saturday. Temperatures in Rutland abruptly went from the 60s to the 40s just before midnight Friday as the cold front came through. The front stalled a few miles south of Rutland, keeping readings there in the 40s most of the day.

That front jogged north and the inversion broke in Rutland a little before 6 p.m., and the temperature immediately rocketed upward into the upper 60s. Very strange.

In Burlington, the temperarture abruptly rose about nine degrees just before midnight as the south wind finally broke through, and that 54 degrees at midnight was the high temperature for the day.

Things are taking a much more normal arc today. Lows in the 50s this morning will rise to the 60s or maybe around 70 this afternoon. Readings will slowly fall this evening, which is the way things are supposed to work.

A Strange, Babyish "Solution" To Climate Change

U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah says if we all get married and have
babies, climate change will be solved. Or something. 

Like most of us, I still haven't fully digested the "Green New Deal"

For those who have been living under a rock for the past several months, the Green New Deal is a sweeping, long-term proposal to deal with climate change in a multi-faceted way, while also taking care to deal with other social ills.

There's a lot of moving parts to the Green New Deal, and if it goes anywhere, it will change and change and change again. We'll be hearing about this for a long time. Probably as long as climate change remains a deep concern. In other words, practically forever.

A lot of Republicans don't like the Green New Deal and even mock it. That is understandable, because liberals are most likely in support of it, and the Green New Deal does contain a lot of proposals that people left of center would tend to like.

That's all and good. The debate over what to do about climate change is missing conservative voices. If there were serious proposals from conservatives, maybe we'd get some decent compromises, probably some new ideas and maybe a better game plan to deal with climate change.

However, too many conservatives dismiss climate change as a hoax, or God's will, or something nobody can do anything about.

Finally, though, we have a conservative voice in this! Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah stepped into the fray this week.

He said:

"This is the real solution to climate change: babies..the solution to so many of our problems at all times and in all places is to fall in love, get married, and have some kids."

Um, OK?

It's hard to fathom what Lee was getting at here. Maybe being married and having kids is so all-consuming and distracting that you don't notice climate change. Sort of, if you're too busy to notice the house is on fire, then the house isn't on fire.

As CNN reports, Lee went on to explain his logic here.  Lee said, "Problems of human imagination are not solved by more laws, they're solved by more humans..... More people mean bigger markets for more innovation. More babies mean forward-looking adults, the sort we need to tackle long-term, large scale problems."

Well, actually I agree with at least part of that whole-heartedly. We do need more forward looking adults capable of tackling long term, big problems like climate change.

So, I'll open up a can of worms here that will drive conservatives crazy. Let's welcome more immigrants!

Sure, we can't just let everybody come across our borders. The United States does need security and sovereignty, after all. But let's face it, Trump and his supporters are fighting tooth and nail to keep pretty much everybody out. Especially if they're people of color.  Can't have non-whites coming in, can we?

My point is, Lee is right, a steadily rising population is necessary for a strong, sociall, vibrant and economically sound nation brimming with new ideas. Yes, even if those ideas come from people of color.

Climate change activists note, with a lot of accuracy, that adding more people to the world doesn't solve climate change. It just boosts fossil fuel emissions, because the bigger the population, the more greenhouse gases end up in the atmosphere.

If so many people want to come into the United States and claim refugee status, let's look into it. Let's let more in, as long as they actually qualify for such status. Let's let in a fair number of immigrants, too.

You never know which ones might have some bright, smart ideas on climate change. Who knows if some kid from Guatamala comes up with a brilliant plan to stabilize the world's climate. Stranger things have happened.

Young people seem to have all the energy when it comes to climate change activism. They have the most to lose if global warming is not addressed. They're the activists here.

Of course, I'm giving Lee way too much credit here. He's just another Republican offering mocking talking points to a rabid, Trumpian base.

So we got from Lee the usual bullcrap stupidity of saying the Green New Deal aims to rid the world of airplanes and farting cows. Really. I'm not making this up. Lee also set up poster board sized pictures of things like Ronald Reagan riding a velociraptor. That's not made up, either.

Lee said that pic was meant to make us "consider the Green New Deal with the seriousness it deserves."

Again. Um, OK.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a principal backer of the Green New Deal, responded to Lee on Twitter thusly: "Like many woman + working people, I occasionally suffer from imposter syndrom: Those small moments, especially on hard days, where you wonder if the haters are right. But then they do things like this to clear it right up: If this guy can be Senator, you can do anything."

It doesn't seem like our government is going to respond to climate change in any real way, huh?

While Vermont Stayed Wintry; Parts Of Arctic Incredibly Spring Balmy

Temperatures in northern Alaska are likely to be a whopping
35 to 50 degrees above normal this week. While temperatures
normally hover near 0 this time of year in that region,
readings are likely to get above freezing. 

It was another truly wintry morning around Vermont today. For the second day in a row, it was right around 9 below up in Island Pond. Lake Eden clocked in with 6 below.  Many Vermonters awoke to temperatures in the single digits above zero.

The good news for those who are winter-weary is that this will likely be the last time anyone in Vermont sees subzero temperatures until next November at the earliest.

The snow cover, deep in many areas, will begin to subside, starting today and continuing through the weekend amid thawing temperatures.

Despite the fact we will have a few wintry setbacks, spring is finally asserting itself in Vermont.

Meanwhile, it's been springlike up in parts of the Arctic all month. At least springlike by their standards. In parts of Alaska and northwestern Canada, this March will be far and away the warmest on record.

The ever-reliable Category 6 weather blog at Weather Underground has the rundown on this incredible Arctic "warmth."

Let's start with Utquiagvik, Alaska, formerly known as Barrow in the extreme northern tip of that state. The high temperature there yesterday was 32 degrees and the low, 17, which was almost exactly like the conditions we had here in Vermont on Tuesday. Seemingly not all that impressive.

But remember, this is the northern tip of Alaska. That 32 was record high for the date and Tuesday was 35 degrees warmer than normal in Utqiagvic. (Normal high there yesterday was minus 4, normal low, minus 17.

Utqiagvic is running 16 degrees above normal for March, and they are likely going to have the warmest March on record, and the first March with a mean temperature above zero, given the forecast of continued mild temperatures into early April.

It's not just Utqiagvic. Much of Alaska has been even hotter.  Kotzebue, Alaska, about 300 miles southwest to the former Barrow is having a March that will end more than 20 degrees warmer than average, and a record high. Thaws in Kotzebue are rare and brief in March, but each of the past five days there have gotten above freezing. (Normal high this time of year around Kotzebue is around 10 degrees).

There have been some incredible March record highs in Alaska, the Northwest Territories of Canada and far western Siberia. Sitka, Alaska,  reached 67 degrees this month.  Yohin Lake, Northwest Territories, Canada sits just 400 miles from the Arctic Circle and managed to hit an incredible 71 degrees a week or so back. At the hour it was that warm in Yohin Lake, it was a degree or two cooler than that in Miami, Florida.

Tofino, British Columbia reached 76 degrees, which is a March record and would have been the all-time hottest reading there in April, too.

The odd warmth in Alaska is due largely to an odd and strangely persistent weather pattern that has brought repeated bursts of air from the south to the region. Plus, the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet due to climate change.

Superimpose climate change on an odd, warm weather pattern and you really get some bizarre northern heat.

HOW IT AFFECTS US

If it seems this Arctic warmth is something that is happening too far away to affect many people and doesn't affect you at all, think again.

First of all, the lack of ice in the Bering Sea off western Alaska is having a wide range of effects. Ice usually prevents large storm waves from crashing ashore in western Alaska. With the lack of ice, the waves have been producing coastal flooding and erosion, notes the Anchorage Daily News. 

Nobody can go crabbing, fishing and walrus hunting either.

This weather pattern has certainly affected the United States. The big northward bulge in the jet stream has created a big dip downstream. That means cold air masses have been able to easily move south from Canada. Air that's really warm for the season north of the Arctic Circle is cold for the season by the time it heads south to places like, well, Vermont.

Which helps explain why the weather was basically the same yesterday in Vermont as it was way up in the northern tip of Alaska.

This warm Arctic spring is reason to worry about the extent of Arctic ice, too.

Overall, despite the tiny amounts of ice in the Bering Sea, overall Arctic ice extent did not set any record lows this winter, which is a good thing. The ice extent probably peaked around March 13 and it was tied for the seventh lowest in the past 40 years. Not a terrific thing, but at least the amounts of ice didn't crash this year.

This week, the odd heat has expanded to include almost all of the Arctic. This is almost certainly a temporary thing, but it does start off the melt season awfully fast. If the trend were to continue well into the summer, we'd be a risk of setting a new record for lowest ice extent.

That's just speculation at the moment, anything can happen with the pace of this year's melt. It all depends upon what the weather pattern is like when summer really hits in June, July and August.

But if the Arctic ice continues to diminish, it will help keep making the weather patterns weirder and more extreme in places where we live in the mid-latitudes.

GREENLAND GLACIER GROWS

A good example of how natural cycles are superimposed on a warming climate is at the Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland.

The glacier became something of a poster child for climate change back in 2014, when it rapidly began to lose mass. It stunned people watching the climate, as glaciers like Jakobshavn, when they melt fast, contribute to sea level rise.

Well, guess what? The Jakobshavn glacier is growing again. Adding ice. So, no worries about climate change right?  A Greenland glacier is actually growing!

Not so fast.

In the short term, the fact that Jakobshavn glacier is growing is a very good thing. It's not contributing to sea level rise, and is in fact slowing it by an imperceptible amount.

The glacier stopped shrinking and started expanding again because an ocean current bringing water to the spot where the glacier meets the ocean got much chillier starting around 2016.  The water there is the coldest it's been since the 1980s, as Marshall Shepherd notes in Forbes.

There's a natural pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation that makes the North Atlantic flip between cold and warm once every five, ten, fifteen, twenty years - it depends.

It's in the cold phase, so that's helping the glacier grow. Which leads Shepherd to a great point in his Forbes article.  People who deny or are skeptical of climate change often say the climate changes naturally.

Climate scientist would respond by saying, Duh!  They all already know climate changes naturally. always changes.  As Shepherd writes:

"It's not 'either/or' with naturally-varying climate and human influences. it's 'and.''

Which is what we're seeing now with the Jakobshavn glacier, and the odd heat in Alaska.

Chances are, when the North Atlantic Oscillation flips again, that Jakobshavn glacier will begin to thaw again.