Arctic Summer Has Been Too Much Like What We Normally Get

X marks the spot where the North Pole is on this map. Red box
points to where there was lightning recently. 

Time to check in once again to the not-so-Great White North, meaning the Arctic, which continues to have an extraordinarily hot summer.

You've seen some posts this summer noting how hot it is up there, but the news keeps coming. Alaska beach weather. Arctic wildfires. Summer thunderstorms rattling around the North Pole.

This in an area that is normally bleak and chilly despite the usual 24-hour a day sun in the first half of summer.

LIGHTNING NEAR NORTH POLE

Here in Vermont, we endured lightning strikes every summer.  That's just normal this time of year around here. But recently. lightning was also striking within 300 miles of the North Pole, which is really something.

In general, if you want a thunderstorm, it's fine to have cold, dry air aloft, but you need relatively warm, humid air near the surface.  We get that here in Vermont in the summer, so we have thunderstorms. As does pretty much everybody else in the mid-latitudes.

The Arctic has always had plenty of cold, dry air around. But warmth and humidity, at least compared to what it normally is up there, is usually scarce. Which means so are thunderstorms.

It's possible there has been lightning that far north before, but nobody that I've found knows of it. And one thunderstorm doesn't prove climate change. But this is odd. And warm.

It does make sense that lightning could become more common in the Arctic. There are signs it already is getting more frequent.  When the Arctic ocean is more ice covered, that stabilizes and chills the air, squelching any attempts at the billowing clouds that can produce lightning.

When there's open water, it can collect more heat, creating rising air currents and produce thunderstorms under the right conditions. Arctic sea ice is at its lowest level on record for this time of year, so it's kinda not surprising they had a weird thunderstorm up there.

The thunderstorms occurred in an area that was frozen over. But open water was just 150 miles away. The storms apparently got going there, over the open water, then moved north. 

ALASKA HEAT UPDATE

The ever helpful Category 6 weather and climate blog has given us a nice update on this summer in Alaska, which statewide, was the hottest on record.

The records are incredible, but the town that takes the cake in my opinion is Kotzebue, along the coast in northwestern Alaska. May, June and July there were the hottest on record. They have not had a single cooler than normal day since February 14! The last time Kotzebue had a cooler than normal month was two years ago.

That pretty much the entire state of Alaska was record warm in July is particularly incredible considering how vast it is. Superimpose Alaska on the Lower 48 and it covers the entire middle of the nation.

So far, the warm Alaska summer has extended through the first half of August.  Another heat ridge might build up there over the coming week or two, which would prolong the odd hot summer in Alaska.

SEA ICE AND OUR WINTERS

At least one new study suggests that melting sea ice is NOT
making our winter in Vermont more harsh. The debate continues....

As I've mentioned in previous blog posts here, some climate scientists have been wondering if the loss of Arctic sea ice have been making winters here in Vermont, elsewhere in the United States and in Europe harsher.

The theory is that the loss of sea ice makes the jet stream wavier and helps get it stuck,  causing cold air to plunge down on us from the north.

A new study questions this theory.  As ScienceDaily points out, the study says that although low winter Arctic ice levels and tough winters here often coincide, the low sea ice isn't having a big influence on these winters.

With or without climate change, Arctic sea ice levels fluctuate year to year. Sometimes there's not much ice, other times there's quite a bit. The overall trend is down for the ice, but it's not a steady drop over years and decades.

Atmospheric weather patterns tend to promote particularly relatively small amounts of sea ice in the Arctic during some winters. Those same weather patterns cause cold snowy winters in eastern North America and western Europe.

This won't be the final word on this issue. I'm sure the scientists will continue studying and debating this one.

Winters in Vermont Have Gotten Warmer. And Snowier

At least seven feet of snow has come down in Woodford,
Vermont, in the southern Green Mountains this month.

It seems like a paradox: Winters in Vermont have been generally trending warmer in recent decades.

Lately, they've also been getting snowier.

As you well know, many of us are buried in snow today in the lead up to the official start of spring next week.

So far this March, Burlington, Vermont has had 30.1 inches of snow. Even if not so much as one more flake falls this month (ha!) it'll still be the sixth snowiest March on record. Also, if it doesn't snow for the rest of March, April and May, this winter's snowfall will be above average.

VERMONT GETTING SNOWIER?

I looked at annual winter snowfall dating back to 1947 at the National Weather Service office in South Burlington, Vermont. The average annual snowfall during that period was 80.7 inches.

Since 2001, 14 of the 18 winters had snowfall above that average. (Including the current winter, since we're already up to 84.5 inches for the season.)

It's hard to say whether climate change has anything to do with this. Storms are wetter in a warmer world. So if it's below freezing locally, any given storm could be wetter, which would boost the snowfall totals.

However, it could just as well be some sort of natural cycle. For instance, during the 13 winters from 1966 to 1979, only one winter's snowfall was below the average, and then, just barely.

Three of Burlington's snowiest winters have been since 2000, and another three of the snowiest winters were during that 1960s and 1970s snowy period.

The difference between the 1960s and 1970s and now is that the earlier snowy winters were also generally cold. Most, but not all of the snowy winters in the 2000s have been near normal or warmer than normal, temperature wise.

THE BIG PICTURE

One study that made news this week concluded that big spikes in winter temperatures around the Arctic since 1990 correlate with big winter storms in the northeastern United States.

I usually have a nice sunset view in the evening out my
St. Albans, Vermont windows, but accumulated snow
and snow that slid off the roof ends that idea for now

A team of researchers looked at winter weather patterns dating back to 1950 According to Inside Climate News:

"Their study, published in the journal Nature Communications, links the increased frequency of extreme winter storms with the rapid and persistent warming of the Arctic since around 1990. When temperatures over the Arctic spike, especially high in the atmosphere, extreme winter weather is two to four times more likely in Boston and New York, while the U.S. tends to see warmer and drier conditions, they conclude."

This study doesn't prove that Arctic warmth is causing these northeastern winter storms, but suggests a possible link. Inside Climate News quotes Rutgers University climate researcher Jennifer Francis as saying this study reinforces previous studies that a declining temperature contrast between a fast-warming Arctic and somewhat slower warming mid-latititudes makes the jet stream more wavy.

A more erratic jet stream like this is more likely to cause extreme weather.

Climate change skeptics, like Joe Bastardi, on the other hand, say there have been weather patterns like this before.  And he's absolutely right. March, 1962, for instance, featured Arctic warming and lots of winter storms in the northeastern United States.

However, the question is, are these warm spells in the Arctic becoming more frequent? The science suggests they are.  Which would tend to indicate that we might have other very snowy winters in our Vermont future.

Short term, it looks like the wintry weather is here to stay in Vermont for awhile yet. Not much new snow will fall between now and Monday, with just scattered snow showers and possible brief squalls now and again as Arctic boundaries and disturbances pass through.

However, everybody is still watching out for the possibility of another snowy nor'easter during the middle of next week. It's still way too soon to determine whether that one will hit us, or mercifully slide out to sea too far south to give us more piles of snow to shovel.

Winter In Vermont: Now A Lot Warmer, And Oddly, A Lot Snowier

Who knows what this winter will bring, but in general,
Vermont winters  have gotten much warmer and snowier
in recent decades. Here's a street scene in Burlington
Vermont after a two-foot snowstorm in March, 2011.

As we prepare to go into winter, with a series of cold fronts due starting now and going into next week to bring us to near normal December temperatures and weather, here's some contradictory long term trends in Vermont winters:  

We are much warmer than we used to be decades ago. But also snowier.

According to Climate Central, Burlington, Vermont is the American city with the fastest warming winter, up about 7 degrees since 1970.

Though most of this is definitely real warming, a bit of it might be a function of the start date of this study, which is 1970.

That year was unusually cold here in Vermont. In fact, we had the coldest January on record that year.

Still, all data points to the fact that winters are warmer than they used to be in the northern tier of states, including Vermont as global warming has taken hold.

As always, the trend is uneven, with cold winters interspersed with warm ones. It's just the warm ones have gotten more frequent. And the winter heat waves have gotten more intense. Witness the unprecedented near 70 degree warmth on Christmas Eve 2015 and the previously unheard of 70 degree weather in late February this year.

There's no telling whether this winter will be cold or warm or all over the place. Stay tuned on that one.

It seems odd, but as Vermont has warmed, it has gotten snowier. Too bad the warmth does not allow the snow to accumulate all that much, or stay around for all that long.

The snow stats are striking. Five of the top 10 snowiest years in Burlington have occured since 1992. Seven of the top 10 occured since 1970.  Fourteen of the past 17 winters have had more than the average annual snowfall for Burlington.  Snowfall so far in this young winter is running a little behind normal, but the season is still extremely young, and that could change.

The big snows seem in large part to come from bigger individual snowstorms. Records in Burlington go back to the 1880s. But four of the top five biggest snowstorms have occured since 2007. Of the 20 biggest snowstorms on record, 13 of them have happened since 1993.

This all makes sense in a strange sort of way. Storms in a warmer atmosphere can draw in more moisture, and drop heavier precipitation that they could in a cooler world. If the temperature remains below freezing, storms in general now have the power to drop more snow than they could in the past.

As far as this winter goes, we'll just have to wait and see.

Is Warming Arctic Making Our Winters More Miserable

Boston during the winter of 2015. Will a warming
Arctic paradoxically give us more winters
like the one pictured?

Another study is telling us that the warming Arctic might not be doing us in the Northeast if we hate cold winters, and hate paying big heating bills.

As the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang reported this week, we're going to have to talk about the polar vortex again, that weather system that became such an internet sensation a couple winters back.  

The polar vortex is always up in the Arctic in the winter. It's a tightly wound circulation of frigid air that is perfectly normal, not the monster it was made out to be in the winter of 2013-14.

But a warming Arctic might be screwing around with that polar vortex.

Says the Washington Post:

"Occasionally (the polar vortex) fragments and pieces of it plunge into eastern North America, carrying bitter cold air. The winters of 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 witnessed several such polar vortex disintegrations and resulted in record setting cold snaps."

The polar vortex has showed a weakening trend over the past three decades, says the study in Nature Climate Change, making it easier to fragment and sent cold air into parts of Europe, Asia and North America, especially in the late winter and early spring.

Other studies have shown this overall polar vortex weakening, but the latest study takes things a little further. It's complicated, but an oversimplified version of it is this:

There's more open water in the Arctic in the autumn and early winter in recent years. That means more evaporation, and more water vapor in the air that falls as snow in Siberia and other high latitude locations.

The snow cover up there is thus, counterintuitively, more widespread than usual, which helps sets off weather pattern changes that make the polar vortex more likely to fall apart.

Additional complicated weather patterns favor fragments of the polar vortex to unload on eastern North America in late winter and early spring, mostly March, so we would be more prone to terrible cold snaps during that time of year, which prolongs winter.

Or at least give us weather whiplash. There have also been notable heat waves in recent years during March when the polar vortex isn't unloading on us. Remember the 80s in mid-March, 2012. And 70 degrees plus in early March last year?

The hints of spring might be prone to getting clobbered by these cold waves. Which screws ups and freezes early budding plants and fruit trees, causing crop losses, and less importantly, aggravated gardeners. It's a situation we saw last year, I know.

Of course, this doesn't always happen. A strong El Nino last year kept the Arctic air pretty much bottled up over the far north, and many of us in the Northeast enjoyed (or cursed) the warmest winter on record.

Even then, a brief very sharp cold wave around Valentine's Day brought some daily record low temperatures, and there was a temporary chill down in the second half of March and early April before the warmth returned. Which created the above mentioned havoc with frozen flowers on fruit trees.

As Scientific American notes, this is just another piece of evidence that global warming can cause more extremes in weather. Occasionally, those extremes are bitter cold, despite the overall warming trend.

This new study the Washington Post cites is not the final word, as there is controversy among scientists as to what Arctic thawing means, exactly how it affects the polar vortex, and howwe might feel the effects down here where we live.

We just know that things are getting screwed up with climate change, and we're only beginning to understand the picky details of how this will play out.

By the way, as I write this on a mild early November morning, there is much above snow cover in Eurasia, including Siberia, and much below normal Arctic sea ice, the Weather Channel notes. 

Many forecasters are saying this will lead to a bitter winter this year. Starting as soon as just before Thanksgiving, according to some predictions.

Bundle up and stow cash for those high winter heating bills!