Winter Hangs Tough, At Least Until Around March 10

A burst of snow adds another dusting of snow to my St. Albans yard
last week. We're on the cusp of March, but winter weather will
last into the new month.  

Friday is the start of meteorological spring, when weather geeks, climatologists and that sort of crowd say the new season begins.

It's arbitrary. Considering the period March 1 to May 31 as spring is a convenient way to compare and constrast current and past seasons. Since records are kept month to month, it makes sense.

Climatologists be damned, don't count on spring weather arriving this Friday, here or in most places in the nation.

A very large blast of Arctic air will be just beginning to enter the nation via the northwestern Great Plains on Friday. This great gush of frigid air will engulf most of the nation east of the Rockies, except maybe Florida.

Granted, this Arctic outbreak will be far from the Worst Ever. It will be the kind of cold wave that often occurs in early March. There might be some daily record low temperatures broken in the northern Plains and perhaps a few other places, but it's not coming close to be historic.

Here in Vermont, the Arctic air won't have arrived yet by Friday, so the optimists among us might feel a subtle taste of spring as temperatures rise into the seasonable upper 20s and low 30s. That won't last.

Before we get to Friday we've got enough winter weather to get through. A small storm is scooting by to our south, and it's about to snow in much of Vermont. You'll notice as of mid-morning today that the overcast is lowering and thickening.

It'll start this afternoon. By tomorrow new snow accumulation in Vermont will be modest: It looks like it will be a dusting to an inch north of Route 2; about 1 to 3 inches between Route 2 and Route 4, and three to five inches south of Route 4.

January-like cold will hang on into Thursday. It'll be in the single numbers above or below zero tonight and tomorrow night, and in the upper teens and low 20s Thursday.

Things get murky with the forecast going into the weekend. Storminess seems likely, but how it will shake it out is not easy to tease out. There seems like there will be some snow, possibly mixed with a little rain Saturday afternoon and night. It's too soon to talk accumulation.

There's even more question marks come later Sunday and Monday. There's some indications there could be a pretty good snowstorm, but the forecast models are all over the place with this. Some say a lot of snow, some say a little, some say nothing.

So, here in Vermont, right now the best I can do is say between Sunday and Monday we'll get between a trace and two feet of snow. That's worthless, right?

That Arctic air that I talked about will flood into Vermont Sunday or Monday and stay around for a good part of next week. The cold won't be as intense as it will be in the northern Plains. The sun angle is higher now than it was in December and January, so the air will modify under that sun on its trip to the Northeast.

Still, it will be colder than normal by both March and January standards.

There are preliminary signs that things might move toward spring in much of the nation around March 10 or so. The flow of Arctic air look like it wants to get largely cut off after that date. There's no guarantees on this, and it's hard to tell how warm it will get. It is reason for hope, though.

Meteorological spring or not, milder weather is inevitable as we move through March, so the chances of welcome thaws are going to increase, whether or not the weather pattern cooperates or not.

Signs point to continued storminess well into March, so things could be a pretty wild wide through much of the month.

Huge Nor'easter And Frigid Arctic Blast Obnoxiously Heated Up Climate Change Debate

Huge expanses of coastal New England ocean water froze over
during last week's record cold spell. The Arctic outbreak did not
prove or disprove climate change, but activists on either side
seized on this big time, facts be damned 

The long Arctic siege that gripped much of the eastern half of the country finally ended Sunday, and the cleanup is well underway from that super powerful nor'easter last week.

Although the Arctic wasteland spell is over, the heat that the cold blast generated in the climate change activist wars show few signs of abating, though.

The brutal stretch of winter weather proved to be a sort of climate Rorschach test of sorts between climate activists on one hand, the climate change denialists and skeptics on the other.

I think the climate change activists did have the intellectual upper hand in this latest battle, but there was still over the top claims on either side.

SILLY DENIALISTS

Surprise, surprise, Donald Trump was the most simplistic of the denialist bunch. We were barely one day into the Arctic siege when he declared global climate change a hoax. Hey, it was cold on the U.S. East Coast, so that's the only indicator of whether the world was hot or cold, right?

Yeah, or something like that. Trump is a real friggin'  climate scientist. (If you didn't notice, my snark font is on.)

Then there was the familiar trope that came roaring back along with the Arctic winds that activists had somehow "rebranded" global warming into climate change, so that they could allegedly blame every kind of weather on fossil fuel emissions.  Hey, now they're saying any weird weather is humans' fault! Silly climate activists! (Ugh.)

For instance, Rex Murphy in Canada's National Post had his sarcasm font on in full blast as he wrote about all those silly little people worried about global warming, er, climate change:

"During the most savage Hyperborean blasts and numbing cold even the little ones busy themselves with exercises to remind themselves of the truth of things. Children in schools hang up posters of the Amazon rainforest, check the temperature in Tanzania, have revivalist reruns of "An Inconvenient Truth" to keep the sense of global peril fresh in their anxious empty little heads."

Cripes, Murphy's prose is as purple as my frostbitten fingers were during the worst of the Arctic blast.

NUANCES, NUANCES, NUANCES

I suppose was a faint glimmer of a point in Murphy's rant about "branding."

Here's why I think that: A number of climate scientists and other activists during the winter siege pointed out that the extreme weather was "consistent" with climate change.

Notice the careful wording. They weren't drawing much of a direct line between the frigid weather pattern and climate change. The climate change crowd was more accurately saying the spell of weather was paradoxically "consistent." with global warming. No proof, but the weird weather pattern might, just might, have had something to do with climate change.

A few activists did flatly say that the cold wave and nor'easter were definitive signs of climate change. Those activists were wrong. A single weather event is proof of nothing. Weather is variable. A world that's overall warmer than it used to be can still have cold weather. It can still have winters. Life goes on, after all.

However, back to that careful working, and the crux of why I said Murphy had a slight point about branding.

The basic science of climate change is simple: Put more carbon dioxide in the air, and more of the sun's heat gets trapped in that atmosphere. So all things being equal, the world warms up.

Then mix in all the nuances of the many ways climate change can affect how things are where you live. And then consider the  million different ways it can affect conditions at all other points of the world. On top of that, add in the complexities that exists with or without global warming. Examples include local effects, natural ocean and air circulation cycles, and factors we might not even know about yet.

Which means you get the simple, if incorrect arguments: "It's cold out where we are, therefore there's no global warming." say the climate denial crowd.

That, versus the scientists: "The weather pattern we are in is consistent with climate change, but it's hard to blame one weather event on climate change. Plus, there are many factors involved that may or not be influenced by climate change, and scientists are still studying these aspects. Melting sea ice in the Arctic might be screwing around with the jet stream and might be bending it in ways that make these Arctic outbreaks in the eastern United States. However, there are winters that aren't so cold because..........."

See the problem? Us humans crave simple explanations for what's going on around us. I know I do. Explanations of how climate change might be affecting us are often not simple at all. We tune out. That's why Donald Trump's tweet got so much attention. It was a simple if wrong sales/con job. He's a great marketer. Simple messages sell.

It's hard to market climate change in ways the public easily understands.

Under climate change, weather extremes will probably continue to get, well, more extreme. You get into the weeds arguing with climate deniers and skeptics on this point, too.

One example is Accuweather Meteorologist Joe Bastardi, among others. Now, I respect Bastardi as a talented meteorologist. He's one smart cookie, and my snark font is definitely OFF when I say that. Where I have a problem with Bastardi is his climate change skepticism. He's not a denialist, but he is very skeptical.   His argument often goes as follows:

Yes, the weather here is exceptionally cold/hot/wet/dry/windy ---- whatever, but it's happened before, so there's nothing going on that's out of the ordinary so there's no human caused climate change. (I'm oversimplifying his argument a bit here.)

And of course, Bastardi is right on one aspect of his argument. There have been cold snaps as bad or worse than the one we just had. There have been nor'easters as bad or worse than the one that socked New England and Atlantic Canada last week. There have been bigger heat waves than the ones that we've had in recent years. All these historic weather events happened without human-induced global warming.

However, Bastardi is missing the most on point of these questions.

Of course these weather patterns have happened before. But are they becoming more frequent than they used to, and if so, why? Are floods getting more frequent and worse in some parts ofthe country than decades ago? Are weather patterns that cause these long lasting cold outbreaks like the one we just had happening more often? again, f so, why? Those are the pertinent questions here.

I'm not sure I have the answer to these questions, but those queries are the ones most worth examining.

Another trope among denialists is to try and discredit all science, as way of trying to convince the public to not believe anything based on scientific fact.

For instance, on Sunday, the climate denial site Watts Up With That mocked NOAA for a winter forecast they put out last fall that said chances were greater than even that the southern and eastern United States would, overall, have a warmer than average winter.

Watts Up With That crowed about the cold weather in the East and parts of the South. Never mind that the winter is less than half over, and, despite the cold spell, these areas could, on the whole, have a milder than average winter. (Notice the January thaw that's now creeping into many of these areas.)

As many, including, to his credit, Bastardi pointed out, it's possible we could have warm weather the rest of the winter, which would make the season a bit on the mild side. We just don't know yet.

NOR'EASTER AS CLIMATE POSTER CHILD

The nor'easter that struck the U.S. and Canada east coasts last weekend strengthened at almost a record pace, and brought near record and even record storm surges to many coastal communities in New England and Canada, especially in Massachusetts.

Waves and coastal flooding batter Scituate, Massachusetts during
last week's epic nor'easter. The storm was huge, and inflated the
arguments over climate change. But it was just one storm, so I'm
counseling that everybody relax. 

The denialists claimed that it was a bitter cold storm, so no global warming. Yeah, it was cold on the western side of the storm, over eastern North America.

But it was super warm on the eastern side of the storm, over the Atlantic Ocean. Nobody lives in the middle of the ocean though, so that warm side of the storm was ignored.

Meanwhile, the climate change activists were a little more careful, but still emphasized that the unusually high tides that flooded Boston and other communtiies were the hallmarks of climate change.

Climate change might have had an influence on all that high water, but it wasn't the principal reason for the flooding. The storm struck when astronomical tides were higher than average, due to the position of the moon.

The worst of the storm also struck just when high tide was scheduled to come in during the early afternoon Thursday. Bad timing, to say the least.

Sea levels have risen due to climate change over the past several decades. Which means climate change did add to the strength and height of the storm tide, It was probably worse than it would have been without climat echange, but it wasn't the main reason for it.

Again, nuance strikes again, and we humans have little patience for that.

This keeps going around and around of course. The always obnoxious Brietbart News, among others, tried to stake the claim that climatologists automatically blamed global warming on the first signs of heat waves last summer, but pooh-poohed the idea that a cold wave on one sliver the globe -namely the eastern U.S., canceled out global warming.

Of course, no reputable climatologists said any such thing.

As long as the denialists have allies in government, sustained by huge campaign contributions by the oil industry and conservative bazillonaires, the science, details and nuances will be as lost in the public discourse as the stuff that floated out to sea when the storm surge hit Scituate, Massachusetts last week.

There will be other exreme weather events. They'll come fast and furiously. (Witness the fatal flash floods, debris flows and mudslides in California on Tuesday)

If you are interested in climate change, and you should be, here's my advice: Don't listen to the shrill public false "debate" when there's a big storm. Seek out the experts, the sober scientists, the politicians that resist hype, the media outlets that don't have much of an agenda, but just want you to know what's really going on.

Doing all these things can be difficult.  But at least you'll know what's really going on. And maybe, just maybe, you'll retain your sanity.

Most Insane Part Of Arctic Blast Is Today, Relief Coming, I Promise

Early this morning, I took the dogs outside to do their business at my St. Albans, Vermont house.

Flooding, ice chumks, debris, stuck cars and snow
remained Friday in coastal Massachusetts, still
recovering from the nor'easter and near record storm
surge and now, bitter cold. 

Needless to say, Jackson and Tonks did NOT stay out long, not with a roaring wind, blowing snow, subzero temperatures and a wind chill in the minus 30s.

I even had trouble closing the door when I got the dogs inside. Blowing snow was getting into the door jam and freezing. It's that bad.

Yes, here in Vermont and the rest of the Northeast, today is insane, no two ways about it. And we're tired of it. Aside from a rather poor excuse for a break in the cold this past Wednesday, we've endured this since December 26 - nearly two weeks.

The end of this Arctic siege is coming though. It will very likely be a temporary end, as it's still early winter, but we'll take it.

As we keep saying, you want to be super careful today in northern New England, much of the rest of the Northeast and southeastern Canada. Don't go outside if you don't have to, and if you do, cover up everything. Skin can easily freeze in less than a minute in these conditions.

Check on your elderly neighbors, too, They can get in trouble quickly in this weather. They can have problems with heat, or busted pipes or something else. Make sure they're warm and safe.

By the way, there's been a lot of nonsense online and in the media as to whether this cold snap and big nor'easter is a sign there's no global warming, or that climate change is entirely to blame. Look for a reality check on this ridiculous jabber in the next day or two.

Here in Vermont, temperatures will stay below zero all day. If Burlington, Vermont stays below zero all day today, which is highly likely, it'll be the first time that's happened since January 22, 2014. (It used to happen pretty much every year, but winters have generally gotten a little warmer.)

The wind will continue to crank all day, too. So there will be little, if any improvement from this morning's conditions.

The news for tonight is a mixed bag. On the plus side, the National Weather Service has backed away a bit from what they expect to be cold overnight lows. Instead of 20s to upper 30s below zero, depending on your location, we're now looking at something like 15 to 30 below. Vaguely better.

But that's because the wind will keep going for a good part of the night, keeping the atmosphere mixed and interfering with radiation of what little heat there is out to space. The wind will die down before dawn, and that's when temperatures will really plunge. Exactly how cold it gets where you are depends upon how early the wind dies down. The earlier the calm winds arrive, the colder it will get, generally speaking.

Temperatures will start to warm late Sunday morning and afternoon but you probably won't notice it. When a cold snap like this one ends in Vermont, I like to say it "warms up cold" especially in the Champlain Valley.

What happens is, the temperature indeed rises. But as the warmer air begins to flood in, strong southerly winds also arrive, most noticeably in the Champlain Valley.  That means wind chills become an issue again.

Sunday, then, won't be a nice day. There will also be a lot of blowing snow around. Remember, the wind Sunday will be coming from the opposite direction as it has for the past two days. That means snow that blew into protected areas will blow around again. Look for snowy, icy patches on roads, drifts and areas of poor visiblity.

It's going to snow again, too, on Sunday night and Monday. Not much. We're looking at one to three inches most places.

By Monday afternoon, however, the warm air will have flooded in. Look for temperatures somewhere in the 25 to 35 degree range Monday. That's above zero, my friends.

If the temperature rises above freezing in Burlington Monday, that would mean we spent 15 consecutive days below freezing. That's not an amazing record, though. That would tie us for the 63rd longest continuous stretch below freezing. The record is 52 days, during the tough winter of 1976-77.

Another cold front will come through Tuesday, but don't worry, this next cold front is really lame. You really won't even notice it. High temperatures Tuesday will be near 32 degrees and "cool" into the 20s Wednesday. Not bad.

Toward the end of the week - Thursday and Friday - we could genuinely get into some thaw conditions in Vermont, with temperatures possibly in the 30s to low 40s during the day. The only problem is mixed precipitation or even rain is a good bet on those days.

Even if there's plain rain, it's been so cold lately that the ground temperatures are frigid. Say it's 38 degrees and raining Thursday afternoon. We'd still be getting freezing rain because the precipitation would likely freeze on contact with pavement. But at least it will be warmer!

This pattern change is good news, though, for most of the country. The eastern half of the nation has been in a deep freeze for so long now. This new weather pattern will keep almost the entire nation warm.

It also has been scarily dry in California this winter. Wildfires lasted into the end of December, which is unprecedented. This new weather pattern makes rainstorms and mountain snowstorms a very good bet for all of California in the upcoming week or two. They only drawback to the California rains is that, starting Monday, locally heavy rains will cause potentially dangerous debris flows in the vast areas hit by wildfires between August and December.

This warmer, and for California, wetter pattern looks like it will last at least into the third week of January. (We'll get brief cold spells here in Vermont, but nothing extreme.) Who knows, though, what we'll deal with in late January and February? At least we're getting a break, though.