U.S. Extremes Coming Up: Montana Blizzard, Southeast Bakes, Stormy Middle

This weather pattern sill encourage record heat in the southern
and eastern United States, possibly a historic snowstorm in Montana,
and lots of storminess in the central and northern United States
over the next few days.

We've been talking about a weather pattern all month that features a strong ridge of high pressure in the Southeast, with a southward dip in the jet stream in the west.

That has contributed to record heat in the southeastern third of the nation, cool conditions in the northern Rockies, and some very stormy and wet Central Plains.

This weather pattern is about to get turbocharged.

The heat ridge in the East will intensify, and the dip in the jet stream out west will get much more pronounced in the next couple of days.

That means the heat records will really fall in the East, while a possibly historic blizzard hits Montana. Yes, a blizzard. In September.

The Montana situation is especially interesting and dangerous. Six inches to three feet of snow is likely Friday night into Monday, with deep, accumulating snow likely even in valley cities like Great Falls, Helena and Butte.

Leaves are still on the trees in these communities. The heavy, wet snow and strong winds with this storm are likely to cause tons of tree damage. The National Weather Service office in Great Falls, Montana is telling residents that "the combination of heavy snow with strong northeast wind will cause severe to extreme impacts to agriculture, trvel, recreation and likely power outages."

A few isolated mountain locations could get up to four feet of snow. It looks like it could well be a historic storm for parts of Montana.  It does snow in northern Rockies pretty frequently this time of year, but nothing close to what's forecast.

Meanwhile, the East Coast will bake in summerlike heat by early next week. (Probably not up here in Vermont, though. I'll get to that in a minute.)

Highs could touch 90 degrees as far north as Boston, and record heat will  keep summer going in much of the east.

Halfway between the western winter and the eastern summer, expect a lot of rain. Which is terrible because the central and northern Plains have basically been flooding since March. And it's going to continue.

A good two to five inches of rain, with locally higher amounts are expected in places like eastern Nebraska, much if Iowa and Wisconsin over the next week. That'll worsen flooding that's still ongoing. (Part of Interstate 29 in eastern Iowa were still under water as of this morning.)

Bottom line: The weather will really be in the news over the next few days. Look at it this way: It'll be a slight distraction from impeachment news, right?

VERMONT IMPACTS

The Green Mountain State will be on the northern edge of the big eastern heat ridge, which will make for a tricky forecast over the next few days.  It's unclear how far north the heat will get.  There's a good chance that they some days will have quite a large temperature gradient from south to north across Vermont.

There's also a chance some days will be much warmer than forecast. Or much cooler than forecast. Don't you love uncertainty?

To make things even more challenging for forecasters, bits and pieces of the storminess across the central United States will ride up and over the heat ridge in the east. That probably means they'll go right over Vermont or close to it.  So there will be frequent bouts of showers.

Because these disturbances will be moving so fast, it will be hard to judge the timing of them that far in advance. At this point it doesn't look like any of these rainy spells between now and the middle of next week will be all that heavy.  It also looks as if northern area of Vermont would get more rain than southern areas.

Expect the unexpected here in Vermont over the next week or so.

Why Very Nice Weather Is Scary

My St. Albans,  Vermont yard Tuesday as the thaw
really took hold. 

If you're outdoors and it's partly sunny and 77 degrees, you should not be scared of the weather. After all, such weather sounds pretty pleasant.  

If you were in Bennington, Vermont yesterday, February 21, you experienced just that kind of weather. Note I said Vermont. In February. You can see why such weather in this case can be a little unnerving.

The weather extremes keep getting more extreme. A few years ago, I would have said it's pretty much impossible to get to 70 degrees in Vermont in February.

Then, yesterday, it was in the upper 70s. And we've now had two Februaries in a row in which it has been in the 70s in Vermont. The winter before that, it was 70 degrees in Vermont on Christmas Eve.

I keep telling you that a weather event on one dot on the map like Vermont does not tell you much about climate change. That is still true.

Yet, the entire East Coast was baking yesterday.

No fewer than 21 cities in the eastern United States from Florida to Maine broke records Wednesday for their hottest temperature on record for any February date.  Wells, Maine; Manchester, New Hampshire and Bennington, Vermont all hit 77 setting February statewide records across northern New England.

Tampa, Florida also hit an all time February record high of 89 degrees this week.

Same spot as above, 24 hours later. 

The weather extremes here in the Green Mountain State seem like they're getting more extreme and more frequent. That wouldn't be that big a deal except the extremes are getting more and more wild across many if not most parts of the world.

Of course, the trouble is, how do you measure the frequency of extremes. The overall temperature of the Earth is rising. That's relatively easy to measure. (NOAA just said that January for the Earth as a whole was the fifth warmest on record. And that means the Top 5 warmest Januaries have all occured since 2007.)  

Climate scientists tell us global warming will cause greater weather extremes. Anecdotally, that's easy to see. In addition to Vermont's February roast, a persistent stalled fetch of deep moisture is once again drowning parts of the Gulf states and South in flooding. The temperature is about to go above freezing at the North Pole like it's done a few times in the winter in recent years, which is very odd.

Arctic ice extent is at record lows for this time of year, and a bitter cold wave is heading toward western Europe from Siberia.

One way to look at the frequency of extreme weather is by examining warm spells, like the kind we just experienced yesterday.

Back in 2014, before many of the latest big, big heatwaves, Real Climate said record hot months at stations around the world were outpacing record cold months by a five-to-one margin. You can infer from this the world is warming as an unchanging climate would produce roughly equal numbers of hot and cold months.

An incredible  36-month streak of daily record maximum records exceeding daily record low minimums at weather stations throughout the United States ended in January, where record lows slightly outpaced record highs.

We're back to our old tricks, though. So far this month, U.S. weather stations have seen 1,707 daily record high temperatures versus just 174 record lows. Also so far this February, 37 weather stations have recorded their all time highest temperature for the month of February while just one recorded an all-time record low.

Another way to look at extreme weather events and trends in those events is the growing field of attribution science.

As Annie Sneed explained in Scientific American last year, computer programs are getting better at simulating the cause of extreme weather events, then estimating what would have happened without climate change. I'd better let her explain it:

"In our experimental set-up, we simulate the event in today's world, and then we remove anthropogenic emissions from the climate model's atmosphere, and do the same experiment again.  ...... Assuming everything else being equal, what is the influence of greenhouse gas emissions?"

This is all great, of course, but still, is there a way to measure the number of extreme events, say 100 years ago, compared to now?

I haven't come across such statistics, but I wish they existed.

Every time something extreme happens in the weather, climate change denialists and skeptics will point to a similar extreme in the past.

Yes, wild weather has always happened and always will, with or without climate change. Yes, it was in the 70s in New England yesterday, but it was 120 in the Great Plains in the summer of 1936.

However, are big hot spells more frequent than they were early in the 20th Century? The denialists and skeptics won't answer that question.

Muddying things further, some extremes that happen are just bad luck and have nothing to do with climate change. Or they would have happened anyway, but were possibly or probably made worse by climate change? How do you measure and prove that?

The consensus among scientists is that weird weather, like yesterday's summery February East Coast heat wave, is becoming more frequent with climate change.

The February heat wave wasn't as harmful as some big extremes, though budding flowers and crops up and down the East Coast will probably fall victim to normal spring freezes. In the past, if it got cold in March, who cares because plants hadn't started blooming yet.

Now we're getting these weird hot spells. California had a record warm winter, forcing crops and trees to start blooming too early. Then the inevitable winter frost and freeze hit last week.  The states $5 billion almond industry was almost certainly damaged by this.

Last year also had record February heat along the East Coast. Cherry blossoms in Washington DC bloomed too early, then many of the blooms were zapped and killed by a March freeze. Those blossoms are starting to bloom again this year, way too early. Will the same thing happen again.

As nice as this week's incredible February warmth felt to many of us, any weather extreme is bad, as I've just outlined.  And if extremes are getting wilder and more frequent, there's lots of trouble ahead.

Which is why I was scared yesterday when it was a very pleasant 77 degrees in Bennington, Vermont yesterday. In February.  Even as, exactly 24 hours later, Bennington was right back to normal February conditions: 30 degrees with fairly heavy snow falling.

A Review: Heat And Storms Were Pretty Extreme In Vermont, New England This Week

Microburst winds of up to 100 mph shredded this camp
in West Addison, Vermont during severe storms Thursday
Image from television station WCAX in Burlington.

(Editor's Note:) I'm travelling this week, so blog posts might on occasion be a little spottier, and at times a little less frequent than normal, but keep checking, as I will be making every attempt to post frequently.)

Anyway, back to the weather.

And what a weather week! Record heat, and more important, the heat was broken by some exceptionally powerful, if brief thunderstorms.

 And yet, over eastern sectons of Vermont and New England, the heat returned Friday, even as it became chilly from the Champlain Valley westward.

Here are the details to recap:

We got going on Wednesday, with record warmth across all of Vermont and much of the Northeast, as noted in the previous post Thursday morning.

Then Thursday came. In Burlington, Vermont the temperature reached 93 degrees, tying the all time high temperature for any day in May since records got going in the 1880s.

This makes two of the five first months of the year tying or breaking monthly record highs in Burlington. (The previous February all time maximum of 63 degrees was shattered by a reading of 72 degrees this year.)

By the way, the low temperature in Burlington Thursday was 70 degrees. That set a record for the highest low tempeature for that date. (May 18.)  The old record was 63 degrees.

Elsewhere, record highs were broken by several degrees. Boston reached 95 degrees, beating the old record by five degrees. Hartford, Connecticut got to 96 degrees, beating the old record of 90.

Way up in the northern tip of Maine, Caribou got up to 90 degrees, the first time it's reached that level there since July, 2014.

As I was preparing to leave my St. Albans home for a trip
amid hot Thursday evening weather, I spotted this
strong storm abruptly take shape northeast of town. 

The even bigger story was the brief, but violent thunderstorms that erupted late Thursday afternoon. At that time, a cold front was still well to our west, but what's known as a pre'frontal trough came in.

These pre-frontal troughs are fairly common well ahead of a cold front during hot spells, and, if timed to come through in the afternoon or evening, often create severe thunderstorms. That's because these troughs add lift to the atmosphere already made volatile by heat.

Almost always, pre-frontal trough severe thunderstorms are hit and miss.  Some places get nailed, others stay in the sunshine.

But the people that get nailed really get hammered. In West Addison, a National Weather Storm survey team on Friday looked at the damage from Thursday's storm to see whether it was a tornado or straight line winds.

No tornado, it turns out, but it was as bad as one. A microburst, which is a blast of air from a severe thunderstorm that plunges to the ground that blows violently in a narrow path once it hits the ground, caused the havoc in West Addison.

In West Addison, the microburst landed just offshore in Lake Champlain and zoomed eastward onshore. It cut down a bunch of trees and hit a house, partially lifting off its roof and largely collapsing the structure. The house was destroyed, the National Weather Service said, by micoburst winds of up to 100 mph.

An occupant inside the house was slightly injured.  WCAX-TV reported the situation could have been even worse. The television station said the hosue was actually a camp that had been blown off its foundation and flipped upside down.  Linda Taft, 75,  and her dog were inside at the time.

As the house flipped over the couch she had been sitting on with the dog got tossed around, and she grabbed a pillow to cover her face as she tried to protect the dog.

Neighbors who rushed to help found the woman on the ceiling with the dog, and luckily both were n good spirits.

According to WCAX, one of the neighbors who rescued Taft quoted her as saying as she was being rescued, "I only had two glasses of wine tonight and I never got my third."

Taft was taken to the hospital to be checked out, but she's fine. Just bruised. She said she plans to rebuild the camp.

In Addison and elsewhere, large, wind driven hail blew out windows and dented cars. In Barton, fallen trees blocked the path of a train, and a tractor trailer was blown over. Statewide, 15,000 people or so lost electricity.

Measured wind gusts included 68 mph in Wells, Vermont and 58 mph at the National Weather Service offices in South Burlington.

By mid morning Friday, the cold front had moved into the Champlain Valley, but not yet further east. At mid-morning it was down to 50 degrees in Highgate. Meanwhile, eastern and southern areas got hot again quickly.

St. Johnsbury in eastern Vermont reached 91 degrees Friday for a new record high. On Friday, Boston and Hartford reached 90 degrees for the third day in a row.

In Atlantic Canada, places like Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick, which are coming off an unusually harsh winter, had record highs that got as far as 90 degrees on Friday.

Now, the weather has reversed again, and I really, really hope you didn't think the hot spell made it safe to put your tomatoes and peppers out.

There's areas of frost this morning. Tonight, frost advisories have been posted for the Adirondacks, north-central and northeast Vermont, and parts of New Hampshire and Maine. A section of far northern New Hampshire and western Maine are under more dire freeeze warnings. 

After tonight, the weather is certainly going to remain changeable for the foreseeable future, but not nearly as wild as it has been this week.

Here's a video from Roger Hill of one of the storms rolling into North Montpelier, Vermont

Mother Nature Makes Her Point Clear During Saturday's Climate Marches

Thousands marched in Washington DC against the Trump
administration's policies on climate change. The march
went on amid record early season  heat

Demonstrations protesting President Trump's and many GOP members' climate denial took place as scheduled in hundreds of cities Saturday and the weather cooperated.

I'm not saying the weather was nice. It just helped drive demonstrators' point home.

The main march was in Washington DC, where temperatures soared to a record-tying 91 degrees. That weather was combined with stifling humidity.

Nothing like that kind of weather to drive home the point that global warming is an issue, no?

I sometimes like to refer to global warming as "global weirding" because a lot of what is happening with the climate is not only warmth, but weather extremes.

Things like bigger storms, floods, droughts, wildly swinging temperatures and the like.

The weather this weekend across the nation demonstrated that point perfectly.

It's true that an individual weather event on one day in any given city or country, even one as big as the United States, neither proves nor disproves climate change.

But the Washington DC heat, and the totally off the rails weather in much of the United States Saturday certainly has all the hallmarks of global climate change.

The East Coast heat is only the most obvious one.

But, as noted, climate change most likely creates more extreme weather and boy, we've had that this weekend.

The most dangerous piece of this is the widespread flash flooding going on in Missouri, Oklahoma and on into the places like Illinois and Indiana.

Places like Springfield, Missouri and other areas of that state were under a flash flood emergency as ten or more inches of rain poured down in persistent thunderstorms. Some areas had record flooding.

Again, you can't say that one weather event is global warming, but extreme rainfall and extreme floods have become more common in recent years and decades.

It seems like every month, or even every week, features a new, devastating local flood.

The storm - and this weekend's weather is absolutely bonkers in another respect, too. As April closes and May begins, a blizzard warning was in effect for northwestern Kansas. Yes. A blizzard warning in mid-spring.

Temperature contrasts were wild, too, on Saturday.

Depending on where you were in Texas Saturday, the high temperature in different parts of the state ranged from 35 to 110 degrees.

It seems like Mother Nature was participating in Saturday's climate marches, too.

The Trump EPA can scrub climate change off its web site, but it can't make "global weirding" go away.