Parts of America’s normally frozen north appear to be on the edge of some sort of time warp wherein the climate months – as opposed to the calendar months – jump from March right into May.
Temperatures in Alaska’s largest city on Wednesday hit a high of 50 degrees with a low of 34 and a daily average of 42.
And this isn’t due to some weird, one-day anomaly. Following a late-February cold snap, the Anchorage metropolitan area – home to more than half of the state’s population – started warming up and since the start of March the weather has generally been tracking the norms for April.
It’s as if the whole month had been grabbed and shifted to the right on the Weather Service graph of normal temperatures.
National Weather Service normals are represented by the green band in the middle of the graph
Polar warmth
Blame the polar vortex and the Arctic oscillation yet again. Instead of spinning northern climates smoothly around the North Pole all winter, the PV and AO have been causing havoc.
That’s been bad for the U.S. Midwest and parts of Europe, if you prefer warm weather to cold, and good for Alaska, if you prefer warm weather to cold. If you prefer cold weather to warm, on the other hand, it’s all the opposite.
What’s going on here is not global warming, though that might play some small part, but pressure ridging in the atmosphere. Think of the air above as looking like the sea ice where pressure ridges regularly pop up when moving sheets of ice collide.
Much the same happens in the atmosphere when moving masses of air interact. The ridges then serve to influence winds that naturally want to move north to south and west to east, at least in the northern hemisphere.
Ridges serve to stabilize things at least temporarily. When high pressure ridges form over western North America, more warm, tropical air gets forced north across the Pacific Ocean and Alaska warms up.
The blocking high forced what one might think of as the Pacific Northwest weather of March to slide north, causing the big warm up that brought rain to the lower Yukon River during the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog race earlier in the month and helped contribute to the open water of the Bering Sea off Nome.
Cohen believes the latter could now further effect air movements.
“I think this blocking high could be hard to dissipate,” he writes. “Sea ice is extremely low or even completely absent from the Bering Sea. I believe that heating from the open waters could help to anchor the ridge that has developed in the atmosphere above.”
That might make it possible the April-like temperatures of March in parts of Alaska could give way to May-like temperatures in April.
The U.S. Climate Prediction Center appears in general agreement with this view. The 8- to 14-day outlook it issued today predicts a 50 percent or greater probability for Alaska to be warmer than normal.
How much warmer it doesn’t say, but this is the time of year when Alaska is already making a rapid transition from the long, dark winter to the glorious days of midnight sun.
The March average, however, jumps almost 8 degrees above the February average, and the April average jumps more than 10 degrees above March with May topping April by another 11 degrees to push into the mid-50s before leveling off into the 60-degree months of July, July an August.
Comfortable, not cooked
The state is warm in summer, but never quite the “Cancun” weather heralded on the internet when Klawock hit 70 degrees on Tuesday.
The National Weather Service record high for Anchorage is 85 degrees set in June of 1969. Cancun’s average high rises to 84 degrees in March and then just keeps on going up to 91 degrees in August.
Eight of the top-10 hottest days in Anchorage are colder than the average for Cancun in March, and those Anchorage temperatures cover a span of 38 years from the 82 degrees in August 1977 to the 83 degrees in June of 2015.
At the moment, the ripple in the atmosphere that caused the ridging that shifted temperatures appears the driving cause for the shift.
As Gizmodo noted, “the heat didn’t stop at the (U.S.-Canada) border, either. Record-setting warmth spread over western Canada and the Pacific Northwest as monthly records fell across British Columbia, Alberta, the Northwest Territories, and the Yukon. And not to be outdone by the ’70s in Alaska, temperatures topped 81 degrees Fahrenheit in Quillayute on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula and 79 degrees Fahrenheit in Seattle. Both are all-time March records.”
Like climate change and how exactly it will manifest itself (maybe this is it?), the link between global warming and polar ice is now a very hot topic.
“While the underlying mechanisms of these dramatic changes are not yet fully understood….it is now believed that initial sea ice reduction started before the abrupt warming over Greenland, and that sea ice expansion started before the end of the warm periods in the same area.”
With Alaska so warm, Alaskans can now ponder whether global warming is melting the sea ice or the melting sea-ice is warming the globe, or maybe a little of both?
Categories: News
Geez, Craig! You blow me away! You must read and study night and day And write as fast as you think, to produce all these fairly in depth articles on such a wide range of subjects. Do you have a stable of captive monkey researchers in your thrall?
Anyway I really look forward to your essays.
Still hoping for a few xtra early morning x country ski’s before things fall apart
You know the HAARP has been “turned on” the last few days…just saying:)
http://mustreadalaska.com/mrak-almanac-pilot-alert-haarp-tests-ahead/
Blessed with beautiful weather: and still people complain and cry “the end is nigh”!
Dems say we have 12yrs left to live “what difference does it make”?
Yup, we’re the ape with anxiety. It’s so hard to just enjoy the moment.
May I repost? I also want to donate $25
And then there is the case of the growing glacier that somehow proves anthropogenic global warming when it recedes, but it really proves it when it advances…
“Greenland’s fastest-flowing and fastest-thinning glacier recently threw a real brain bender at scientists, who realized that instead of shrinking, the glacier is actually growing thicker, they reported in a new study.”
“The finding took the scientists completely by surprise. “At first, we didn’t believe it,” study lead researcher Ala Khazendar, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. “We had pretty much assumed that Jakobshavn would just keep going on as it had over the last 20 years.” But the cold water isn’t a one-off. Data from OMG shows that the water has been cold now for three years in a row.” https://www.livescience.com/65080-greenland-glacier-growing.html
It’s almost like we live in a world where things are connected, put some ice in the drink…the drink gets cold. Warm it up in this room and open a window in another, guess what happens. There are cycles all over the world that we are only beginning to understand, some we don’t know about, and other we pay no heed to.
This Spring has been awesome, my road was sloppy for about a week, but with this warm dry weather it is getting nice. Soon all the snow will be gone and it will be time to plant the garden!
Steve-O, you probably intended this quote from your link too: “But this crisp change won’t last forever. Once the NAO climate pattern flips back, the Jakobshavn will likely start melting faster and thinning again, the researchers said.” And these guys are talking about a 20 year flip.
Bill,
I alluded to that when I said this magic glacier “proves anthropogenic global warming when it recedes, but it really proves it when it advances…”
With all the anthropogenic global warming climate Nostradamuses out there, you would think that a couple of them would get it right once in a while. These scientists freely admit that they didn’t believe a glacier that has been receding could stop receding and start to advance. Not only did it do so, but it did it in one year and continued to do so for three years running now.
Here’s some news for you Bill, glaciers recede and advance. They’ve done so from the time the first one formed and will continue to do so.
When you put ice in the drink it gets cold, when you take the ice out of the drink it warms up.
I agree Steve-O that some glaciers do both but you are talking a special glacier whose face is in salt water that could be influenced by water currents. And no doubt the Mendenhall glacier was at one time such a glacier but it no longer is and my guess is it’s no longer advancing and hasn’t for several hundred years.
Now, these guys didn’t “get it right” they just observed something happening they were surprised at. And science runs into this regularly-things such as this is what advances science and it’s theories all the time. It marches on, building knowledge. Not even rocket science.
Yep, and these scientists said when the water gets warm the ice will melt…nah really?!? Not exactly rocket science is right. Making a prediction that ice melts in warm water, if that is what passes for climate science then it makes sense why these climate scientists had no idea that there was an ocean current that changes from warm to cold roughly every 20 years in the North Atlantic and that that current could maybe possible have an effect on the glacier they are studying.
There are plenty of glaciers that enter the salt water, while most are currently retreating some are advancing. I tend to think all glaciers are special, they are magnificent objects. The fact of the matter is that overall glaciers as a whole have been receding for thousands and thousands of years, since the last ice age. Bonus points if you remember what that time frame was know as.
The interesting thing is Jakobshavn started receding after a lengthy stable period and pretty close to 20 years before it recently started advancing. I wonder if anyone in this study knew this information, it doesn’t appear so.
“Jakobshavn Isbrae, retreated 30 km (19 mi) from 1850–1964, followed by a stationary front for 35 years…the glacier seemed to be in balance from 1955-1985. After 1997 the glacier began to accelerate and thin rapidly…It also thinned at a rate of up to 15 metres (49 ft) per year and retreated 5 km (3.1 mi) in six years.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakobshavn_Glacier
Here is one of the more ignorant quotes about glaciers I’ve heard:
“The thinking was once glaciers start retreating, nothing’s stopping them,” explains Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and OMG’s lead scientist. “We’ve found that that’s not true.” https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/03/one-part-of-greenland-ice-growing/
Apparently the rocket scientists at NASA’s JPL on the OMG failed to speak with a glaciologist and have never studied glaciers. Just absurd.
The interesting thing is Jakobshavn started receding after a lengthy stable period and pretty close to 20 years before it recently started advancing. I wonder if anyone in this study knew this information, it doesn’t appear so.
“Jakobshavn Isbrae, retreated 30 km (19 mi) from 1850–1964, followed by a stationary front for 35 years…the glacier seemed to be in balance from 1955-1985. After 1997 the glacier began to accelerate and thin rapidly…It also thinned at a rate of up to 15 metres (49 ft) per year and retreated 5 km (3.1 mi) in six years.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakobshavn_Glacier
Here is one of the more ignorant quotes about glaciers I’ve heard:
“The thinking was once glaciers start retreating, nothing’s stopping them,” explains Josh Willis, an oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and OMG’s lead scientist. “We’ve found that that’s not true.” https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/03/one-part-of-greenland-ice-growing/
Apparently the rocket scientists at NASA’s JPL on the OMG failed to speak with a glaciologist and have never studied glaciers. Just absurd.
Steve O,
I agree with your comment:
“There are cycles all over the world that we are only beginning to understand, some we don’t know about, and other we pay no heed to.”
I guess the deciding factor is the “take away” from these “cycles” we are witnessing?
More Polar Bears are being discovered walking into neighborhoods and many feel this is due to decreases in Arctic Ice.
“Polar bears prowling around a children’s playground. Polar bears lumbering along the corridors of apartment blocks and offices. Polar bears descending on a sleepy Russian town in their dozens.
To state the obvious: polar bears should not be wandering into human habitation, and certainly not in these numbers. That they are doing so in Belushya Guba shows how they are being driven off their normal migration routes and hunting trails by a changing climate. This has long been predicted – with the Arctic heating twice as fast as the rest of the planet, winter temperatures are rising and the sea ice – which is the primary habitat of polar bears – is shrinking.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/shortcuts/2019/feb/11/polar-bears-russian-apartment-block-climate-crisis
But, I thought “Global Warming” and the resulting “lack” of sea ice was supposed to be killing off the polar bear, not increasing their numbers? I get confused when they say “Global Cooling is actually Global Warming”. You can see how that can get confusing right?
Steve,
Are you talking about that trash heap that attracted scavengers? Have you seen the pictures or videos? https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2019/02/11/polar-bears-invade-russian-town-org-caf.cnn
Maybe if the townsfolk there in Russia don’t want to be over run with polar bears they shouldn’t over run themselves with trash.
For as long as we have records showing how many pilar bears there are today there are more than ever before.