General Discussion

malaise

(269,054 posts) Tue Feb 14, 2017, 02:33 PM Feb 2017

This is February? 80F in Denver, 99 in Oklahoma, 66 in Iceland, 116 in Australia

https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=3558
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The strong, recurrent Pacific jet stream that’s been delivering massive amounts of rain to California has also been pushing mild Pacific air downslope off the Rockies and eastward, keeping the southern two-thirds of the U.S. absurdly warm for early February. From New Mexico to Virginia southward to the Gulf Coast, trees and shrubs are budding out en masse up to three weeks ahead of schedule (see Figure 1). In Texas, Dallas-Fort Worth recorded its last freezing temperature on January 8. With no freezes expected into at least the last week of the month, there’s a chance that the Jan. 8 reading of 20°F will be DFW’s last freeze of the winter. That would eclipse the earliest final freeze of the season (Feb. 5, 2000), in records extending back to 1899. The February warmth comes after a three-month span that was milder in Texas than any Nov/Dec/Jan period since the 1930s Dust Bowl, according to state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon.

The warm, moist air prevailing along the South has been teaming up with occasional jet-stream intrusions to produce severe thunderstorms, including an unusually large number of tornadoes for the year thus far. This includes six confirmed tornadoes across southeast Louisiana on February 7, with an EF3 twister causing more than 30 injuries and damaging or destroying more than 600 homes in and near East New Orleans (see the detailed National Weather Service survey report on all six tornadoes). As of February 13, NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center had tallied 163 U.S. tornadoes for the year thus far, not quite a record but far above average. On Tuesday morning, NOAA/SPC placed parts of the western and central Gulf Coast under a slight risk of severe weather, with a small enhanced-risk area along the central Texas coast near a large thunderstorm complex that had already produced several tornado reports west of Houston.

Close to the century mark in Oklahoma
While there’s been quite a few ups and downs to the national temperature picture in recent days, with frequent frontal passages, the low temperatures haven’t been all that low and the highs have been unusually high, as noted by WU blogger Steve Gregory. For the month to date through February 12, NOAA had compiled a preliminary total of 1207 daily record highs and 10 daily record lows, for a staggering ratio of more than 100 to 1. It’s a picture in line with recent months: November 2016 had the largest ratio of record highs to lows of any month in modern records. It’s also consistent with the inexorable effect of human-produced greenhouse gases in boosting temperatures to make record warmth more widespread and extreme than record cold.