"Eye-Popping" Record Temperatures Soar: This Is What Climate Change Looks Like In The United States [View all]

[Better Believe It]

Unprecedented, "Eye-Popping" Temperatures Soar, Highs Continue
Climate scientist: "This is to me the most unusual weather event I've witnessed in my lifetime."
by Common Dreams staff
March 20, 2012

People from the Midwest and Northeast have been stepping out to record-setting temperatures this month. Meteorologists are calling the temperatures unprecedented.

Deke Arndt, who leads the climate monitoring branch of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., said, “This will be a March event that we’ll look back on as one of the big March events of modern history.” And Jonathan Martin, chairman of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at UW-Madison, adds, "This is to me the most unusual weather event I've witnessed in my lifetime."

Weather maps show many areas with temperatures at 30 degrees above normal days in a row.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/03/20-5


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90 Degrees in Winter: This Is What Climate Change Looks Like
by Bill McKibben
March 20, 2012

The National Weather Service is kind of the anti–Mike Daisey, a just-the-facts operation that grinds on hour after hour, day after day. It’s collected billions of records (I’ve seen the vast vaults where early handwritten weather reports from observers across the country are stored in endless rows of ledgers and files) on countless rainstorms, blizzards and pleasant summer days. So the odds that you could shock the NWS are pretty slim.

Beginning in mid-March, however, its various offices began issuing bulletins that sounded slightly shaken. “There’s extremes in weather, but seeing something like this is impressive and unprecedented,” Chicago NWS meteorologist Richard Castro told the Daily Herald. “It’s extraordinarily rare for climate locations with 100+ year long periods of records to break records day after day after day,” the office added in an official statement.

It wasn’t just Chicago, of course. A huge swath of the nation simmered under bizarre heat. International Falls, Minnesota, the “icebox of the nation,” broke its old temperature records—by twenty-two degrees, which according to weather historians may be the largest margin ever for any station with a century’s worth of records. Winner, South Dakota, reached 94 degrees on the second-to-last day of winter. That’s in the Dakotas, two days before the close of winter. Jeff Masters, founder of WeatherUnderground, the web’s go-to site for meteorological information, watched an eerie early morning outside his Michigan home and wrote, “This is not the atmosphere I grew up with,” a fact confirmed later that day when the state recorded the earliest F-3 strength tornado in its history. Other weathermen were more… weathermanish. Veteran Minneapolis broadcaster Paul Douglas, after noting that Sunday’s low temperature in Rochester broke the previous record high, blogged “this is OFF THE SCALE WEIRD even for Minnesota.”

It’s hard to overstate how impossible this weather is—when you have nearly a century and a half of records, they should be hard to break, much less smash. But this is like Barry Bonds on steroids if his steroids were on steroids, an early season outbreak of heat completely without precedent in its scale and spread. I live in Vermont, where we should be starting to slowly thaw out—but as the heat moved steadily east, ski areas shut down and golf courses opened.

Read the full article at:

http://www.thenation.com/article/166917/90-degrees-winter-what-climate-change-looks


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Record-breaking dead heat in Illinois for both polls and temperature
Bill McKibben for Grist, part of the Guardian Environment Network
March 20, 2012

Today may mark the seventh straight day of 80 degree temperatures at O'Hare, something that's never happened before in March. Or in April, for that matter. "It is extraordinarily rare for climate locations with 100+ year-long periods of records to break records day after day after day," the local office of the National Weather Service said in a statement on Sunday morning, following a Saint Patrick's Day that shattered 141 years of records.

And the Windy City is not alone. In International Falls, which threatened suit when a Colorado city tried to steal its "Nation's Icebox" moniker, the mercury went to 77 degrees on Saturday — which was 42 degrees above average, and 22 degrees above the old record. It's possible, according to weather historian Christopher Burt, that no station with a century of weather data has ever broken a mark by that much.

Here's how Jeff Masters, founder of the website WeatherUnderground and probably the internet's most widely read meteorologist, put it from his Michigan base: "As I stepped out of my front door into the pre-dawn darkness I braced myself for the cold shock of a mid-March morning. It didn't come. A warm, murky atmosphere, with temperatures in the upper fifties — 30 degrees above normal – greeted me instead. Continuous flashes of heat lightning lit up the horizon, as the atmosphere crackled with the energy of distant thunderstorms. I looked up at the hazy stars above me, flashing in and out of sight as lightning lit up the sky, and thought, this is not the atmosphere I grew up with."

For 25 years climatologists have been telling us to expect exactly this kind of weather — such extremes become ever more likely as we warm the planet. It's not just heat; it's also drought and flood. Last year the US suffered through more multi-billion-dollar weather disasters than any other year in history. And it's not just the US — in 2010, the world's largest insurance company said there was no way to explain the rapid planetary spike in extreme weather except for global warming.

Read the full article at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/mar/20/us-heatwave-climate-change-republicans?intcmp=122


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Record streak of records ends, but more on the way
by SAMARA KALK DERBY | Wisconsin State Journal & BILL NOVAK | The Capital Times
March 20, 2012

The record-tying streak of record high temperatures ended on Monday in Madison, but record warmth is forecast to return for three more days this week.

"This is to me the most unusual weather event I've witnessed in my lifetime," Jonathan Martin, chairman of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at UW-Madison, said in an interview.

Before this month, Madison's weather history had recorded only five days in March where the temperature climbed past 80 degrees. In the last week alone, there have been three, he said.

"This is simply unprecedented," Martin said. "I think that the longevity of this particular warm streak, the time of year it comes at, and the record high temperatures that we've set, are simply remarkable."

http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/record-streak-of-records-ends-but-more-on-the-way/article_c51c94c4-7224-11e1-a330-001871e3ce6c.html


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WGN-TV Chicago meteorologist Tom Skilling:

"An unheard of seventh consecutive record-level temperature is forecast Tuesday, and Wednesday is likely to bring an eighth," Skilling says. "On the verge of replacement Tuesday is March 20's 91-year-old record high of 76 degrees set in 1921. The day's predicted late June-level high of 83 degrees would be an eye-popping 35 degrees above normal."

http://www.wgntv.com/news/local/breaking/chi-skilling-eyepopping-first-day-of-spring-20120320,0,4618341.story?track=rss

WZZM Michigan: Warmest March day ever forecast Tuesday

For the past week, West Michigan's basked in record warmth. Temperatures have skyrocketed 35 degrees above average into the 70s and even low 80s, feeling more like June than mid March.

Tuesday is the first day of spring, but it will feel more like summer with a temperature reading we've never seen in March. The 13 On Target Weather team is forecasting a high of 86 degrees today in Grand Rapids. That would be not only a record high for the date, but the warmest temperature ever in the month of March.

http://www.wzzm13.com/news/article/205373/2/Warmest-March-day-ever-forecast-Tuesday