STOCK MARKET WATCH -- Wednesday, 5 March 2014

[Demeter]

16. How cold is it? The OFFICIAL REPORT!

New index confirms it: This winter is miserable

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_SCI_WINTER_MISERY_INDEX?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

DETROIT (AP) -- A new winter misery index confirms what many Americans in the Midwest and East know in their all-too-chilled bones: This has been one of the harshest winters of our lifetimes. And nowhere has been hit harder, relatively, than Detroit.

Sure Chicago, Indianapolis and Philadelphia and Moline, Ill., are in the midst of their third most extreme winters in more than 60 years. But Detroit, a city that is trying to crawl out of bankruptcy, is also slogging through what so far is the most extreme winter it has had since Harry Truman was president, at least, according to a winter extremity index created by a National Weather Service meteorologist Barbara Mayes Boustead. The index is based on cold temperatures and snowfall. And so far Detroit has had more than 6 1/2 feet of snow and 100 days when the thermometer plunged below the freezing mark. Of two dozen cities studied, Detroit alone is in the middle of its harshest winter since 1950...Boustead, a former Detroit-area resident who now works in Omaha, Neb., created the index a couple years ago to judge the severity of winters. Omaha, by the way, is the only city in two dozen metro areas that Boustead examined that is not having an "extreme" or "severe" winter. It's merely average.

Boustead uses daily high and low temperatures and daily and accumulated snowfall to come up with a winter index that's equivalent to the way meteorologists categorize hurricanes and tornadoes. Officially, it is called the Accumulated Winter Season Severity Index...New York, Milwaukee and Duluth are in the midst of their fourth harshest winters. Also having top-10 harshest winters are Minneapolis-St. Paul in Minnesota; Louisville, Ky.; Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., and Cheyenne, Wyo. The idea is to put winter in context. This winter seems unusually harsh because it has been a while since the late 1970s and early 1980s when severe winters were far more frequent. People have short memories. Plus, for almost three-quarters of the places studied the winter of 2011-2012 was the mildest on record, Boustead said.

But why Detroit?

Just bad geography and luck. Much of the cold and snow this winter is because of a change in the jet stream that has funneled frigid air south from the Arctic "right down the alley" through Detroit, Hilberg said. The winter index keeps going, until the cold, snowy weather stops. And that's at least a couple weeks away, according to forecasts...

OR A COUPLE OF MONTHS, BUT SINCE NOBODY CARES ABOUT DETROIT....WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?