In much of America, especially in the normally cold north, the country went through the winter without one.
In Parker’s home towns of Burlington, Vermont, and Portland, Maine, thermometers never dipped below freezing. Minnesota has dubbed the past three months its “lost winter,” and it has been warmer than the infamous “year without winter” of 1877-1878. Michigan, which suffered mosquito bites in February, provided disaster loans to businesses hurt by the lack of snow. The Great Lakes set records for the least amount of winter ice, with Erie and Ontario “essentially ice-free.”
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Across a wide swath of the country, from Colorado to New Jersey and Texas to the Carolinas, spring foliage is three to three times lower than the average from 1991 to 2020, according to the National Seasonal Network, which tracks flowering times for plants and insects. Arrived 4 weeks early. Other seasonal natural signs.
“Long-term warming and El Niño conspired to keep the U.S. from experiencing winter this year,” said Jeff Masters, a meteorologist at Yale Climate Connections and co-founder of the private company Weather Underground. Ta. Masters said he was bitten by a mosquito this year in Michigan, which he said was crazy.
Cyclists cruise Lake Michigan near the Adler Planetarium on Monday, February 26, 2024 in Chicago. Federal meteorologists officially announced Friday, March 8, that the U.S. winter was the warmest on record.
On Friday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration acknowledged that the 2023-2024 winter was the warmest in the U.S.’s nearly 130-year record. The average temperature in the Lower 48 was 37.6 degrees (3.1 degrees Celsius), 5.4 degrees (3 degrees Celsius) above average.
This is just the latest example of national and global temperature record-breaking, which scientists say is largely due to human-induced climate change caused by the burning of coal, oil and gas.
And it was by far the warmest winter in America. Temperatures over the past three months have been 0.82 degrees Celsius (0.46 degrees Celsius) warmer than the previous record set eight years ago, said Karin Gleason, NOAA’s National Environmental Information Center’s chief monitor. ” he said.
Last month was only the third warmest February on record. But in Iowa, it was more than 2 degrees above its warmest February, and in parts of Minnesota it was 20 degrees warmer than the average for all of February, Gleason said.
On February 11, Great Lakes ice coverage hit a record low of 2.7% for February.
A strong high-pressure ridge is keeping the eastern United States warm and dry, but California continues to be hit by atmospheric rivers, she said.
European climate agency Copernicus announced earlier this week that this year has been the warmest winter globally, largely due to climate change and the natural El Niño phenomenon, which alters weather around the world and provides additional heat. This is said to be due to support from
Over the past 45 years, winters in the United States have warmed faster than in the rest of the world, and winters in the lower 48 states are now an average of 2.2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) warmer than in 1980, according to an Associated Press analysis of NOAA data. press.
That’s probably because the U.S. is mostly land and most of the Earth is ocean, so land warms faster than ocean, Gleason said.
Although the United States is still warming, the rate of extra warming has slowed slightly since 2000, NOAA data show. Judah Cohen, a winter weather expert at Atmospheric Quality Research, a for-profit company outside Boston, says climate change is making the Arctic three to four times warmer than the rest of the world and shifting weather patterns further south. This is attributed to “Arctic amplification” that appears to be occurring.
As the Arctic warms faster, the jet stream that powers global weather systems wobbles and weakens. It’s called a polar vortex, in which cold air trapped at the top of the planet escapes its normal range and drifts elsewhere, resulting in short-term plummets of frigid air that, in some places, alter the overall warming trend. That means a temporary cancellation, Cohen said.
Cohen said it happened briefly in January, when Wintour “just appeared in a cameo on The Lower 48.” But for the most part this year, as the polar vortex wandered, it hit Europe or Asia rather than the United States with plumes of icy air, so there was no offsetting effect on U.S. winter temperatures, he said. .
Boston hasn’t even smelled the single digits this year, with a winter low of 14 degrees, a record for the fewest frigid temperatures.
And what about snow? Forget about it, at least in the East and North.
In Fort Kent, far north in Maine, the annual dog sled race has been canceled due to lack of snow. As of last week, the town had received 46.8 inches (119 centimeters) of snow this year, just over half of normal years, according to the National Weather Service.
February had the second-lowest U.S. snowfall on record, December was the third-lowest, and only January was above normal, according to the Rutgers Snow Research Institute.
Teresa Crimmins, director of the National Phenology Network, said the warm winter has an impact.
“A warmer winter could result in an earlier, longer, and more abundant pest season because the cold weather did not allow populations to rebound,” Crimmins said in an email. “Similarly, allergy season can also be worse; it starts earlier and lasts longer, resulting in increased amounts of pollen in the air.”
As the weather warms up, trees and flowers may bloom earlier. Cherry blossoms in Washington are predicted to peak about two weeks earlier than in 2013. Early flowering can disrupt the complex timing of pollinators and birds.
“Many birds that migrate south for the winter use day length as a signal to come north in the spring,” Crimmins says. “In years like this one, plant and insect activity starts much earlier than usual, so birds can arrive too late and miss peak feeding times.”
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But Gleason said it’s good news for California because atmospheric rivers and snowstorms will likely rebuild the snowpack and fill in reservoirs that were dangerously low just a few years ago.
Cohen, a winter weather expert based outside Boston, joked that the U.S. no longer has four seasons: “We have two seasons. We have summer and we have November.”
