Winter Missing From Lower 48 States: The snow was missing for most of the United States over the past two months. It’s not just snow. It ‘s almost the season that he deserted.
“What is winter?” said Mike Halpert, deputy director of the Centre National Weather Service Climate Prediction a. To Lower 48 January was the third least snowy on record, according to the Global Snow Lab at Rutgers University. Reports on the amount of ground covered with snow in 1967.Last year, more than half of the country was covered with snow as the blizzard barreled Groundhog Day all over the country, killing 36 people and causing $ 1.8 billion in damages. This year, less than a fifth of the country outside of Alaska have snow on the ground.
Bismarck, North Dakota, was one-fifth of normal rainfall, Boston third. Buffalo three feet below normal for snowfall this year. Midland, Texas, has been more snow this season, Minneapolis and Chicago.
Forget the snow. For most of the country has even nip in the air. On Tuesday, the last day of January, all but a few states in the temperature of the 50s or higher. In the capital, where the temperature flirted with the 70s, some of the cherry trees are already beginning – weeks before.
To the northeast, this is one of the warmer winters and less snow on record, with most of the temperature in the region the past two months on average 5 degrees warmer than normal, according to the Regional Climate Center at Cornell University in the north-east .
“I am disgusted by the fact that golfers on my skis,” said the New Jersey State Climatologist David Robinson, Director of the Laboratory of global rainfall.
Matt Dulli, a professional golf at the Golf Club at Yankee Trace assistant in Dayton, Ohio, a suburb of Centerville, said that 115 rounds were played on Tuesday against a background of mild temperatures, which reached a maximum of 60 degrees.
“The first thing you hear from the lips of the people is:” Can you believe that we have played golf in January? I’m just ecstatic that they can get in this time of year, “said Dulli.
But there are a lot of snow, cold and dangerous – it’s just somewhere else in the world. Valdez, Alaska, had 328 cm of snow this season – 10 meters above the average – and the state of cold, from Fort Yukon hit a record 66 below zero this weekend.
About 80 people have died for a second vicious cold in Europe and much of Asia was covered with snow. January was the ninth of snow since 1966 for Europe and Asia, but for the entire Northern Hemisphere, it was the medium of snow this season.
Weather so cold that some parts of the Black Sea froze near the coast of Romania, and rare snowfall occurred on the islands of the Adriatic Sea in Croatia. Ukraine reported only 43 deaths, many of the homeless victims found dead in the street. More than 720 Ukrainian others were hospitalized with hypothermia and frostbite.
Reason for change in the Arctic winds, which redirects the snow and cold. Instead of dipping to a low of twenty jet stream, which usually bring cold and snow was trapped in the south to north. It’s called the Arctic Oscillation. Think of it as a cousin of the famous El Niño.
When the Arctic Oscillation is in positive phase, the winds back quickly deposited in the arctic north. But in recent days, the Arctic Oscillation has turned negative, although not in his usual way, Halpert said. Cold jet stream plunged in Europe and Asia, but still connected to North America.
This is because other atmospheric phenomena, called North Atlantic Oscillation plays an eccentric, remaining positive and keep the cold from the rest of North America. About 90 percent of the time, the North Atlantic and Arctic oscillations synchronous, Halpert said. But not this time, so most of the United States to avoid the worst of winter.
What is happening is not just a nuisance.
Trees and plants too early to start losing their ability to bloom, when the freezer is inevitable, said USGS ecologist Jake Weltzin, who runs a national network, which controls the timing of spring for plants and animals. He said that the peach trees are budding in Georgia and Oklahoma, Forsythia and daffodils were for two weeks, adding that “it happens everywhere.”
“If you think about plants and animals, especially thermometers, stress, early spring,” said Weltzin. “This is a problem.”
This may mean less fruit available this year, Weltzin said. In New York, could weaken the grapes for wine production, said Cornell University horticulturist David W. Wolfe.
But it is getting people out more often.
At the center of the belt snow, Holden Arboretum have seen participation jump by 32 per cent in December and 20 percent more visits in the month of January. For two months, about 4,200 people visited the site in Kirtland, Ohio, outside Cleveland, which shows the ‘, orchards, woods and trails.
Along the Lake Erie near Toledo, Ohio, ferry service that transports visitors to the islands was the start of winter routes on Wednesday for the first time in six years.
“We have just been wonderful to perform an unusual winter in the last six years around the world,” said Jeff Masters, Director of Meteorology Weather Underground in Ann Arbor, Mich. “I have to say that winter has not really hit yet. Certainly not, where I live. “
