Octopus Overlords

Kraken wrote: ↑Sun Feb 11, 2024 10:23 pm I understand that we've set a record for the number of days without a snowstorm of >4". It's been 715 days and counting. But it looks like that stretch of good luck will end on Tuesday. What started as a chance for 1-3" went to 4-8" yesterday and is now at 7-13" with 40mph wind gusts. Well, that's OK. I need to use my snowblower at least once so I can put it away with an empty gas tank.

em2nought wrote: ↑Mon Feb 12, 2024 2:01 am Weather was perfect for an evening dip on Saturday after day three of suspension repairs.

jztemple2 wrote: ↑Mon Feb 12, 2024 2:24 am

Kraken wrote: ↑Sun Feb 11, 2024 10:23 pm I understand that we've set a record for the number of days without a snowstorm of >4". It's been 715 days and counting. But it looks like that stretch of good luck will end on Tuesday. What started as a chance for 1-3" went to 4-8" yesterday and is now at 7-13" with 40mph wind gusts. Well, that's OK. I need to use my snowblower at least once so I can put it away with an empty gas tank.

Was going to post this earlier but forgot, thankfully your post reminded me

You can see 2023 in the orange line below, the other gray lines being previous years. That solid black line is where we are so far in 2024—way, way above even 2023. While we’re nowhere near the Atlantic hurricane season yet—that runs from June 1 through the autumn—keep in mind that cyclones feed on warm ocean water, which could well stay anomalously hot in the coming months. Regardless, these surface temperature anomalies could be triggering major ecological problems already...

...the Atlantic Ocean has been boiling, as you can see in this map of January’s temperature anomalies relative to the mean between 1910 and 2009. “The Atlantic has been record-breakingly warm since early March of 2023,” says McNoldy. “It’s not even close. That’s kind of the head-scratcher: Will it ever be back to just normal record-breaking instead of record-crushing? It’s just kind of crazy.”

If you know that a warm ocean fuels Atlantic hurricanes, you might be wondering whether we’re now in danger of a cyclone forming in February. But worry not. “There are quite a few ingredients that hurricanes need, and warm ocean temperatures is just one of them,” says McNoldy. For one, the low wind shear that hurricanes require to form isn’t there yet. But, McNoldy adds, when those conditions do appear, they’ll take advantage of that warm ocean. “We actually did see that a year ago with two named storms, Brett and Cindy, both in June in the middle of the tropical East Atlantic, which is incredibly odd,” he says. “We were also looking at extremely warm ocean temperatures out there, where normally they would have been a little too cool.”

Last week, the US Climate Prediction Center put the odds of La Niña developing between June and August at 55 percent. Whereas El Niño tends to create wind shear in the Atlantic, which beats down hurricanes, La Niña reduces wind shear. “All other things being equal, La Niña acts to enhance Atlantic hurricane activity,”

The only ocean basin on Earth that does not regularly see tropical cyclones develop is the South Atlantic, but it had a rare tropical storm form on Sunday night. Tropical Depression 01Q was designated by the Brazilian Navy Hydrographic Center at 7 a.m. EST Sunday and by 7 p.m., it had been upgraded to Tropical Storm Akará, with top sustained winds estimated at 40 mph and a central pressure of 1000 millibars. NOAA’s Office of Satellite and Product Operations was also tracking Akará and assigning Dvorak intensity ratings.

Although one or two subtropical storms typically form each year in the South Atlantic, Akará is the region’s first officially recognized tropical storm that has been named since Iba in 2019 and only the third one there since Anita in 2010.

jztemple2 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 20, 2024 9:12 pm A rare bird in the South Atlantic: Tropical Storm Akará

It’s not that the United States has been entirely bereft of snow during what’s likely to end up as the nation’s warmest winter on record. But for most of the traditionally snowy swaths from the northern Great Plains to the Northeast, there’s been a startling lack of winter storms in 2023-24. The result: widespread bare ground in midwinter and what could end up being some all-time lows for seasonal snowfall.

On top of that, there have been a couple of bizarre cases of extremely dry or wet snows, both of which threw monkey wrenches into the forecast and left many snow lovers crestfallen.

At weather.com, Jonathan Erdman pulled together some of the noteworthy seasonal stats for a February 23 writeup. Erdman noted that the average snow extent across the contiguous U.S. on that date was a paltry 17%. That’s well short of the average to date of 37%, and the lowest for any February 23 in satellite-derived data going back to 2004

LordMortis wrote: ↑Tue Feb 27, 2024 12:09 pm We might break 70 today... on February 27th... The literal coldest time of the year before weather gets unpredictable in March. If this continues to the weekend I suspect we are on the two week countdown until college campus COVID spread begins getting documented, expanding from there. That's about two weeks earlier than I would have expected, with St Pat's weekend being the marker for the previous four years.

Jeff V wrote: ↑Wed Feb 28, 2024 6:15 pm Yesterday high was 76, wore shorts, This morning windchill was 10. In the meantime, it got stormy and tornadoey around here, I had to tell the girl driving my kids around to shelter until the tornado warning expired, then had her stay here until the storms moved east.

Unagi wrote: ↑Fri Mar 01, 2024 1:12 pm We are expected to break record highs in Chicago, tomorrow. Sunday is supposed to be warmer.

Pyperkub wrote: ↑Thu Feb 29, 2024 8:24 pm I was thinking about trying to go to Tahoe for some skiing this weekend.

Up to 12 feet of snow and blizzard conditions expected.

Ok, staying home!

Max Peck wrote: ↑Fri Mar 01, 2024 2:47 pm Yeah, the kicker with this flash freeze was that it was preceded by a melt and rain, so there was a lot of water on the ground. I guess we're lucky that the transition from warm/wet to severe cold was so sharp that there was no period of freezing rain to complicate things.

Pyperkub wrote: ↑Thu Feb 29, 2024 8:24 pm I was thinking about trying to go to Tahoe for some skiing this weekend.

Up to 12 feet of snow and blizzard conditions expected.

Ok, staying home!