Snow now possible in all 50 states
[Via CEJournal]
Negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation is back — with a vengeance
Incredibly enough, snow is forecast for Thursday night and Friday during the day, stretching all the way from Dallas across the Deep South to Tallahassee in the Florida Panhandle.
If this storm develops as forecast, all 50 states could have some snow cover as of Friday, according to Patrick Marsh of the National Severe Storms Laboratory, quoted in USA Today.
Just as strange, temperatures in parts of Greenland are reaching 40 degrees — and in one spot even 50. There’s also a 30 percent chance of rain — not snow — forecast for the southeastern part of the island. (To check the weather in various locations in Greenland, see this Weather Underground page.)
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Like in December and January, the Arctic Oscillation is reaching record lows. In fact, the standard figure that NOAA puts out does not display just how low this AO is:
I had to dig around to find a better chart. Here it is with the predictions for the next week or so:
The 2 week prediction indicates that the current negative cycle could last until the end of February with longer times at negative values than in December. Wow! Greenland could be toasty.
Here is how this negative cycle compares with others, back to 1950:
The period we are going through may be one of the longest deepest periods seen since 1950. (I wonder if there were big East Coast snow storms in 1969?)
A quick Google search finds that the Lindsay Storm shut down New York for 3 days in February 1969. Called the Lindsay storm because the Mayor , John Lindsay, did such a poor job overseeing snow removal.
February 12, 2010 at 4:44 pm
I remember the so-called “Lindsay Storm” very well because it occurred right around a major event in my life at the age of 13. It was a pretty big dump (although not that impressive compared to some of the storms we get here in the Boulder, CO area where I live now). The city was indeed utterly paralyzed for days. And to my delight, school was cancelled for at least a day.
I also remember that storm because after it faded into memory, the frequency of events like that began to decline. My childhood was filled with blizzards and drifts that piled up against the cars parked along the street where I lived in Brooklyn. But by the time I got to high school in 1973, my recollection is that it just didn’t snow like that anymore. Of course this is all anecdotal, but the AO index record maybe lends it a little credence.
What I’d really like to see is a record of El Nino juxtaposed against the AO index, and some data on weather conditions in the U.S. during years when a very negative index occurred simultaneously with a strong El Nino, which is what we’ve got working right now.
February 12, 2010 at 5:53 pm
I was going to school in California in the mid 70s and I remember how every year, when we would try and schedule a sping brak trip to the rockies to ski, there never seemed to be any snow! And I grew up in Houston, where I think we got a smattering of snow ONCE.
But then I spent a few years doing my postdoc in Boulder and I decided actually having to deal with snow (i.e. shoveling it) was not great. But I finally got to ski, learning on the ice at Eldora (which made Cascade concrete pretty easy;-).
I wonder just what the Olympics will be like? We have had so little snow along the Cascades with some of the warmest winters ever.
December 31, 2010 at 12:10 am
[...] commented on the Arctic Oscillation the CEJournal mentioned last year, when the East got hit with a lot of cold weather. The AO was even lower this [...]
December 28, 2012 at 11:42 am
[...] Both are involved in the Arctic oscillation and thus determine when and where cold Arctic weather falls lower into the US or Europe. Some of the deepest negative phases ever seen have happened in the last few years. [...]