roardog

The melt season is starting off kind of boring this year.

So what happened to weatherbo? He seems to have disappeared.

2 hours ago, michsnowfreak said:

 I was only 5 but I actually remember 1988 a little bit. That year clearly reigns supreme for extreme heat. I honestly do not know how they survived the 1930s to 50s with much less air conditioning and so much extreme heat

It’s kind of funny how we can remember certain events from a young age. I can remember the warm Christmas of 1982 even though I was only 4. Although I can’t remember specifics, I can remember it because it was the main topic of conversation that day. 

I can remember the weather channel having a segment called Drought Watch at like 8pm every night during the summer of ‘88.  lol 

If we are going to do heat then give me ‘95 over ‘88. Unless you’re looking for an extreme air temperature then you should want to take the humid summer of ‘95 to at least get a derecho or two.

5 hours ago, Harry Perry said:

Looks like another long drawn-out upper level low coming for the end of next week. Hopefully it stays East. 
 

Beginning to remind me of the spring/summer of 2009.

I’d bet about $1000 that the summer of ‘21 will not be as cool or cooler than the summer of ‘09.

2 hours ago, Hoosier said:

My brother in law's aunt got the vaccine and is now in the hospital with a 104 fever and low oxygen (84%).  I am trying to find out exactly when she got the vaccine to see how much of a temporal relation exists.  Has anyone heard of that combination of side effects (high fever AND low oxygen) from the vaccine?  It sounds more like actual COVID.  

This is probably a silly question but did she get tested for covid?

13 minutes ago, Frog Town said:

It's so outlandish that I think it's possible, LOL.  

This.....and Ending Later.  

Apparently winter chill in February is new thing. I’m not sure a warmer December is hot.

I don’t think there’s much doubt that the higher dewpoints are what’s causing the rise in summer averages. It’s causing both much warmer lows and less extreme highs. I know we’ve had people talk about crops playing a role and that might be true but I don’t think that’s the main reason. Overall moisture really is up globally. With the oceans being warmer I wonder if that doesn’t just naturally put more moisture into the atmosphere. This would also help keep the Arctic warmer during the winter which is obviously happening. You never know what the planet will throw at you next. Viruses, volcanic eruptions, etc. lol  That’s what makes it so interesting.

3 minutes ago, TimB84 said:

This is why it’s even more incredible that the averages went up so much. Despite incredibly cold periods in 2014 and 2015, those were entirely erased and then some by the period from 2016-2020, which I would guess was the warmest five year period in recorded history for many locations.

The 2000s weren’t exactly a deep freeze and neither were the 90s so despite having some extreme cold for two consecutive winters, that’s not going to overwhelm all the other mild years. 

10 hours ago, BuffaloWeather said:

I think winters got warmer too. Once the 90s go away and we get the 30 year temps from 2000-2030 the average yearly temps will skyrocket. 96 and 97 were very cold.

Also going off of memory(so I could be wrong)the winter of 96-97 was very harsh in the center part of the country but mild in the east. 97-98 was the very mild super El Niño.

Weren’t the 90s a warm decade around the Great Lakes? Going off of memory, I can recall a lot of mild winters and a few hot summers mixed in. Everyone remembers previous decades as cold and snowy even when they weren’t. lol 

24 minutes ago, Hoosier said:

Question for anyone who has gotten the vaccine.  It seems to be a universal recommendation to hydrate well after getting it, but has anyone received any advice as far as working out or not working out?  I'm not talking about taking a stroll around the block... I mean a lot of exertion.

I can't find any official recommendation on this.  It seems like it's a listen to your body thing.  Like if your arm is sore, it probably wouldn't be a good idea to do a heavy overhead press.  But anecdotally, has anyone noticed anything unusual while exercising after getting the vaccine (higher than expected heart rate, more fatigue, etc)

Both my wife and I had pain in our muscles around our mid section(stomach area). The pharmacist said that was common and is worse if you are exerting yourself. Before getting the shot, I had not heard about that side effect. This was after the first shot( I just had my second shot about 5 hours ago). I’m no expert but I would probably take it easy for a couple of days just because of the soreness of your muscles in general after getting the shot. 

21 hours ago, Stebo said:

Let me tell you how hard up I am to get vaccinated, right now have a standing appointment in Lima Ohio to get vaccinated on Saturday. If I find something closer I will take it but at this point I am willing to drive 150 miles one way to get the shot and be done with it.

So get this. I've been signed up with the county health department for quite awhile now. I've been eligible since January. I haven't heard anything from them. Today, a co-worker called the "immunization manager" phone number at the health department and was given an appointment tomorrow. She said they told her that there were several appointments available tomorrow. So I guess that's the key to getting an appointment in this county. 

6 hours ago, michsnowfreak said:

If anything advisories need more clear wording. A 3" wet snow with temps in low 30s gets an advisory with minimal impacts of a bit of slush on roads...a 5.5" powder snow with temps in the teens and strong winds also gets an advisory with drift rutted streets and crawling traffic. The impact to the public is tremendously different but the message is the same.

 

This is why I think it made more sense to keep the different advisories for various weather conditions. Some people just look or hear what the advisory is then assume it’s for the same type of weather that occurred the last time the advisory was issued. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people tell me it’s going to snow when there’s a winter weather advisory even if the advisory is for freezing drizzle. They just remember the 5 inches of snow that fell the last time a winter weather advisory was issued. I think less confusion would have been not consolidating most winter weather events into a winter weather advisory. 

Hopefully someday Beavis can move to Winnipeg. There might not be much snow there in the winter but what snow does fall probably isn’t going anywhere Dec-Feb. The ponds and lakes will easily be frozen during that time too. I suggest Winnipeg because I’m afraid he wouldn’t be happy in a place like the U.P. either since it can rain there once in awhile in winter and we all know how he feels about that.

2 hours ago, WestMichigan said:

I wonder when the last time this happened, if ever - Lansing with more snow than Muskegon.

I bet Lansing does get more snow on occasion during “mild” winters. What was funny about this winter was that it looks like the temp in Muskegon was only .5 above normal. You wouldn’t usually think a winter barely above average would have such little lake effect. Most of the above average temps came from the obnoxious overnight lows especially in January when most of the month had a diurnal range of about 1 degree. A lot of times a winter that comes out with a departure of .5 has a mixture of very cold and blowtorch periods. That situation would actually produce a lot more lake effect. It was kind of an unlucky situation how the block in January trapped all that garbage pacific air in Canada. If colder air would have been in Canada before the block formed, I think January would have been much better in the lake effect snowbelts.

So severe weather season is a dud because the first couple of weeks of March look less than ideal? This is like all of the talk in here about snow futility records last December. This is the first spring in a long time that has a decent looking -PDO. I think we should give it a chance.

1 hour ago, Hoosier said:

Obviously there's more to it than this, but with the western/southwestern drought already pretty far along and likely to continue/worsen and the bona fide Nina, it does set off some alarm bells in my head for a potentially active Spring severe season in the Midwest.  Certainly if it does turn out to be active, it won't be a thing where you look back and wonder 'gee, how did that happen'?

I wonder if that drought expands to make it a hot and dry summer in parts of the Midwest. It seems like it’s been awhile but we haven’t had a decent La Niña and -PDO in awhile either. We’ve obviously had warm summers recently but not the 100 degree drought stuff.

1 hour ago, A-L-E-K said:

absolute clown run

Yeah. It even has the big flood for good measure.

1 hour ago, michsnowfreak said:

Another interesting thing i notice about anomalies in ensembles and weeklies is that 850mb temps are colder relative to avg than 2m temps. Maybe a sign that lower diurnal ranges (& hopefully unsettled weather) will continue as it turns colder?

What I’ve noticed is that 2M temps on the models in the long range in the cold season are generally way too warm during cold patterns for whatever reason. They seem to do better with 850 temps. 

I just realized that in the post I made yesterday that my phone decided to add an apostrophe in the word Decembers in a couple of spots in shouldn’t have. I can’t believe I didn’t catch it yesterday. lol

The problem with using lake ice as a gauge for winter temperatures is that a mild December will make for late ice thickness no matter what the rest of the winter brings. You could have a mild December and frigid January and February and the thick ice will still be late coming on. There’s been a lot of mild December’s in the past 10 years. I can think of 2011,2012,2014,2015 along with the last 3 December’s.
 

The other point is that if you take an inland lake like Houghton Lake and you have a cold December then by January 1st, the ice will be plenty thick enough for winter activities. If that cold December is followed by a “mild” January and February, the ice will still remain thick enough for outdoor activities because unless it’s an extreme situation, a “mild” January at Houghton Lake isn’t going to melt ice that is already thick. I’ll bet the ice there was very thick after the cold December and early January of 2017-2018. I’ll also bet that when the very mild 2nd half of January and mild February came, that the ice was still thick enough to go on because of the early season cold. So, that winter would be remembered as a good winter for ice on the lake even though half of the winter was mild.

One could argue that December’s have been milder due to less early season cold available with less sea ice in the Arctic but I have a hard time with that because when the pattern supports cold(2017 for example) it can be very cold as we saw that year. In the end, I think the mild December’s have been more of a product of the shift to warmer waters in the North Pacific that occurred around 2012. I think that’s also a reason for the quieter severe weather seasons overall since then as well but that’s a discussion for another time.

If you watch the extended 2M temperature anomalies on a regular basis, you will see they have a huge warm bias on all of the models. Maybe in a mild pattern they might be ok but in a cold pattern, they’re always terrible. The models seem to do much better with the 850mb temp anomalies. I love it when it forecasts  a cold source region, well below normal 850 temp anomalies and above normal 2M temps. lol

I would take a rainy, stormy look to the models over the pattern we've had this past weekend and will have thru mid week. If it's a stormy pattern in December, there's a good chance to run into an accumulating snow, especially up here.