TheClimateChanger

I don't know how you had that date memorized. Anyways, up to 60F now (-5F to +55F).

Hard to believe it was -5F yesterday morning! Must be one of the bigger day-to-day swings on record.

Up to 50F now. First over 40F reading since January 14th (48F), and first 50F since the 13th.

One of the anti-Weathergamis is not like the others! You can see how the relative lack of variability in the summer versus the winter leads to many more unique combinations occurring in the wintertime than the summer. Spring and fall, of course, are more changeable in general, so they have the lowest number of common high/low pairings. Interesting data!

If you follow me enough, you know I like to include USCRN data as well. We built a parallel climate network with pristinely-sited, rural weather stations, including features such as multiple redundant temperature sensors, but it's rarely discussed. For context, this was largely constructed based on criticisms such as the ones presented frequently in this forum that the "official" numbers were inflated due to urban heating and/or adjustments. Of course, the reality is USCRN has consistently exhibited MORE warming than nClimDiv in the period of overlap. Over the last several months, the divergence has grown significantly. Heck, if you follow me closely enough, you probably know I even have a theory as to why that is... Anyways, USCRN agrees with the satellite data, finding this to be the WARMEST winter to date on record for the CONUS. The two month anomaly is up to +2.705F, compared to 2023-2024's anomaly of +2.630F in the USCRN dataset.

Some more on the winter anomalies:

Weathergami for NYC on Saturday. First 27/6 combo on record.

BVI has been below .75 mile visibility since 6:15, down to .25 mile at 7:55 am. https://forecast.weather.gov/data/obhistory/KBVI.html

At the worst, I couldn’t even see my neighbor’s outdoor lighting. Visibility must have been 50-100 yards.

It’s absolutely insane here right now. Near zero visibility.

Weatherbug was showing a couple strikes near New Castle earlier.

Lightning has been detected in the snow squall.

Lol, not the same person at all.

Thanks for the update, Don. Wild start to February. Almost exactly "normal" through the first 4 days, but actually 20F warmer than normal in the northern Rockies and 20F colder than normal in parts of the Eastern U.S. Very spring-like 73F in Rapid City, SD yesterday (2F shy of February monthly record high), while the deep freeze continues in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes.

Possibly, but I'm also factoring in the fact that we are aging and our remaining lifetime is less. So most of don't have another 50 years or more.

Wow, that's quite impressive IMO, considering 1991-2020 was, by far, the warmest climatological normal period in recorded history. And the last 20 years are outpacing them by 0.6-1F across the board. One would think the warmer norms would tilt the scale towards more cooler than normal years, but, in fact, one finds the opposite phenomenon. Very intriguing.

Surprised to see some areas of freezing drizzle on my way into work today.

You're welcome, Bob. I didn't bring it up. Just think we should be accurate if we're going to claim the forecasts were wrong for that period. We have a lot of weather forecasters and meteorologists on here, and it's bad enough to be slammed for a missed forecast, let alone forecasts that were correct.

Yeah, now that I think about it... I think it's there CDAS or whatever that shows the past anomalies that always seems to show an anomalously cooler area over Lake Superior. But that might be a problem with the lake temperature dataset.

Shouldn't be that dramatic of a discrepancy though... the 1991-2020 normals are generally ~0.5F, maybe 1F warmer, than the 1981-2010 normals for most places. After all, they share 20 years.

It looks like they fixed whatever always led to a big negative departure over Lake Superior.

I don't think this snow will be any match for the strong February sun angle.

Agreed. Even expanding that out a bit, the period from December 20th to January 10th was the 2nd warmest on record at Tri-Cities Airport and 3rd warmest at Knoxville (exceeded only by a couple of questionable recordings from the 19th century - it was more than 3F warmer than any year since 1890). Yes, it's been very cold since mid-January, but I don't know why some feel the need to carry on with this myth that there was no torch around the Holidays / New Year. The 3-week period centered around New Year's was about as warm as it gets in the Tennessee Valley. Tri-Cities Knoxville

I'm with you guys. This way of ranking makes zero sense to me. I saw Paul/Chesco do the same thing with his 20-day snow cover streak. Turning what was really tied for 36th place with 4 other years into the #22 longest streak, so it went from being something that would occur once every three years [probably even more frequent when accounting for missing data - not sure he actually has 132 years of full data] to much more significant. This gets even more ridiculous the further down the line you go as there are more and more tied values. So it's actually 64th longest sub-40 streak (of 157 years), which is barely above the median - meaning it should occur, on average, nearly every other year, maybe more like 2 out of every 5. Ignoring all the tied values catapults it into some sort of significant cold spell. 18th makes it sound like it's nearly 90th percentile (maybe 1 every 9 years or so). One could imagine a scenario where there are three record cold months tied at 18.9F, and the month ends at 19.2F. Why should it be considered second coldest just because the three colder months happened to end tied at the same value? There's no difference than if the three colder months had instead been 18.7, 18.9, and 19.0F.

Thanks for the update, Paul. I think the surprising thing is how common this really is over there in Western ChesCo. The creative ranking makes it seem more impressive, but really 39 years had as long or longer stretches (of what 132, 133 winters - maybe less if there's incomplete data?). So about 30% of the time assuming full data, perhaps higher. Not too bad - looks like you guys were due for a harsh one with just one such stretch since 2015 prior to the current one! I suppose there's some time to climb on the list still as well this go around. Curious - do you always count ties as only one rank? 22nd longest really makes it sound so much more impressive than tied with 4 other years for 36th longest, which is how it actually ranks unless I'm misunderstanding your data above?