TheClimateChanger

Not bad

Checking in on 2026... safe to say, we are picking up right where 2025 left off.

Ended up narrowly edging out 1939 for 5th place in the official records. Quite the turnaround, considering the first 15 days of the month were around 1.7F BELOW the 1991-2020 mean, per PRISM's analysis.

That was intentional. I wanted to limit the analysis to higher quality data, excluding the older, warm-biased rooftop station at the downtown WB office in Raleigh.

Interesting. I don't know how a park could have a warmer microclimate than surrounding urban neighborhoods. Doesn't make much sense.

By comparison, Orlando is pretty close to true tropical thresholds in recent years. Over the past 15 years, only January has dropped below the 18C/64.4F threshold. And only by a few degrees.

Anywhere outside of the park where people actually live? Lol.

I don't know... comparing to Orlando is comparing one extreme to the other. Recent means aren't substantially different than late 20th century norms at Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, and I think everyone would agree on that being classed as subtropical. Certainly much closer to that than a true continental climate of say Minneapolis.

The moving 10-year average is decidedly subtropical - not even close to freezing. Neither December, nor February have been below freezing in the last 10 years, and January only three times. Coldest month based on the past 10 years is January at 35.3F, and this is at the park. I would imagine more urban environs, and other favorable microclimates, are even warmer.

Here's another example of a pairing. This subforum spends a disproportionate amount of time discussing Chester County, PA. So I decided to locate a pair for the small town of Avondale, Pennsylvania. And if you look at the data, it's very similar to Warrenton, Va. of the late 20th century, over the past 10 years. And these two sites are acceptable pairs because they are both small towns on the edge of large metro areas, at similar elevation, and in a similar location relative to the coast.

Obviously, you want to find pairs that aren't drastically different in elevation. I would not agree that "many areas it gets hotter as you go north in the summer" - that may be the case for the Florida peninsula, but mean summertime temperature changes are still largely consistent with latitudinal changes for the bulk of the continental US, even if the gradient is somewhat reduced. Again, obviously, excluding higher elevated locations to the south where the elevation induces cooling.

So I've been working on a new concept I call "climate analog pairs" and basically it looks to pair a location's current climate with a late 20th century climate of another location hundreds of miles south. I actually think it's more intuitive going in the opposite direction. As a millennial, you may want to determine where you can locate the climate of your childhood. Unfortunately, it's no longer going to be in your hometown but rather hundreds of miles north of your hometown. I think this is a better way of looking at climate change - rather than saying its warmed a couple of degrees, one could say instead it's warmed so much that the local climate has been replaced with the late 20th century climate conditions 200 miles south of here. Here's the thread where I explain the concept and then address a couple of anticipated objections. Any thoughts?

Really can't beat this, with temperatures nearing 70F in southeast Ohio.

@GaWx

Is the 62" at Arlington plausible? Taunton reached 45" and Ashburnham 48" at the same time. How about the 60" at Washington 2 in 1963? Snow depth reached 4 feet at West Cummington at the same time. Also, two locations (Hoosac Tunnel and Adams) reached 50" depth in 1947. I knew 1947-1948 was a doozy, but I guess 1946-1947 was quite harsh as well. The most recent 50" depth was at Boxford 2.4S - a CoCoRaHS observer - in 2015. A number of 40"+ depths were recorded that winter, including 45" at Blue Hill Coop.

Here are the candidates for highest snow depth in Massachusetts. The first three are data entry errors and can be excluded. The next three are legitimate, in the sense that they are what was reported in those winters from those locations, but they could be other than data entry errors.

Isn't the more likely explanation that the snowfall totals were underdone and only given as change in depth?

Looking at the numbers, map looks pretty accurate. For the period since December 15, Omaha had it warmest mean high temps (by more than 2F!). With Des Moines in 4th place by the same metric: Moline officially in 13th place by this metric, but 4 of those years predate the start date of IEM's analysis. So 9th warmest since 1893.

Updated through today: The commentary on the original post is kind of funny. FFS, how much hotter do the Iowans want? Not every period needs to be record breaking, does it? Source: IEM :: 2026-01-07 Feature - Quite Warm Three Weeks

Nice. I wanted to bring up the insects I've been seeing but I figured I'd be accused of lying, so it's nice to see others are seeing them in their homes and backyards. I had a massive moth fly in last week (thought it was a bat - lol), ticks on the Christmas decorations and, yes, a mosquito tonight as I let the dog back in. And there were dandelions in the lawn on Christmas day. "BuT iT's ThE cOlDeSt WiNtEr EvEr"