michsnowfreak

There is literally no better than 2013-14. Easily the most severe winter on record here.

Meant to post yesterday. July 24th was the 90th anniversary of the hottest temp on record for both Detroit and Chicago. Both places hit 105° on July 24, 1934. Regarding dog days. I always considered the dog days the hottest two weeks of the year and the dead of winter the coldest two weeks.

I got missed yesterday too, but this month should be the largest difference in precip between my yard and DTW 7-8 miles west, since I've been keeping track (precip 2000, snow 1995). Month to date imby 4.88", DTW 2.02".

My early guess is above average snowfall in the Great Lakes, greater the further north you go. Ie: probably an excellent snow season for the UP and snowbelts, probably slightly above avg here but not without thaws and rainstorms in the lower Lakes.

Awesome, thanks!

NAO is definitely much different up here than, say, NYC southward. Not only do +NAO periods increase the potential of big snowstorms, but in general can be stormy. But of course, you also run the risk of rain depending on storm tracks. -NAO often means cold & dry suppression, which is not always a bad thing if theres already a good snowpack and the clipper express sets up, but if theres little to no snowcover and no clippers set up, it can be frigid with bare ground. So as important as the NAO is as part of the overall pattern, it truly is a case by case basis for here, at least per my memory. Are there any good links to NAO by winter? All I could find is a graph that was hard to read.

2007-08 analog is music to my ears.

A refreshing 56F this morning at DTW, so nice to have fresh air and not AC filling the house during the dog days. This was the 2nd night of July (the other being the 1st) that rural areas of SE MI dipped into the 40s.

Excellent point. If I just categorized winters by min temp rather than mean temp, not only would you see no rise (the period of record regress line is straight as an arrow 1874-present), you would see the average annual winter min temp has gotten colder if you narrow the data set to the past 100 years (at Detroit). Id suspect its even more pronounced in areas west of Lake MI.

Dec 2017, Jan 2019, Feb 2021, Dec 2022, Jan 2024 were all impressive arctic outbreaks despite the domination of mild winters since 2016.

Winter forecasts have always busted...and this includes when the harsher winters were forecast to be mild. Its because forecasts are plentiful, and many have biases one way or the other. Its laughable to lump the 1950s-2000s climate into one Winters of the 1950s and 1990s were very mild in many places while the 1960s and particularly 1970s were the coldest and harshest of all time in spots. Winters for me were much more harsh in the 2000s/2010s than growing up in the 1990s, and id able to use that same sentiment in the 1970s if i grew up in the 1950s.

Interesting...warmer mins are more noticeable in summer than winter here. We still routinely go below zero most winters. Yet in summer, we almost never see 40s in July or August whereas we used to see the occasional night or two (the outlying areas still do..in fact they did last night lol).

"I don't remember" is a dangerous word to use in weather haha . Looking up the actual data can really surprise you. Not an encyclopedia of weather knowledge for Boston as I am for Detroit...and I do know east coast winters have warmed a bit more than here (I've found that fall/winter warming is much slower than spring/summer here)....but when you actually look at data you might be surprised. Using just our memories is how the tales "when I was a kid" start. Since the beginning of climate record there have been eye popping warm months, out-of-season warm temps at any time of year, and multi-year cycles of unusually warm weather. They just happened less frequently back then (how much less depends on location).

Great point about gradual warming. An unusual warm temp at any time of the year is always media fodder for a CC post regardless of what caused said warm temp. There are so many patterns and natural variables in the climate. It's why the average annual temp rise is slow. You will still get plenty of cold days and such, it's just they are being outnumbered by warm.

Still well early, but based on the forecast, looks very doable for Detroit to have no 90F days this July. July historically is our hottest month and sees the most # of 90s, but DTW has not passed 93F in July since 2020.