bluewave

Newark is in track for its 2nd top 10 warmest June in a row. The coming heatwave will boost the ranking to potentially top 5. Looks like Boston will make a run on the #1 spot. So a continuation of the warmest summer departures and rankings going to our north in recent years. Time Series Summary for NEWARK LIBERTY INTL AP, NJ - Month of Jun Click column heading to sort ascending, click again to sort descending. Rank Year Mean Avg Temperature Missing Count 1 1994 77.8 0 2 2010 76.2 0 3 1993 75.8 0 4 1943 75.4 0 5 2008 75.3 0 6 1984 75.0 0 7 1971 74.8 0 8 2005 74.6 0 - 1981 74.6 0 - 1973 74.6 0 9 2011 74.5 0 10 2021 74.4 6 - 2020 74.4 0 - 1987 74.4 0 Time Series Summary for Boston Area, MA (ThreadEx) - Month of Jun Click column heading to sort ascending, click again to sort descending. Rank Year Mean Avg Temperature Missing Count 1 1976 73.4 0 2 2021 72.8 6 3 1930 72.4 0 4 1994 71.9 0 5 1949 71.6 0 6 1957 71.3 0 7 2001 71.1 0 - 1943 71.1 0 8 1999 71.0 0 9 1925 70.9 0 10 1983 70.7 0 - 1981 70.7 0

If we can pull off upper 90s to near 100° at the warm spots like Newark, then it will be a first when Seattle is so hot. Seattle 100° days and Newark high temperature Downtown Seattle…..6-9-55…..100°……Newark….58° Downtown Seattle…..7-16-41….100°…..Newark…77° Sea Tac…………………….7-20-94…..100°….Newark….94° Sea Tac…………………….7-29-09……103°….Newark…..85°

I believe this is the first time we had 594+ dm ridges in the PAC NW and NE at the same time. Notice how those values for either location are outside the 30 year climo. So a continuation of the unusual wavelength patterns that have become more common since 2010.

Our area may be able to challenge the June 500mb height record next week. Looks like the OKX record for June is near 595 dm. The PAC NW all-time record could fall with heights above 597 dm. It appears that these record breaking ridges that get stuck in place are related to areas of marine heatwaves and drought on land. We have seen frequent near to record WAR amplifications near the Northeast in recent years with the record SSTs east of New England. The Western US has also experienced record ridging in association with the warm blob off the West Coast and historic drought conditions. So these features seem to go together.

This higher humidity is part of our shift to a humid subtropical climate. 60-80 days a year with 70° dew points used to be normal for the Delmarva to Southern NJ. Now it has moved up to the NYC area.

This June is an unusual one for front-loaded heat.The 97° back on June 6th at Newark will be the max for the month. The remainder of the month will feature a Great Lakes Trough squeezed between the WAR and the Western Ridge.

Some of the long range climate models have the current megadrought out West expanding eastward to the Plains over this century. So if that projection is correct, then it would put quite a stress on US agriculture. A gradual desertification of the Plains would probably mean more frequent 100° days for our area in the summer. https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/1/e1400082

Yeah, the Dust Bowl was an early example of humans altering the Great Plains climate through land degradation. We had a big hand in the magnitude of the record heat. Now we are cooling the region through our farming practices. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16676-w Here we show, using an atmospheric-only model, that anomalously warm North Atlantic SSTs enhance heatwave activity through an association with drier spring conditions resulting from weaker moisture transport. Model devegetation simulations, that represent the wide-spread exposure of bare soil in the 1930s, suggest human activity fueled stronger and more frequent heatwaves through greater evaporative drying in the warmer months. This study highlights the potential for the amplification of naturally occurring extreme events like droughts by vegetation feedbacks to create more extreme heatwaves in a warmer world. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/02/america-s-corn-belt-making-its-own-weather The Great Plains of the central United States—the Corn Belt—is one of the most fertile regions on Earth, producing more than 10 billion bushels of corn each year. It’s also home to some mysterious weather: Whereas the rest of the world has warmed, the region’s summer temperatures have dropped as much as a full degree Celsius, and rainfall has increased up to 35%, the largest spike anywhere in the world. The culprit, according to a new study, isn’t greenhouse gas emissions or sea surface temperature—it’s the corn itself. This is the first time anyone has examined regional climate change in the central United States by directly comparing the influence of greenhouse gas emissions to agriculture, says Nathan Mueller, an earth systems scientist at the University of California (UC), Irvine, who was not involved with this study. It’s important to understand how agricultural activity can have “surprisingly strong” impacts on climate change, he says.

There are always going to be sparks that can start wildfires. But with the historic dry conditions, they are growing to record proportions. That’s really the main problem.

Yeah, the warming and drying trend out West is pretty extreme.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/langley/joint-nasa-noaa-study-finds-earths-energy-imbalance-has-doubled Researchers have found that Earth’s energy imbalance approximately doubled during the 14-year period from 2005 to 2019. Earth's climate is determined by a delicate balance between how much of the Sun's radiative energy is absorbed in the atmosphere and at the surface and how much thermal infrared radiation Earth emits to space. A positive energy imbalance means the Earth system is gaining energy, causing the planet to heat up. The doubling of the energy imbalance is the topic of a recent study, the results of which were published June 15 in Geophysical Research Letters. Scientists at NASA and NOAA compared data from two independent measurements. NASA's Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) suite of satellite sensors measure how much energy enters and leaves Earth's system. In addition, data from a global array of ocean floats, called Argo, enable an accurate estimate of the rate at which the world’s oceans are heating up. Since approximately 90 percent of the excess energy from an energy imbalance ends up in the ocean, the overall trends of incoming and outgoing radiation should broadly agree with changes in ocean heat content. "The two very independent ways of looking at changes in Earth's energy imbalance are in really, really good agreement, and they're both showing this very large trend, which gives us a lot of confidence that what we're seeing is a real phenomenon and not just an instrumental artifact, " said Norman Loeb, lead author for the study and principal investigator for CERES at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. "The trends we found were quite alarming in a sense." Increases in emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane due to human activity trap heat in the atmosphere, capturing outgoing radiation that would otherwise escape into space. The warming drives other changes, such as snow and ice melt, and increased water vapor and cloud changes that can further enhance the warming. Earth’s energy imbalance is the net effect of all these factors. In order to determine the primary factors driving the imbalance, the investigators used a method that looked at changes in clouds, water vapor, combined contributions from trace gases and the output of light from the Sun, surface albedo (the amount of light reflected by the Earth's surface), tiny atmospheric particles called aerosols, and changes in surface and atmospheric temperature distributions. The study finds that the doubling of the imbalance is partially the result an increase in greenhouse gases due to human activity, also known as anthropogenic forcing, along with increases in water vapor are trapping more outgoing longwave radiation, further contributing to Earth’s energy imbalance. Additionally, the related decrease in clouds and sea ice lead to more absorption of solar energy. The researchers also found that a flip of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) from a cool phase to a warm phase likely played a major role in the intensification of the energy imbalance. The PDO is a pattern of Pacific climate variability. Its fingerprint includes a massive wedge of water in the eastern Pacific that goes through cool and warm phases. This naturally occurring internal variability in the Earth system can have far-reaching effects on weather and climate. An intensely warm PDO phase that began around 2014 and continued until 2020 caused a widespread reduction in cloud coverage over the ocean and a corresponding increase in the absorption of solar radiation. "It's likely a mix of anthropogenic forcing and internal variability," said Loeb. "And over this period they're both causing warming, which leads to a fairly large change in Earth's energy imbalance. The magnitude of the increase is unprecedented." Loeb cautions that the study is only a snapshot relative to long-term climate change, and that it's not possible to predict with any certainty what the coming decades might look like for the balance of Earth's energy budget. The study does conclude, however, that unless the rate of heat uptake subsides, greater changes in climate than are already occurring should be expected. "The lengthening and highly complementary records from Argo and CERES have allowed us both to pin down Earth’s energy imbalance with increasing accuracy, and to study its variations and trends with increasing insight, as time goes on." said Gregory Johnson, co-author on the study and physical oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, Washington. "Observing the magnitude and variations of this energy imbalance are vital to understanding Earth’s changing climate." Joe Atkinson NASA's Langley Research Center Last Updated: Jun 16, 2021 Editor: Joe Atkinson

Yeah, that was the first summer with such high dew points and heat indices.

Pretty extreme to see all-time record heat tied so early in the season.

1983 was our highest dew point summer until it was finally surpassed in 2018 and 2019.

While it was wet here in 1983, the source region for all the heat just to our west was dry.

JFK set its record for 95° days back in 2010 at 10. They also tied for most 100° days at 3. The rainfall pattern in JJA 2010 was wet in the West and Central US and dry in the East. So we needed the dry pattern with more westerly flow to set all those heat records. Time Series Summary for JFK INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, NY - Jan through Dec Click column heading to sort ascending, click again to sort descending. Rank Year Number of Days Max Temperature >= 95 Missing Count 1 2010 10 0 2 1963 8 0 3 2002 7 0 - 1999 7 0 - 1983 7 0 4 2013 6 0 - 1949 6 0 5 2012 5 0 - 1966 5 0 - 1955 5 2 Time Series Summary for JFK INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, NY - Jan through Dec Click column heading to sort ascending, click again to sort descending. Rank Year Number of Days Max Temperature >= 100 Missing Count 1 2010 3 0 - 1966 3 0 2 2011 2 0 - 1993 2 0 - 1983 2 0 - 1948 2 198 3 2013 1 0 - 1999 1 0 - 1972 1 0 - 1963 1 0 - 1957 1 1

I hear many people mention the term alarmist in regard to climate change. But I see very little alarmism in terms of the actual global response to climate change. Complacency will probably turn out the biggest risk that we face.

Many people who have been leaving California relocated to around Boise, Idaho. That is one of the hottest property markets in the country right now. A bunch of Hurricane Maria refugees from Puerto Rico wound up in Buffalo. Past history Is full of examples of people migrating from the tropics to more temperate zones. But this will probably accelerate in coming decades. Is Idaho prepared for climate refugees from California? https://www.idahostatesman.com/opinion/readers-opinion/article237278474.html Wildfires in California are igniting more than chaparral and forest. They are firing up additional reasons Californians will seek safer, blackout-free homes in Idaho. An Oct. 28 San Francisco Chronicle article sounded an ominous alarm: “fires intensified fears California has become almost too dangerous to inhabit.” This is exceedingly bad news for Idaho. For our state to remain the place we love, Idahoans should be cheering for California to address its problems lest they soon become our own. We should acknowledge that the entire arid American West shares a common danger, and Idaho is not exempt.

The major trend over the years has been a migration of our population to places which have been subject to a record number of billion dollar weather and climate disasters. The West has been drying out with an record amount wild fire damages. The big population increase in Texas has been hammered by record flooding and hurricane damages with storms like Harvey. Florida has had a double whammy of sea level rise and billion dollar hurricane damages. So now their residents are seeing steep property insurance increases. The same goes for fire prone areas of the West. My guess is that the coming years will see a reverse migration away from these areas. Property insurance increases will price residents out of those markets. So they will look for areas of the country that don’t see as many billion dollar events. The future of population growth may be back to cooler parts fo the country. But such a change may take time since people love living in the Sun Belt.

Their water usage has actually been declining in recent years. So it shows you how historic this current drought is. If the Colorado Basin doesn’t see an increase in precipitation the next few years, then they will have to institute drastic cuts. It looks like the first level of cuts will begin by by later this summer. https://www.circleofblue.org/2020/world/remarkable-drop-in-colorado-river-water-use-a-sign-of-climate-adaptation/ Use of Colorado River water in the three states of the river’s lower basin fell to a 33-year low in 2019, amid growing awareness of the precarity of the region’s water supply in a drying and warming climate. Arizona, California, and Nevada combined to consume just over 6.5 million acre-feet last year, according to an annual audit from the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that oversees the lower basin. That is about 1 million acre-feet less than the three states are entitled to use under a legal compact that divides the Colorado River’s waters. The last time water consumption from the river was that low was in 1986, the year after an enormous canal in Arizona opened that allowed the state to lay claim to its full Colorado River entitlement.

The Northeast is getting warmer and wetter while the Southwest is becoming warmer and drier.

Somebody out West may be able to finish the month at +10 or greater. Looks like the pattern tries to reshuffle a bit later in June. More of a WAR and Plains trough with ridging along the West Coast.

You knew that the ridge had to eventually pull back to the West with cooling from the Plains east. It’s just too difficult for the Upper Plains to run a +15 or higher monthly departure during the summer. That is more like what happed during some recent winter and early springs.