bluewave

Very rare to see 100+ degree heat for SOCAL in late October.

Yeah, Biloxi had 22 feet of storm surge with Katrina. The closest the Northeast has come to that was 17 feet with the the 38 hurricane in Rhode Island.

The silly #Miami heat record I’m most ready to end- over 20 months since the low has dropped below 50 at MIA. Keeps growing day-by-day toopic.twitter.com/4HBp0Xgpdo 9:05 AM - 13 Oct 2017

Yeah, it's only a matter of time before either EWR or LGA has the first 80 degree average summer.

Check out how big the margin was in Miami for the new record number of 80 degree minimums. I guess this may make some of the LGA area posters jealous. Miami has had 70 days at or above 80 for lows. Previous record was 45 days in 2010 7:44 PM - 11 Oct 2017

September finished just below 5 million sq km near the long term trend line. Or about 1 million sq km below 2006 which was the last summer with such a strong polar vortex over Arctic. Strongest Arctic summer polar vortex since 2006

Record warmth in January before the February blizzard.

Several stations had their warmest 2nd half of September on record by 2-3 degrees.

Congrats!

September 2017 was another top 10 warmest month around the area. EWR...10...LGA...8...JFK...7...BDR...8...ISP...4

Record shattering 2016-2017 water year ends today, with the Northern Sierra 8 Station Index more than 6" higher than previous record! #cawxpic.twitter.com/uTyyJ333Tw 12:55 PM - 30 Sep 2017

Jose provided some great swells for the surfers in Lido Beach.

The last time we had a decent wet pattern here in September was way back in 2011. Pretty impressive dry streak the last several Septembers. The lack of major summer heat in places like Long Island prevented the dry conditions from getting worse than they were this summer. But NNJ did much better in the rainfall dept than Long Island this summer.

Dry conditions expanded west into NY and PA in the latest US drought monitor update yesterday. http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Maps/CompareTwoWeeks.aspx Northeast Another week of mostly dry weather, accompanied by late-season warmth, led to the introduction of abnormal dryness (D0) in several areas. In addition, moderate drought (D1) persisted in eastern Maine, while dryness was expanded to include the remainder of coastal New England. By September 24, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that topsoil moisture was 77% very short to short in Maine, along with 46% in Vermont and 40% in West Virginia. Through September 26, month-to-date rainfall totaled just 1.04 inches (33% of normal) in Elkins, West Virginia, and 0.77 inch (24%) in Massena, New York.

We got really lucky with Gloria. There was an 8-9 foot storm surge along the LI South Shore which hit right near low tide. The actual tide levels were similar to Irene which had a 4-5 surge at high tide. The biggest story with Gloria was the power outages with some shoreline apartments and houses getting their roofs blown off in Suffolk.

Dozens of water rescues at Long Beach yesterday with this combination of summer in late September and the strong rip currents. http://www.fios1news.com/longisland/Dozens rescued from Long Beach waters after getting caught in rip currents #.WcjxaihM4lI There were dozens of water rescues at the beach in Long Beach on Sunday despite warnings about rough waters and rip currents. “It's the rip current from the hurricane that are out in the ocean, and the people should not be in the water when the lifeguards are not on duty,” Assistant Chief Long Beach Fire Department Rick Digiacomo said. Though lifeguards were not on duty since it is after Labor Day, many of them were at the beach to help Long Beach Fire Department with rescues. While the water was good for surfers, many said the waters were dangerous for the average swimmer. “There’s a lot of undertow. These are hurricane waves, needless to say, they are very unassuming because it looks calm. But in actuality, there’s a tremendous pull on the water, you can get crushed in the water as we saw,” said Theodore Sampieri of St. James. Long Beach fire officials say it’s best for all to stay out of the water when there are no lifeguards on duty.

Even with the strongest summer polar vortex pattern since at least 2006, NSIDC extent still finished 8th lowest. Our most favorable years now for sea ice retention are still significantly lower than the most hostile years pre 2005.

Congrats!

For those that didn't get a chance to read the story. http://mashable.com/2017/03/10/hurricane-forecasts-suffer-gfs-model-upgrade/

Still looks like the paper is behind a paywall. But phys.org posted some of the key findings. https://phys.org/news/2017-04-eastern-arctic-ocean-atlantification.html (Phys.org)—An international team of researchers has found that the eastern part of the Arctic Ocean is undergoing what they describe as "Atlantification"—in which the ocean is becoming more like the Atlantic Ocean. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes how they tracked ocean temperatures over a 15-year period and the changes they found. The Arctic Ocean has traditionally been different from the Atlantic or Pacific in a fundamental way—the water gets warmer as you go deeper (due to inflows from the Atlantic) rather than the other way around, as happens with the other two. But now, the researchers with this new effort have found that may be changing. They have been using tethered moorings to record ocean temperatures at different depths for approximately 15 years and have found that changes have taken place—sea ice is melting from below, not just from above due to warmer air temperatures. In studying the data from the moorings, the researchers found that warm water from the Atlantic, which has traditionally been separated from melting ice because of the halocline layer—a barrier that exists between deep salty water and fresher water closer to the surface—has been penetrating the barrier, allowing ice to melt from below. It has also led to the water becoming less stratified, like the Atlantic. They describe the changes as a "massive shift" in the ocean that has occurred over an extremely short time frame. These new findings may explain why the extent of ice coverage has been shrinking so dramatically—at a rate of 13 percent per decade. The result, the researchers report, is a feedback loop—as more ice melts due to warmer air, more vertical mixing occurs, allowing warmer water to move upwards, which causes melting from below. They also acknowledge that it is not yet clear what impact the change might have, but suggest it is likely to be substantial—from the biogeochemical to geophysical levels, basic components of the ocean will likely be altered, causing changes such as phytoplankton blooms in places where they have never been seen before. They also note that there is another factor to consider—the massive amounts of fresh water pouring into the ocean from rivers in Siberia as permafrost thaws.

Gives new meaning to heavy wet snow. 0810 AM HEAVY SNOW 2 SE MONTANA CITY 46.52N 111.90W 09/16/2017 M15.0 INCH JEFFERSON MT TRAINED SPOTTER POWER IS OUT. LOST PART OF CHERRY TREE DO TO THE WEIGHT OF THE SNOW. 2.21 INCHES OF LIQUID EQUIVALENT

http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-16-0693.1 Extreme warming in the Kara Sea and Barents Sea during the winter period 2000 to 2016 Abstract The regional climate model COSMO-CLM (CCLM) is used with a high resolution of 15 km for the entire Arctic for all winters 2002/2003-2014/2015. The simulations show a high spatial and temporal variability of the recent 2-m air temperature increase in the Arctic. The maximum warming occurs north of Novaya Zemlya in the Kara Sea and Barents Sea between March 2003-2012 and is responsible for up to 20°C increase. Land-based observations confirm the increase but do not cover the maximum regions that are located over the ocean and sea-ice. Also the 30 km version of the Arctic System Reanalysis (ASR) is used to verify the CCLM for the overlapping time period 2002/2003-2011/2012. The differences between CCLM and ASR 2-m air temperatures vary slightly within 1°C for the ocean and sea-ice area. Thus, ASR captures the extreme warming as well. The monthly 2-m air temperatures of observations and ERA-Interim reanalyses show a large variability for the winters 1979-2016. Nevertheless, the air temperature rise since the beginning of the 21st century is up to eight times higher than in the decades before. The sea-ice decrease is identified as the likely reason for the warming. The vertical temperature profiles show that the warming has a maximum near the surface, but a 0.5°Cyr−1increase is found up to 2 km. CCLM, ASR and also the coarser resolved ERA-Interim Reanalysis show that February and March are the months with the highest 2-m air temperature increases, averaged over the ocean and sea-ice area north of 70°N; for CCLM the warming amounts to an average of almost 5°C for 2002/2003-2011/2012.

I am beginning to think that the key number for Arctic amplification was dropping below 6 million sq km. Crossing the technically ice free mark below 1 million sq km sometime in the future may not even be that significant an event.

It would probably take an extraordinary circumstance to ever see a September minimum extent above 6 million sq km after the damage that was done to the ice during the 2007-2012 era.

Tough to beat the 2012 extent record with such a strong summer polar vortex pattern since then. But 2007 will probably go down in history as the year that the Arctic permanently shifted to this warmer state with reduced sea ice. Even recent numerous more favorable summers haven't allowed the sea ice recover to pre 2007 levels. Our best year now is still lower than anything that came before 2005-2007.