According to the official date, it is. This is not what February in Minnesota should look like, though.
That’s what late March might look like, or better yet, April. Fog and naked trees and patches of dirty snow are not at all appropriate for this time of year.
Have I been dislocated to Kansas?
Not sure. Try clicking your heels together three times while chanting, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.”
It’s so cold and snowy in Alaska that fuel oil is thickening and roofs are collapsing
Way to jinx it, PZ.
I just checked and saw this headline; Temps to plumet this weekend.
After further investigation, turns out that plumet means going from way above average to a little above average.
I take back the jinx accusation. : )
It’s also unbelievably rainy here is Southern California. Could it be due to climate change? Nah, say Republicans, we need to drill more oil and pump more CO2 into the atmosphere. Remember the old TV ad: “Some say CO2 is a pollutant. We call it life.” [Cue shot of cute white baby breathing]
Wow, you still have patches of dirty snow? I’m in the southwest metro and we’ve got nothing. Even those piles of dirty snow are more than I’ve had all winter.
It’s short-sleeves and shorts weather here in Maryland. The weather is fickle though so it can be a surprise blizzard any day now.
We’re in Western Montana, and the high elevation snowpack levels are about half of normal. Any snow we do get at the lower elevations melts right away because other than the polar vortex week where we hung out in the negatives (farenheit), it’s been appallingly warm. The ski hills are barely open, and our spring snowmelt river flows are going to be abysmal. Late summer baseflow will be nonexistent in the smaller tributaries. Of course, we might get a 2022-style Yellowstone super-late-heavy-snow-then-crazy-atmospheric-river-rain-on-snow-event to make things spicy. It’s unlikely, but if I’ve learned anything about climate in the last several years, I’ve learned that stationarity is dead and things like “recurrence intervals” are only sorta-helpful at this point.
After a very cold couple of weeks, north Sweden got very mild weather, but the snow is not melting…yet.
The bare ground in PZs region provides opportunities for birds and other animals to scavenge for food, which is a plus.
If you have bears, it is possible some will stop hibernating early.
I remember February in Minnesota, visiting my grandparents in the 1970’s. There was 3 feet of snow on the ground, and I went sledding down the streets with my cousins.
There was a 3-day run here last week where I could go out and ride my bike no problem (avoiding some of the ice from the last snowstorm that remains in shady areas). On Saturday, I was walking dogs in the snow. We’ve got about 3 inches of really heavy, wet snow now (the kind I lived for when I was a kid), and a bunch of people who are too lazy/too sick, too disabled (hip or back problems) to shovel. The up and down temperatures are common, but 60 degrees at the end of January?
The first time after my bike accident (to wit, years ago) that we went to visit my grandparents in Wisconsin, I was very disappointed that it was raining. It was Thanksgiving, Mom had told us all about the snow of her childhood, and I wanted snow! (This was something like 1988 or 1989, fr reference.)
It’s only been down to zero for about 1 week this winter. It snowed once and basically just dusted the ground with about an inch of snow . It was gone by the late afternoon . That was the so called blizzard that the weatherman was predicting . It’s been raining so I don’t think we’ll have a drought. It’s been hovering around 35F (2-3C) and hasn’t gotten any colder. The only concern I have is that a lot of trees here won’t break dormancy and as much as I hate cold weather, I’d hate that even more! Yes, I’m a bit of a tree hugger 🤷🏾♀️
Im with @5 and Im slightly north of of the TCs proper. Worried an actual Feb cold snap at this point will kill a ton of trees.
It’s almost like that anthropogenic climate disruption is An Actual Thing That Is Happening. Or something. 🤔
Reginald Selkirk @ 1, huh, I thought the quote was, “Auntie Em, Auntie Em, I promise I won’t do LSD again!”.
I clearly recall that and wondering whyinhell I was inside of a picnic basket, looking for some lizard that’s odd.
Saw flying insects here yesterday, the last of our snow piles are rapidly melting away. Soon enough, I’ll be buzzing my mop from my head, as I tend to grow my hair long in the winter to protect my radar dishes on the sides of my head.
I’ll likely have my new boots fully broken in just in time to toss them into the closet until next winter.
Of course, this being the Harrisburg, PA area, if one doesn’t like the weather, one needs only wait 10 minute and it’ll do something else. Saw all four seasons in the space of two hours. Started off like a nice, brisk fall morning, clouds rolled in and dumped two inches of snow on us, the sun came out and it went into the 80’s. I literally had men in my ambulance sitting next to each other, half with mild cold injuries, the other half with mild heat exhaustion. At least it didn’t anvil on us that day.
Tokyo workers head home early due to heavy snow
It’s all the fault of that groundhog.
N.S. (Nova Scotia) digging out after historic snowfall drops 150 cm in some areas
Temperature records have been smashed already :
Source : https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/01/25/record-warmth-earth-climate-europe/
Sea Surface temperatures are literally at the point of going off the charts as folks can see for themselves here :
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/
If graphs could scream..
The implications are beyond terrifying and the present reality of bushfires, floods, extreme temperature records falling, milder and warmer winters generally – except the disturbed jetstream has meandered out of its usual path – that Global Overheating (“warming”is toomild a word for it) is clear.
Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf on X twitter (any typos mine – typing from off fb) :
This should be headline news and first prority for our national andgovts and international organisations but, well, here we are as a suppsoedly intelligent species. Living in a Mass Extinction Event that we are also causing and refusing to stop and try and take serious steps to prevent.
We are in extremely serious trouble here and that’s an understatement.
Not exactly committal, is it, StevoR? Seems rather speculative, actually.
That means they could not, obviously — else the word would have been ‘will’.
Just saying.
John, if you stand in front of a target on an active rifle range, you could get hit by a bullet. Would you stand in front of that target?
@ ^ John Morales : That’s your first and main takeaway from what I posted above? Seriously? FFS.
Well, StevoR, not like there’s anything there that hasn’t been said before.
wzrd1, heh. No need to stand in front of the target for that possibility.
Here:
(https://carindalenews.com.au/index.php/qps-cop-seriously-injured-in-belmont-rifle-training/)
—
Again: ‘could’ implies could not, else it would be ‘will’.
It’s a possibility, not a certainty, at least in the mind of the writer.
And neither of you disputed that, you merely got indignant that I noticed the prevarication present in that piece.
@19. John Morales : else the word would have been ‘will’.
The other thing and point being made by the word choice here is that if we act and choose wisely and change what we are doing then its NOT inevitable. This is what could and very likely will happen unless we take serious Climate Action. The site linked does provide some alternatives and options so that the ‘coulds’ here are avoided.
Well, there you go, StevoR. It ain’t hopeless, things might turn out alright.
There is no certitude at hand. It’s a warning, not a prediction. Etc.
Again, nothing new there. cf. https://www.ipcc.ch/assessment-report/ar6/
Always interesting to see how experts react to non-experts’ perception of the science.
Usually in my part of Florida we have a few times a year we get into the 30s or maybe one or two freeze watches. Don’t recall getting lower than somewhere in the low 40s so far this year, though February can get pretty cold (for us wussies).
Hmmm.:
https://www.noaa.gov/understanding-el-nino
Part 2 of 4:
It has rained quite a bit off and on in Florida. PZ hasn’t notice as much snow? Warmer than usual?
More:
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/enso/how-does-el-nino-influence-winter-precipitation-over-united-states
Egads: https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2024/01/will-la-nina-return-this-fall-the-tea-leaves-are-unusually-strong/
I hates Fall La Ninas very much! Ramp up the tropics in the Atlantic.
Some generalizations to be made for MN but it’s complicated:
https://www.weather.gov/arx/strong_el_nino_temps
Plus:
https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/climate/journal/el-nino-oct-2023.html
So PZ’s observation may fit a typical strong El Nino year. That’s not to discount a definite trend of anthropogenic global warming over the years.
It’s been an incredibly mild winter in Edmonton. We barely got even a dusting of snow until January when the temperature plummeted from near constant above freezing days to a deep freeze for a couple of weeks with a lot of snow, and then it got back above freezing, into the low plus teens (C) so most of the snow is gone again.
I’ve never seen one like this before.
Two dog pin worms named Kansas and Oklahoma suddenly are blinded by brilliant light. Oklahoma turns to Kansas and says “Well, Kansas, we’re not in Toto any more”.
Saskatoon looks a lot like that now, which it shouldn’t in early February.
But it was 70° in Kansas recently!
We just had a huge storm in northern California (and southern California) with lots of rain, and unusually high winds with extensive power outages. (My power has been out for a couple of days.) However, I just checked the California snow pack status, which translates to water in the dry summer, and overall it’s about 75% of normal. The storms we’ve had this winter have tended to be warm, except for the last one which turned cooler the last day or so. I think that storm is still heading to Minnesota.