In both the meteorological and figurative sense, the forecast continues to be relatively dry.
There does not seem to be any chance of rain (or snow for the mountains) until next Tuesday at the earliest and even then the models are saying it may very well dissipate before it gets to us.
The evidence, 1AM Tuesday:
7AM, dissipated. Notice the high pressure bubble just to the southwest of the Island marked 1024(mb). High pressure seems to be expected to build back in after a brief exit on the weekend. We’ve been under high pressure, which has kept us dry and foggy, for much of the month of January.
The good news is we might see a bit more sun over the next few days as the fog should lift. So get out there and soak up that Vitamin D! 🙂
2013 official NOAA and NASA recap
Before I get to the world update for 2013, check out this fantastic image of North America (courtesy Jeff Masters) showing the departures from normal temperatures. The bitter cold again hitting the South and East has been the big story of course, but notice that the opposite is happening in the North and West.
Temperatures are 20° C below normal out East, but 20° Cabove normal in Northern BC and all of Yukon and Alaska! It’s truly an extreme weather pattern right now… As an example, Nashville Tennessee is slated to get down to -14° C tomorrow, (normal is -2° C) in Fairbanks Alaska, it will be -3° C (normal is around -25° C).
Of course this is the second big cold snap the central and eastern parts of North America have had to deal with since December. But regardless of that, the world as a whole recorded another top 10 warmest year since 1880. The NOAAs report is very human readable, I recommend reading though it,
As you can see, the eastern US is the odd man out in terms of the rest of the world where it was pretty uniformly warmer than average.
This first point from the report summarizes it well.
The year 2013 ties with 2003 as the fourth warmest year globally since records began in 1880. The annual global combined land and ocean surface temperature was 0.62°C (1.12°F) above the 20th century average of 13.9°C (57.0°F). This marks the 37th consecutive year (since 1976) that the yearly global temperature was above average. Currently, the warmest year on record is 2010, which was 0.66°C (1.19°F) above average. Including 2013, 9 of the 10 warmest years in the 134-year period of record have occurred in the 21st century. Only one year during the 20th century—1998—was warmer than 2013.
1998 was and remains a very important year in the climate record, not only because it is the genesis of a favourite denier lie ‘it hasn’t gotten warmer for 17 years’, but more importantly because the reason it was so warm is due to an extreme El Niño that occurred that year. In fact, 1998 was one of the strongest El Niños of recent memory.
El Ninos inject huge amounts of heat from the ocean into the atmosphere, so they can amplify warming that is already occurring. As I mentioned in Mondays post, we are currently in a neutral El Niño period. Waters in the El Niño region are around average. They have been like this for all of 2013 and have in fact been cooler, a La Niña, in recent years. Despite these cool waters the globe has continued to set top 10 records, including beating the extreme 1998 year through the 2000s and into this decade. This is an indication that the temperature floor is rising. The next big El Niño will likely make for a pretty big spike in global temperatures, and a lot of new records yet again, but it is clear we don’t need El Niño to set new records anymore.
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One response to “Continuing quiet weather. 2013 top 10 warmest.”
Great post, from the current outlook to the historical perspective. I appreciate the documentation and the little comment at the end. I just finished reading The Energy of Nations by Jeremy Leggett who, along with thee and me, believes that the time for action is now (actually several decades ago, but I haven’t yet mastered the chronosynclastic infundibulation). Forward, please.