Hope everyone had fun at the Centennial Weekend events! Wish the weather-gods could have relented a little and given the Puddle Ducks some wind and the Car buffs some relief from the 35C heat, but that’s just the way the weather is sometimes.
Continuing Great Weather!
The great news is though that our pleasant temperatures between 25-29 are going to continue for the foreseeable future. We can expect the same pattern of some fog in the morning, sunny skies after around 10 and wind in the afternoon and evening.
Thunderstorms?
We will also have another chance at some thunderstorms tonight.
We pretty much missed out on all the action that hit Nanaimo, Victoria, Vancouver and the Southern Interior yesterday but if you were at the Starlight movie, or following my twitter feed, you would have known that there were a few flashes to the East visible from town.
You could see the clouds building off to the East:
But to the West there was also a spectacular sunset:
Thankfully all it provided was some sky-borne drama and not much else. The movie was funny by the way… and it seems lots of people were there to enjoy it!
Arctic Drama
If you have been following my page on Facebook or Twitter you’d already know that I’ve been tracking an incredible, and extremely unusual Arctic Summer Storm being reffered to in the Arctic blogosphere as the “Great Arctic Cyclone” of 2012.
You can see there that the centre is only around 1500km (the distance from Vancouver to Edmonton) away from the North Pole (the white dot).
It started on Monday and has taken what was already a record-low Arctic sea ice pack and whipped up the seas and winds to smash the ice a bunch more.
The US NWS describes it as (it’s reports are always in CAPS so don’t take this as’yelling’) :
“AN UNUSUALLY DEEP LOW FOR ANY TIME OF THE YEAR IN THE ARCTIC OCEAN”
“A LOW THIS DEEP IN AUGUST IS INDEED A RARE EVENT.”
“EXCEPTIONALLY DEEP…PARTICULARLY FOR THIS TIME OF YEAR…”
I discovered the excellent “Arctic Sea Ice Blog”. The comments there are top-notch as well, full of hard-science links and pointers to other places. Like here! 🙂
Here’s the sea ice over the last few days:
You can see the storm pushing the ice from left to right and splitting off a big chunk on top near Siberia. It’s a pretty awe-inspiring look.
Hot Hot South:
And to follow that up, closer to home, the US NOAA has announced that July 2012 was the hottest month in US history (since 1895). (not “july”… any month) This beat July 1936 (the famous ‘dust-bowl’ years) and continues the hottest 12-month period for the US since 1895.
Here is an excellent graph showing just how abnormally hot the last 12 months have been in the Contiguous US compared to all other years. (ie. not including Alaska/Hawaii).
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