2012 Heat Records Demolish Cold Records 14-to-1

It has been a summer to remember. In winter.

Like a baseball player on steroids, our climate system is breaking records at an unnatural pace. As Weather Channel meteorologist Stu Ostro says of the current heat wave:

This remarkable warmth is associated with a bulging ridge of high pressure aloft that is exceptionally strong and long-lasting for March. While natural factors are contributing to this warm spell, given the nature of it and its context with other extreme weather events and patterns in recent years there is a high probability that global warming is having an influence upon its extremity.

This year, U.S. heat records have been outnumbering cold records by a stunning amount — 14-to-1 (19-to-1 in March) – as this chart from Steve Scolnik at Capital Climate makes clear:

Monthly ratio of daily high temperature to low temperature records set in the U.S. for every month of 2011 and the first half of March, seasonal ratio for summer and fall 2011, winter 2011-2012 to date, and annual ratio for 2011 and 2012, data from NOAA.

I like the statistical aggregation across the country, since it gets us beyond the oft-repeated point that you can’t pin any one record temperature on global warming. If you want to know the historical ratios, see the 2009 analysis, “Record high temperatures far outpace record lows across U.S.,” which shows that the average ratio for the 2000s was 2.04-to-1, a sharp increase from previous decades. Gerald Meehl, the lead author and a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), explained, “If temperatures were not warming, the number of record daily highs and lows being set each year would be approximately even.”

As Jason Samenow of the Capital Weather Gang notes, this week saw truly “Historic record warm weather“:

Temperatures more characteristic of June have broken hundreds of temperature records over the last several days and promise to continue into the next week in many areas. In some places, temperatures have been an eye-popping 30-40 degrees above normal, nearing or surpassing the warmest temperatures ever recorded so early in the season.

Since Sunday, an amazing 943 new record highs have been broken or tied across the U.S. compared to just 9 record lows

Record highs set Wednesday. Open circles indicate records were tied, circles with an x indicate records were broken.

This is not your father’s climate, as Ostro has documented at great length (see this big PDF):

In recent years I’ve documented hundreds of extreme and/or unusual weather events nationally and globally, but this one is even freaking me out with the nature of the air mass, clouds and downpours yesterday and today, and how the sky has looked so tropical, where I live in the Atlanta area – in mid-March. It’s surreal.

Unfortunately, it’s all too real — and just going to get worse and worse until we act to sharply reduce emissions of industrial carbon pollution.

Meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters has done some great reporting on this heat wave, in part because he lives in Michigan, which just got slammed by “the earliest EF-3 or stronger tornado in Michigan history, going back to 1950.”

As Masters wrote Friday (emphasis in original):

As I stepped out of my front door into the pre-dawn darkness from my home near Ann Arbor, Michigan yesterday morning, I braced myself for the cold shock of a mid-March morning. It didn’t come. A warm, murky atmosphere, with temperatures in the upper fifties–30 degrees above normal–greeted me instead. Continuous flashes of heat lightning lit up the horizon, as the atmosphere crackled with the energy of distant thunderstorms. Beware the Ides of March, the air seemed to be saying. I looked up at the hazy stars above me, flashing in and out of sight as lightning lit up the sky, and thought, this is not the atmosphere I grew up with.

If we’re going to paraphrase Shakespeare, how about: Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by global warming.

Here’s Masters today on “Summer in March continues for Midwest“:

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Map used to define Nebraska Sandhills doesn’t include nearby areas also vulnerable to contamination

A depth-to-water map of eastern Nebraska, with the original Keystone XL route in orange. Areas in light blue have a high water table (depth to water 0 to 50 feet) and are more vulnerable to an oil spill. Areas in dark blue have a depth to water of over 50 feet. The new route will likely pass through northern Holt County. Credit: Catherine Mann for InsideClimate News, based on a map created by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Conservation and Survey Division. PDF here.

New Keystone XL Route Could Still Threaten Ogallala Aquifer (InsideClimate News)

… while the [Keystone XL oil pipeline's new route through Nebraska] will avoid the Nebraska Sandhills—a region of grass-covered sand dunes that overlies the critically important Ogallala aquifer—it could still pass through areas above the Ogallala, where the water supply is vulnerable to the impacts of an oil spill.

The original Keystone XL would have crossed through 100 miles of the Sandhills on its way from the tar sands mines of Alberta, Canada to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast. But TransCanada agreed to reroute it in November, after thousands of Nebraskans joined environmentalists to protest the pipeline’s path over the aquifer.

The aquifer spans eight states and supplies 83 percent of Nebraska’s irrigation water. It’s also connected to the High Plains aquifer, which in many places lies above the Ogallala aquifer. Although residents of the Sandhills technically rely on the High Plains aquifer for drinking and irrigation, most refer to the Ogallala aquifer when talking about their water supply.

“It was always about the water,” said Amy Schaffer, a fifth-generation Nebraskan whose father runs a Sandhills ranch. “This isn’t over until they get [the pipeline] out of the Ogallala aquifer.

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Opine away. Or pine away….