Holly Yan and Judson Jones CCN Mon, 27 May 2019 11:32 UTC
So much for that warm, sunny Memorial Day vacation to the Grand Canyon.
Clear views of America's most beautiful ditch were briefly interrupted by something rarely seen this late in the year -- snow. Light snow began falling in the morning, lasting for several hours, dusting the Grand Canyon.
'It's common for snow to fall in Flagstaff in April and May, but to have accumulating snow after May 26th is quite unusual," said the National Weather Service's office in Flagstaff, Arizona
In fact, "it's only happened 8 times since we've been keeping records," the NWS Flagstaff office said.
Patrick Thorne Inthesnow.com Mon, 27 May 2019 19:18 UTC
Falls Creek, Victoria
A week-long snow storm (if forecasts prove correct) is just getting underway in Australia.
The country's ski areas have reported up to 25cm of snowfall in the first 24 hours of the snowfall, which is due to continue through to the start of June - meteorological winter in the southern hemisphere - on June 1st.
Up to 70cm (2 feet, 4 inches) is expected to fall in total due to a front moving up from Antarctica.
It looks to be the perfect start to the 2019 ski season for Australia where resorts are due to open over the weekend of 7 - 10 June in just under a fortnight's time, a long holiday weekend for much of the country in celebration of the Queen's birthday.
California's strange spring weather continues to stun the state, now setting a record for the snowiest May at Mammoth Mountain.
The resort got a record 29 inches of snow this month, giving those in Southern California a chance to ditch the sandy beach for the powdery mountain this Memorial Day weekend. Roughly 1.4 million passengers are expected at Los Angeles International Airport through Tuesday, a new record.
The snowfall has already topped May 2015's record of 28 inches, further adding to the enormous dump of powder that Mammoth has received. A total of 489 inches have accumulated at the main lodge, and 715 inches have been recorded at the summit. The ski resort's current base depth is between 90 and 155 inches.
Heavy winter snow and ice finally melts into Lake Michigan along the Milwaukee Harbor along the lakefront.
In 2017 "Climate Experts" had irrefutable proof that the Great Lakes would continue an evaporation decline spiral due to climate change, but today we are at 100 year high water marks with all of the great lakes about to set the highest water marks ever set. We also see the same "this place is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world" headlines coming out of the same Great Lakes. When will the corporate media begin asking hard questions why so many bad predictions didn't pan out?
A report released this week from the US Drought Monitor shows Colorado is now 99.99% drought-free. According to the Colorado Climate Center in Fort Collins this is the lowest coverage of drought in our state since the US Drought Monitor was established in 2000. The previous low was 99.87% drought-free in May 2001.
The dramatic improvement is thanks to an active jet stream pattern that set up over Colorado during the middle of February. It brought a parade of storm systems across the region through early March that dropped heavy snow and created a record cycle of avalanches.
California growers are frustrated by an unusually wet spring that has delayed the planting of some crops like rice and damaged others including strawberries and wine grapes.
The state's wet conditions come as much of the West is experiencing weird weather. Colorado and Wyoming got an unusually late dump of snow this week. Meanwhile temperatures in Phoenix have dropped 15 degrees below normal.
Large swaths of California have seen two to five times more precipitation than is normal for this point in May, the National Weather Service said. A series of storms soaked much of Colusa County where rice grower Kurt Richter was forced to wait weeks to seed his land.
"You should be seeing green lawns of rice out there right now," Richter said Tuesday from his farm about 120 miles north of San Francisco. "But it's just flooded fields, with nothing sticking out of the water."
Two months' worth of snow fell in the city of Salekhard in Russia's Yamalo-Nenets Region overnight into Friday, a spokesperson for the city administration told TASS.
"We got two months' worth of precipitation. The new snow cover is 12 cm deep, yet the monthly average is six centimeters. It just keeps snowing," she said.
Comment: Significant spring snowfall also struck a day earlier in another part of northern Russia at Norilsk:
Late-season snow on Tuesday night coated Garze Tibetan Autonomous Region in southwest China's Sichuan Province, catching local residents, tourists and many drivers off guard.
In the Mount Zheduo area, one of the most affected areas, the sprouting grassland was covered with white snow, flinging people back to winter overnight.
The heavy snow disrupted local traffic. Over 1,000 vehicles were stranded on the Mount Zheduo section of the National Highway 318.
Northern Arizona is getting a rare dose of late-season snow.
The National Weather Service is recording snow in the inches near Flagstaff, in Seligman and at the Grand Canyon's South Rim.
The weather service says measurable snowfall in Flagstaff in late May is unusual. It's happened less than a dozen times since record keeping began in 1898.
The storm also brought record-breaking daytime lows across the region Wednesday.
Colorado's lingering and robust snowpack will prevent Rocky Mountain National Park from opening its famed Trail Ridge Road by its annual goal of the busy Memorial Day weekend.
Crews will continue plowing away at the road that reaches more than 12,000 feet, but their efforts have been hindered by persistent snow that continued to dump on the park last week and this week. It is not known when the park's main road that connects the east side of the park to the west side will be open, according to a park news release Wednesday.
Last week, several avalanches involved nine park visitors in the Bear Lake area. The Bear Lake Trailhead, located at 9,475 feet, still has 35 inches of snow. No one was seriously hurt. However, the Bear Lake Road as well as the Wild Basin Road to the summer trailhead are open. The road near the Twin Sisters Trailhead is not yet open.
Comment: California cherry crop devastated by storms