Extreme Temperatures
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Snowflake Cold

Record cold in interior Alaska - heading into the USA, agriculture at risk

reader "agimarc" writes:
As with the Lower 48 states, spring is late and cold here in central Alaska. Fairbanks reported a record low of 2 degrees F above zero Sunday, breaking the previous record of 8 from 1924.

Here in Anchorage, looks like we are around 3 - 4 weeks late with ice of local lakes and snow off the ground. Winter was not particularly hard, but it all changed with a very cold April. And at this point it does not appear things will be warming up soon. So much for manmade global warming due to carbon dioxide emissions.
Story here: http://www.adn.com/2013/04/29/2883299/interior-alaska-sees-record-breaking.html

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Yes, have a look at the image at right.

Here is a complete list of record lows for Alaska in the past 7 days, 996 new record lows were set (click low temp and details tab):

http://wx.hamweather.com/maps/climate/records/7day/usak.html?cat=maxtemp,mintemp,snow,lowmax,highmin,

Ice Cube

Ice Age Cometh: Spring disappears from northern hemisphere: the winter that won't end

April has been a freakishly cold month across much of the northern USA, bringing misery to millions of sun-starved and winter-weary residents from the Rockies to the Midwest. "The weather map ... looks like something out of The Twilight Zone," Minneapolis meteorologist Paul Douglas of WeatherNation TV wrote on his blog last week. Record cold and snow has been reported in dozens of cities, with the worst of the chill in the Rockies, upper Midwest and northern Plains. Several baseball games have been snowed out in both Denver and Minneapolis.
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Cities such as Rapid City, S.D.; Duluth, Minn.; and Boulder, Colo., have all endured their snowiest month ever recorded. (In all three locations, weather records go back more than 100 years.) In fact, more than 1,100 snowfall records and 3,400 cold records have been set across the nation so far in April, according to the National Climatic Data Center. Unfortunately for warm-weather lovers, after some mild temperatures the past few days, the chill is forecast to return as the calendar turns to May: Accumulating snow is forecast overnight Tuesday night and Wednesday in Denver and in Minneapolis-St.Paul by Wednesday night and Thursday, said AccuWeather meteorologist Mark Paquette.

Snow Globe

Spain's spring snow: Unseasonal weather blocks roads


Spain has been struck by unseasonal weather which has seen snow falling across the country.

Extreme weather warnings are in place in 18 provinces, with small roads blocked as temperatures continue to hover around freezing.

Simon McCoy reports.

Snowflake Cold

Global Cooling: Sudden European temperature plunge over the last decade... Are we on the brink of a Little Ice Age?

Temperature change in perspective

The UK Met Office long term Central England Temperature record has kept a continuous and consistent data set since the 1660s. It appears to be reliable and to have maintained its quality. It has not been adjusted as have so many other official temperature record.

Temp chart
© Met Office
Although the CET record covers only a small part of the northern hemisphere, it has shown a consistent rise since the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850 at a rate of about +0.45°C/century or about +0.67°C in the last 150 years. This rise accords well with other temperature records.

However since the year 2000, diminishing solar activity in solar cycle 24 (moving back towards little ice age patterns) appears to be having a real effect.
temp chart
© Unknown

Snow Globe

UK: Hedgehogs emerging from hibernation very late in 2013

Hedgehogs emerging a month later than usual

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Hedgehog emergence is a month behind where it was in 2011 and 2012, suggesting that it is likely to have been a particularly difficult winter for this declining species.
April 2013. Latest results from the BTO Garden BirdWatch survey have revealed that British Hedgehogs are emerging from hibernation very late this spring. This weekly survey, which covers mammals as well as birds, shows that Hedgehog emergence is roughly a month behind what was seen in 2011 and 2012. The long winter may also have led to increased levels of overwinter mortality.

Difficult winter

The latest results from the British Trust for Ornithology's (BTO) Garden BirdWatch show that Hedgehog emergence is a month behind where it was in 2011 and 2012, suggesting that it is likely to have been a particularly difficult winter for this declining species. The weekly 'reporting rate' graph (below) shows how the cold weather of February and March held emergence back, underlining that Hedgehogs are only now emerging from hibernation.
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Snow Globe

Colorado avalanche: Deadliest in 50 years

On Saturday afternoon, the wet snow piled in the mountains of the Loveland Pass gave way, creating a fatal avalanche.

Adding to the already 19 deaths by avalanches during the 2012-13 winter season, five people were trapped and killed on Saturday.

A sixth snowboarder managed to escape the snow and go to get help.

Despite now being in the latter half of April, the slopes definitely don't look like it out in Colorado.
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© Colorado Avalanche Information CenterThe eastern flank of an avalanche in Colorado that killed several people in April 2013.
Colorado Avalanche Information Center executive director Ethan Greene said "We are very much in a winter snowpack right now. The calendar may say it's April, but the snowpack looks more like February..."

That is due to the heavy snow that Colorado has seen for the start of spring, making it still feel like winter.

Gusting winds following the heavy, wet snow of these storms has risen the avalanche danger in the central Rockies, which is typically uncommon for this time of the year.

The last avalanche to cause this many deaths was back in 1962, when seven people were killed at Twin Lakes in January.

Igloo

Happy #$&*!? Earth Day

Earth Day
© m4gw
Well it's earth day again, and here in Minnesota we are supposed to get 6 to 9 inches of global warming over the next 24 hours. We are breaking all kinds of snow and cold records in this state, it was 14 degrees below zero in Embarrass Minnesota Saturday morning and Duluth Minnesota got 41.7″ of snow in April (so far) making it the snowiest April ever.

Meanwhile the Greeny Weenies are having an Earth Day Rally at the capital in St. Paul Minnesota pushing for carbon taxes to stop, you guessed it, GLOBAL WARMING!!

Arrow Down

Which way is up? According to leading experts, Global Mean Temperature has dropped 1°C since 1990!

Climate science/renewable energy critic Rainer Hoffmann has researched the literature on mean global surface temperature.

Stunningly, he shows that something is not right with the figures coming from the world's leading climate experts. The figures tell us the mean global surface temperature has dropped 1°C over the last 25 years. At that rate, we'll be in an ice age by the year 2100!

Snow Globe

Canada: Reports of many deer dead along Saskatchewan highways

Search for food leads to carnage after long winter

It's always a good idea to keep an eye out for animals such as deer and moose along Saskatchewan highways.

At this time of year the animals are hungry after a long winter of deep snow, and the winter has been longer and harsher than usual this year.

With the snow starting to melt, deer are finding some grass in ditches along the roads.

That is leading to carnage, according to many reports on social media. Drivers say they have spotted unusually high numbers of dead deer in ditches along Saskatchewan's highways.

[View the story "Deer dying in ditches across Saskatchewan " on Storify]

Snow Globe

Enduring winter tough on migratory birds in Great Plains

A rare sequence of spring snowstorms across the northern Great Plains is causing difficulties and even starvation for some migratory birds.

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© Eric Landwehr, South Dakota State UniversityBirds that normally winter in the Dakotas, like this Junco hyemalis, are having a tough time scavenging for food as winter refuses to end, even in April.
While it's not unusual to get a single snowstorm in April, the weekly storms during late March and the first half of April are taking their toll on wildlife, according to bird expert Kent Jensen of South Dakota State University.

He and others beneath North America's Central and Mississippi migratory "flyways" have found dead robins in their backyards, with the birds emaciated and even having burned up their breast muscles for nutrition in a last-ditch effort to survive.

"The ground to the north in North Dakota and Canada is still frozen, and we're only getting occasional thaws that allow the birds to feed from the ground here in eastern South Dakota," Jensen tells Earthweek.

He said many species are holding back far to the south, but the early-arriving robins have been forced to eat the wax coating of cedar berries to keep their fat supplies up.

Frozen lakes are also holding back migratory waterfowl, which could mean they are using up energy during their unplanned layover that they need for successful breeding this summer, Jensen says.

The fat supplies those birds need for laying eggs high in the Arctic is also being depleted as the birds hold back to the south, waiting for spring to finally arrive.