Extreme Temperatures
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Snowflake Cold

Winter remains in Romania - "It's as if we were preparing for Christmas - not Easter"

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Winter in April - In some places the snow measures 30 cm (12 inches).


(Google translate) - Just days before Easter , on April 14, it snowed like at Christmas. - road workers were out working just like in a regular month of winter !

Romania was under code yellow alert for snow and rain in 12 districts in the country !

Everyone hoped the snow would pass quickly, but on Friday it began snowing again, dumping 10 cm of snow on Predeal .

Tourist : "I got winter in the mountains, we came to leave for the summer and winter. I'm not ready , I had to change the tires.... two days of rain and sunny spring and summer and then two days - yesterday and today - two authentic winter days .

Snowflake Cold

Winter suddenly returns again for Russia's Urals

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© RIA Novosti/Aleksandr KondratukPedestrians cross the street during a heavy blizzard in Chelyabinsk, Russia
Russia's Urals region has been hit with freak winter weather, causing massive traffic jams, flight delays, power blackouts and school closures.

Just when everybody in the cities of Ekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk thought they had waved winter good-bye and was anticipating greener spring weather, blizzards dragging the region back to winter.

Having heard the forecast for snow, internet users were taking photos of the frail Urals spring that was proclaimed doomed by meteorologists.

Those would later be used in "before and after" collages with "goodbye summer" hashtags.

Arrow Down

UK Barn owls suffer worst year on record due to bitterly cold spring of 2013

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© Marlene Finlayson / AlamyA barn owl in flight.
Monitoring results show species struggled in the bitterly cold spring of 2013

Barn owls suffered their worst year on record in 2013 as they struggled in the bitterly cold spring, conservationists have said.

Results from barn owl monitoring schemes around the UK revealed the number of sites where nesting took place last year was significantly down in every area compared to previous years, and some surveys found no nests with eggs in at all.

Overall the number of occupied nests was down 71% on the average across all previous years, according to the Barn Owl Trust, which collated the information from 21 independent groups stretching from Jersey in the Channel Islands to south-west Scotland.

A survey in Berkshire which normally finds 14 nests in use and a surveyor in Yorkshire who normally finds 25-30 occupied nests both found none at all, while surveys in Buckinghamshire and Sussex were both down more than 90% on normal levels.

Conservationists described the situation as the "worst year ever recorded" for the flagship farmland species.

Ice Cube

Ice shifts bridge in New Brunswick, Canada

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Ice moving a Bridge In Sainte-Marie de Kent, New-Brunswick, Canada. The bridge has been moved 3 ft - 6 ft.

Ice Cube

Antarctic iceberg six times the size of Manhattan in open ocean tracked by scientists

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© NASA/REUTERSThe B-31 Iceberg as it separated from a rift in Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier
Scientists are monitoring one of the largest icebergs in existence, after it broke off from an Antarctic glacier and began to head into the open ocean.

The iceberg covers about 255 square miles, making it roughly six times the size of Manhattan - and is up to 500 meters thick.

Known as B31, glacial crack that created the iceberg was first detected in 2011 but the iceberg separated from Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier in November.

NASA glaciologist Kelly Brunt said that the iceberg is not currently presenting a danger, but needs to be continually monitored.

"It's one that's large enough that it warrants monitoring. There is not a lot of shipping traffic down there. We're not particularly concerned about shipping lanes. We know where all the big ones are."

Snowflake Cold

Third coldest start to a year on record in US

US temperatures through April 23 are the third coldest on record

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Generated by :

./ghcn.exe US23042014.txt through=0423 > US23042014_through_0423.csv

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YearTDeptUS.png (688×531)


Igloo

UN issues new 15 year climate tipping point - but UN issued tipping points in 1982 and another 10-year tipping point in 1989!

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© Space.com
According to the Boston Globe, the United Nations has issued a new climate "tipping point" by which the world must act to avoid dangerous global warming.

The Boston Globe noted on April 16, 2014: "The world now has a rough deadline for action on climate change. Nations need to take aggressive action in the next 15 years to cut carbon emissions, in order to forestall the worst effects of global warming, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."

Once again, the world is being warned of an ecological or climate "tipping point" by the UN.

As early as 1982, the UN was issuing a two decade tipping point. UN official Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP), warned on May 11, 1982, the "world faces an ecological disaster as final as nuclear war within a couple of decades unless governments act now." According to Tolba in 1982, lack of action would bring "by the turn of the century, an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust."

Ice Cube

Another report of dead whales stranded by ice off Newfoundland

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© Kayla KendallKayla Kendall tweeted this photograph on Saturday of a whale stranded at Rocky Harbour because of ice.
The Canadian Coast Guard has issued a new report of dead whales off western Newfoundland.

Mariners have been warned about four whale carcasses at different locations at the entrance to Bonne Bay.

It has not said what kind of whales have died.

Earlier this month, at least nine blue whales died in ice in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

In March, dozens of dolphins were killed when they were crushed by ice near Cape Ray, on Newfoundland's southwest coast.

Attention

Rare Arctic Bowhead whale seen in Cape Cod Bay - only the second in recorded history

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© NOAAA bowhead whale was spotted feeding with right whales in Cape Cod Bay last week
Experts call the sighting rare and remarkable

It is a remarkable sighting, according to experts from the Center for Coastal Studies (CCS) in Provincetown. Last Friday marks only the second time in recorded history that a bowhead whale has been seen so far south in the waters of the Atlantic. The whale was spotted swimming and feeding with right whales on Cape Cod Bay on April 11, according to a CCS release.

The first time a bowhead was spotted in our waters was two years ago, when one was observed by CCS researchers off the Outer Beach in Orleans in August 2012.

Ice Cube

Why it's a big deal: Half of the Great Lakes are still covered in ice

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© NASA
Over the winter, as polar vortices plunged the U.S. Midwest into weeks of unceasing cold, the icy covers of the Great Lakes started to make headlines. With almost 96 percent of Lake Superior's 32,000 miles encased in ice at the season's peak, tens of thousands of tourists flocked to the ice caves along the Wisconsin shoreline, suddenly accessible after four years of relatively warmer wintery conditions.

The thing is, all of that ice takes a long time to melt. As of April 10, 48 percent of the five lakes' 90,000-plus square miles were still covered in ice, down from a high of 92.2 percent on March 6 (note that constituted the highest levels recorded since 1979, when ice covered 94.7 percent of the lakes). Last year, only 38.4 percent of the lakes froze over, while in 2012 just 12.9 percent did - part of a four-year stint of below-average iciness.