N America

Cold wave across North America

23 Dec 2022
12 UTCUTC Coordinated Universal Time or UTC is the primary time standard by which the world regulates clocks and time. It is within about 1 second of mean solar time (such as UT1) at 0° longitude (at the IERS Reference Meridian as the currently used prime meridian) and is not adjusted for daylight saving time. It is effectively a successor to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). analysis

Dear Diary
A lot of sensational reporting going on in the media about the low that’s been undergoing cyclogenesis in the eastern parts of the Great Lakes today, and the cold wave that’s introducing Arctic air across much of North America in its wake, as the low tracks NENE North East’ward into Canada. BBCBBC The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is the national broadcaster of the United Kingdom, based at Broadcasting House in London. It is the world's oldest national broadcaster, and the largest broadcaster in the world by number of employees, employing over 22,000 staff in total, of whom approximately 19,000 are in public-sector broadcasting. News seems content to report temperatures in degrees Fahrenheit, perhaps because it makes the negative numbers even larger. Here are a few of the phrases that I’ve picked up from the BBC reports.

  • Weather Bomb
  • Bomb cyclone
  • Flash freezing
  • Brutal cold

The cold front has certainly dropped temperatures as it’s raced through. In my experience wind chills of -40°C or lower are very severe, but far from unprecedented across North America, and ones like this usually occur in most winters, but what the hell do I know. Another thing I don’t know is if the NWSNWS National weather service definition, an agency of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that is responsible for meteorological observations. has named the culprit low, perhaps it has descended into the realms of lunacy as most of its European counterpart Met Services have.

23 Dec 2022
12 UTC wind chill

Analysis, BBC, Cold, N America, Wind chill

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Surprising North American anomalies

A rather surprising chart of temperature anomalies for North American for the first 20 days of November 2022. Well it was at least for me. The cold air and mountains of snow at Buffalo gave me the impression that the whole of November had been very cold but not so. For the first two weeks of November eastern America was extremely mild with anomalies as high as +8°C. The third week saw the opposite conditions and it was much colder, which reduced the magnitude of the warm high that you can see in the anomaly chart close to New York (+4°C). It’s just how climate is with extremes of temperature cancelling each other out within the space of a year or less.

Anomalies, N America, Temperature

Surprising North American anomalies Read More »

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