Monday, May 13, 2024

It's Been Warm

Global temperatures have been remarkably warm over the past 12 months or so.  April numbers are not quite out yet from the National Centers for Environmental Information, so the analysis below is based on the 12-month period ending in March.  Average temperatures were 1.26°C (2.27°F) above the 20th century mean, easily the warmest such period on record.  

Source: NCEI

Locally, the airport also saw its warmest April–March on record with an average temperature of 56.8°F.

Source: https://xmacis.rcc-acis.org/

It was a pretty good ski season, but a lot depended on elevation.  At the Salt Lake City Airport, total snowfall from November to April was only 28.3", 14th lowest since 1876 (lowest on record is 14.3" in 1934).  Mean November to April temperatures were 42.4°F, 4th highest on record (highest on record is 43.6°F in...you guessed it...1934).  It was a dream winter in many respects meteorologically.  Not a lot of snow to shovel in the valley and a lot to ski in the mountains.  

The global warmth is related to global warming, but El Nino probably contributed some to the extreme warmth of the past 12 months.  El Nino is now weakening and we may be transitioning to La Nina conditions by fall. That will probably result in a drop in global temperatures from the insane peak of the past 12 months.  However, these are small fluctuations on top of the long-term trend due to global warming, which will continue for at least the next 2 to 3 decades.  After that, much depends on ongoing and future greenhouse gas emissions.  

8 comments:

  1. Just like the stock market, it goes up every year!

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  2. 20 or 30 years from now, i hope we have enough snow in the Wasatch for my grandkids. Sad, stupid situation where short term gain overwhelms the good of everyone.

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  3. Many below average days recently…

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  4. These Global temperatures come from 70 land based weather stations and 30 ocean observations. The land based stations are the major cities of the world and do not account for changes in instrumentation, re-location's, urban growth and numerous other factors. The cities can easily be cherry-picked. Similar analysis using rural locations show no such extreme warming.
    There is also a mathematical error of rounding up every time the mean temp ends in a .5 decimal. This adds extra degrees over time.

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    1. What insight! You’ve got this all figured out. What about numbers that end in a less than 0.5 decimal? Don’t those go down and average with the 0.5 or greater?
      Seriously though, get some better denialist propaganda. Yawn…

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    2. Wow, so inaccurate for so many reasons. Did you really blindly believe that there are only 100 weather stations in the whole WORLD? There are far more than that in Utah alone!! Not to mention we can also measure temperatures with satellites (thermal imaging, it's how we do ocean surface temperatures, which factor in here) which are not at all biased by location (obviously). Your misunderstanding of how rounding works is just the cherry on top; in addition to what the other comment notes, if you were right about there being a bias, that wouldn't matter because the bias would apply to all temperature data being compared! Climate denialism is really scraping the bottom of the barrel!

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  5. May was colder than normal.

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