So far it’s been a very mild winter across Central Europe. Just days ago, with temperatures in the double-digit Celsius range, meteorologists and media wrote off the possibility of a white Christmas. Gradually all the snow being a “thing of the past” talk was starting up.
Wrong again. So unpredictable can chaotic systems like weather and climate be.
Sunday morning outlook. Chart cropped from wetteronline.de.
Suddenly the picture has reversed 180°.
Blizzard conditions forecast
Now Central Europeans are being told to brace for blizzard conditions, forecast to arrive this weekend.
Wetter.net here reports that on Europe’s 2nd Christmas Day (December 26) snow will spread from the Alps and across southern Germany, and make its way through the east with temperatures dropping into the minus zones. By Saturday night readings will drop to as low as -6°C and snow will spread over the northwestern flatlands to the North Sea coast.
30°C temperature drop
Wetter.net writes that significant snowfall is expected for Saturday with a thick blanket over many regions. “Winter will be setting an exclamation mark!” Wetter.net warns of blowing and “massive drifting snow” and of chaotic traffic conditions. Temperatures will plummet to as low as -11°C, thanks to a low positioned over Italy pumping cold air from the East. By Tuesday, according to wetter.net, readings will fall to as low as -18°C in East Germany, some 30°C below values measured just days ago.
In Fulda the temperature may drop to as low as -20°C on New Year’s Eve.
How long will the cold linger? Forecasts are showing it to persist into early January. This year the North Atlantic has been especially tempestuous and forecasts have been difficult to pinpoint more than 3 days out.
Long-range forecasts by the NCEP have been pointing to normal winter conditions for the January to March period. But judging by what Central Europe has seen so far, everything from spring-like to Arctic conditions are likely this winter. Once again, the North Atlantic dominates Europe’s weather.
4 day forecast from meteomedia/meteogroup : Weekend will see -5 deg C, no wind, no precipitation in Northern Germany.
Braunschweig:
http://wetterstationen.meteomedia.de/?station=103480&wahl=vorhersage
My snow cover for the past month in New Hampshire is pretty much gone, definitely time for a recharge.
Did you hear there was a blizzard warning in Hawaii for the mountain tops? Snow is fairly common, a blizzard is not, Blizzard conditions include high winds and snow in the air, it doesn’t require much be falling.
Cold coming your way about January 9th.
Happy New Year.
No end-of-the-year / end-of-the-world global warming stories this Christmas in Norway, with a downright uncomfortable -34C in the town of Røros, and -15C in Oslo.
Will children in the future know what spring flowers are?
In all climate change stages, there have been “out-of-the-trend” events, as the announced snow is. But if you look at the trend of the http://www.1ocean-1climate.com, you can see it is warming, at a global scale. This also means that there are areas on the planet where the climate is stable or a bit cooling, but globally, the climate is warming.
Ocean heat content rise is given by warmists not as temperature but in increments of 10 ^22 Joule; which sounds big but given the content of the oceans works out to 0.001 deg C or somesuch (I’m too lazy to compute it right now but it’s simple arithmetic. I might be off by one order of magnitude.).
Also, the stall in surface temperatures has not been predicted by climate models, falsifying them and all their forecasts.
So it might well be that the ocean is warming very slowly – but the models are junk anyway. What do you propose? Blindly assuming their forecasts are correct nonetheless? That is as scientifically valid as forecasts made by tea leaves.
Or do you propose we simply assume that the current slow warming continues linearly? Notice that a linear trend is a model, which makes a prediction. So how about waiting another 15 years to validate your linear trend model?
Going into alarm mode on a new unproven model that posits no physical mechanism is a crazy reaction.
Presumably you touch the problem, but maybe 0,001 deg. C. is even too high. At least it seems irresponsible to talk about ocean warming if the correlation between water vapor in the air and the ocean water body is 1:1000 and the ocean is only about 4 deg.C warm. The question what oceans do to our climate is IMO what matters most.