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Category Archives: Seasons
How is the Arctic sea ice doing?
One of several diagnostic signals of a warming climate is the extent of sea ice in the Arctic, particularly its annual minimum extent which often arrives around the autumnal equinox.
The sea-ice extent is directly measured by satellite data and is available through the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Continue reading
Why does it get colder in the fall and winter?
After a fairly prolonged stretch of warm and humid weather through mid-September, culminating in a temperature of 82 degrees just before midnight on Thursday, southern Wisconsin residents were greeted with low temperatures in the 40s on Saturday morning.
This seems particularly fitting as Saturday, Sept. 22, was the day of the autumnal equinox this year — fall officially arrived at 8:54 p.m. that night. Continue reading
How normal was this summer’s weather?
In southern Wisconsin, the average temperature for the summer months — defined as June, July and August — was near normal.
Rainfall was a different story. All of southern Wisconsin had summer accumulated precipitation of more than 16 inches, or 125 percent of normal. For much of the region, accumulated precipitation in August was more than 7 inches, which is more than 175 percent of normal. Continue reading
What forces a mid-latitude cyclone to develop?
Our rainy Friday was arguably the first storm, or cyclone, of the autumn/winter season. Though it will surely be followed by more powerful examples, you may well have wondered how do such storms come to be?
That has been the central motivating question in meteorological science for most of the past 100 years. During that time, meteorologists have learned a great deal about how these mid-latitude cyclones are formed. Continue reading
Why did the end of July have nice weather?
During the last week of July — the 25th through 31st — the temperatures across Wisconsin were 1 to 4 degrees below normal. In fact, much of the Midwest was cooler than normal.
The cooler temperatures resulted from a Canadian high-pressure system that settled over the central U.S. during that final week of July. Continue reading
