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Tracie Hunte: It's The Takeaway. I'm Tracie Hunte in for Melissa Harris-Perry.
It's February and it's winter but at least here in New York City, it hasn't felt like winter. Several states in the Northeast had the warmest January on record. Meanwhile, California has been pummeled with rain making it the third wettest January on record. After that winter staple snow, well, New York City finally got a tiny sprinkling on February 1st, making this the longest snow drought in recorded history. Other cities out west are seeing their snowiest winters.
To talk more about what's going on with this winter weather, I'm here with Dr. David Robinson, the New Jersey State Climatologist and a professor at Rutgers University in the Department of Geography. Welcome to the show, Dave.
Dr. David Robinson: Thanks for having me.
Tracie Hunte: What are the places getting the most snow and the least snow?
Dr. David Robinson: The most snow we've seen thus far this winter in the east is a very small area near Buffalo, off of Lake Erie, and up near Watertown off Lake Ontario. Elsewhere in the east, for the most part, well below normal. Now you look to the west, and the mountain's west the [unintelligible 00:01:16] in particular in California and Nevada. They've already had a season's worth of snowfall, and we have a couple months more possible accumulation to come. It's really been feast or famine.
Tracie Hunte: What's going on with the West Coast?
Dr. David Robinson: It was a series of storms that came pouring in off the Pacific Ocean, you hear the terms of fire hose or atmospheric river to be more technical, and it was just the situation was quite persistent. Not every place in the state of California got it at the same time, but it was like putting the fire hose on. In the valleys, low elevations, it was rain and a pie. It was snow, that wonderful reservoir of water that they'll be using in the spring and summer.
Tracie Hunte: You mentioned Buffalo was the outlier in the east. Why is that?
Dr. David Robinson: It had to do with the way the storm track has been going through the eastern part of the country. Storms have been going up through the Great Lakes, and into eastern Canada. The counterclockwise movement around those storms has brought warm air up the East Coast more often than not, and those storms bring rain. As the storm head into Canada, colder air can come behind it on westerly winds and those winds blow up the length of Lake Erie, and up at the northeastern end is Buffalo. They hit the land there and just dump prodigious amounts of snow, so it's a very specific post-storm actually storm.
Tracie Hunte: Why has this winter been so much warmer?
Dr. David Robinson: Well, fundamentally underlying all of our winters every month of the year, the planet is warming, so we're starting with that foundation. Then on top of that, you build day-to-day weather events, or a seasonal pattern such as we've seen across North America this year, for that matter over in Europe too where it's been snowless and quite mild. With that, you get these recurrent patterns that we believe in the case of North America is related to La Niña event in the tropical Pacific and ocean-atmosphere anomaly that tends to set up the storm track over North America that we've seen this winter.
Now it's obviously more complicated than that, but in general, there's the long-term warming, there's the seasonal La Niña pattern, which has been going on now for the third winter consecutively. Then the day-to-day weather events, the storms that come across the country.
Tracie Hunte: We're taking a quick snow break here, more takeaway when we return. It's The Takeaway. I'm Tracie Hunte. We're talking about what's going on with the winter weather with Dr. David Robinson, the New Jersey state climatologist. This is the third year of La Niña. Can we expect any El Niño soon?
Dr. David Robinson: That's a real good question. The models that are run to try to predict these events, and the observations suggest that the La Niña is in a waning phase for this year, it would be highly unlikely for it to return for a fourth consecutive year. That however doesn't mean El Niño is on the horizon. For now, it's a wait-and-see, there's some indicators suggesting by summer and next fall there could be more El Niño conditions, but we may be in a neutral phase, we simply don't know at this point.
Tracie Hunte: On Groundhog Day, the groundhog predicted six more weeks of winter. What can we expect for the rest of the season?
Dr. David Robinson: Well, looking two weeks ahead, it looks like mild conditions are generally going to prevail in the eastern half of the country. Precipitation is a little bit difficult to call, but there's no indication we're going to go without precipitation. Then once we get into March, it's extremely difficult to look ahead, there's some suggestion, a sudden stratospheric warming might ultimately bring cold air down into the middle latitudes from polar regions but we're going to be into March by that time. Things continually warm-up week after week, doesn't mean we can't still can have some wintry weather.
There's plenty of cases of strong March storms, but for now, in the very short term, it doesn't look like much in the way of severe cold and snowy weather, particularly in the eastern half of the country. March, it's a bit of a wild card right now, for snow lovers, winter lovers, there might be one last attempt. I guess you could say get going on a season that's only had two very short bursts of cold air one in December, and one just several weeks ago. Everyone has to remember the temperatures are starting to rise now, and they will continue to rise into the summer so it will become more and more difficult for winter to rear its ugly head.
Tracie Hunte: How will snowfall in the winter climate be impacted by climate change in the coming years?
Dr. David Robinson: That's a great question and the hypothetical situation is something we think we already see unfolding, is that as temperatures start to rise in the winter, and flirt with and exceed the freezing point, your snow events are going to become a rain event, so we should see less snow, more rain. We're already seeing that in the southern and middle latitudes of the US, but it's not been seen yet up in say New York over to Chicago and points west.
Even further north, there's some signs of some increasing snow, as the atmosphere warms, holds more moisture, but it's still cold enough to snow. Eventually, we're going to see that snow line moved to the north and the higher elevations, but we're still going to be in the sights for snow storms for many years still to come.
Tracie Hunte: Dr. David Robinson, the New Jersey State Climatologist and a professor at Rutgers University in the Department of Geography. Thanks so much for joining us.
Dr. David Robinson: Thank you for having me.
Tracie Hunte: All right.
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