No, I have not given up my job as a blogger to turn meteorologist. In case you haven’t noticed lately, and I am sure you have, there seems to have been a lot of snow this winter. Even normally mild coastal North Carolina was graced with six inches of the white stuff recently.
This has caused a lot of people to mock both Al Gore and global warming in general. I’ve read comments on Facebook like “Someone come and help me shovel all this global warming off my sidewalk.” There is even a “12 inches of global warming” video on Youtube.
But, it seems like the joke may actually be on us. Scientist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado thinks we may be seeing more snow because of global warming.
He said, “The fact that the oceans are warmer now than they were, say, 30 years ago means there’s about on average 4 percent more water vapor lurking around over the oceans than there was, say, in the 1970s. So one of the consequences of a warming ocean near a coastline like the East Coast and Washington, D.C., for instance, is that you can get dumped on with more snow partly as a consequence of global warming.”
Another thing that may be causing the record snowfalls this winter is a strong El Nino. This weather pattern comes up from the western Pacific Ocean to blow towards the eastern United States. It pops up ever few years, pushing high-altitude jet streams with colder air further south.
So, when my friends in Memphis wonder why they have repeatedly been hit with snow this winter – El Nino, which keeps storms coming down the same track – may be the cause.
Meteorologist Jeff Masters of Weather Underground also pointed out that climate change is judged on long term temperature averages of large regions or the whole planet, not the amount of snowfall we get. The temperature can still warm on average over a period of time, but if it gets cold enough, we will get snow.
In fact, Masters points out that global warming may cause more drastic weather, but it is hard to predict where, when, and how.
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