Two mild winters in a row had some people thinking climate change was going to make winters in our area shorter and more pleasant. Weather forecasters had predicted that odds were against us experiencing three mild winters in a row, and they were right. This winter has had prolonged cold that has been breaking records.
“I think everybody got spoiled with the past two winters being mild,” Arthur Bruno, a long-time weather enthusiast from Holiday Island, said. “The last month was pretty darn interesting. The globe as a whole is very, very warm. If you take a whole planet view of temperature anomalies, most of it is above normal. The one area that has been much below normal is the North and Central U.S.”
Bruno said basically the Arctic air has been displaced southward. The core of the cold air has been over Central North America.
Despite what is the coldest winter in memory for many residents of Northwest Arkansas, Bruno said global warming is full speed ahead.
“There has been no pull back in that whatsoever,” he said. “When you look at the weather, which is different than climate, the day-to-day weather has been very cold here. But the overall climate picture is unchanged.”
The Pacific Ocean is on a cooling trend and Bruno suspects that, at least over the next year to two, the rate of increase of global warming will slow, if not temporarily halt. There have been some really warm years in the Pacific with water temperature that gave overall global warming a kick. He said the slowdown observed in heating of the Pacific Ocean is probably a combination, some natural, some manmade.
“It is a subtle distinction,” he said.
In terms of this particular cold weather, events like this are not frequent, but there are plenty of them in history.
“So, I would say, ‘No, this particular outbreak is not a sign of climate change or an offshoot of climate change’,” Bruno said. “But can anyone say for sure? There is so much that is not known about what are the true forces behind certain jet stream patterns. Scientists don’t really know for certain.”
At the beginning of winter, many meteorologists predict a lot of strong peaks and valleys. So, Bruno is not surprised. “What is surprising is how much I have adjusted to the lack of cold,” he said. “My experience of the cold spell was more difficult than I thought.”
Some days this winter it has been warmer in Moscow, Russia. Bruno said it is not terribly unusual because when you get an extreme outbreak like this with polar air slipping down on this side of the globe, the other side would be warmer. And he points out that southern Wyoming and all of Colorado were warmer than Arkansas at Christmas.
The next couple of weeks might be less harsh than the previous three weeks.
“It will be closer to normal,” he said. “Indications are that we are in for a January thaw. We may have a couple of very nice weeks. And we will finish off sometime in mid-February with a more normal temperature regime for late winter, the current modeling predicts.”
Speaking of models, this has been a challenging year for weather models. That has made medium and long-time forecasting models produce erratic output, Bruno said.
People are talking about the cold, but not so much about the precipitation. The lack of precipitation has been a concern.
Andrew Schwerin, who with his wife, Madeleine, operate organic farm Sycamore Bend in the Keels Creek area, are keeping a wary eye on the drought.
“We’ve been dry the past four months, so we have been getting into some pretty strong drought,” Schwerin said. “A couple good rains in December have helped. But it is starting to dry up again now. It affects us quite a bit with our sheep because we stockpile fescue for the winter and grass grew very little in the fall this year because of drought. So, we are having to feed a lot more hay. In general, drought is never good for the environment. It creates stress on everything, including our gardens.”
Schwerin would be more concerned but said winter droughts have less impact than any other time of the year, and it doesn’t take a lot of precipitation to relieve the drought conditions.
Schwerin said that they have been able to continue growing some crops outside, like spinach and carrots. And they have a hoop greenhouse for growing other winter crops. But they have found it has taken a lot more wood to keep their yurt warm this winter. “We have used as much firewood in the past couple weeks as we used in each of the past two winters,” Schwerin said.
As a weather enthusiast, Schwerin doesn’t think we can say it will be cold the rest of the winter. “It could still go either way,” he said.