“It’s Hot Out There” – Here’s Why In One Visualization

“It’s not just warm, but very warm,” exclaims one east coast ski resort owner, adding “I can’t remember it ever being like this here.” But why? As WSJ reports, two weather occurrences – the Arctic Oscillation and El Niño – are combining to shake up temperatures from coast to coast in the U.S., bringing springlike conditions to the Northeast for much of this month and leaving parts of the West colder and wetter than usual.

Typically this time of year, Arctic Oscillation would bring cold air to the Eastern U.S., bringing temperatures down. But so far this year, the oscillation has stayed much farther north, allowing warm air from the south to fill the void, said Mike Halpert, deputy director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s climate prediction center.

 

The other factor is El Niño, a periodic climate cycle in which sea surface temperatures over the eastern Pacific become warmer than usual. The effects from changes in Arctic Oscillations generally last only a few weeks, but the balmy weather in the Northeast could continue because of the El Niño effect, experts say.

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El Niños push the subtropical and polar jet streams, which help define weather around the world, to the north. The result is that the southern U.S. gets rain that normally falls in Central and South America, while the Northeast and Midwest get a reprieve from winter as the polar jet stream is pushed up into Canada.

“If people are nervous, they should be nervous.”

The current El Niño is on track to rank among the top three strongest since record-keeping began in 1950, according to federal climatologists.

“The El Niño impact is not dominating yet,” said Bill Patzert, a climate scientist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “It’s like the tale of two climates here.

And since every failure of central planning to achieve its seasonally-adjusted economic targets must be blamed on something, even something as ridiculous as the weather, regardless if it is “too cold” like in the past two years, or “too hot”, now we know why Q4 GDP will be crap!