Last year it was the US that had its hottest summer on record. This year, it’s Australia’s turn to grab all the hot headlines:
Records were set for the duration of extreme heat at both individual locations, and for Australia as a whole. Birdsville experienced 31 successive days above 40°C and Alice Springs had 17.
When it comes to averages over time, January 2013 was the hottest month recorded in the entire observational record for Australia, stretching back to 1910 (the first year for which we can confidently estimate national temperatures).
And as of yesterday, a new record was added to the books. The summer of 2012-13 was Australia’s hottest on record. In fact, the entire six months — from September 2012 to February 2013 — were warmer than the previous high for that period, set in 2006-2007.
Meanwhile, Japan is suffering from a surfeit of snow in amounts usually seen in places like Alaska or Siberia:
This is proving a freakish year for weather, but Japan is having an odder time of it than most. The country has had a record winter for snow, and northern Japan is currently coated by unprecedented volumes of the white stuff – more than five metres at higher altitudes, with houses turned into igloos and roads into snow tunnels.
In the Hakkoda mountains the depth of snow has been measured at 5.61 metres – a record for Japan. Even lower down, in the city of Aomori, snow is standing at almost 1.5 metres and bulldozers are having to work round the clock.
This has also been a record year for snow in parts of Russia – a couple of weeks ago snowpiles of more than five metres caused gridlock in Moscow – and Switzerland, too, has been experiencing dramatic snowfalls, with depths of up to three metres.
My wife has family in that part of Japan. I wonder what they think of climate change and what’s causing it.
Meanwhile, just a friendly reminder as we head into tornado season here in America- the sequester set to go into effect tomorrow threatens to make weather forecasting much more difficult due to mandated budget cuts to the National Weather Service:
Budget cuts set to take effect on March 1 could seriously compromise the ability of the National Weather Service to provide timely, reliable weather forecasts government officials and industry leaders warn. Programs and staffing to support weather forecasting are set to be slashed. […]
The cuts loom large following a two-year onslaught of extreme weather, including Superstorm Sandy and continuing historic drought conditions in the Heartland. In 2011 and 2012, the U.S. experienced the most and second most number of billion dollar weather disasters on record.
“Sequestration substantially increases the risk that the United States will not be a weather-ready nation,” said Kevin Kelly, a lobbyist at Van Scoyoc Associates, who advocates for the weather enterprise. “Communities that experience a heightened risk of severe weather – which affects large portions of the nation in the spring and summer – face the chance of greater danger because the Weather Service will not be operating at 100 percent.”
This is serious people. Small government is bad government when you drastically cut essential programs such as the NWS. Anyone who thinks private business is going to pick up the slack has another thing coming. There is no viable business plan for investing in the personnel, technology and infrastructure necessary to duplicate what the NWS does. The Weather Channel is not going to launch its own weather satellites – the cost is simply too prohibitive. In fact, all the weather related companies piggyback on the information provided by the NWS. They’d go out of business if they had to pay the cost of obtaining that information through their own efforts.
Hopefully we won’t get hit with any devastating extreme storms this spring, but based on the past several years of violent, killer tornadoes and derechos (not to mention hurricanes), I’m not going to bet on this year being a mild one, which is bad news for people living in the South, Midwest and even the Mid-Atlantic regions of the country.
