Upside Down Weather
Posted on 17 March 2010 by LynThomas in Uncategorized
With climate warming on the global agenda, it seems strange that the United States have just experienced the worst and coldest winter in the past 25 years and the 18th coldest winter in the past 115 years. It also had the 19th wettest winter ever recorded, according to the National Climatic Data Centre.
Now the United States faces its tornado season, where a 79-year old man, sheltering in his single storey wood-frame home, has become the first victim. One person was injured as another tornado ripped through Haines City, Florida, destroying four condos and damaging fifteen others. Two other tornadoes caused minor damage in central Florida.
Along the Mid-Atlantic coast up to four inches of rain have been predicted, along with the melting of the winter’s major snowstorms. With the soil already saturated from the heavy snowstorms, flooding is anticipated.
However, further to the north of the continent, David Phillips, a senior climatologist with Environment Canada, warned of potential ‘horrific’ water shortages, insect infestations and wildfires this summer, due to Canada experiencing its warmest and driest winter on record. Phillips blamed El Nino for the warm winter weather and the severe loss of arctic sea ice last fall.
The winter season in Canada has warmed, on average, by 2.5degrees centigrade over the past 63 years.
Australian Drought
In the Southern ocean, Australia, one of the world’s driest continents, is slowly emerging from what scientists have called the ‘one in a thousand years drought’.
Over the past 8 years, the continent of Australia has experienced the worst drought in living memory, with over half of Australia’s farmland in drought conditions.
The Murray-Darling river system, which receives 4% of Australia’s water, but provides three-quarters of the water consumed nationally, was already at 54% below the previous record minimum, as far back as 2006. The drought update to the Murray and Darling River systems still shows the mighty river to be in very poor condition.
Mike Young, a water management expert at the University of Adelaide, told Reuters this week that Australia’s long-term climate was changing. “When the drought breaks we will not return to cooler, wetter conditions. It is the worst type of drought because we are not expecting to return back to the old regime. The last half of last century was much wetter. What we seem to have done is … built Australia on the assumption that it was going to be wetter, and we haven’t been prepared to make the change back to a much drier regime.”
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17 March 2010
[...] Read more how Canada has experienced its warmest winter on record, while in the Southern Hemisphere … [...]
the weather these days is hotter than the previous decades, i guess it is the effect of global warming-”"
the weather will always be cold now because the winter months are coming.,`