A weather pattern partly linked with El Nino has turned winter upside-down across the U.S. during a week of heavy holiday travel, bringing spring-like warmth to the Northeast, a risk of tornadoes in the South and so much snow across the West that even skiing slopes have been overwhelmed.
In a reversal of a typical Christmas, forecasters expect New York to be in the mid-60s on the holiday — several degrees higher than Los Angeles.
The mild conditions have helped golf courses in New England do brisk business, but the pattern comes at a steep cost for ski resorts that have closed and for backcountry skiers who confront avalanche risks. And many Americans complain that it just doesn’t feel like the holidays without a chill in the air.
“It’s been a great snow season so far from the Rockies to the higher elevations in the Cascades and the northern Sierras, and it’s been the total opposite on the East Coast,” said Bob Oravec, lead forecaster with the National Weather Service.
Big parts of the county are basking in above-average temperatures, especially east of the Mississippi and across the Northern Plains. Record warmth was expected on Christmas Eve along the East Coast, Oravec said.
He laid the credit — or blame — with a strong El Nino pattern, the warming of surface waters in the Pacific Ocean near the equator. That’s helped drive warm air west to east across the Lower 48 and kept colder air from the Arctic at bay, he said.
In the Pacific Northwest and California, the effects of El Nino haven’t really hit yet. They’re typically seen in January through March, and the heavy rains and snows in the region are probably not linked to the phenomenon, said Washington State Climatologist Nick Bond.
The winter in the Pacific Northwest is still predicted to be drier than normal, so the series of storms that dumped feet of snow in the Cascades this month and piled the snowpack back above normal, were helpful, he said.
Come summer, farmers and salmon alike will rely on that melting snow.
In Washington, authorities have closed the state’s main east-west route, Interstate 90, over the Cascade Mountains repeatedly this week due to heavy snows and avalanche danger. Officials closed a sledding hill near Snoqualmie Pass on Tuesday because the storm kept the state Transportation Department from plowing the parking lot. On Sunday, a heavy storm closed Oregon’s Mount Ashland Ski Area when it knocked out power.
California is in its driest four-year span on record, and experts anticipate a possible fifth year of drought. Weather forecasters say a strong El Nino weather system could drench the state, but one good, wet winter won’t be enough to rehydrate the parched land. A fresh round of chilly rain was expected to hit San Francisco late this week. The same system was expected to drop some 4 feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
While ski resorts celebrated a deluge that threatened to drop almost 2 feet of snow in parts of Colorado’s mountains, forecasters warned of serious avalanche risks.
An avalanche near the Montana-Wyoming state line on Sunday buried three snowmobilers, killing a 33-year-old North Dakota man. Another avalanche partially buried a ski patrol employee at the Snowbasin resort, about 45 miles north of Salt Lake City, and two snowboarders were caught in a backcountry slide southwest of Breckenridge Ski Area on Saturday. They escaped serious injury.
“We’re giving our generally weak snowpack a very large and rapid load, and it’s unlikely to be able to hold up,” said Brian Lazar, deputy director of the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. Warnings and advisories were posted for much of Colorado’s high country, with an emphasis on the risk of large, dangerous slides in steep terrain.
Meanwhile, the National Weather Service said the most recent storm had raised the level of Lake Tahoe by about 2 inches since midnight Monday. Officials calculated that that’s nearly 6.4 billion gallons of water.
Elsewhere, severe thunderstorms and possible tornadoes were forecast for Wednesday in Arkansas, northern Alabama, northern Mississippi and western Tennessee. Tornadoes are not unheard-of in the region in late December, but the extreme weather, driven by warm temperatures and large amounts of moisture in the atmosphere, was nonetheless striking, said Jeff Masters, director of meteorology at Weather Underground.
In addition to El Nino, a weather pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation is also helping keep cold air bottled up in the Arctic. Combine that with warm temperatures around the planet from man-made global warming, he said, and you have a recipe for intense weather: “There are a couple of natural patterns at work, and then there’s this human-caused component too.”
With such balmy temperatures in the Northeast, Pine Oaks Golf Club in Easton, Massachusetts, is probably having its busiest December since it was built more than 50 years ago — a bonus for a club that doesn’t count on much winter revenue.
“We’ve got 65 degrees coming up on Christmas Eve,” said Scott Ibbitson, a golf specialist at the course. “It’ll be our busiest December day ever.”
Not everyone welcomed the warmth.
Astrid Rau, 55, of Perkasie, Penn., baked 16 kinds of Christmas cookies, but with the temperature expected to reach 72 on Thursday, she had trouble getting in the holiday spirit.
“I associate cold with Christmas,” she said. “And if it’s warm it just doesn’t feel quite right to me.”
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
We need the heavy snows and rains
We’ve had 15 inches of snow at 2000′ and who knows what the mountains have gotten here in the northern Rockies. Skiing be good.lol
Now all the “global warming” and “climate change” freaks will have a field day – smh…
There is still ZERO proof climate change is anything other than the normal climate irregularities caused by the way our sun changes its radiation output. The Arctic and tundra show proof that the earth was tropical above the arctic circle, we are or were coming out of the last ice age, and may be well on the way into another ice age. Follow the money as to where the scientists get their funding, any that do not agree with the agenda lose funding, are ridiculed and forced to be quite.
I AGREE WITH DON
I also agree.
Exactly…We have had Climate Change since the Earth was formed….We have had periods of colder and then periods of warmer Weather throughout history….Long before we had large Businesses and Industry….
MAN MADE Climate Change/Global Warming or whatever other names these WHACKOS attach to it….Is nothing but a GIGANTIC SCAM…By such CON ARTISTS as EGore….Al Gore….and all the rest of such like him…including the DC DICTATOR and all those that were recently in Paris…promoting this SCAM…..The real reasons are two fold….OnE it enlarges the HIP NATIONAL BANK of the SCAM ARTISTS Promoters….and Two….it is about POWER AND CONTROL of the People of the World…
And where do you get your “facts” from might I ask?
Bruce,
Just study natural climate change over the past 3.5 billion years.
Unless you know about Ice Eras, Ice Epochs, Ice Age Cycles (Ice Ages & Interglacials), then you have no frame of reference to even begin to address whether or not human activity could possibly change climate.
Are you aware that Earth’s typical climate, when not in an interglacial of an ice age cycle of an ice epoch of an ice era (current climate) is dramatically warmer — warmer than anything humans have ever experienced? Are you aware that there is no permanent ice at sea level during Earth’s typical climate? Are you aware that natural climate change varies 18 degrees F (10 degrees C) between typical climate (90% of past 3.5 billion years) and ice era/ice epoch/ice age cycle climate?
Real scientists would first attempt to fully understand natural climate change so that they would have a background from which to attempt to discern a human component to any climate change. But natural climate change is not well understood, cannot be predicted, and dwarfs anything humans could possibly produce (even if the theory were valid that they COULD influence global climate).
So on what basis does anyone profess that human activity is causing climate change when there is no possible method for actually testing that hypothesis through observation? Predicting climate change caused by humans assumes things not known and relies on the continuing natural climate warming (since the Little Ice Age) for “proof” of its specious theory.
It is warmists who have no proof — nor can they begin to offer proof. So they just pronounce climate change to be human-caused and denounce any who object. “Pronounce and denounce” is NOT the scientific method.
I hope this helps you better understand.
The WEATHER is being created by the GEOENGINEERING that is taking place!!! All U need to do is LOOK UP! WE are under attack by this UNnatural weather! The earth would be just fine if MAN stopped trying to control it ALL!
“Combine that with warm temperatures around the planet from man-made global warming,…”
Pure fiction. There is no demonstrated ability of humans to impact global climate, period. Not ONE scientific study has EVER discerned the difference between normal climate variability and any human component.
“man-made global warming” is a fiction based on a specious “theory” that has been debunked for more than 100 years by science, scientific experimentation, and scientific observation. There is NOTHING unusual about climate variability in the past 50 years to distinguish it from climate variability over the past 200 years. Slow, normal warming from the depths of the Little Ice Age have had interruptions, but the rate of warming is no different than typically observed in many decadal episodes of climate prior to 50 years ago.
Government “scientists” in the US, UK, and Australia are “cooking the books” by lowering past temperatures and inflating current temperatures to create the illusion that their theory might be correct. This is well-documented. Even if the temperature histories were actually what the doctored date claim, that would not prove anything about the origin/reasons for the variability that is well within the norm.
Few people know about Earth’s typical climate. How many know that Earth is now in an Ice Era that begin 65 million years ago? How many know that only seven Ice Eras totaling a combined 350 million years have been revealed over the past 3.5 billion years of Earth’s climate? Earth’s climate when not in an Ice Era is 18 degree F warmer than during an Ice Era! There is no permanent ice on Earth at sea level during Earth’s typical climate.
Earth is now in an Ice Epoch of an Ice Era. Within the Ice Epoch are 80,000 to 100,000 year Ice Age cycles that are separated by very short Interglacials that last 4,000 to 15,000 years. Earth is in the Holocene Interglacial that began 10-12,000 years ago.
Current global climate is much colder than Earth’s typical climate.
Even the wildest claims of human-caused-global-warming true-believers pale into insignificance compared with natural climate variability.
So, please, stop giving ANY credibility to claims of pseudo-scientists are promoted by formerly respectable publications like National Geographic and Scientific American. Big contributions from billionaires with an agenda make quite a difference to Boards controlling such publications.
You need to let authors edit their posts to correct typos… “date” should be “data” in fourth paragraph of prior comment. Missing word “that” in last paragraph between “pseudo-scientists” and “are”.
All I know is ….shorts and a t-shirt and riding motorcycles on Christmas eve in upstate NY…I’m loving it!!!!!
GOD is in charge of all things that happen here on this earth, it is time we paid attention too what our Bibles tell us about end times, We are not in charge of any thing here on earth,
We created it and are doing a good job of making it worse.
God is in charge of all things that happen here on earth good or bad we just have too pay attention to what he says in his book “the Bible”. We as people have no control.