In many respects, the winter of 2012 has been very unusual
and maybe even a bit disturbing to me. With all the talk about climate change,
it gets easy to read all kinds of nasty stuff into what may be normal
variability.
The first half of February is a good case in point,
especially when you also look at what happened a year ago. The graph below
comprises data that I recorded at my location here in Forsyth, Missouri
using a Davis Weather Monitor II. The blue line represents the average combined
temperature of 38F recorded over the last 30 years. As you can see, there was a
very big swing or departure from normal in the temperatures recorded in 2011 and a somewhat more moderate range recorded by me so
far this year.
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| Click to enlarge |
Seeing extremes in the average for a day or even a group of
days is not all that unusual. Seeing such large fluctuations (deviation from the norm) almost daily
certainly raises some questions. And then, when you compare data from 2002
(graph below) for the same location and look at the ‘trends’ you can easily see
that while back in 2002 the temperature was on average still cooling down, in
2012 it’s already on a fixed and definite warming trend! (The overall shift seems to be about 2 degrees Fahrenheit upwards).
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| Click to enlarge |
What does this mean? Perhaps nothing, yet when you combine
other data along with the realizations of what common sense dictates; something seems to be happening and seems to be happening relatively fast!
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