Global weather in March
NCDC
There’s just one trouble with making sense of this climate change deal: the Weather.
While the 48 contiguous United States simmered through the second warmest March on record — setting something like 2,500 all-time records for daily high temperatures — Alaska shivered, and shivered some more.
The lower latitudes experienced an average temperature of 48.1 °F last month, warmer than any other March in the past 113 years except for 1910, according to the latest climate trend report published on-line by the National Climate Data Center.
On March 13, more than 250 daily high temperature records were set, including the earliest 90-degree day ever seen in Las Vegas, the NCDC says. Overall, the month was 5.6 °F warmer than the 20th century average of 42.5 °F.
Not so in the Far North. To the discomfort of some house-bound and winter-weary Alaskans — and to the delight of skiers and snowmachiners and dog mushers who rely on below-freezing temperatures to maintain snowy trails — the temperatures in America’s Arctic state dipped. Blame (or thank) high-pressure weather patterns that diverted frigid polar air south, driving the North Pacific’s warmer flows elsewhere.
Jim Jager skied the Anchorage
backcountry in late March
The result? Alaska piled on the layers to get through its third coldest March on record. The state’s major reporting stations averaged 12.5 °F (6.9 °C) below the 30-year average. The month tied or broke 40 records for daily low temperatures, according to the NCDC.
“Strong and widespread cold described March this year all across Alaska,” reported the Alaska Climate Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in its monthly summary. “Temperatures throughout the mainland were more than 8 °F below average and the most extreme temperature departures of more than 16 °F below average were observed in the central Interior.”
One late March morning, I discovered that it had hit 20 below zero overnight at my backyard fence, overlooking a creek bottom in the middle of Anchorage. “This global warming thing isn’t working out as predicted,” was my flip comment to one of my friends. Skiing at that temperature meant stuffing a hat in my tights, neck gaiters up the chin, mittens on the fingers and special wax.
Three weeks later, Anchorage-area snow slushes up most afternoons, interrupting spring ski season with muck and puddles.
Weather comes and weather goes. Natural variability, driven by jet streams and the cyclonic dance of drifting storms, can freeze our butts one week, then melt us down the next. Alaska may have so far experienced an overall increase in average annual temperatures of about 3.5 °F during the past 56 years (more than twice the increase in the global average temperature.)
But this rise occurred in sudden leaps and chilly stumbles. One month, whether up or down, means little in the climate game.