Self-absorption is like renewable energy – it is hard to exhaust it. Yesterday's post on the Western drought that dried up our well and that contrasts so deeply with the Eastern freezer blizzard machine gets today a dollop of related news writing. Some might call it another whiff of weather weirding.
Here are some complementary pieces:
- Alaska Dispatch – Laurel Andrews: Road to Valdez blocked indefinitely as water impounded by avalanches hampers cleanup/ Massive avalanches close Richardson Highway ; Mostly this is a traffic report, but the cause is a series of gigantic snow avalanches that roared down steep canyon walls following a spell of warm weather and heavy rain. They blocked the road, dammed the river, impounded so much water it flooded an additional stretch of highway, and made it dangerous to do road work anywhere down stream due to the peril of the snow dam suddenly giving way. See related report by Yereth Rosen: Forget snowfall – winter rain becoming new normal in Alaska and Arctic ; Worst weather combo – warm enough to rain, cold enough to freeze it on to the road. It has even been raining of late as far north as Barrow (as far up as you can go in the USA).
- Climate Central – Douglas Fischer: What we're seeing: Record warmth, huge avalanches isolate Alaska town ; Fischer credits the Dispatch story above for parts of his own, but advances the ball considerably with global weather context. That includes these simple, intensely descriptive and expansive two opening lines: "Cold weather slamming into the Midwest and Eastern United States has plenty of people feeling isolated and cut-off. Turns out the corresponding record warmth baking Alaska as the polar vortex shifts has made that literally true for the coastal town of Valdez." The story, as does the Dispatch's, comes with xlnt video illus shot presumably from helicopter.
- AP (Jan 22) Seth Borenstein : THE BIG STORY/ Go Figure: Alaska Is Warmer Than Lower 48 ; Lede: "The weather seems more than a bit upside down," another good and pithy way into the news. Temps up there, he reported, are as much as 30F above what's typical for January. Story then goes into what has become boiler plate in such stories with reference to the meandering Arctic jet stream scooping up warm air and delivering it north and, correspondingly, dragging the subzero airmasses over the frozen Arctic Ocean much farther south than is generally expected. While I am at it, this story pairs nicely with another recent Borenstein context-setter (Jan 9): Scientists: American Are Becoming Weather Wimps, on evidence that brutal cold weather in the lower 48 was far more common in the not-distant past than now. He did not report how often meandering polar vortices were the agents in the cold snaps lost to memory in the deep past – ie, two or three decades back.
One supposes that, if one ignores the slight annual average temperature rise due to global warming, on the time scale of daily and weekly weather the heat in the part of the atmosphere in which we live is pretty much a zero-sum game. If things warm up one place they have to correspondingly cool elsewhere. Wet begets a dry somewhere, too. Even ENSO's temperature swings across the broad Pacific's surface waters go on longer time scales than these recent cold snaps and heat waves.
More reporters should try to take time – in the interest of raising public awareness of the global scale balances and ebbs and flows of rain, heat, humidity, wind, and all the rest – to refer regularly to the meteorological tradeoffs that permit regions to occasionally veer far from their weather norms. It's all connected.
Leave a Reply